Quotes of the Day:

“History does not repeat, but it does instruct. As the Founding Fathers debated our Constitution, they took instruction from the history they knew. Concerned that the democratic republic they envisioned would collapse, they contemplated the descent of ancient democracies and republics into oligarchy and empire. As they knew, Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants. In founding a democratic republic upon law and establishing a system of checks and balances, the Founding Fathers sought to avoid the evil that they, like the ancient philosophers, called tyranny. They had in mind the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit. Much of the succeeding political debate in the United States has concerned the problem of tyranny within American society: over slaves and women, for example.”

– Timothy Snyder

"When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives."

– Robert A. Heinlein

"A democracy thrives on diversity. Tyranny oppresses it."

– Sam Brownback

1. Burton L. Gerber, CIA officer who boosted Cold War spying, dies at 91

2. Dark Money’ Is Tainting Washington Think Tanks. A New Report Shows It’s Worse Than You Think.

3. The Militia and the Mole

4. Washington Post cartoonist resigns over paper’s refusal to publish satirical cartoon of Bezos and Trump

5. The Pentagon is Panicking Over Venezuela’s Peykaap-III Missile Boats

6. How Chinese Hackers Graduated From Clumsy Corporate Thieves to Military Weapons

7. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 4, 2025

8. Iran Update, January 4, 2025

9. Biden Honors Navy SEAL Whose Innovations Transformed Battlefield Care

10. 8 Simmering Threats You Shouldn’t Ignore in 2025

11. Global Mining’s Dangerous New Reality: Guns, Hostages, Arrests

12. New Orleans attacker had a transmitter to set off explosive devices, F.B.I. says

13. The Islamic State Is a Franchise Now

14. How Israel’s ‘Operation Grim Beeper’ rattled global spy chiefs

15. Is your car spying on you? What it means that Tesla shared data in the Las Vegas explosion

16. Trump Sees the U.S. as a ‘Disaster.’ The Numbers Tell a Different Story.

17. Trump, Hegseth and the Honor of the American Military

1. Burton L. Gerber, CIA officer who boosted Cold War spying, dies at 91

What an American hero. He is the consummate quiet professional. I really thought he would live forever.

It was an honor to know him. I was fortunate enough to have many discussions while I was at Georgetown and he was teaching intelligence in the Security Studies Program. Nearly every week before his class he would stop by for a chat and it was the highlight of my week as we discussed every aspect of current events and he provided insights based on his decades of intelligence service. He was one of the most sought after professors.

David Hoffman pays a wonderful tribute to him in the article below. I strongly recommend reading his book The Billion Dollar Spy.

Burton L. Gerber, CIA officer who boosted Cold War spying, dies at 91

As CIA station chief in Moscow in the 1980s, he oversaw an operation for a trove of secret documents on Soviet military research and development.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/01/04/burton-gerber-cia-dies/

January 4, 2025 at 3:03 p.m. ESTToday at 3:03 p.m. EST

Burton L. Gerber in January 2010. (Tim Leedy/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle/Getty Images)

By David E. Hoffman

Burton L. Gerber, who as an operations officer for the CIA pushed for greater risk-taking in spying against the Soviet Union, and who later as the agency’s chief of station in Moscow managed one of the most productive espionage operations undertaken by the United States in the Cold War, died Jan. 2 under hospice care at home in Washington. He was 91.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Stephen Gerber, his nephew.

Mr. Gerber, a lanky Midwesterner who spoke bluntly and was a demanding taskmaster, mentored dozens of CIA case officers over the years. He schooled them in the mental skills and critical methods of espionage, from recruiting agents to surveillance detection runs, from dead drops to handling defectors.

His 39-year career as a CIA operations officer included assignments in West Germany, Bulgaria, Iran, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and as chief of the division for the Soviet Union. Under his sometimes-gruff exterior, he was sensitive to the human costs of spying and lit candles at Roman Catholic churches to honor the memory of agents he had lost.

Mr. Gerber joined the CIA in the 1950s, a time of ambition and optimism, but the young agency faced a steep learning curve against the KGB, which was far more experienced in human-source espionage. Mr. Gerber had little interest in the CIA’s often disaster-prone early covert actions, devoting his career instead to honing espionage tradecraft and tactics on the Cold War’s front lines — what Secretary of State Dean Rusk once called the “back alleys of the world.”

Mr. Gerber never accepted the term “denied areas” used by other U.S. officials to describe the Soviet bloc regions, including Moscow, that were so heavily monitored by secret police that they were considered off-limits for American spying. “Denied areas” — to whom? he asked. Not to him or his classmates. Mr. Gerber and others on their first tours in the 1950s were not intimidated by the KGB, he said.

Berlin became an early laboratory. The classic way of handling Berlin was inviting agents, meaning potential sources or paid informants, to come from the East to the West to meet in a safe house. But the younger case officers there — and elsewhere — began planning methods to sustain communications with agents and run operations as the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 and the Iron Curtain fell on Eastern Europe. One of them, Haviland Smith, in Prague, pioneered a method of the “brush pass,” to exchange a package even under surveillance, with both handler and agent momentarily ducking out of view of the secret police.

Even more daring, Mr. Gerber insisted that CIA case officers could shake off surveillance and hold in-person meetings with an agent, not just slip away for a few seconds to make a brush pass. Mr. Gerber attempted this in Sofia, Bulgaria, his second overseas assignment. He proposed to hold personal meetings with an agent, but the city was more spread out and chances for a brush pass were limited.

CIA headquarters advised against a personal meeting, but Mr. Gerber went ahead. “I pointed out that I couldn’t do this any other way,” he recalled. Sometimes meetings had to be short, almost like a brush contact, when the agent would drop something into the purse of Mr. Gerber’s wife, Rosalie. But the agent was visible, and allowed Mr. Gerber to look him in the eye, judging the body language and mood.

In 1968, Mr. Gerber returned to the United States for five years. This was a period when the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, James J. Angleton, believed that any Soviets who might volunteer to provide secrets to the United States must be a trap or a KGB “dangle,” someone sent by the KGB to embarrass or expose the CIA officer, or to provide misleading information. Those who dared to show up at the door of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow were usually asked a few questions and shown the way out; rarely was effort made to find out if they were genuine.

At headquarters in 1971, Mr. Gerber began to question this caution. Acting on his own hunch, he pulled the files of every person who had volunteered information in Moscow going back a decade and a half, and in Eastern Europe for a decade. The files suggested that Angleton had been wrong, and that the CIA had been turning away genuine volunteers, potential agents, losing what might be valuable intelligence.

He felt that the CIA ought to be smart enough to check out those offering information and sift the “dangles” from those who were sincere. He also noticed an interesting pattern: that in the cases of a dangle or trap, the KGB used someone who was already known to the recipient, to sugarcoat it. They never used a serving KGB officer or a stranger.

Mr. Gerber wrote an analysis and recommendations in May 1971 that said CIA officers should not be afraid to accept something from someone they had never seen before, but they should be wary if a Soviet acquaintance seemed eager to thrust something into their hands.

These came to be known as the “Gerber rules” and marked a turning point that upended the Angleton mindset. Angleton was forced out in 1974. In the years that followed, the CIA began a much more forward-leaning attempt to recruit human sources against the Soviet target.

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Mr. Gerber headed to Moscow as CIA station chief in early 1980. The fruits of the Gerber rules had begun to pay dividends under Gardner “Gus” Hathaway, the outgoing chief.

Adolf Tolkachev, a middle-aged Soviet radar engineer, had repeatedly volunteered to provide secrets to the United States, and the CIA’s Moscow station, after some hesitation, began a highly productive espionage operation with him. Tolkachev met in person with CIA case officers, handing over rolls of film containing secret documents he had photographed on the lunch hour in his apartment using a simple Pentax 35mm camera. The documents revealed Soviet military research and development plans a decade into the future — an intelligence gold mine.

Taking over, Mr. Gerber coached and planned every step with his case officers. His watchword was always, “What works — works.” He had a knack for the choreography of espionage. When headquarters tried to press the Moscow station to use a newfangled electronic device known as Discus for communicating with Tolkachev by sending written messages in a burst from a distance, Mr. Gerber had doubts whether it was right for the moment.

One day he tested Discus in a Moscow vegetable market while looking over cucumbers and tomatoes as his wife Rosalie held the second unit in another section of the market. Mr. Gerber tried to send a signal, but realized immediately that an agent would have to be looking into a shirt pocket to see if the red verification light flashed, or else he would not know if the message was transmitted. Mr. Gerber wondered: Was looking down into one’s shirt pocket at a red flashing light the kind of body language that would betray a spy?

In the end, Discus did not play a major role in the Tolkachev operation, but Mr. Gerber’s vision of personal meetings did. Tolkachev met with CIA officers 21 times over six years on the streets of Moscow. Most of the meetings were within three miles of the front entrance of KGB headquarters, but they were never detected, in part thanks to the Moscow station’s painstaking tradecraft and calculated risk-taking under Mr. Gerber.

Mr. Gerber went on to become the Soviet division chief at headquarters in Langley in 1984. Some of his more difficult days at the CIA came in the wake of the betrayal of Tolkachev to the Soviets by a fired CIA trainee, Edward Lee Howard. Tolkachev was arrested in 1985 and executed the next year.

Burton Lee Gerber was born in Chicago on July 19, 1933. His father worked for a book and encyclopedia publishing company.

The family later moved to Upper Arlington, Ohio, and Mr. Gerber graduated from Michigan State University in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in international relations. He had an interest in global affairs ever since working as a paperboy for the Ohio State Journal and reading headlines during World War II.

He was recruited into the CIA on campus, he recalled, by a man who “could not tell me what the job would be, he couldn’t tell me anything about it, but would I be interested?” Mr. Gerber went back to his fraternity house and filled out the application. He was hired into the agency, did a six-month stint in the Army as a second lieutenant, then returned to the CIA.

In 1958, he met Rosalie Marie Prokarym at the CIA, and they married in Washington that September. She died in 1999.

He wrote a classified memoir, “Splendid Day: A Case Officer’s Journey,” that is still in use at the agency. He received the CIA’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the Intelligence Commendation Medal.

Mr. Gerber had a long interest in wolves and supported the U.S. government and nongovernmental organizations’ effort to reintroduce red wolves into Dare County, North Carolina, and gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park. He five times rode his bicycle in retirement from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Washington to raise money for AIDS service organizations Food & Friends and the Whitman-Walker Clinic, and volunteered for other charity organizations.

Mr. Gerber often and openly espoused an uncomplicated patriotism. He often asked students about the ethics of espionage: Is it moral to urge someone to betray their country? Yes, he said, when in defense of a political system such as the United States. He signed every email, “God Bless America.”

2. ‘Dark Money’ Is Tainting Washington Think Tanks. A New Report Shows It’s Worse Than You Think.

The Quincy Institute is doing some deep research on US think tanks.

From the Politico article below:

Excerpt:

The real question the news ought to raise is: Why is a think tanker’s work worth the investment by a foreign government, legal or otherwise? It’s because the organizations have a cachet in our never-ending political wars.

In fact, the Quincy report is a pretty good example of think tank work as political advocacy. This particular think tank, after all, is not an organization dedicated to the abstract question of transparency in policy research. Rather, Quincy describes itself as an “action-oriented” outfit working to “expose the dangerous consequences of an overly militarized American foreign policy and present an alternative approach.”

The 39 page report that is very much worth the read is at this link: https://quincyinst.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/18151647/QUINCY-BRIEF-NO.-68-JANUARY-2025-FREEMAN-CLEVELAND-STOUT.pdf

The Quincy Institute's new think tank tracker is at this link: https://thinktankfundingtracker.org/

The Quincy institute rates itself a four out of five on its transparency scale.

Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

{Transparent}

Transparency Score★

★

★

★

☆

Methodology

This think tank publishes a donor list and does not appear to accept contributions from US government, Pentagon contractors, or foreign governments

COLUMN | CAPITAL CITY

‘Dark Money’ Is Tainting Washington Think Tanks. A New Report Shows It’s Worse Than You Think.

The Atlantic Council and Brookings lead the way, according to a brand-new report.

https://archive.is/WzCUa#selection-861.0-1787.91

Illustration by Erin Aulov/POLITICO (source images via iStock)

By Michael Schaffer

01/03/2025 05:00 AM EST

Michael Schaffer is a senior editor and columnist at POLITICO Magazine. He has covered national and local politics for over 20 years and spent seven years as editor-in-chief of the Washingtonian. His Capital City column chronicles the inside conversations and big trends shaping Washington politics.

Washington’s think-tank industry, which sets the terms of debate for so much of American policymaking, is floating on a sea of foreign-government and Pentagon-contractor dollars.

That’s the conclusion of a brand-new report out this morning and shared with me by a pair of scholars at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank that officially eschews foreign-government money — and delights in tweaking the Beltway foreign-affairs establishment.

Among other things, the paper says that the top 50 think tanks took in some $110 million over the past five years from foreign governments and related entities, including nearly $17 million from the United Arab Emirates, the largest single foreign donor. Leading Pentagon contractors, meanwhile, kicked in nearly $35 million over the same period.

The Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution topped the list of foreign-government beneficiaries, taking in nearly $21 million and over $17 million, respectively. All in all, 54 different governments contributed to the industry, a list largely made up of pro-western democracies but also including fantastically wealthy authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Most disturbingly, the report makes clear that the numbers it cites may only be partial: Unlike traditional PACs or registered foreign agents, think tanks don’t have to disclose where their money comes from. Researching the study, co-authors Ben Freeman and Nick Cleveland-Stout told me, meant poring through the organizations’ annual reports in hopes that information would be voluntarily shared.

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“More than a third of the top foreign policy think tanks in the US don’t disclose any donor information,” said Freeman. The category encompasses 18 of the 50 biggest think tanks, including highly-regarded Beltway stalwarts like the American Enterprise Institute or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “We really have no clue whatsoever who is funding them. We call these organizations dark money think tanks.”

That particular loaded term — lifted from the secretive political groups legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — is no accident.

According to Freeman and Cleveland-Stout, the typical think tank in 2024 looks a lot more like an advocacy group than a university. The paper doesn’t get into analyzing whether specific white papers were bought and paid for, but the implication is clear: Between media appearances, Congressional testimony and serving as mini governments-in-waiting for whatever party is out of power, the organizations do a lot to shape the political conversation, or at least set the boundaries of what views Washington deems respectable.

As such, they say, Americans have a vested interest in knowing who’s underwriting the opinions.

There are a couple of problems with that ask. One is the U.S. Constitution, which rightly makes it hard for the government to simply order a private organization to open up its books. The second is the self-conception of a lot of think tanks, which often cast themselves as high-minded research organizations rather than outfits involved in the grubby business of lobbying. This mindset underlies some of the reluctance to just lay out the finances voluntarily.

I think it’s time to get over that. In a low-trust moment where the policy views of many think tanks are about to face unprecedented assault, they should be going above and beyond to demonstrate that they’re legit. Hiding behind their researchers’ PhDs — as if they were ivory-tower philosophy professors who couldn’t even find their way to the bursar’s office — won’t cut it.

If the end result is that think tanks’ scholarly self-conception gets muddied up a bit, that’s probably good news for Washington’s culture, even if it dents a few researchers’ egos.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks at the Brookings Institution in March 2016. The Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution topped the list of foreign-government beneficiaries, taking in nearly $21 million and over $17 million, respectively. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

To get a sense of why, you don’t have to look further than the most recent foreign-entangelement scandal to roil the think tank world: last summer’s arrest of Council on Foreign Relations scholar Sue Mi Terry on charges of improperly working for the South Korean government.

