Mr. Trump announced Thursday that he is sending 5,000 U.S. troops to Poland, an abrupt announcement that came a week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth drew criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill over his announcement that the Pentagon was canceling the nine-month rotation to Poland by the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, a unit from the 1st Cavalry Division based in Texas.

The president made his own announcement on Truth Social and tied the new deployment directly to his relationship with Karol Tadeusz Nawrocki, a conservative, who took over as Polish president in August 2025.

The development came while Polish Deputy Defense Minister Pawel Zalewski was in Washington for meetings with U.S. Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll and Elbridge Colby, Mr. Trump’s undersecretary of defense for policy. Defense and National Security Correspondent John T. Seward had an exclusive interview in Warsaw with Mr. Zalewski, who said his country now possesses the most powerful land army in Europe and is gearing up for a drastic increase in defense manufacturing capacity.

Ukraine is considering legalizing private military companies to turn the country’s unmatched experience of modern warfare into an export business. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this month that the goal is to turn Ukraine’s “security export” into a real economic opportunity and outlet for veterans after the war with Russia.

Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak writes in a dispatch from Kyiv that Ukraine is poised to emerge from the war as one of the world’s largest pools of combat-tested soldiers, drone operators, deminers, medics, electronic warfare specialists and air defense crews. Many will return from the front with skills that few civilian employers can use.

Supporters of the plan say private military companies could give veterans a legal way to use their experience after leaving the armed services. They argue that without such a framework, Ukrainian veterans could be recruited abroad by foreign governments, private companies or armed networks that Kyiv cannot control. “The real security risk is what happens if PMCs are not legalized,” says Halyna Yanchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker who supports the privatization proposal. “Legalization is about transparency and control.”

U.S. universities that have satellite campuses within the ambitious Education City in the Qatari capital of Doha are maintaining their operations despite fears of economic blowback and serious skepticism about longterm regional security stemming from the U.S.-Israel war with Iran.

Fifty miles north of Doha, two of Qatar’s 14 liquefied natural gas trains and one of two gas-to-liquids facilities remain offline. An Iranian strike on those assets in March will take three to five years to repair. Qatar has lost an estimated $20 billion in annual revenue and the International Monetary Fund projects its economy will contract 8.6% this year.

Threat Status Correspondent Jacob Wirtschafter examines the situation in a dispatch from Doha, writing that Northwestern, Virginia Commonwealth, Georgetown and the other American universities that maintain operations in Qatar held commencement ceremonies in early May amid the sober prospect of being disrupted by surprise Iranian drone or missile attacks.

The Trump-Xi summit “did not redefine the U.S.-China relationship, nor did it fundamentally alter Taiwan’s strategic position,” writes Yao-Yuan Yeh, who argues that the summit “merely revealed … the enduring reality of great-power competition: Beneath diplomatic ceremony and political theater, the structural conflict between America and China remains unresolved, with Taiwan at its center.

“The relationship between Washington and Beijing today increasingly resembles a long-term hegemonic rivalry rather than a normal bilateral partnership,” Mr. Yeh, the chair of international studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, writes in an op-ed for The Washington Times.

“Issues such as technological supremacy, supply chains, military dominance in the Indo-Pacific and ideological influence are not temporary disputes that can be solved through personal diplomacy,” he writes. “Even if Mr. Trump prefers transactional negotiations and dramatic symbolism, the institutional foundations of American foreign policy are remarkably stable.”

Some members of Congress and others are fighting to keep export controls on American microchips or “even ratchet them up” because “they think these controls are better equipped to manage global semiconductor trade than the companies developing the technology,” writes Phil Kerpen, who asserts that “in their attempt to secure a geostrategic lead for the U.S., they are more likely to undermine it.

“These advocates think Washington can prevent high-end silicon from reaching China by government fiat. This is nonsensical,” Mr. Kerpen, president of American Commitment and a principal of Unleash Prosperity, writes in an op-ed for The Times. “Governments that have been powerless to stop the global drug trade cannot stop the flow of high-value microchips — period.

“The Trump administration officially lifted the outright ban on Nvidia selling H200 chips to Chinese buyers in January, but Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently testified that no sales have yet been finalized and that China’s current policy is an impediment,” Mr. Kerpen writes. “If sales do proceed under the new policy, they will be subject to a 25% export tax.”

• May 22 — The Western Hemisphere’s Energy Moment, Hudson Institute

• May 22 — What Are the Biggest Space Threats in 2026? Center for Strategic & International Studies

• May 26 — Security Challenges and Paths to Stability in the Sahel, Atlantic Council

• May 26 — High Wire: The Sheinbaum Administration and the Future of U.S.-Mexico Relations, Brookings Institution 

• June 18 — Deterring Russia and China: Securing America’s Nuclear Future, Hudson Institute

• June 24 — IndoPac 2026 | Naval Dominance: Shipbuilding, Autonomy & C2, Threat Status Events