The 30-page threat assessment issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence singled out China as the “actor most capable of threatening US interests globally, though it is also more cautious than Russia, Iran, and North Korea about risking its economic and diplomatic image in the world by being too aggressive and disruptive.”
“Many of the threats we face are truly existential,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said during a Tuesday hearing scheduled around the report’s release.
“Communist China is actively working to replace the United States as the world’s dominant superpower.”
“Given these threats, we have to ask are our intelligence agencies well-postured against these threats? I’m afraid the answer is no, at least not yet,” he added.
The assessment found that “China is using complex, whole-of-government campaigns featuring coercive military, economic, and influence operations short of war to assert its positions and strength against others, reserving more destructive tools for full-scale conflict.”
In the meantime, ODNI found, Beijing is expected to “apply stronger coercive pressure against Taiwan” in 2025 “to further its goal of eventual unification” with the island, while pushing its claims in the South and East China Sea against US allies such as Japan and the Philippines.
China was also called the “most active and persistent” cyber-threat to the US government and private sector, while ODNI predicted Beijing “almost certainly has a multifaceted, national-level strategy designed to displace the United States as the world’s most influential AI power by 2030.”
Meanwhile, Russia has been rapidly developing a “more modern and survivable nuclear force designed to circumvent US missile defense,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told lawmakers Tuesday.
ODNI’s assessment also indicated that Russian President Vladimir Putin shows no sign of winding down his war against Ukraine, which Moscow sees as a “proxy conflict with the West.”
“Putin appears resolved and prepared to pay a very high price to prevail in what he sees as a defining time in Russia’s strategic competition with the United States, world history, and his personal legacy,” it noted.
“Most Russian people continue to passively accept the war, and the emergence of an alternative to Putin probably is less likely now than at any point in his quarter-century rule.”
“Russia has the battlefield advantage [and] is grinding forward slowly,” stated CIA Director John Ratcliffe of the war in Ukraine.
“With regard to the Ukrainian resistance, the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian military have been underestimated for a period of several years now,” he continued.
“Ultimately, I’m convinced from my reflections and observing from an intelligence standpoint,” Ratcliffe added, “that they will fight with their bare hands if they have to, if they don’t have terms that are acceptable to an enduring peace.”
Russia’s invasion has provided the clearest example of all four US adversaries working to support each other, as the report laid out.
“[China] is providing economic and security assistance to Russia’s war in Ukraine through support to Moscow’s defense industrial base, including by providing dual-use material and components for weapons,” it read.
“China’s support has improved Russia’s ability to overcome material losses in the war and launch strikes into Ukraine … [and] to withstand US sanctions.
“Iran has become a key military supplier to Russia, especially of UAVs [drones], and in exchange, Moscow has offered Tehran military and technical support to advance Iranian weapons, intelligence, and cyber capabilities,” it went on.
“North Korea has sent munitions, missiles, and thousands of combat troops to Russia to support the latter’s war against Ukraine.”
Gabbard told lawmakers Tuesday that North Korea’s growing links to Russia have allowed Pyongyang to reduce its dependence on China and gain access to “stronger strategic and conventional capabilities” to challenge the US.
As for Iran, Gabbard told senators that Tehran “is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Seyyed Ali] Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
However, Gabbard added, “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
“In the past year, there has been an erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public that has emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus,” the ODNI assessment found.
“[Ayatollah] Khamenei remains the final decisionmaker over Iran’s nuclear program, to include any decision to develop nuclear weapons.”
The report did note that Iran is likely continuing work on “chemical and biological agents” for military use, with Tehran scientists showing special interests in “chemicals that have a wide range of sedation, dissociation, and amnestic incapacitating effects, and can also be lethal.”
Tuesday’s hearing also touched on what Gabbard referred to as “threats presented by several non-state actors: Cartels, gangs and other transnational criminal organizations in our part of the world are engaging in a wide array of illicit activity to endanger the health, welfare and safety of everyday Americans.”
“For a year-long period ending in October 2024, cartels were largely responsible for the deaths of more than 54,000 US citizens from synthetic opioids,” she added, claiming that Mexico-based transnational criminal organizations are primarily responsible for the dissemination of fentanyl.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) expressed surprise that Canada wasn’t mentioned in the report, given the Donald Trump administration’s pressure campaign on America’s northern neighbor over fentanyl trafficking.
“The focus in my opening and the ATA [annual threat assessment] was really to focus on the most extreme threats in that area,” Gabbard admitted.
The 2025 assessment also highlighted a renewed focus on foreign-based terror groups in the Western hemisphere after a Daesh-inspired man mowed down New Year’s Eve revelers in New Orleans, killing 15.
One topic that was left out of this year’s report, after being present for nearly a decade, was climate change. Gabbard said she was unsure who excised the section, but stressed that she didn’t recall ordering that to be taken out.