What was notable about the affair was not any purported outrageousness: Terry allegedly accepted pricey handbags in exchange for publishing relatively conventional op-eds that largely echoed both Korean and U.S. establishment views. She’s denied the charges, and my hunch is that the case against her will be less than a slam dunk in court. Yet the illustrative fact is that so much of what she’s accused of doing is just a sloppier version of the perfectly legal status quo. (South Korea has given at least $4.4 million to top think tanks since 2019, according to the Quincy paper.)

The real question the news ought to raise is: Why is a think tanker’s work worth the investment by a foreign government, legal or otherwise? It’s because the organizations have a cachet in our never-ending political wars.

In fact, the Quincy report is a pretty good example of think tank work as political advocacy. This particular think tank, after all, is not an organization dedicated to the abstract question of transparency in policy research. Rather, Quincy describes itself as an “action-oriented” outfit working to “expose the dangerous consequences of an overly militarized American foreign policy and present an alternative approach.”

As an anti-interventionist redoubt, it channels the views of a lot of folks opposed to the internationalist Washington foreign policy “blob” — and presumably more inclined to suspect that the establishment’s views are bought and paid for by self-interested governments and military-industrial buckrakers. No wonder the report focuses on overseas or weapons-manufacturer money, as opposed to donations from Big Pharma or Silicon Valley or any other vested interest that might want to steer American policy.

Or, for that matter, donations from organizations linked to the Koch family or George Soros, both of which donate to Quincy. David Sacks, the tech mogul slated for an AI “czar” position in the Trump administration, has also contributed to the organization’s publication.

For his part, Freeman said he’d love to eventually see research on think tank donations from other sectors. The report currently ranks organizations based on their transparency, and will coincide with the launch of a funding tracker designed to enable readers to search foreign and military donations to think tanks the same way they can search for donations to elected officials. Whatever the authors’ foreign-policy motivations were, it’s a smart and useful idea.

As for his own organization, Freeman said, the relevant thing is that we know who the donors are, which depending on your view of the benefactors may help put the group’s work in context, positive or otherwise: “I think the thread across all of our recommendations is this transparency. Think tanks should put all their cards on the table, then let the recipients of their information be able to judge for themselves.”

Alas, efforts to find ways to force policy organizations to reveal their donors have tended to die in Congress, and so-called “truth in testimony” policies — which require hearing witnesses to say whether any of the research money came from overseas — are relatively easy to evade.

Ditto the kinds of transparency enforced by the fourth estate rather than the government. When journalists quote people from advocacy groups, they tend to explain the group’s political orientation. But we often don’t do the same for think tank scholars, who get treated more like university professors than recipients of cash from vested interests. Most of the time when a think-tank scholar shows up in the media, the reporter doing the story is trying to write up a newsy foreign event or controversial Congressional bill on deadline, and is not inclined to do the research that would enable a “to be sure” paragraph about the talking head’s income stream.

When pressed about foreign donations, of course, think tanks typically cite ironclad policies that prevent donors from meddling in work product.

“Every donor must agree to the Atlantic Council’s Intellectual Independence Policy, which ensures the Atlantic Council retains strict intellectual independence for all of its projects and publications,” a spokesperson for the organization told me. “This means donors agree to the Council maintaining independent control of the content and conclusions of any products resulting from sponsored projects. To safeguard our independence, we have a strict policy for accepting funding from government sources.”

“Brookings and all its personnel are governed by robust policies on research independence,” said spokeswoman Jenny Lu Mallamo, noting that less than 10 percent of the budget typically came from foreign governments.

In real life, though, many ironclad policies can be porous. “If I had to bet I would say window dressing at worst and sincere good intentions at best,” said Enrique Mendizabal, who leads On Think Tanks, a think tank that researches (you guessed it) other think tanks. “Think tanks are rarely (if ever) independent. Think-tanking is all about navigating undue influences, playing funders against each other, hiding behind the evidence.”

And in a moment where there are more ways than ever of getting your views into the public-opinion slipstream, the old game has gotten harder. “The model is somewhat doomed,” Mendizabal said. “It is overtly political. When a think tank meets a prospective donor they sell their influence over public policy and their access to key policymakers and power brokers. They are attracting funders who want to change public policy. Funders who want to have an influence.”

Elsewhere in the world, foreign funding for NGOs has become a political flashpoint, particularly for authoritarians like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and nationalists like India’s Narendra Modi. There’s no saying that couldn’t happen in Trump-era Washington, though it’d be at least a little awkward given that many of the most opaque think tanks are on the right.

Instead, the danger is that the foreign governments, and the rest of the special-interest universe, stop seeing think tanks as a worthwhile investment.

If the second Trump administration is at all like the first, it will be a period notably light on influential white papers and difference-making wonk trends — but big on personal connections to the boss. Against that backdrop, there could be a lot less incentive for deep-pocketed types to underwrite the kind of research that aims to shape policy. For think tanks, which can’t rely on tuition dollars like universities can, that’s an enormously dangerous scenario.

One way to forestall it might be to preemptively make themselves a little more transparent.

3. The Militia and the Mole

A long read.

 While this is a fascinating report, I have three words about Wlliams: grain of salt.

You can read the complete 17,000 word article at this ​https://www.propublica.org/article/ap3-oath-keepers-militia-mole?utm

Democracy

The Militia and the Mole

by Joshua KaplanJan. 4, 5 a.m. EST

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https://www.propublica.org/article/ap3-oath-keepers-militia-mole?utm

Reporting Highlights

·      A Freelance Vigilante: A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.

·      The Future of Militias: He penetrated a new generation of militia leaders, which included doctors and government attorneys. Experts say that militias could have a renaissance under Donald Trump.

·      A Secret Trove: He sent ProPublica a massive trove of documents. The conversations that he secretly recorded give a unique, startling window into the militia movement.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.

On April 1, 2023, Williams retrieved the bag from his closet and rushed to his car. He had no time to clean the dishes that had accumulated in his apartment. He did not know if armed men were out looking for him. He did not know if he would ever feel safe to return. He parked his car for the night in the foothills overlooking Salt Lake City and curled up his 6-foot-4-inch frame in the back seat of the 20-year-old Honda. This was his new home.

He turned on a recording app to add an entry to his diary. His voice had the high-pitched rasp of a lifelong smoker: “Where to fucking start,” he sighed, taking a deep breath. After more than two years undercover, he’d been growing rash and impulsive. He had feared someone was in danger and tried to warn him, but it backfired. Williams was sure at least one person knew he was a double agent now, he said into his phone. “It’s only a matter of time before it gets back to the rest.”

In the daylight, Williams dropped an envelope with no return address in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive and a gold Oath Keepers medallion.

It was addressed to me.

The documents laid out a remarkable odyssey. Posing as an ideological compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the surveillance of a young journalist, then improvised ways to sabotage the militants’ schemes. In one group, his ploys were so successful that he became the militia’s top commander in the state of Utah.

Now he was a fugitive. He drove south toward a desert four hours from the city, where he could disappear.

1. Prelude

I’d first heard from Williams five months earlier, when he sent me an intriguing but mysterious anonymous email. “I have been attempting to contact national media and civil rights groups for over a year and been ignored,” it read. “I’m tired of yelling into the void.” He sent it to an array of reporters. I was the only one to respond. I’ve burned a lot of time sating my curiosity about emails like that. I expected my interest to die after a quick call. Instead, I came to occupy a dizzying position as the only person to know the secret Williams had been harboring for almost two years.

We spoke a handful of times over encrypted calls before he fled. He’d been galvanized by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol, Williams told me, when militias like the Oath Keepers conspired to violently overturn the 2020 presidential election. He believed democracy was under siege from groups the FBI has said pose a major domestic terrorism threat. So he infiltrated the militia movement on spec, as a freelance vigilante. He did not tell the police or the FBI. A loner, he did not tell his family or friends.

Williams seemed consumed with how to ensure this wasn’t all a self-destructive, highly dangerous waste of time. He distrusted law enforcement and didn’t want to be an informant, he said. He told me he hoped to damage the movement by someday going public with what he’d learned.

4. Washington Post cartoonist resigns over paper’s refusal to publish satirical cartoon of Bezos and Trump

​The cartoon in question is at the link below.

Washington Post cartoonist resigns over paper’s refusal to publish satirical cartoon of Bezos and Trump

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/04/media/washington-post-cartoonist-ann-telnaes-resigns-bezos?cid=ios_app&utm

By Jon Passantino and Brian Stelter, CNN

 3 minute read 

Updated 9:00 PM EST, Sat January 4, 2025

The Washington Post headquarters in downtown Washington on Feb. 21, 2019. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

New YorkCNN — 

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes announced Friday she had resigned from The Washington Post after the newspaper refused to publish a satirical cartoon depicting billionaire Post owner Jeff Bezos on bended knee in front of President-elect Donald Trump.

Talnaes, who had been with The Post since 2008, wrote in a Substack post announcing her resignation that, “I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”

The cartoon depicted Bezos, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI chief Sam Altman on their knees, handing over bags of cash to a statue of Trump next to a lipstick-holding Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and bowing Mickey Mouse.

Ann Telnaes

Talnaes said the cartoon “criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” satirizing “these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago.”

The Post’s refusal to run the cartoon, Talnaes said, was a “game changer…and dangerous for a free press.”

In a statement Saturday, The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists condemned The Post’s decision, accusing the newspaper of “craven censorship” and “political cowardice.”

“Editorial cartooning is the tip of the spear in opinion, and the Post’s cowering further soils their once-stellar reputation for standing up and speaking truth to power. We weep for the loss of this once great newspaper,” it said, calling on other cartoonists to finish Telnaes’ sketch and post it online in a show of solidarity.

David Shipley, The Post’s opinions editor, said in a statement provided by a newspaper spokeswoman that he respected Telnaes, “but I must disagree with her interpretation of events.”

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” he said. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column – this one a satire – for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”

Related article

Amazon plans to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration

The resignation marked the latest high-profile departure from The Post, which has seen several members of its editorial board step down and star reporters exit after Bezos killed an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris just weeks before the November election. Bezos’ controversial decision led to a tidal wave of reader backlash, with The Post reporting more than 250,000 readers canceling their subscriptions.

Last month, Bezos dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and Amazon announced it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Disney, the parent company of ABC, settled a defamation suit brought by Trump for $15 million in a highly scrutinized decision. And Facebook and Instagram parent Meta said that it was donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund after Zuckerberg met with Trump privately.

The Los Angeles Times, owned by biotech billionaire Soon-Shiong, also announced in October it would not publish its endorsement of Harris, leading to a subscriber revolt and resignation of all but one member of its seven-member editorial board.

5. The Pentagon is Panicking Over Venezuela’s Peykaap-III Missile Boats

The Pentagon is Panicking Over Venezuela’s Peykaap-III Missile Boats

The Peykaaps are in Venezuela’s possession for one reason: to increase Venezuela’s power projection capacity and to complicate America’s. The Peykaap-IIIs are specifically designed to stunt and stymie the larger powers of the world while still allowing the Venezuelans to run roughshod over international shipping and their neighbors.

The National Interest · by Brandon J. Weichert · January 3, 2025

More generally, Venezuela has been committed to undermining the power and reach of the United States throughout Latin America wherever—and however—it can.

Venezuela’s government has embraced a series of alliances to help Caracas intimidate its U.S.-backed neighbors and crush American power in the wider region. For instance, Venezuela’s regime has made common cause not only with a variety of drug cartels in the region but with the Islamic Republic of Iran. That’s especially odd, considering that the Chavismo regime in Caracas styles itself as atheistic and socialist.

Nevertheless, Venezuela and Iran are dangerously close to each other. This relationship has extended far beyond diplomatic friendship and has transmogrified into a full-blown military alliance, replete with arms sales. More to the point, Venezuela has striven to emulate Iranian unconventional warfare tactics of the kind that both Iran and its terrorist proxies, such as the Yemeni Houthis, have employed throughout the Middle East over the last decade.

Venezuela’s Plot to Disrupt Shipping in the Panama Canal Zone

Specifically, there is real concern on the part of some U.S. strategists that Venezuela is planning to disrupt key shipping on the Panama Canal in much the same way that the Houthis have been disrupting international shipping in both the Red Sea or the Strait of Bab El-Mandeb or the way in which the Iranian Navy plans to shut down the Strait of Hormuz in the event of a direct conflict with the United States.

This further explains the incoming Trump administration’s seemingly random fixation on restoring direct U.S. control over the Panama Canal Zone, even at the risk of violating international agreements made with Panama.

A key system that the Venezuelans have procured from their Iranian partners has been the Peykaap-III-class missile boat (known in Iran as the Zolfaghar-class), which was designed as a fast patrol craft meant to conduct quick, agile strikes. Interestingly, the Iranian boats that the Peykaap-IIIs are based on are themselves derived from the North Korean IPS-16 fast-attack boats.

The Specs

Coming in at almost 57 feet in length with a beam of 12 feet and a draft of a little more than two feet, this fast and tiny boat is meant for conducting attacks in the shallowest of waters. Powered by two diesel engines, these boats can cruise at a top speed of almost 60 miles per hour.

These boats carry two single anti-ship missile launchers, which can pop off either Kowsar or Nasr, Iranian-built, missiles. The Kowsar missiles have a range of around 12 miles while the Nasr goes out until about 21 miles. These two missiles rely on internal guidance and active terminal homing.

Peykaap-IIIs carry lightweight anti-ship torpedoes, compatible with Chinese (another close Venezuelan ally) C-701/FL-10 models. These boats come with heavy-caliber machine guns for close combat. Thus, the Peykaap-III boats are perfect for hit-and-run tactics, particularly against less maneuverable ships. Venezuela’s acquisition of the Peykaap-III-class missile boats began in 2023 and mean only one thing: at some point, Caracas will seek to do to international shipping in the Panama Canal Zone what both the Houthis and Iranians have done in the Red Sea and the Strait of Bab El-Mandeb.

For the last two years, U.S. intelligence surveillance has spotted Peykaap-IIIs in Venezuelan waters around strategic areas like the Gulf of Paria near Trinidad and Tobago, suggesting an intent to dominate (or at least monitor) key maritime routes near Venezuela. The deployment of these boats so close to Guyana adds a layer of tension to overall regional maritime security.

The Geopolitical Implications

Venezuela is a revanchist power in Latin America that is intent on rolling back U.S. power and influence in the region. It has aligned with Iran and other rivals of the United States to achieve this goal. The recent acquisition of Peykaap-III-class missile boats from Iran highlights this fact.

And if the United States does not pay close heed to what Venezuela is up to in its own geostrategic backyard, then it might discover that the Venezuelans are doing to the Panama Canal that which Iranian-backed militias in the Mideast are doing to global shipping in that region.

The Peykaaps are in Venezuela’s possession for one reason: to increase Venezuela’s power projection capacity and to complicate America’s. Sure, the United States Navy has infinitely more powerful, larger warships to enhance its power projection in the region. But the Peykaap-IIIs are specifically designed to stunt and stymie the larger powers of the world while still allowing the Venezuelans to run roughshod over international shipping and their neighbors.

Brandon J. Weichert, a Senior National Security Editor at The National Interest as well as a Senior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest, and a contributor at Popular Mechanics, consults regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including the Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, the Asia Times, and countless others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.

Image: Shutterstock.

The National Interest · by Brandon J. Weichert · January 3, 2025

6. How Chinese Hackers Graduated From Clumsy Corporate Thieves to Military Weapons

How Chinese Hackers Graduated From Clumsy Corporate Thieves to Military Weapons

Massive ‘Typhoon’ cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure and telecoms sought to lay groundwork for potential conflict with Beijing, as intruders gathered data and got in position to impede response and sow chaos

https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/typhoon-china-hackers-military-weapons-97d4ef95?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Dustin VolzFollow

, Aruna ViswanathaFollow

, Sarah KrouseFollow

 and Drew FitzGeraldFollow

Jan. 4, 2025 9:00 pm ET

The message from President Biden’s national security adviser was startling.

