U.S. forces struck missile-launch sites and other targets in southern Iran Monday night, even as the Trump administration signaled a peace deal could be near. Tehran said it downed a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone and fired upon an American F-35 fighter jet, forcing it out of Iranian airspace, as it threatened retaliation.

The back-and-forth came as Mr. Trump and other top administration officials expressed optimism about ongoing talks between Iranian and U.S. officials, while Tehran warned that unresolved issues remain, especially over the status of the Strait of Hormuz and U.S. demands that Tehran end its nuclear program and halt all support for militant proxies in the region, specifically Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The terms in a draft U.S.-Iran peace deal include a 60-day extension of the current ceasefire; Iran immediately reopening the Strait of Hormuz; