Defense & Security

The biggest success story for us in the last dozen years is the way we created a leadership crisis in the global jihadist movement, by effectively taking out every senior leader. We’ve become very good at what the counterterrorism world calls ‘decapitation.’ [Trump’s anti-Islam rhetoric and ban on Muslim immigrants reinforced a] fundamental al-Qaeda message, which is that America is against Islam. That’s going to come back to haunt us. We may have made it very difficult for them to operate, but their message is still very, very strong, and we’re not doing much to fight that message.

What worries me about Kim Jong Un is that the threat perception of North Korea has declined quite a bit since 2017... The absence of tough talk from Kim Jong Un and the absence of big demonstrations of nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic missile testing lull us into a view that maybe Kim Jong Un is not dangerous after all... North Korea has between 20 to 60 nuclear weapons. Kim Jong Un has conducted four times more ballistic missile tests than his father and his grandfather combined... We have to assume that they have succeeded and are close to or have achieved that miniaturization... Kim requires a hostile outside world, and he’s going to convey that to his people through his propaganda. What we can reliably predict is that it’s just a matter of time before we have another strategic provocation.

[The allies] have enough heft and are willing to do these things together... and take the heat that might come from Beijing for working with each other.