Chinese hackers had gained the ability to shut down dozens of U.S. ports, power grids and other infrastructure targets at will, Jake Sullivan told telecommunications and technology executives at a secret meeting at the White House in the fall of 2023, according to people familiar with it. The attack could threaten lives, and the government needed the companies’ help to root out the intruders. 

What no one at the briefing knew, including Sullivan: China’s hackers were already working their way deep inside U.S. telecom networks, too. 

The two massive hacking operations have upended the West’s understanding of what Beijing wants, while revealing the astonishing skill level and stealth of its keyboard warriors—once seen as the cyber equivalent of noisy, drunken burglars.

China’s hackers were once thought to be interested chiefly in business secrets and huge sets of private consumer data. But the latest hacks make clear they are now soldiers on the front lines of potential geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China, in which cyberwarfare tools are expected to be powerful weapons. 

U.S. computer networks are a “key battlefield in any future conflict” with China, said Brandon Wales, a former top U.S. cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, who closely tracked China’s hacking operations against American infrastructure. He said prepositioning and intelligence collection by the hackers “are designed to ensure they prevail by keeping the U.S. from projecting power, and inducing chaos at home.” 

As China increasingly threatens Taiwan, working toward what Western intelligence officials see as a target of being ready to invade by 2027, the U.S. could be pulled into the fray as the island’s most important backer. Other friction between Washington and Beijing has intensified in recent years, with President-elect Donald Trump threatening a sharp trade war and China building a tighter alliance with Russia. Top U.S. officials in both parties have warned that China is the greatest danger to American security.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan at the White House in October, top. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing in May.

Kent Nishimura/Getty Images, Sergei BOBYLYOV/AFP/Getty Images

In the infrastructure attacks, which began at least as early as 2019 and are still taking place, hackers connected to China’s military embedded themselves in arenas that spies usually ignored, including a water utility in Hawaii, a port in Houston and an oil-and-gas processing facility. 

Investigators, both at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in the private sector, found the hackers lurked, sometimes for years, periodically testing access. At a regional airport, investigators found the hackers had secured access, and then returned every six months to make sure they could still get in. Hackers spent at least nine months in the network of a water-treatment system, moving into an adjacent server to study the operations of the plant. At a utility in Los Angeles, the hackers searched for material about how the utility would respond in the event of an emergency or crisis. The precise location and other details of the infrastructure victims are closely guarded secrets, and couldn’t be fully determined.

American security officials said they believe the infrastructure intrusions—carried out by a group dubbed Volt Typhoon—are at least in part aimed at disrupting Pacific military supply lines and otherwise impeding America’s ability to respond to a future conflict with China, including over a potential invasion of Taiwan.

In the separate telecom attacks, which started in mid-2023 or earlier and were first reported by The Wall Street Journal in September, a hacking group—this one known as Salt Typhoon—linked to Chinese intelligence burrowed into U.S. wireless networks as well as systems used for court-appointed surveillance.

They were able to access data from over a million users, and snapped up audio from senior government officials, including some calls with Trump by accessing the phone lines of people whose phones he used. They also targeted people involved in Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. 

They were also able to swipe from Verizon and AT&T a list of individuals the U.S. government was surveilling in recent months under court order, which included suspected Chinese agents. 

A ceremony at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei in October. Photo: tyrone siu/Reuters

The intruders used known software flaws that had been publicly warned about but hadn’t been patched. Investigators said they were still probing the full scope of the attack. 

Lawmakers and officials given classified briefings in recent weeks told the Journal they were shocked at the depth of the intrusions and at how hard the hacks may be to resolve, and some telecom company leaders said they were blindsided by the attack’s scope and severity. 

“They were very careful about their techniques,” said Anne Neuberger, President Biden’s deputy national security adviser for cybersecurity. In some cases hackers erased cybersecurity logs, and in others the victim companies didn’t keep adequate logs, meaning there were details “we will never know regarding the scope and scale of this,” she said.

Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, accused the U.S. of peddling disinformation about threats from Chinese hackers to advance its geopolitical ambitions. Chinese leader Xi Jinping told President Biden during their meeting in Peru in November that there was no evidence to support the allegations, he said.

“Some in the U.S. seem to be enthusiastic about creating various types of ‘typhoons,’” the spokesman said, referring to the names assigned to the hacking groups. “The U.S. needs to stop its own cyberattacks against other countries and refrain from using cybersecurity to smear and slander China.”

Verizon said a small number of high-profile customers in government and politics were specifically targeted by the threat actor and that those people had been notified. “After considerable work addressing this incident, we can report that Verizon has contained the activities associated with this particular incident,” said Vandana Venkatesh, chief legal officer at Verizon.

An AT&T spokeswoman said the company detected “no activity by nation-state actors in our networks at this time,” adding that the Chinese government targeted a “small number of individuals of foreign intelligence interest” and that affected customers were notified in cooperation with law enforcement.

‘Shocking how exposed we are’

Some national security officials involved in the investigation said they believe the telecom hack is so severe, and the networks so compromised, that the U.S. may never be able to say with certainty that the Chinese hackers have been fully rooted out. 

Several senior lawmakers and U.S. officials have switched from making traditional cellphone calls and texts to using encrypted apps such as Signal, for fear that China may be listening in. Federal law-enforcement officials have told state and local law enforcement to do the same. (Federal agents already use their own encrypted systems for classified work.)  

An AT&T store in New York. Hackers attacked the company’s network. Photo: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg News

In late December, in response to the Salt Typhoon campaign, federal cybersecurity officials published new guidance recommending the public use end-to-end encryption for communications, and said text-based multifactor authentication for account logins should be avoided in favor of app-based methods. 

U.S. officials have warned for more than a decade about fast-evolving threats in cyberspace, from ransomware hackers locking computers and demanding payments to state-directed thefts of valuable corporate secrets. They also raised concerns about the use of Chinese equipment, including from telecom giants Huawei and ZTE, arguing they could open a back door to unfettered spying. In December, the Journal reported that U.S. authorities are investigating whether the popular home-internet routers made by China’s TP-Link, which have been linked to cyberattacks, pose a national-security risk.

But Beijing didn’t need to leverage Chinese equipment to accomplish most of its goals in the massive infrastructure and telecom attacks, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the investigation. In both hacks, China exploited a range of aging telecom equipment that U.S. companies have trusted for decades.

In the telecom attacks, the hackers exploited unpatched network devices from security vendor Fortinet and compromised large network routers from Cisco Systems. In at least one case, they took control of a high-level network management account that wasn’t protected by multifactor authentication, a basic safeguard. 

That granted them access to more than 100,000 routers from which they could further their attack—a serious lapse that may have allowed the hackers to copy traffic back to China and delete their own digital tracks.

The router hijacking took place within AT&T’s networks, a person familiar with the matter said. 

AT&T declined to comment on the router attack. Cisco and Fortinet declined to comment.

In December, Neuberger said the number of U.S. telecom victims had grown to nine, and that there could be more.

In addition to deep intrusions into AT&T and Verizon, hackers pierced other networks belonging to Lumen Technologies and T-Mobile. The Chinese hackers also reached into Charter Communications, Consolidated Communications and Windstream, according to people familiar with the matter.

Lumen said it no longer sees evidence of the attackers in its network and that no customer data was accessed. T-Mobile said it stopped recent attempts to infiltrate its systems from advancing and protected sensitive customer information from being accessed.

Some U.S. officials, including Neuberger, have said the hack underscores the need for baseline cybersecurity requirements for the telecom industry. The Biden administration created such mandates through executive actions for pipelines, railways and the aviation industry.

“Cyberspace is a fiercely contested battlefield,” said Sullivan, the national security adviser. “We…have made considerable progress, but serious vulnerabilities remain in sectors where we don’t have mandatory cybersecurity requirements.”

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R., Alaska), during a congressional hearing in December, said “It’s shocking how exposed we are, and still are.” He described a recent classified briefing on the telecom hacks as “breathtaking.”

The infrastructure hacks also alarmed officials. In April, during a five-hour session with his Chinese counterpart in Beijing, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said China’s attacks on physical infrastructure were concerning, dangerous and escalatory, people familiar with the encounter said.  

Flanked by aides at a long table with pots of tea and water, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi shrugged and called the allegations a phantom concocted by the U.S. to increase support for military spending.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, top, and China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a meeting in Beijing in April.

MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/AFP/Getty Images

In another meeting later that week, other U.S. officials presented evidence linking the intrusions to China-based IP addresses. The Chinese officials said they would look at it and get back to the Americans, but never substantively did, U.S. officials familiar with the interactions said.   

This account of the two devastating cyberattacks is based on interviews with around 50 national security, law enforcement and private-sector officials. Many of the details have never been reported. 

Port attack

The first shot that revealed the new cyberwar came midmorning on Aug. 19, 2021, when Chinese hackers gained a foothold in the digital underpinnings of one of America’s largest ports in just 31 seconds.

At the Port of Houston, an intruder acting like an engineer from one of the port’s software vendors entered a server designed to let employees reset their passwords from home. The hackers managed to download an encrypted set of passwords from all the port’s staff before the port recognized the threat and cut off the password server from its network.

A mysterious file launches a global hunt

How Chinese hackers broke into the Port of Houston in just 31 seconds.

An attacker, acting like an engineer from one of the port’s software

vendors, enters a server that lets employees reset their passwords.

The user uploads a file that looks like a normal IT file that would track server usage and generate reports. The file, named reportwriter.js, even had

comments explaining each piece of the code to anyone looking at it.

reportwriter.js

The attacker leaves with a back door in place, to get back in even more easily.

At approximately this time, a cybersecurity vendor notices the activity and flags it to the port's cybersecurity chief, who

examines it and decides it's a false alarm. He heads to lunch at Whataburger.

log in credentials

Two additional suspicious IP

addresses access the server, then use its connection to the server holding all employee username and password data to download a complete list of log in credentials.

The attackers start using their access to explore the network further, while the cybersecurity vendor issues another warning that attackers are back.

The port's cybersecurity staff removes the compromised server from its network, ending the attack.

Afterward, the port’s cybersecurity chief, Chris Wolski, called the Coast Guard, which has authority over U.S. ports, to notify it of the attack: “It looks like we have a problem.”

The Houston port neutralized the threat, but unfettered access to the port’s passwords could have given hackers the ability to move around in internal networks and find places to hide until they wanted to act. They could have eventually been in position to disrupt or halt operations, according to investigators.  

The attack on the port—which at that time had only recently upgraded from basic antivirus software and from just one IT employee working part time on cybersecurity—was a crucial early tip to U.S. officials that China was going after targets that didn’t house corporate or government secrets, and was using novel ways to get in.

The FBI found the intrusion relied on a previously unknown flaw in the password software.

A group of Microsoft analysts determined that the same hacking group had used the flaw in the software, which came from another company, to also target consulting services and IT companies. The analysts also spotted the hackers targeting networks in Guam, the U.S. territory in the Pacific that is home to a key American naval base, where the intruders had breached a communications provider.

The Redmond, Wash., team prowls for security threats, using billions of signals that come from security features built into Microsoft products, including Office 365, the Windows operating system or Azure cloud.  

The intruders started showing up in other surprising places, from the Hawaii water utility and a West Coast port, to sectors including manufacturing, education and construction, according to U.S. officials and researchers at cyber-threat firms.  

The Port of Houston in September. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Microsoft analysts realized they were seeing novel behavior from China, with a host of Chinese hackers inside critical infrastructure, which appeared to have little espionage or commercial value, at the same time. 

Tom Burt, until recently Microsoft’s vice president for customer trust and safety, said in an interview the company’s threat researchers identified commonalities in the tradecraft and victim targeting that helped link the attacks to a common hacking group. “And that all builds up to, oh, OK, we know this is a new actor group in China,” he said. 

With the information from Microsoft and other intelligence streams, federal agents fanned out across the U.S. to investigate, and throughout 2022 and ’23 heard a similar story at visits to more than a dozen sites. The victims had mediocre cybersecurity, and some had no idea they had even been breached. The hackers generally weren’t installing malware or stealing data such as trade or government secrets or private information—they were just trying to get in and learn the system.

Using old routers

In previous cases, FBI agents could often trace hackers once they found the servers in the U.S. they were renting for their attacks. 

This time, the hackers were getting in via a type of router used by small and home offices, which disguised the intrusions as legitimate U.S. traffic. 

A Cisco display at a telecom event in Barcelona in 2023. Photo: Jordi Boixareu/ZUMA PRESS

The routers, largely built by Cisco and Netgear, were vulnerable to attack because they were so old they were no longer receiving routine security updates from their manufacturers. Once in the hackers’ control, the routers functioned as steppingstones to other victims, without raising alarms because the incursions looked like routine traffic. Netgear declined to comment.

Separately, analysts at the National Security Agency had observed that Beijing was starting to lay the cyber groundwork for a potential Taiwan invasion, including in the U.S., according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the analysis. The information helped bring the new infrastructure hacking activity into focus, showing investigators a bigger picture. 

American officials shared with allies data on the infrastructure intrusions, Western security officials said. 

The focus on Guam and West Coast targets suggested to many senior national-security officials across several Biden administration agencies that the hackers were focused on Taiwan, and doing everything they could to slow a U.S. response in a potential Chinese invasion, buying Beijing precious days to complete a takeover even before U.S. support could arrive. 

Other targets gave analysts pause. One was a small air-traffic control facility on the West Coast, others were water-treatment plants. Those choices suggested the hackers were looking for ways to inflict pain on American civilians, including by scrambling plane routes or shutting off local water-treatment facilities, according to officials familiar with the discussions. 

At the NSA, deputy director George Barnes wondered in late 2022 and early 2023 if Beijing’s plan was for the hackers to be found out, intimidating the U.S. into staying out of a potential conflict in Taiwan, he said in an interview. 

After Taiwan itself, the U.S. “would be target zero” for disruptive cyberattacks in the event of a conflict over the island, said Barnes, who left the NSA in late 2023 after decades at the spy agency. 

George Barnes, deputy director of the NSA at the time, testified in the Senate in 2023. Photo: Michael Brochstein/Zuma Press

By the end of 2023, the FBI had amassed enough information to identify hundreds of the small office routers commandeered by the hackers. Prosecutors asked a judge for authorization to go into the routers remotely and issue a command to neutralize the malware—essentially going into the homes of unsuspecting American victims, who had bought the routers years ago and had no idea their Wi-Fi network was secretly being used as a launchpad for an attack.

In January 2024, a judge approved the request, and the FBI carried out the operation, defanging one of the hackers’ important tools.

Telecom attack

At least several months earlier, a separate group of hackers linked to China had begun a different domestic attack—this time, an all-out assault on U.S. communications systems.

In the summer of 2024, some of the same companies whose executives had visited the White House in the fall of 2023 were told by U.S. officials that a group linked to China’s intelligence operations in the Ministry of State Security had crept into their networks. 

The intruders exploited pathways that telecom companies use to hand data off to each other through links that often lack multifactor authentication. Such extra layers of protection, akin to what many consumers use to log in to bank accounts, don’t always exist between telecom providers in part because the barriers can slow down phone call and web traffic. 

The hackers were also able to compromise cellphone lines used by scores of senior U.S. national security and policy officials, and at least some phone audio from Trump, incoming Vice President JD Vance and people affiliated with both the Trump and Harris presidential campaigns. 

Separately, the hackers sought to access wiretap surveillance systems at Verizon and AT&T in an apparent effort to learn how much the FBI and others understood about Beijing’s spies operating in the U.S. and internationally, investigators said.   

They remain unsure whether Salt Typhoon actors were able to funnel real-time content, such as calls or texts from people under law-enforcement surveillance, from the wiretap breaches back to China. 

The White House in December. Photo: Tom Brenner/Getty Images

The hackers maintained access to the surveillance systems for a long time without detection. At one company, they were inside for about six months, in the other, for about 18 months, according to investigators. Hackers were still inside the wiretap systems of both companies as of October, weeks after the Journal first publicly exposed the intrusions. U.S. officials believe the hackers are now out of the wiretap systems.

After the Journal’s first reports, the hackers changed their behavior, further complicating efforts to locate and evict them, according to investigators. 

This fall, a group of Verizon leaders and cybersecurity experts hunkered down in closed sessions in Texas to spot intruders, study their behavior and determine how to oust them. The carrier has since reviewed each router in its network to check for vulnerabilities. 

Investigators learned that the hackers at times lurked, simply observing network traffic, and in other cases swiped it, exfiltrating their haul through elaborate paths around the globe before funneling it to China. They were expert at creating footholds from which they could observe network traffic. They would, for example, behave the way network engineers might and then cover up their tracks.

The hackers’ focus was in part regional: Phone records of individuals who work in and around Washington, D.C., were a priority. They accessed call event-date records—including date and time stamps, source and destination IP addresses, phone numbers and unique phone identifiers—from over a million users.

“We saw a massive set of data acquired,” an FBI official familiar with the investigation said.

The relationship between the private sector and federal officials investigating the hack has at times grown tense, with each side saying the other is falling short in their responsibilities. Some lawmakers have grown impatient with the time it has taken to expel the hackers. 

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Sullivan, the national security adviser, again convened top executives from telecommunications firms—many of the same ones he called together roughly a year earlier to get help on the infrastructure hacks. This time, the telecoms were themselves the victims, and Sullivan pushed for progress.

Investigators are still determining the full scope and intent of the data haul. They said the data could help hackers establish who different people in the government talk to and better understand their social and professional circles. That intelligence could help facilitate future intrusions or attacks on those individuals.

Robert McMillan and Sadie Gurman contributed to this article.

Write to Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com, Aruna Viswanatha at aruna.viswanatha@wsj.com, Sarah Krouse at sarah.krouse@wsj.com and Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com

7. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 4, 2025

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 4, 2025

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-4-2025

Ukrainian forces reportedly destroyed or damaged over 3,000 Russian tanks and almost 9,000 armored vehicles in 2024 as Russia continues to accrue vehicle losses that are likely unsustainable in the medium-term. Data from the Ukrainian General Staff indicates that Ukrainian forces destroyed or damaged 3,689 tanks, 8,956 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), 13,050 artillery systems, and 407 air defense systems between January 1, 2024 and January 1, 2025. Russian forces reportedly lost at least 197 tanks, 661 armored personnel carriers (APCs), and 65 artillery systems larger than 100mm throughout the frontline during a period of intensified offensive operations in Donetsk Oblast in September and October 2024 and likely sustained a higher rate of tank and armored vehicle losses in June and July 2024 when Russian forces were conducting mechanized assaults in western Donetsk Oblast several times a week that often resulted in armored vehicle losses.

Russia's current armored vehicle and tank production rates indicate that such losses will likely be prohibitive over the longer term, particularly as Russia continues to dip into its Soviet-era stocks. Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated in February 2024 that the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) can produce 250-300 "new and thoroughly modernized" tanks per year and can repair roughly 250-300 additional damaged tanks per year, far below Ukraine's estimate of 3,600 Russian tanks lost in 2024. The British International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) think tank also reported in February 2024 that Russia is likely able to sustain its rate of vehicle losses at that time (over 3,000 armored fighting vehicles including tanks, armored personnel carriers, and infantry fighting vehicles annually as of 2023 and nearly 8,800 between February 2022 and February 2024) for at least two to three years (until about February 2026 or 2027) by mainly refurbishing vehicles from Soviet-era storage facilities. A social media source tracking Russian military depots via satellite imagery shared an updated assessment of Russian tank and armored vehicle storage facilities on December 22 and assessed that Russian forces have 47 percent of their pre-war tank reserves, 52 percent of pre-war infantry fighting vehicle reserves, and 45 percent of pre-war armored personnel carrier reserves remaining in storage as of a recent unspecified date. The social media source noted that Russian forces have used most of their newer T-90 and T-80 tanks but still have a majority of their older tanks in storage, although some of these tanks have likely been heavily degraded by weather and time. It appears increasingly unlikely that the Russian military can sustain its current annual rate of almost 9,000 armored vehicle losses through 2025. This loss rate is nearly three times the annual loss rate of the first two years of the war according to IISS, suggesting that the February 2024 IISS estimate that Russia can sustain its vehicle losses through 2025 and possibly 2026 is no longer valid.

Russian forces have reportedly been using fewer armored vehicles in assaults in the most active areas of the frontline in recent weeks, possibly in order to conserve these vehicles as Soviet stocks dwindle. Ukrainian military sources have recently noted that Russian forces have been using fewer armored vehicles and conducting fewer mechanized assaults in the Kurakhove direction after suffering significant vehicle losses in October and November 2024. The spokesperson of a Ukrainian brigade operating in the Kurakhove direction stated on January 3 that Russian forces have switched to mainly using infantry to conduct assaults in the area over the past few weeks and are only using armored vehicles as fire support for infantry assaults. The New York Times reported on December 31 that a Ukrainian lieutenant colonel stated that Russian forces are increasingly using electric scooters, motorcycles, and all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) during assaults in eastern Ukraine, possibly as part of ongoing Russian efforts to offset armored vehicle losses. Russian attacks near more mid-sized, urban settlements such as Kurakhove and Pokrovsk may also be less conducive to mechanized assaults than the small settlements and open fields where Russian forces advanced in most of 2024. Russian forces may be using fewer armored vehicles in the Kurakhove and Pokrovsk directions if the Russian military is struggling to reequip frontline Russian units and formations and if Russian military command does not want to withdraw Russian units for rest and reconstitution and risk further slowing Russian advances in high-priority frontline sectors.

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces reportedly destroyed or damaged over 3,000 Russian tanks and almost 9,000 armored vehicles in 2024 as Russia continues to accrue vehicle losses that are likely unsustainable in the medium-term.

• Russian forces have reportedly been using fewer armored vehicles in assaults in the most active areas of the frontline in recent weeks, possibly in order to conserve these vehicles as Soviet stocks dwindle.

• Ukrainian forces struck a gas terminal at the Ust-Luga port in Leningrad Oblast on the night of January 3 to 4.

• Ukrainian forces recently regained lost positions near Kreminna and likely maintain positions near Kurakhove.

• Russian forces recently advanced near Kreminna, Toretsk, Pokrovsk, and Kurakhove.



• The Russian government continues to increase financial incentives in order to boost the recruitment of military personnel.

8. Iran Update, January 4, 2025

Iran Update, January 4, 2025

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-january-4-2025

An Alawite organization accused the Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS)-led interim Syrian government of failing to address instances of sectarian violence. The Alawite Islamic Forum in Syria released a statement on January 3 expressing its support for the interim Syrian government but argued that the interim government, though it has stated it seeks to respect all Syrians, has so far failed to back words with action. The group cited instances of sectarian-motivated attacks and killings in Homs, Hama, Latakia, Tartous, Damascus, and Daraa. HTS-led security forces have been conducting clearing operations targeting former regime members in these areas since December 28. The Alawite Islamic Forum in Syria rejected the interim government’s claims that acts of violence were perpetrated by individuals and argued that the prevalence of this violence suggested that the violence was a planned revenge campaign. The group added that the government must protect all Syrians by holding the perpetrators accountable, regardless of whether the perpetrators are loyal to the HTS-led interim government or engaging in individual actions against orders.

The HTS leader and interim government head of state Ahmed al Shara has attempted to assuage the Alawite's fears by highlighting the ways HTS and the interim government aim to protect minorities, but he has made only limited concrete, unambiguous steps. The HTS-led interim government has also thus far failed to prevent individual opposition fighters from targeting members of the Alawite community. Accusations of sectarian-motivated attacks can create a dangerous cycle of groups refusing to disarm because they fear for their safety, which then causes HTS-affiliated forces to target those groups that don’t disarm, thereby causing the groups to continue to accuse HTS of sectarianism. This dynamic could easily spiral out of control into larger armed conflict if left unchecked. The HTS-led government has a requirement to assuage the concerns of former regime loyalists and minorities, part of which requires controlling these sectarian narratives as and if they spread.

Key Takeaways:

• Sectarian Tension in Syria: An Alawite organization accused the Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS)-led interim Syrian government of failing to address instances of sectarian violence. The HTS leader and interim government head of state Ahmed al Shara has attempted to assuage the Alawite's fears by highlighting the ways HTS and the interim government aim to protect minorities, but he has made only limited concrete, unambiguous steps.

• Changes to Education in Syria: The interim Syrian government has begun to implement changes to the Syrian government without the consensus of a representative Syrian National Dialogue Conference.

• Syrian National Army-Syrian Democratic Forces Fighting: The Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) has advanced southeastward towards the Tishreen Dam since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on January 3.

• Iranian Nuclear Negotiations: Iran is signaling its readiness to resume nuclear talks, probably in an attemptto prevent the E3 (the United Kingdom, France, and Germany) from triggering "snapback sanctions" later in 2025.

• Iranian-Syrian Relations: Araghchi also reaffirmed Iran's commitment to a unified Syrian government and emphasized cooperation with regional countries to ensure Syria's territorial integrity, which appears to be at odds with statements by other Iranian government officials, including the supreme leader.

• IDF in Lebanon: An Israeli media and a Lebanese media report suggested that the IDF may extend its deployment in southern Lebanon by an additional 30 days due to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) failure to dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure there. Lebanese Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem threatened to break the ceasefire agreement in a January 4 speech.

9. Biden Honors Navy SEAL Whose Innovations Transformed Battlefield Care

Biden Honors Navy SEAL Whose Innovations Transformed Battlefield Care

https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurkellermann/2025/01/03/biden-honors-military-healthcare-innovator-at-white-house-ceremony/

Arthur L. Kellermann

Contributor

I’m an ER doc, public health researcher and patient advocate.

Jan 3, 2025,11:45am EST

Updated Jan 4, 2025, 07:18pm EST

Navy SEALS (Photo by Greg Mathieson/Mai/Getty Images)Getty Images

The Presidential Citizens Medal, the second highest civilian award of our government, was established to recognize U.S. citizens who have performed “exemplary deeds of service for our nation.” Past recipients include Hank Aaron, Muhammed Ali, Bob Dole, Robert Gates and Colin Powell. At the White House on Jan. 2, President Biden added Navy Captain (Ret) Dr. Frank Butler and 19 others to this list.

The White House announcement explained his selection: “As a pioneering innovator, Navy SEAL, and leader in dive medicine, Dr. Frank Butler introduced Tactical Combat Casualty Care to the medical world that set new standards for tourniquet use not only for injuries in war but injuries across daily civilian life. He has transformed battlefield trauma care for the United States military and saved countless lives.”

From Navy SEAL To Navy Doctor

Dr. Butler’s career path was unusual, even by the standards of military medicine. A Navy SEAL platoon commander before he became a doctor, Butler’s first medical assignment was with the Navy’s Experimental Diving Unit, where he tested equipment and helped design diving protocols used by navies and special operations forces around the globe.

After completing a Navy residency in ophthalmology and practicing for a few years, he returned to the Special Operations community as biomedical research director for the Naval Special Warfare Command, overseeing the health of personnel during training and ensuring that all SEALs were fit for any mission. In the early 1990s, he grew interested in improving trauma care on the battlefield.

The Challenge Of Transforming Battlefield Care

Most combat fatalities die instantly or succumb to their injuries before they reach a medical facility. Because all were thought to be unsalvageable, they were classified as “killed in action” (KIA). As a result, battlefield treatment barely changed for 130 years.

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Dr. Butler knew better. He believed that improving battlefield care could boost survival rates. To translate this idea into action, he and like-minded colleagues devised guidelines to address rapid bleeding, airway compromise and other immediate life threats. They named the strategy “Tactical Combat Casualty Care” (TCCC). Despite the logic of this approach, they encountered stubborn resistance to changing long-standing policies.

10. 8 Simmering Threats You Shouldn’t Ignore in 2025

M​y two concerns with Korea.

One: why would Kim need to conduct an attack on the South to drive a wedge in the ROK/US alliance when the current political turmoil (as well as the perception of a Trump administration that is not favorable to the alliance) will likely lead to a new ROK administration that will be favorable to continue north Korean subversion activities to achieve the saem effects without a kinetic strike?

Second: My real concern is an actual attack of the South due to Kim 's internal instability that he can no longer control. We are not paying attention to the growing internal instability in north Korea and what very well may be the effects when Kim no longer has any choices remaining.

Excerpts:

Politically, Kim’s international backing has also never been stronger. His new alliance with Moscow has given him access to resources and technology in exchange for munitions, equipment, and troops. A Beijing-Washington confrontation that Kim could exploit also appears to be brewing once the new U.S. administration takes office—if Kim sees the opportunity to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea.

If Kim strikes, the risk is high that Seoul would feel forced to either accede to Kim or respond disproportionately and unilaterally show strength and force Kim to back down. Either outcome could destabilize the entire region.

T​he threats:

U.S. Military Strikes Targeting Mexico’s Cartels

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front Destabilizes the Philippines—Again

Norwegian Fishermen Take on the Kremlin

A Plausibly Deniable Russian War Against Europe

A North Korean Strike on a Divided and Distracted South

The Houthis Conquer All of Yemen

Russian Destabilization of Moldova

Manipur Violence Undermines Modi’s Regional Ambitions

8 Simmering Threats You Shouldn’t Ignore in 2025

From Moldova to Mexico, these conflicts are currently flying under the radar but could emerge as major flash points.

January 2, 2025, 6:00 AM

By Emma Ashford, Nick Aspinwall, Elisabeth Braw, John R. Deni, Markus Garlauskas, Mina Al-Oraibi, Natia Seskuria, and Sushant Singh

Foreign Policy

FP Live:

The International Crisis Group’s president and CEO, Comfort Ero, joins FP Live on Jan. 9 to discuss 10 conflicts to watch in the year ahead. Register now.

2025

FP’s look ahead

Earlier this week, Foreign Policy featured 10 conflicts to watch in 2025. Here, we are focusing on those international disputes that have been flying under the radar but could emerge as full-blown conflicts in the coming year.

This list is not intended to be predictive; rather, it is a warning from FP’s columnists and contributors that there are a number of flash points—from Manipur to Mindanao—that deserve more attention than they have received from experts on geopolitical risk.—Sasha Polakow-Suransky, deputy editor

Earlier this week, Foreign Policy featured 10 conflicts to watch in 2025. Here, we are focusing on those international disputes that have been flying under the radar but could emerge as full-blown conflicts in the coming year.

This list is not intended to be predictive; rather, it is a warning from FP’s columnists and contributors that there are a number of flash points—from Manipur to Mindanao—that deserve more attention than they have received from experts on geopolitical risk.—Sasha Polakow-Suransky, deputy editor

JUMP TO

U.S. Military Strikes Targeting Mexico’s Cartels

By Emma Ashford

A man holds two small children as others look into the burned-out shell of a car.

Members of a family look at one of the burned-out cars where nine people were killed during an ambush in Bavispe, Sonora mountains, Mexico, on Nov. 5, 2019. U.S. President Donald Trump offered to help Mexico “wage war” on its drug cartels after three women and six children from an American Mormon community were killed in an area notorious for drug traffickers. HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images

During U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, one often heard that his statements should be taken “seriously, but not literally.” Therefore, it’s surprising that so many people ignore the risk of conflict in one area where Trump has threatened the use of military force both literally and seriously: his threat to invade Mexico.

More precisely, during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly proposed the use of special forces, drones, and other tactics commonly used against terrorist groups for Mexican cartels to inhibit the smuggling of drugs and humans across the U.S. border. This is not a new idea: former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper wrote in his 2022 book that Trump once asked whether he could launch missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs—and whether such strikes could be kept secret.

The idea has only grown more popular in conservative media and foreign-policy circles. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, for example, has argued that the U.S. government should have the power to deploy troops to Mexico to restrain the flow of fentanyl. Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz introduced a bill in 2023 that would have authorized the use of military force against the cartels, and an anonymous source recently told reporters that plans to send U.S. special forces to assassinate cartel leaders were being widely discussed within Trump’s transition team.

It might sound patently illegal—or even ridiculous—to suggest that the United States wage war on its neighbor, but the truth is that during the global war on terror, drone strikes and targeted assassinations of the kind that killed Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have occurred in a legal gray zone. Presidents from both political parties have authorized missions that clearly violate the sovereignty of other states in the name of counterterrorism.

If the U.S. military can conduct drone strikes inside Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia without permission from their governments—so the logic goes—then why not Mexico? Many of the justifications already emerging from Trump’s circle sound like those advanced during the war on terror: The cartels do pose some direct threats to U.S. national security—whether from drugs, migrant flows, or other concerns—and Mexico has been unable to entirely control actors within its own territory.

Washington probably wouldn’t succeed either. Research suggests that targeted so-called decapitation strikes tend not to degrade terrorist groups, and the cartels have grown stronger in recent years even as several key leaders have been captured or killed. The United States struggled for years to contain the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) using similar methods. More worrisome is the risk that as further targeted or hands-off attacks fail, the more pressure the Trump administration might feel to move toward a larger-scale U.S. military role in Mexico.

If the incoming president’s statements and inclinations mean anything, the possibility that the Trump administration will engage in military action in Mexico in 2025 is a threat to be taken both seriously and literally.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front Destabilizes the Philippines—Again

By Nic Aspinwall

A man in uniform holds on to a gate behind yellow police tape.

A member of the military stands guard at the entrance to a gymnasium while police investigators look for evidence after a bomb attack at Mindanao State University in Marawi, Philippines, on Dec. 3, 2023. MERLYN MANOS/AFP/Getty Images

Geopolitical analysts who worry about the Philippines tend to focus on the contested South China Sea, where the Chinese coast guard and navy have attacked Philippine vessels in numerous clashes that the United States has called “unlawful” and “dangerous.” Manila, backed by Washington, has emphasized a shift to external defense and away from the internal conflicts with communist and Islamist insurgents that have preoccupied its military for decades.

But in the southern island of Mindanao’s Bangsamoro region, a historic election scheduled for May 2025 threatens to reignite a deadly conflict the country hoped it had left behind.

In 2014, the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) signed a peace agreement that ended a 50-year insurgency and eventually led to the creation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. The region was legally established in 2019, but its inaugural elections were delayed when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the process of decommissioning rebels, raising concerns of election violence.

But the Bangsamoro region’s deep regional, ethnic, and ideological fissures have yet to heal, and violent incidents are rising ahead of the 2025 elections, according to a report from crisis group Conflict Alert. Violence in the Philippines spiked during the 2022 national and 2023 regional elections, and the report warned that political feuds between families and clans will “contribute to the anticipated deadly nature” of the 2025 elections. Several local politicians have been killed or targeted in ambushes in recent months.

Plans for a peaceful vote took another hit in September when the Supreme Court ruled to exclude the region of Sulu from the Bangsamoro, rendering Sulu Gov. Abdusakur Tan—a leading candidate for Bangsamoro’s chief minister—ineligible to run for the post. Allies of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. recently introduced legislation to postpone elections yet again to 2026, citing Sulu’s exclusion. But further postponement could produce even more violence, as the path to a functioning autonomous region becomes hazier.

“Time is running out for completion of the roadmap set out by the 2014 [peace] agreement,” the International Crisis Group warned in January, citing feuds between former rebels and local politicians, along with the presence of jihadist groups that oppose the peace agreement. In December 2023, Islamic State-inspired militants killed four people in Marawi, a city that was all but destroyed during a siege in 2017.

At a time when Manila and Washington are desperate to leave internal conflicts behind and focus on countering China, a resurgence of violence throughout the Bangsamoro region would be a stark reminder of the fragility of peace in the Philippines.

Norwegian Fishermen Take on the Kremlin

By Elisabeth Braw

A port hole looks out onto a Russian flag amid the seascape.

A Russian flag hangs from outside a fishing trawler docked in Kirkenes, Norway, on Oct. 22, 2019. Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

During the Cold War, the friendly Norwegians even managed to maintain workable relations with the Soviet Union (granted, from a safe position underneath NATO’s protective umbrella). But these days, things are more tense. Russia is very interested—for not so friendly reasons—in the pipelines and undersea cables that dot the seabed off the Norwegian coast, and it’s equally interested in Norway’s military installations on the coast.

That means more Russian activity in the waters that Norwegian fishermen depend on for their livelihood, and they’ve already demonstrated that they won’t ignore threats to their bottom line.

The fishermen may decide that they need to stand up for themselves, because naval exercises with live fire mean people have to vacate the waters for safety—and such exercises scare fish away.

In recent months, astute journalists at NRK have been documenting all manner of mysterious maritime Russian visits to Norwegian waters. There have been fishing vessels with communications equipment going far beyond what a fishing boat needs. There have been ships loitering near Norwegian military installations and others hanging around Norwegian pipelines and communications cables.

In August 2023, Russia launched a naval exercise in the Barents Sea. The body of water, part of the Artic Ocean, is divided into a Russian side and a Norwegian side. The exercise was going to cover the Norwegian side, and it was going to be a major undertaking that involved 20 warships, support vessels, submarines, and some 8,000 military personnel. Because the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) doesn’t ban countries from conducting naval exercises in other nations’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs), there wasn’t much Oslo could do.

Norwegian fishermen, who fish in the Barents Sea, were aghast. Even though they were aware that foreign countries were allowed to conduct these exercises, they knew they would lose income as a result. Taking a page from their Irish brethren, who managed to get Russia to move a planned exercise in Ireland’s EEZ back in January 2022, they stayed put.

Things ended peacefully, but they may not go so well next time. Norway’s fishermen are understandably determined to continue plying their trade along their country’s coast, while Russia is likely to keep sending military vessels and civilian ones with mysterious capabilities to the very same waters.

If Russia launches another exercise and some fishermen decide to stay put, the Kremlin may conclude that withdrawing, as it did in Irish waters, would send a message of weakness. Then Norway would face the prospect of its citizens harmed by Russian ammunition in Norwegian waters. Countries have far fewer rights in an EEZ than in territorial waters, so Norway and its NATO allies would face a difficult choice: how to respond.

A Plausibly Deniable Russian War Against Europe

By John R. Deni

A destroyed and burned-out building lies in run behind a yellow excavator.

An excavator stands at the Diehl Metal Applications facility following a fire that gutted the building in Berlin on June 24. Though investigators categorized the May 3 fire as an accident, media reports cited intelligence sources as being convinced that Russia was behind the fire. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The sabotage of undersea communications cables in the Baltic Sea by the cargo ship Yi Peng 3 is only the latest in a series of asymmetric attacks against Western interests and infrastructure that appear to be connected in one way or another to Moscow. The Kremlin has clearly ratcheted up efforts to intimidate and coerce Europe, hoping to frustrate—and ultimately force an end to—Western support for Ukraine. But what if Putin orders his minions to turn the temperature up even more?

It could all start if Putin senses the right opportunity, such as an increasing American indifference toward Europe. Putin may seize the moment and seek to clear the Europeans from the field as well, before any new aid package materializes on the battlefields of Ukraine. Ironically, a major effort by Europeans to fill the Ukraine assistance gap created by the Americans might function as a red cape does in the bullring—goading the aggressor to charge.

To date, Russian hybrid operations against European targets have generally focused on the infrastructure, entities, and countries most closely tied to Ukraine’s war effort—an assassination plot against the CEO of Germany’s leading defense contractor sending arms to Ukraine, an explosion at a Bulgarian ammo depot owned by a company that supplies Ukraine, and attempts to sabotage Polish rail lines used to send military equipment to Ukraine.

A dramatically ramped-up Russian-organized hybrid campaign designed to convince Europeans to pull the plug on Ukraine assistance would likely consist of a far broader array of targets.

For example, an unattributable kamikaze drone or a debilitating cyber-attack against a major power plant or a critical electrical substation; the introduction of disease-spreading pathogens into a water treatment plant; or deep-fake videos depicting a centrist political candidate engaged in corrupt activities at the height of an election campaign could all cause substantial damage and disruption.

Just as wolves hunt the weakest of the herd, it’s reasonable to assume that Russia would aim an expanded hybrid campaign against the more vulnerable countries in Europe, politically or otherwise, in hopes that they would eliminate bilateral support or break consensus in NATO or the EU.

The target list might include France, where political instability is particularly acute these days; Belgium, which has a notoriously decentralized governance structure and deep linguistic fault lines; or Romania, where an annulled election—due to alleged Russian interference—has placed the country in uncharted waters and threatens political stability.

To achieve its goals, Moscow would likely need to reach beyond its own network of spies and operatives. Russia might leverage its relationship with Libya’s warlord, Gen. Khalifa Haftar, to enlist Libyan operatives to conduct a sabotage operation against a Greek port, or the Kremlin could tap into organized crime networks to assassinate media, business, or political elites on the streets of Brussels or Madrid.

Europeans need to prepare for a desperate Kremlin doubling down on hybrid warfare.

A North Korean Strike on a Divided and Distracted South

By Markus Garlauskas

A man stands in front of a large television set airing video of a missile launch.

A TV at Yongsan Railway Station in Seoul airs footage of a test launch of the new intercontinental ballistic missile Hwasong-19 at an undisclosed place in North Korea on Nov. 1.Kim Jae-Hwan/SOPA Images/Reuters Connect

The ever-present potential for renewed warfare on the Korean Peninsula has been overshadowed by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed attempt to declare martial law in order to crush the opposition. Though the headlines are likely to remain dominated by political crisis, this would conceal the rising risk of North Korean aggression—particularly in the disputed Yellow Sea waters off South Korea’s west coast.

A prolonged period of division and uncertainty is likely in South Korea. This will make it difficult for Seoul to deter Pyongyang’s aggression and coordinate with the incoming U.S. administration

Though North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been largely silent on the events in South Korea, probably to avoid bolstering hawkish conservatives backing Yoon, he is likely looking for an opportunity to exploit. Once Yoon has been replaced—or appears set to hang on—the moment will be ripe for Kim to force a confrontation.

The disputed waters of the Yellow Sea, a longtime flashpoint for limited military clashes between North and South, seem tailor-made for North Korea to initiate such a military confrontation on favorable terms, politically and militarily.

The most intense North Korean aggression there to date—Pyongyang’s submarine sinking Seoul’s warship, followed by rocket and artillery attacks on a South Korean island—killed dozens but ultimately did not escalate further. However, much has changed since 2010 to increase North Korea’s incentive and ability to strike.

North Korea’s capability to launch surprise military strikes has advanced dramatically in the last decade and a half, with new rockets, short-range missiles, and drones. These are backed by an increasingly credible nuclear threat—underscored by multiple nuclear tests, repeated intercontinental ballistic missile launches, and displays of tactical nuclear weapons—which could give Seoul and Washington pause about responding. Geography also stacks the deck here in North Korea’s favor, with the North’s mountainous Hwanghae Peninsula providing numerous launching points for attacks onto and around South Korea’s tiny and isolated northwest Islands.

Politically, Kim’s international backing has also never been stronger. His new alliance with Moscow has given him access to resources and technology in exchange for munitions, equipment, and troops. A Beijing-Washington confrontation that Kim could exploit also appears to be brewing once the new U.S. administration takes office—if Kim sees the opportunity to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea.

If Kim strikes, the risk is high that Seoul would feel forced to either accede to Kim or respond disproportionately and unilaterally show strength and force Kim to back down. Either outcome could destabilize the entire region.

The Houthis Conquer All of Yemen

By Mina Al-Oraibi

An elderly man with a gray beard holds a giant missile.

An elderly Houthi fighter mans a cannon mounted on a vehicle at a rally on the outskirts of Sanaa, Yemen, on Feb. 4. The rally was in support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the recent Houthi strikes on shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images

Yemen’s Houthi militants targeting ships in the Red Sea made global headlines, yet too little attention has been paid to the precarious situation inside the country.

After years of criticizing the Saudi Arabia-led coalition—and refusing to get directly involved in the war to restore the internationally-recognized Yemeni government in the capital of Sana’a—the United States, United Kingdom, and several of their allies launched a military operation to stop Houthi attacks in the Red Sea in December 2023. Even so, the Iranian-backed group has managed to launch dozens of attacks this year on ships it accused of being Israeli or in aid of Israel.

Saudi Arabia and the Houthis held a number of talks last year aimed at ending the war that started after the militant group conquered Sana’a in 2014 and forced then-President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to step down in 2015. Those talks stalled in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Developments within Yemen are largely forgotten or ignored—at the world’s peril. The Houthis feel emboldened despite Israeli and U.S. strikes. And while the Yemeni people suffer from disease, poverty, and malnutrition—the United Nations World Food Program estimates that 17.1 million Yemenis will be food insecure in 2025—Houthi local weapons production and smuggling continues unabated.

With less and less external support for the internationally-recognized authorities in Aden, the government of Prime Minister Ahmed bin Mubarak is under increased pressure from the Houthis. The group has also been able to claim propaganda wins by standing up to Israel, whose wars in Gaza and Lebanon are deeply resented in Yemen, and surviving in the face of major military operations by Western powers.

Without serious efforts to support the prime minister’s government, the Houthis could decide to push further south into the country with the help of other militants. Arms proliferation and broken state institutions mean these threats are very real. If the Houthis were to secure power over all of Yemen, a militant and Iranian-aligned Arab state would emerge.

Such a scenario would not only mean greater suffering for the Yemeni people but also a greater strategic threat to the Gulf, the Horn of Africa, and global shipping. While the Houthis and its allies could sweep through Yemen, they would struggle to hold it, leading to greater bloodshed and internal fighting. If sectarian tension mounts, groups like al Qaeda will seek to take advantage and ignite new battles—and reignite old ones—while continued war in nearby Sudan could spill over into the country.

Russian Destabilization of Moldova

By Natia Seskuria

The shadow of a man holding a microphone appears before a campaign poster.

Alexandr Stoianoglo, a Moldovan presidential candidate representing the pro-Russian and anti-European Union party, delivers a speech in Comrat, Moldova, on Oct. 18.Pierre Crom/Getty Images

Moldova’s pro-Western incumbent president, Maia Sandu, recently won a closely watched runoff in the country’s presidential elections, gaining 55 percent of votes against pro-Russian candidate Alexandr Stoianoglo.

In a recent referendum, Sandu also secured a constitutional change that would enshrine Moldova’s commitment to join the European Union. Despite a large-scale Russian campaign that included election interference, vote buying, and disinformation, Moldova’s EU aspirations have prevailed for now. However, it is highly likely that the country, which is sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania and has a presence of around 1,500 Russian troops in the breakaway region of Transnistria, will remain at the forefront of Russian influence and sabotage operations.

Moscow has traditionally seen Moldova as falling within its sphere of influence, yet the country has made significant progress on its path to European integration by opening accession talks with the EU through the efforts of its pro-Western government.

Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin’s hybrid attacks have significantly increased . According to Moldova’s Security and Intelligence Service, Moscow spent around $55 million to destabilize the country—seeking to spread disinformation and manipulate election outcomes in favor of pro-Kremlin candidates. In April, Moldovan authorities seized around $1 million in cash from more than 100 passengers at Chisinau airport; the money was believed to be for vote-buying and sabotage operations through Russian proxies.

Moscow will keep investing significant resources to undermine growing pro-EU sentiment among Moldova’s population by spreading disinformation, including the idea that pursuing pro-Western foreign policy will risk a war in Transnistria. Even though Moldova is militarily neutral, Russia wants to deter the country from pursuing NATO membership by creating fear of a potential spillover from its war with Ukraine. Meanwhile, any success on Moldova’s EU integration path would be seen as a major defeat for Russia, which means the country will remain a high-priority target for Moscow.

A Russian invasion of Moldova through Ukraine remains highly unlikely. But the Kremlin will try to take advantage of weak institutions by attempting to capture them through its proxies, weaponizing its leverage in Transnistria and the predominantly Russian-speaking autonomous region of Gagauzia, and by using economic pressure, cyberattacks, and sophisticated information operations.

Manipur Violence Undermines Modi’s Regional Ambitions

By Sushant Singh

Two women sit on the ground next to razor wire as members of the military surround them.

Family members sit in protest as army personnel stand guard at a checkpoint in Manipur, India, on Nov. 30. The people were demonstrating after a man from the Meitei community went missing. AFP/Getty Images

The conflict in Manipur, a northeastern state in India bordering Myanmar, is complex and multifaceted. While the crisis there—primarily involving the Meitei, Naga, and Kuki communities—may seem like a localized ethnic rivalry, the implications of this conflict could have significant geopolitical ramifications in 2025.

Manipur has been a hotspot of ethnic conflict for decades. The roots of the violence can be traced back to the controversial merger of the princely state of Manipur with post-colonial India in 1949. The recent violence, which started in May 2023 between the Meitei and Kuki communities, has resulted in at least 250 deaths, the displacement of 60,000 people from their homes, the loss of over 6,500 weapons from state police armories, social tensions, and a geographical split of the state between the two warring groups. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has appeared largely apathetic toward the crisis, which saw further death and destruction in November.

The conflict in Manipur is part of a broader pattern of unrest in northeast India, a region characterized by ethnic diversity and historical insurgencies. The political instability in Manipur has already spilled over into neighboring states such as Nagaland, Assam, and Mizoram, creating a broader security crisis that can reignite dormant local conflicts. That could serve as a major drain on New Delhi’s energies and resources, diverting its attention from other security challenges like the border with China or Kashmir, which has been the cause of long-standing enmity with nuclear-armed Pakistan.

The ethnic groups involved in the conflict, such as the Nagas and Kukis, have ethnic brethren across international borders in Myanmar and Bangladesh. The conflict could therefore exacerbate tensions in these countries, complicating bilateral relations and worsening an unstable regional situation. The ongoing civil war in Myanmar, which began after a military coup in 2021, has already created a volatile situation and provides a breeding ground for insurgent groups that can operate across borders.

The recent political upheaval in Bangladesh, which brought in a new government less friendly to India, complicates the picture. Anti-India sentiment and potential support for insurgent groups in the area could increase, further destabilizing the region.

The conflict in Manipur and broader instability in northeast India will hinder major infrastructure projects and trade routes that are key to unlocking the region’s economic potential and integrating it with the rest of India.

The success of initiatives like the India-Myanmar-Thailand Trilateral Highway—which will provide India with direct land access to the ASEAN region that bypasses China-dominated maritime channels—and the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project—which connects India and Myanmar with a network of roads and waterways to facilitate the movement of people and goods—depends on regional stability that is unlikely in the new year unless New Delhi demonstrates political will, administrative competence, and a rubric for regional diplomacy.

Foreign Policy

11. Global Mining’s Dangerous New Reality: Guns, Hostages, Arrests

Global Mining’s Dangerous New Reality: Guns, Hostages, Arrests

With the U.S. and China intensifying demand for critical metals and minerals, host countries are making hostile plays for more of the profits

https://www.wsj.com/finance/commodities-futures/global-minings-dangerous-new-reality-guns-hostages-arrests-63868366?st=KjPgXZ&utm

By Julie Steinberg

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 in London and Rhiannon Hoyle

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 in Adelaide, Australia

Updated January 5, 2025

Armed soldiers escort miners off a site in southern Ethiopia, in an image provided by Abyssinian Group. Photo: Warwick Bullen

Neil Warburton was finishing up his breakfast of porridge and local honey when the armed soldiers converged. 

The Australian veteran mining executive had flown to southern Ethiopia in 2023 to check on progress at his lithium mine. One of the largest undeveloped lithium projects in the world, it was supposed to start production in late 2024, selling spodumene concentrate that would end up in batteries for electric vehicles and other products.

That plan has gone seriously—and perhaps irreversibly—awry. 

The mine, with around $2 billion at stake, is among a number of projects around the world caught in an increasingly tense geopolitical struggle for valuable metals and minerals. Two world superpowers—the U.S. and China—are bankrolling much of the investment to power their economies, which in turn is leading developing countries where the mines are located to push for a greater slice of the profits. 

At about 7:30 a.m. on Oct. 16, 2023, Warburton was dining with the mine site manager and geologists when an army colonel arrived and ordered all expats off the site, citing a security issue.

Warburton spied machine guns cradled in soldiers’ arms and mounted on white pickup trucks. Dozens of soldiers flanked the dozen or so expats, then drove them away from the mine to a nearby town. 

Abyssinian Group’s Neil Warburton. Photo: Neil Warburton

“It was scary,” said Warburton, executive chairman of an Abyssinian Group company. “They were army soldiers with automatic weapons. And if they say move, you move.”

A unit of the Abyssinian Group had been exploring the area since 2021 in a joint venture with a state government-backed mining company. Under the terms of the agreement, the Abyssinian Group would bear the costs of the exploration and get 51% of the project’s profits, with the rest going to its local partner. 

But now the government was asking for cash outside the bounds of the agreement.

Abyssinian offered to pay tens of millions of dollars to resolve the spat if the government satisfied certain conditions, but its exploration license was revoked in August. In October, its country director, Ali Hussein Mohammed, was summoned by the government to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, ostensibly to continue the discussions. Instead, he was taken to a detention center, where he remains. 

The government says Mohammed mined lithium and exported it without proper authorization, a claim his lawyer and the Abyssinian Group deny. His lawyer says the detention is unlawful as no formal charges have been brought against him. 

“This situation is extremely frustrating,” said Stephen Miller, an Abyssinian Group executive, who added that the company had been invited to deploy its money and expertise in Ethiopia in part to benefit the country. “We’re now being pushed to one side. This is a unicorn of a project.”

Racing for resources

The Abyssinian Group’s experience is just one of many examples of resource nationalism that have cropped up around the world, from Mexico to Mongolia to parts of Africa. While host governments and miners have sometimes been at odds in recent decades, lawyers and executives say they have never seen arrests and nationalist actions at this level.

Risk analysis firm Verisk Maplecroft said last month that 72 of the 198 countries it tracks in a resource nationalism index have recorded a significant increase in interventionist policies and protectionism over the past five years. 

Helaina Matza, a U.S. State Department official, said while countries should expect fair investments into their mining sectors, the U.S. is concerned about the “increasingly aggressive actions” toward Western investment in some markets. 

Investors worry about pouring big sums of cash into mines that can cost billions of dollars to build, only for governments to later shift the goal posts, said John Ciampaglia, senior managing partner of precious metals and critical materials-focused Sprott. Toronto-based Sprott manages roughly $33 billion in assets. 

It is common for governments to try to wring more from miners when commodity prices rocket and fatten company profits. And it is now generally understood that a larger percentage of benefits should flow to local communities, many in countries that were previously exploited for their raw materials.

These days, many governments are strapped for cash after borrowing surged during the pandemic, and are looking for ways to replenish their coffers. 

In addition, “host countries are seeing just how important these minerals are to the U.S. and China,” said Jeffery Commission, a director at Burford Capital, a legal finance company that has funded companies involved in mining disputes.

Yet industry participants say there is a difference between bilaterally rejiggering mining rights and a government using intimidation to wrest more control. 

The tactics being used are different than in the past and are “borderline criminal at this stage,” said Damien Nyer, an international disputes partner at law firm White & Case. “People getting arrested and held as hostages, as bargaining chips—it’s something I haven’t seen in my career.” 

Sprott’s Ciampaglia said his team has become much more cautious backing companies in some places, particularly in West Africa. 

Panama stunned the global copper market little more than a year ago when a court ruling forced the closure of First Quantum Minerals’ Cobre Panama mine, which accounted for roughly 1.5% of the world’s copper production.

“Cobre Panama is a really good example,” said Ciampaglia. “You thought you were investing in a copper mine in Panama but, in reality, you were investing in a political party in Panama.”

An Abyssinian Group unit has been exploring in the area of southern Ethiopia since 2021 in a joint venture with a state-backed entity; now the state is wresting more control. Photo: Warwick Bullen

Global shift

In Mali, the Russia-allied military government has recently netted almost a quarter-billion dollars in payments from international mining companies including Canada’s Barrick Gold. 

Mali last month issued an arrest warrant for Barrick Chief Executive Mark Bristow. In September, it briefly detained four Barrick employees, releasing them only after the company agreed to a payment of $85 million to “resolve outstanding disputes.” Since then, several employees have been imprisoned on unfounded charges, Barrick said.

Barrick said that gold shipments have been blocked and, if that continues, it will be forced to suspend its operations in the country. 

Australia’s Resolute Mining recently agreed to pay the Malian government $160 million after authorities detained the company’s chief executive and two other employees for nearly two weeks. 

​The Democratic Republic of Congo recently froze some assets of commodity giant Glencore amid a royalties dispute. The freeze was lifted in recent months, a person familiar with the matter said. 

Bronwyn Barnes, far right, with her team at a mine site in Guinea. Photo: Bronwyn Barnes

Searching for recourse

Miners are turning to international arbitration to get compensation for the seizure of their mines or licenses. Since the pandemic, mining cases have exploded at a division of the World Bank that oversees investment disputes.

The Abyssinian Group and Barrick are submitting cases to that body. The Abyssinian Group will petition for a multibillion-dollar claim, corresponding to the value it places on its lithium reserve, people familiar with the situation said.

Miners have been heartened by outcomes in some recent cases. Bronwyn Barnes, executive chair of Australian exploration company Indiana Resources, filed a case in 2020 after Tanzania changed its mining code, yanked her company’s operating license and seized the spot where a potential nickel mine would go.

The company was awarded more than $100 million to cover its sunk costs on the project. Tanzania and Indiana Resources last year agreed to a settlement of $90 million.

Government officials in Ethiopia, Mali and Tanzania didn’t return requests for comment.

Abyssinian’s Warburton spent chunks of his earlier career working on projects in Africa, including in Mali. The lithium project in Ethiopia was intended to be the swan song of a more than four-decade career. 

“Certainly, I’m never going back there,” he said. 

Write to Julie Steinberg at julie.steinberg@wsj.com and Rhiannon Hoyle at rhiannon.hoyle@wsj.com

12. New Orleans attacker had a transmitter to set off explosive devices, F.B.I. says

​Excerpts:

Authorities are investigating how Jabbar acquired the knowledge to create this homemade explosive, the officials said.

Those officials say that the explosive has never been used in a U.S. terror attack or incident, nor in any European terror attack. A key question for investigators is how Jabbar learned about the compound and how he managed to produce it.

New Orleans attacker had a transmitter to set off explosive devices, F.B.I. says

The explosive has never before been used in a U.S. or European terrorist attack. A key question for investigators is how he learned of the explosive and managed to produce it.

NBC News · by Freddie Clayton · January 4, 2025

The driver who killed 14 people in an ISIS-inspired attack by plowing into a crowded New Orleans street on New Year’s Day had planned to use a transmitter to detonate two explosive devices he had placed nearby, authorities have said.

The FBI and ATF said in a joint statement Friday that the explosives were placed on Bourbon Street, which Shamsud-Din Jabbar later turned into a scene of devastation.

Neither of the explosive devices were detonated, and it remains unclear whether the failure was due to a malfunction, lack of activation, or another issue. The transmitter and two guns were recovered from Jabbar’s truck, the statement said, and are being transported to an FBI laboratory for testing.

Federal investigators examining the attack say that Jabbar used a very rare explosive compound in the two devices, two senior law enforcement officials briefed on the matter told NBC News.

Authorities are investigating how Jabbar acquired the knowledge to create this homemade explosive, the officials said.

Those officials say that the explosive has never been used in a U.S. terror attack or incident, nor in any European terror attack. A key question for investigators is how Jabbar learned about the compound and how he managed to produce it.

The carnage unfolded when Jabbar, 42, drove onto a sidewalk with a pick-up truck, bypassing a police vehicle that had been parked to block cars from pedestrians celebrating on the crowded street.

Police killed Jabbar, a Texas-born U.S. citizen and an Army veteran, moments after the attack.

Jabbar had also set fire to a short-term rental house in New Orleans on Mandeville Street in New Orleans where bomb making materials were found, Friday's joint statement added, “in his effort to destroy it and other evidence of his crime.”

The New Orleans Fire Department responded to the fire at around 5:18 a.m., after Jabbar had carried out the attack on Bourbon Street, but the fire had "extinguished itself" before spreading to other rooms, allowing for the "recovery of evidence, including pre-cursors for bomb making material and a privately made device suspected of being a silencer for a rifle,” the statement said.

The agencies said in the statement that it was determined that Jabbar was the only person who could have set the fire.

The FBI has stated that the investigation remains ongoing and it has not changed its posture that Jabbar acted alone.

A mourning period for the victims of the attack will begin Monday, when President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to New Orleans.

NBC News · by Freddie Clayton · January 4, 2025

13. The Islamic State Is a Franchise Now

The Islamic State Is a Franchise Now

Many plots inspired by the group depend on rudimentary, low-tech methods.

By Clara Broekaert, a security researcher focused on foreign interference, technology, and terrorism, and Colin P. Clarke, the director of research at The Soufan Group and a senior research fellow at The Soufan Center.

Foreign Policy · by Clara Broekaert, Colin P. Clarke

• United States

January 3, 2025, 1:27 PM

In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, a 42-year-old U.S. Army veteran named Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove through a crowd of revelers in the French Quarter of New Orleans, killing at least 14 and injuring dozens more. Jabbar had an Islamic State flag on the rented vehicle and reportedly recorded a video pledging his allegiance to the jihadi group.

The FBI is likely conducting an assessment of Jabbar’s electronics to see what the digital forensics reveal: what kind of Islamic State propaganda was he imbibing; how frequently was he reading Islamic State posts; did he download guides to make improvised explosive devices, or IEDs; which social media platforms did he visit; and was he in touch with any actual Islamic State operatives who may have served as a cyber-coach or virtual entrepreneur in the attack.

In the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, a 42-year-old U.S. Army veteran named Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove through a crowd of revelers in the French Quarter of New Orleans, killing at least 14 and injuring dozens more. Jabbar had an Islamic State flag on the rented vehicle and reportedly recorded a video pledging his allegiance to the jihadi group.

The FBI is likely conducting an assessment of Jabbar’s electronics to see what the digital forensics reveal: what kind of Islamic State propaganda was he imbibing; how frequently was he reading Islamic State posts; did he download guides to make improvised explosive devices, or IEDs; which social media platforms did he visit; and was he in touch with any actual Islamic State operatives who may have served as a cyber-coach or virtual entrepreneur in the attack.

In the past year, almost all thwarted and successful Islamic State external operations—meaning attacks outside the perimeter of the group’s various provinces—have been inspired by the group, rather than enabled or directed by it. This is a stunning feat: The Islamic State has effectively leveraged its brand worldwide to inspire violence and carnage far away from the territories it controls, without even extending basic support to the attackers.

This underscores the crucial role of technologies such as social media and communication platforms in providing access to radicalizing content, as well as the knowledge and technical know-how necessary to orchestrate attacks. It also implies, however, that many such plots depend on rudimentary, low-tech methods—such as vehicle ramming—that capitalize on the simplicity and brutal effectiveness of forceful tactics.

So, how can these attacks be thwarted, and what are ways to stem the effective franchising of the Islamic State worldwide?

The adoption of advanced technology by terrorists—from IEDs to unmanned aerial vehicles—and the continued, highly successful use of simple attack measures—from vehicle ramming to stabbing attacks—indicate the need for a more nuanced understanding of why terrorists opt for certain technologies to commit attacks over others. In a case from last November, a far-right extremist in the United States planned to attack an energy facility substation with a drone rigged with explosives—a stark contrast with what happened in New Orleans.

Vehicle ramming attacks, requiring little to no planning, have become one of the most successful tactics in Islamic State-inspired terrorism due to a combination of practical and ideological factors. They have been used in attacks inspired and enabled by the group worldwide, including in Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York City, Nice, and Stockholm. Vehicle ramming attacks are more likely to succeed because they are incredibly difficult to detect in the planning phase and are equally hard and resource-intensive to mitigate.

In terms of accessibility, cars are readily available, and through rentals and vehicle-sharing platforms, only limited resources are necessary to conduct such an attack. In what the FBI says is merely a coincidence, the New Orleans attacker and a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who shot and killed himself before the Tesla Cybertruck he was in exploded on Jan. 1 in Las Vegas both used the peer-to-peer rental app Turo to obtain their vehicles.

Additionally, the barrier to entry is low and only requires a driver’s license. The symbolic aspect of vehicle ramming attacks is also important: An everyday utility object can cause mass carnage at any moment, with almost no preparation necessary. These attacks are not unique to jihadi groups. A far-right extremist used a vehicle during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to ram into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one. Just weeks ago, a Saudi national living in Germany, motivated by a strange brew of anti-Islamic and far-right ideas, used a car to attack a Christmas market southwest of Berlin.

The Islamic State has long relied on inspiring its supporters to conduct vehicle attacks, following an explicit admonition to do so by its former No. 2, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, who once exhorted Islamic State supporters to conduct attacks against Westerners with any means at their disposal. “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car, or throw him down from a high place, or choke him, or poison him,” Adnani urged more than a decade ago. These brute-force tactics remain highly successful and hard to detect in the planning stages.

Counterterrorism can be a thankless profession. When plots are disrupted or terrorist cells rolled up, it may make the news cycle momentarily, but few people give much thought to what could have been if an attack had succeeded. And the FBI, CIA, and other agencies focused on counterterrorism have a legitimately impressive record in the generational struggle against groups such as al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their various affiliates, franchises, and regional branches.

But as the Irish Republican Army stated publicly after nearly killing British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984, “We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky always.” It also means that counterterrorism authorities need to allocate resources where they believe the threat is the greatest, which sometimes leads them to become fixated on the “bright, shiny object” or the potential black swan event. This means a great deal of focus on terrorists using drones for attacks or attempting to deploy chemical or biological weapons. But the more quotidian attacks, like that in New Orleans, can still be highly lethal and nearly impossible to deter or defend against.

Constructing steel bollards or other objects that help harden soft targets is one method used by counterterrorism practitioners to secure public event spaces. In New Orleans, the bollard system was being repaired in preparation for next month’s Super Bowl. But even this shows that our societies are always adapting or responding to terrorism, even as our politicians like to trot out the fallacy that altering our lives in any way is “letting the terrorists win.” Still removing one’s shoes in the security line at the airport more than two decades after the infamous shoe bomber attack is a clear example of this. On the contrary, hardening soft targets, with either protective barriers or an increased police presence, is merely a recognition that the threat is real and, as a society, we intend to stand up against it.

There is no silver bullet solution to managing the threat posed by terrorism. After all, it is a tactic and as such cannot be defeated in the traditional sense, as if it were an army or a nation-state. Sound counterterrorism means kinetic measures such as drone strikes and special operations raids but also a comprehensive approach to dealing with root causes and grievances, whether those are socioeconomic, religious, ethnonationalist, or otherwise. In many ways, the Islamic State’s model of outsourcing its terrorism in the West to lone actors with a litany of grievances is the group’s realization of its long-sought playbook. It also makes focusing on root causes more important. In the case of Jabbar, reporting suggests that he struggled, like many others, with reintegrating into civilian life after leaving the military.

Counterterrorism in the modern age must be viewed through a broad, multifaceted lens, addressing both high-tech and low-tech threats in tandem. While the proliferation of advanced technologies—such as drones, encrypted communications, and bombs—requires a sophisticated and coordinated response, we must not overlook the enduring threat posed by more primitive methods such as vehicle ramming attacks and stabbings. Consequently, a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy means dismantling the technological infrastructure that enables terrorist groups to communicate and operate across borders while simultaneously fortifying the physical and societal barriers that mitigate the risk of simpler, brute-force tactics.

Only through a balanced approach that spans the full spectrum of technology used in attacks can we ensure the safety and resilience of our communities against the ever-evolving, blinking-red landscape of terrorism. As the Islamic State ramps up its operations overseas, taking advantage of power vacuums from Syria to Somalia, it will also accelerate its propaganda and media operations, leading to more of its followers seeking to conduct attacks in its name.

The Islamic State may have fallen off the front page of the newspaper, overshadowed by Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, but it remains stubbornly resilient and will prove to be a day-one issue for the Trump administration.

Foreign Policy · by Clara Broekaert, Colin P. Clarke

​14. How Israel’s ‘Operation Grim Beeper’ rattled global spy chiefs

​Excerpts:

The synchronised detonation on September 17 of thousands of Hizbollah electronic pagers left security officials around the world stunned by the operation’s audacity and mystified over the elaborate front companies that Israel set up to supply the booby-trapped devices.

Yet the attack, a reworking of the Trojan Horse for the digital age, has also triggered a broader debate among western security chiefs that has left them grappling with two fundamental questions over modern spycraft.

1) Are their own communication systems similarly vulnerable to interception? 

2) And would they ever approve a comparable operation — given that the pager attack killed 37 people, including at least four civilians, two of them children, and injured about 3,000?

In interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior security officials from four of Israel’s most important western allies, all acknowledged that the pager attack was an extraordinary feat of espionage. But only three said they would approve a similar act.

One said it set a dangerous precedent that non-state actors, such as terrorists or criminals, might use. Another concern was how the explosive-packed pagers were smuggled across Europe and the Middle East, posing a danger to property and human life along the route.

 Financial Times 

How Israel’s ‘Operation Grim Beeper’ rattled global spy chiefs

Few western intelligence officials say they would approve something similar to Israel’s pager attack

https://www.ft.com/content/f578b6c0-d534-4a04-ae25-3b97d11b6e71

John Paul Rathbone, Max Seddon and James Kynge  

DECEMBER 28 2024

A group of Israeli executives were in an ebullient mood earlier this year after seeing how exploding pagers, sent by the Mossad, had killed or maimed thousands of Hizbollah militants and civilians in Lebanon.

Then they met a former European spymaster. Instead of high-fiving the executives over the Israeli sabotage, the ex-intelligence chief doused their high spirits with an unforgiving appraisal.

Operations must be “necessary and proportionate” to be legally approved in this country, the former spy chief told them during a business conference. On that count the exploding pagers “did not meet my test”.

The synchronised detonation on September 17 of thousands of Hizbollah electronic pagers left security officials around the world stunned by the operation’s audacity and mystified over the elaborate front companies that Israel set up to supply the booby-trapped devices.

Yet the attack, a reworking of the Trojan Horse for the digital age, has also triggered a broader debate among western security chiefs that has left them grappling with two fundamental questions over modern spycraft.

1) Are their own communication systems similarly vulnerable to interception? 

2) And would they ever approve a comparable operation — given that the pager attack killed 37 people, including at least four civilians, two of them children, and injured about 3,000?

In interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior security officials from four of Israel’s most important western allies, all acknowledged that the pager attack was an extraordinary feat of espionage. But only three said they would approve a similar act.

One said it set a dangerous precedent that non-state actors, such as terrorists or criminals, might use. Another concern was how the explosive-packed pagers were smuggled across Europe and the Middle East, posing a danger to property and human life along the route.

Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA, even described the pager attack in a television interview as a “form of terrorism”. Other officials took a similar view of an action that, with dark humour, some have nicknamed “Operation Grim Beeper”.

“It was just the sort of operation the Russians would do,” said a former intelligence chief. “I don’t think any other western intelligence service would even consider that sort of operation, maiming thousands of people.”

“I like audacity, but on balance would not have approved the operation as it was not fully targeted,” a senior defence official said. “There was a chance the pagers could, say, kill a child who happened to be holding it.”

“It was an extraordinary operation — even if many western states might consider it murder,” said another former senior intelligence official. “Defence ministries around the world will now be asking themselves: how do we protect ourselves from similar sabotage?”

People familiar with the operation say it was caused by a small but potent plastic explosive hidden in the pagers’ batteries and a detonator invisible to X-rays that was triggered remotely.

Israel initially denied any involvement in the attack, but several weeks after it happened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Le Monde that he personally approved the operation.

It is of a piece with other operations by Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. In 1972, Israeli operatives blew up a phone they had implanted with explosives, which was used by the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s representative in Paris. The man, Mahmoud Hamshari, lost a leg and later died. In 1996, they repeated the trick with Yahya Ayyash, a skilled Hamas bombmaker.

One important difference with the 2024 pager attack was its scale. In addition, the next day a further series of explosions — this time of booby-trapped walkie-talkies used by Hizbollah operatives — killed another 20 people and wounded 450, according to Lebanese authorities.

Outside the region, the operation has raised urgent concerns about the risk of copycat sabotage operations.

Sir Alex Younger, former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, warned that the attack was a “valuable wake-up call” about the vulnerability of western supply chains.

“Because supply chains are invisible, we pay them no attention,” he said. “But the west has got to properly price the risks inherent in supply chains — be that Russian energy, Chinese electronics, or now this — and put them alongside other risks, such as AI, drones and cyber warfare.”

That includes the possibility that supply chains could be intercepted by terrorists, a point addressed by Ken McCallum, head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5.

Asked about the pager operation at a rare press conference in October, McCallum replied that an important aspect of MI5’s work was to “stay ahead of where terrorism might get to”.

Alex Younger warned that the attack was a ‘valuable wake-up call’ about the vulnerability of western supply chains © Andrew Milligan/ PA

Supply chain sabotage and assassinations are as old as spycraft itself. Medieval armies used spies to act as merchants to discover what their adversaries were buying. They would also poison water supplies, according to Calder Walton, a historian of espionage.

More recently, during the cold war, the CIA smuggled flawed computer chips into supply chains that the Soviet Union used to steal western technology via commercial front companies.

The most successful example of the CIA’s campaign was some malfunctioning software that blew apart a gas pipeline in a three-kilotonne explosion in 1982. No one was killed, and the repairs cost the Kremlin millions of roubles it could ill-afford.

At a recent meeting in Washington, a group of US officials worried that if Israel could booby trap mundane electronic gadgets such as pagers, a whole range of Chinese civilian technologies — such as electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, almost anything with a battery — could also be weaponised.

“The new digital world allows for previously unimaginable means of sabotage,” Walton said.

Not all of the interviewed officials believed the operation was either disproportionate or unnecessary. 

As one put it bluntly: “War is about violence”.

Younger said he did not judge the attack to be an indiscriminate use of violence because the pagers were used by Hizbollah operatives, and Israel was at war with the militant group. However, he cautioned that “decapitation operations are most effective in the context of a broader strategy — they are not an end in themselves”.

One senior western security official went so far as to call it a “very beautiful operation . . . I am jealous”. Western countries might balk at Israel’s apparent disregard for civilian casualties caused by the attack, the official said, but it paled in comparison to the ferocity with which the Israeli military had attacked Gaza and Lebanon.

“They [the Israelis] have their own methods of assessing that — and a different threshold,” the official added. 

What does seem clear is that targeted killings remain central to Israel’s security operations in a way that they do not among its western allies, where civilian casualties during wartime are widely seen as unacceptable.

In the first 17 years of this century alone, Israel conducted more than 2,000 targeted killing operations, according to Ronen Bergman, author of a history of Israeli assassinations. Over the same period, the US authorised less than a fifth of that amount.

“Israel’s security calculations are different from the west’s,” said John Raine, a senior adviser at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “They live in a rough neighbourhood and have been brutalised by that. The saving grace is that Israel is aware of this. The worry is that it appears to care ever less.”

Such considerations leave as moot the question whether a western intelligence agency would ever approve its own version of Operation Grim Beeper.

As one official commented: “If our state was also facing a similar existential threat as Israel does, what would we do? The answer is that it all depends on conditions that we can’t anticipate until we get there.”

15. Is your car spying on you? What it means that Tesla shared data in the Las Vegas explosion

​Yep.

Excerpts:

“The whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now,” Musk wrote on X. “Will post more information as soon as we learn anything.”

Over the next few hours, Tesla was able to piece together Livelsberger’s journey over five days and four states by tracking, among other things, his recharging stops in various locations, including Monument, Colorado, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Flagstaff, Arizona.

There are no federal laws regulating car data similar to those that restrict information collection and sharing by banks and health care providers. And state laws are a grab-bag of various rules, mostly focused on data privacy in general.

Daniels, the privacy consultant, thinks that new national laws are needed because rules have not kept up with technology.

“I think law enforcement should have access to data that can help them solve things quickly,” she said. “But we have a right to privacy.”

Is your car spying on you? What it means that Tesla shared data in the Las Vegas explosion

AP · January 4, 2025

NEW YORK (AP) — Your car is spying on you.

That is one takeaway from the fast, detailed data that Tesla collected on the driver of one of its Cybertrucks that exploded in Las Vegas earlier this week. Privacy data experts say the deep dive by Elon Musk’s company was impressive, but also shines a spotlight on a difficult question as vehicles become less like cars and more like computers on wheels.

Is your car company violating your privacy rights?

“You might want law enforcement to have the data to crack down on criminals, but can anyone have access to it?” said Jodi Daniels, CEO of privacy consulting firm Red Clover Advisors. “Where is the line?”

Many of the latest cars not only know where you’ve been and where you are going, but also often have access to your contacts, your call logs, your texts and other sensitive information thanks to cell phone syncing.

The data collected by Musk’s electric car company after the Cybertruck packed with fireworks burst into flames in front of the Trump International Hotel Wednesday proved valuable to police in helping track the driver’s movements.

Within hours of the New Year’s Day explosion that burned the driver beyond recognition and injured seven, Tesla was able to track Matthew Livelsberger’s movements in detail from Denver to Las Vegas, and also confirm that the problem was explosives in the truck, not the truck itself. Tesla used data collected from charging stations and from onboard software -- and to great acclaim.

“I have to thank Elon Musk, specifically,” said Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Kevin McMahill to reporters. “He gave us quite a bit of additional information.“

Some privacy experts were less enthusiastic.

“It reveals the kind of sweeping surveillance going on,” said David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston. “When something bad happens, it’s helpful, but it’s a double edged sword. Companies that collect this data can abuse it.”

General Motors, for instance, was sued in August by the Texas attorney general for allegedly selling data from 1.8 million drivers to insurance companies without their consent.

Cars equipped with cameras to enable self-driving features have added a new security risk. Tesla itself came under fire after Reuters reported how employees from 2019 through 2022 shared drivers’ sensitive videos and recordings with each other, including videos of road rage incidents and, in one case, nudity.

Tesla did not respond to emailed questions about its privacy policy. On its website, Tesla says it follows strict rules for keeping names and information private.

“No one but you would have knowledge of your activities, location, or a history of where you’ve been,” according to a statement. “Your information is kept private and secure.”

Auto analyst Sam Abuelsamid at Telemetry Insight, said he doesn’t think Tesla is “especially worse” than other auto companies in handling customer data, but he is still concerned.

“This is one of the biggest ethical issues we have around modern vehicles. They’re connected,” he said. “Consumers need to have control over their data.”

Tensions were high when the Cybertruck parked at the front doors of Trump’s hotel began smoking, then burst into flames. Just hours earlier a driver in another vehicle using the same peer-to-peer car rental service, Turo, had killed 15 people after slamming into a crowd in New Orleans in what law enforcement is calling a terrorist attack.

Shortly before 1 p.m., the Las Vegas police announced they were investigating a second incident.

“The fire is out,” the police announced on the social media platform X, one of Musk’s other companies. “Please avoid the area.”

Tesla shortly thereafter swung into action.

“The whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now,” Musk wrote on X. “Will post more information as soon as we learn anything.”

Over the next few hours, Tesla was able to piece together Livelsberger’s journey over five days and four states by tracking, among other things, his recharging stops in various locations, including Monument, Colorado, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Flagstaff, Arizona.

There are no federal laws regulating car data similar to those that restrict information collection and sharing by banks and health care providers. And state laws are a grab-bag of various rules, mostly focused on data privacy in general.

Daniels, the privacy consultant, thinks that new national laws are needed because rules have not kept up with technology.

“I think law enforcement should have access to data that can help them solve things quickly,” she said. “But we have a right to privacy.”

BERNARD CONDON

Condon is an Associated Press investigative reporter covering breaking news. He has written about the Maui fire, the Afghanistan withdrawal, gun laws, Chinese loans in Africa and Trump’s business.

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AP · January 4, 2025

16. Trump Sees the U.S. as a ‘Disaster.’ The Numbers Tell a Different Story.

​It is all about the narrative. The best narrative wins.

Trump Sees the U.S. as a ‘Disaster.’ The Numbers Tell a Different Story.

President Biden is bequeathing his successor a nation that by many measures is in good shape, even if voters remain unconvinced.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/05/us/politics/trump-us-disaster-numbers.html

Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

By Peter Baker

Reporting from Washington

Jan. 5, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET

To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump tell it, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” he declared on social media last week.

But by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath for a second time, two weeks from Monday, is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001.

For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century.

Jobs are up, wages are rising and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Mr. Trump’s presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was just before the Covid-19 pandemic and near its historic best. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been.

The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush. Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.

“President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The U.S. economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than prepandemic.”

Those positive trends were not enough to swing a sour electorate behind Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election, reflecting a substantial gap between what statistics say and what ordinary Americans appear to feel about the state of the country. And the United States clearly faces some major challenges that will confront Mr. Trump as he retakes power.

The terrorist attack by an American man who said he had joined ISIS that killed 14 people in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day served as a reminder that the Islamic State, which Mr. Trump likes to boast he defeated during his previous term, remains a threat and an inspiration to radicalized lone wolves. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are daunting challenges even without U.S. troops engaged in combat there.

Thanks in part to Covid relief spending by both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the national debt has ballooned so much that it now represents a larger share of the economy than it has in generations, other than during the pandemic itself. Families remain pressed by the cost of living, including housing, health care and college tuition. The cost of gasoline, while down from its peak, is still about 70 cents per gallon higher than when Mr. Biden took office.

Moreover, Americans remain as divided as they have been in many years — politically, ideologically, economically, racially and culturally. As healthy as the country may be economically and otherwise, a variety of scholars, surveys and other indicators suggest that America is struggling to come together behind a common view of its national identity, either at home or abroad.

Indeed, many Americans do not perceive the country to be doing as well as the data suggests, either because they do not see it in their own lives, they do not trust the statistics or they accept the dystopian view promoted by Mr. Trump and amplified by a fragmented, choose-your-own-news media and online ecosphere.

Only 19 percent of Americans were satisfied with the direction of the country in Gallup polling last month. In another Gallup survey in September, 52 percent of Americans said they and their own family were worse off than four years ago, a higher proportion than felt that way in the presidential election years of 1984, 1992, 2004, 2012 or 2020.

It was in Mr. Trump’s political interest, of course, to encourage that sentiment and appeal to it during last year’s campaign. He was hardly the first challenger to emphasize the negative to defeat an incumbent president.

Image

Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Dwight D. Eisenhower disparaged the state of the country when he first ran in 1952, much to the irritation of President Harry S. Truman, only to have John F. Kennedy do the same to him when running in 1960. Kennedy hammered away at a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union that did not exist, then after winning declared that America was in “its hour of maximum danger,” in contrast to Eisenhower’s view of his security record.

“This is a contrast you oftentimes find,” said Michael Beschloss, a historian who has written nine books on the American presidency. “Candidates who are running against incumbent presidents or sitting governments make it sound much worse than it is.”

Still, few have been as extreme in their negative descriptions as Mr. Trump, or as resistant to fact-checking. He has suggested falsely that immigration, crime and inflation are out of control, attributed the New Orleans incident to lax border policies even though the attacker was an American born in Texas and as recently as Friday called the country “a total mess!”

Yet Mr. Trump is moving back into the White House with an enviable hand to play, one that other presidents would have dearly loved on their opening day. President Ronald Reagan inherited double-digit inflation and an unemployment rate twice as high as today. President Barack Obama inherited two foreign wars and an epic financial crisis. Mr. Biden inherited a devastating pandemic and the resulting economic turmoil.

“He’s stepping into an improving situation,” William J. Antholis, director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which has studied presidential transitions, said of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Antholis compared the situation to President Bill Clinton’s arrival in 1993, when he took over a growing economy and a new post-Cold War order. While the country had already begun recovering from recession during the 1992 election, many voters did not yet feel it and punished President George H.W. Bush.

“The fundamentals of the economy had turned just before the election, and kept moving in the right direction when Clinton took over,” Mr. Antholis recalled.

Much as it did for the first Mr. Bush’s team, the disconnect between macro trends and individual perceptions proved enormously frustrating to Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, who failed to persuade voters during last year’s election that the country was doing better than commonly believed. Rattling off statistics and boasting about the success of “Bidenomics” did not resonate with voters who did not see it the same way.

“Of course, not everyone is enjoying good economic times, as many low-middle income households are struggling financially, and the nation has mounting fiscal challenges,” said Mr. Zandi. “But taking the economy in its totality, it rarely performs better than it is now as President Trump takes office.”

Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said the latest reports demonstrated that Mr. Biden’s policies are working and argued that Republicans should not seek to repeal them once they take control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

“After inheriting an economy in free-fall and skyrocketing violent crime, President Biden is proud to hand his successor the best-performing economy on earth, the lowest violent crime rates in over 50 years, and the lowest border crossings in over four years,” Mr. Bates said.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, responded by citing the election: “Americans delivered an overwhelming Election Day rebuke of the Biden-Harris administration’s abysmal track record: communities being overrun with millions of unvetted migrants who walked over Biden’s open border, lower real wages, and declining trust in increasingly politicized law enforcement agencies that are unable to even publish accurate crime data.”

Mr. Trump does not have to share a positive view of the situation to benefit from it. When he takes office on Jan. 20, absent the unexpected, he will not face the sort of major immediate action-forcing crisis that, say, Mr. Obama did in needing to rescue the economy from the brink of another Great Depression.

Mr. Trump instead will have more latitude to pursue favored policies like mass deportation of undocumented immigrants or tariffs on foreign imported goods. And if past is prologue, he may eventually begin extolling the state of the economy to claim successes for his policies.

He has already taken credit for recent increases in stock prices even before assuming office. He has a demonstrated skill for self-promotion that eluded Mr. Biden, enabling him to persuade many Americans that the economy during his first term was even better than it actually was.

At the same time, with unemployment, crime, border crossings and even inflation already pretty low, it may be difficult for Mr. Trump to improve on them significantly. Mr. Trump obliquely seemed to acknowledge as much when he noted in a post-election interview with Time magazine that he may not be able to live up to his campaign pledge to lower grocery prices. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he said. “You know, it’s very hard.”

On the contrary, Mr. Trump faces the risk that the economy goes in the other direction. Some specialists have warned that a tariff-driven trade war with major economic partners could, for instance, reignite inflation.

N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard and chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under the second Mr. Bush, recalled that even his former boss faced significant challenges when he took office in 2001 as the economy was already heading into a relatively mild recession following the bust of the dot-com boom.

“There are no similar storm clouds on the horizon right now,” Mr. Mankiw said. “That is certainly lucky for Mr. Trump. On the other hand, all presidents must deal with unexpected shocks to the economy. We just don’t know yet what kind of shocks President Trump will have to handle.”

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker

See more on: U.S. Politics, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, President Joe Biden, Donald Trump

17. Trump, Hegseth and the Honor of the American Military

​Can't we have both? Skepticism about major military commitments abroad AND a military with a moral purpose and a commitment to moral conduct?

Conclusion:

There may be benefits to Mr. Trump’s skepticism about major military commitments abroad. But a military with neither moral purpose nor a commitment to moral conduct is a military that fights without honor.

Opinion

Guest Essay

Trump, Hegseth and the Honor of the American Military

Jan. 2, 2025

Pete Hegseth helped persuade Donald Trump to pardon an officer convicted of war crimes. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/trump-hegseth-military-morality.html

By Phil Klay

Mr. Klay is a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war.

In September 2016 I went to a televised forum with the two leading presidential candidates and asked Donald Trump about military policy in Iraq, where I served with the Marine Corps several years earlier. He told me America should “take the oil.” Then he said it again: “Take the oil.”

A dumb answer, but a clear one. If we’re going to put American lives at risk, let’s get something out of it. Something concrete, something valuable. You can’t touch an ideal, but you can shove your grasping hands deep into a black pool of liquid gold. A few years later, explaining our military presence in Syria, Mr. Trump said he was keeping troops there “only for the oil.” What a thing to ask soldiers to fight for.

When it comes to articulating a vision of American warfare, Mr. Trump is the least hypocritical president of my adult life. He does not promise to spread democracy or human rights or a liberal, international rules-based order. He does not claim we’re a shining city on a hill. “We’ve got a lot of killers,” he has said instead. “What? You think our country’s so innocent?” He has stated smaller, less idealistic goals: our borders, secure; our economy, soaring; our wars, ended. These are most presidents’ goals, of course, but Mr. Trump expresses them plainly, even crassly.

Given this, it seems unlikely that Mr. Trump will start a disastrous war in a faraway country to “free its people and defend the world,” as George W. Bush did, or make appeals to international law in Ukraine while ignoring it in Gaza, like President Biden. And if and when Mr. Trump does kill people overseas, he’s more likely to claim they “died like a dog” than perform hand-wringing the way Barack Obama did about how he wanted to save them but “the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.” After so much presidential windbaggery, Mr. Trump’s bracing cynicism is almost refreshing.

But this sort of amoral pragmatism, especially in matters of war, has its limits and dangers. It will inevitably run up against a core belief in America’s identity as a nation, the belief in the moral obligation to strive to conduct and fight wars honorably. It’s a belief I still hold and that millions of Americans do, too.

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When I started Marine training, our instructors constantly harangued us candidates about the core military virtues and told story after story of past heroes who had lived them. For men and women to trust their lives to one another in combat, you need a shared set of values and commitments, which is why all great militaries teach their recruits something closer to religious devotion than business calculation.

Is it all a sham? JD Vance, our vice president-elect and an Iraq war veteran, seemed to have come to an answer about his service when he said, simply, “I was lied to.” And what do you call a man who puts his life at risk because he fell for lies? Apparently, you call him a sucker. Or a “loser.” That’s what a former Trump chief of staff, the retired Marine general John Kelly, claimed that Mr. Trump had called the Americans who died fighting in World War I — troops who had been told they were fighting to make the world safe for democracy: losers. After all, if we measure virtue in profit and loss, then American troops who lost their lives in war really are losers.

So the incoming Trump administration isn’t offering our military a moral purpose. “People will not fight for abstractions,” Mr. Vance claimed at the Republican National Convention; they’ll fight only to defend their homeland. It’s a smaller vision, fitting for a country that has lost faith in itself.

How a second-term President Trump will lead the military is an open question. His inconstancy and lack of ideological commitment make it impossible to know. But his proposed cabinet appointments give us at least some idea of what he hopes the future will be. And more than any other pick, it is Pete Hegseth, whom Mr. Trump has chosen to be the next secretary of defense, who troubles me.

There’s a swirl of controversies and concerns around Mr. Hegseth that make it difficult to focus on what’s important. But most notable to me, because it strikes at the core of the honor of the American military, is his signature achievement as a political advocate: helping persuade Mr. Trump to intervene in the cases of three men accused or convicted of war crimes. Afterward, Mr. Trump publicly heralded the men as “great warriors” and later invited two of them, including Clint Lorance, onstage at a private fund-raiser.

Here’s how Mr. Lorance earned that invitation.

In 2012 he was sent as a new commander without combat experience to lead a platoon of young soldiers deployed to Afghanistan with the largely hopeless mission of defeating the local Taliban and winning over the area’s population. One day he threatened to kill a farmer and his son, a 3- or 4-year-old boy, and a day later ordered his men to shoot within inches of unarmed villagers, including near children. “It’s funny watching” the villagers “dance,” he said. Mr. Lorance’s men, combat veterans, eventually balked at his orders and refused his instructions to make a false report about taking fire from the village. The next day he ordered fire on unarmed Afghans over a hundred yards from the platoon, killing them, and radioed a false report claiming the bodies couldn’t be searched.

And here the difference between an idealistic and an amoral vision of America becomes concrete. Because those soldiers, who’d seen combat and watched their friends suffer terrible wounds, turned in Mr. Lorance that evening, 14 of them eventually offering testimony against him in the court-martial that found him guilty of second-degree murder.

That testimony meant nothing to the elite media personalities like Sean Hannity and Mr. Hegseth who took up Mr. Lorance’s cause, though. Mr. Trump’s pardon of their former leader was a final betrayal for the troops who served in that platoon.

One of them said that he attempted to kill himself when Mr. Lorance became a cause célèbre in right-wing media. Even beforehand, the killings haunted them. “It tainted our entire service,” another explained. Soldiers from other units called them the “murder platoon.” “I thought of the Army as this altruistic thing,” yet another veteran of the unit reflected. “The Lorance stuff just broke my faith.”

Anyone who knows the history of America’s wars knows that such faith has often been betrayed, but that’s not the same as saying that it should be or that it always will be. I choose to believe in an America that might honor that faith, despite the worst my country has done and despite what it might do over the next four years. How else to respond to an age of cynicism than to point out, steadily, without undue histrionics, that Americans have proved capable of more in the past and they can prove capable of more in the future? That our notion of our homeland has always been tied up with grand moral principles.

And this faith I have, despite it all, is tied up in my experience in the Iraq war, the same war that left Mr. Vance so embittered. Because, by and large, the men and women I served with really did want to make the world a better, safer and more democratic place. Sure, they wanted college money and adventure, too, but they were less like Mr. Lorance than the men of his platoon, decent people who wanted to do something good and be a part of something larger than themselves. Peculiar and crass and funny and filthy and heroic, they expended monumental efforts that reaped little reward, but that’s hardly their fault. And though their aspirations, shared by so many Americans, are an untapped resource in politics, that doesn’t mean they’re not still there, waiting.

Right now, I’d like to speak up for the suckers and the losers. After all, I am one. I was a 21-year-old dupe, taking the oath of office. Twenty years later, I’m still convinced that America can be a force for good in the world and that soldiering is an honorable profession. I still haven’t learned my lesson, nor have I lost my admiration for those who, even when poorly led by men without honesty or honor, tried to serve their country well.

There may be benefits to Mr. Trump’s skepticism about major military commitments abroad. But a military with neither moral purpose nor a commitment to moral conduct is a military that fights without honor.

Phil Klay, a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war, is the author, most recently, of the essay collection “Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War.”

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De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

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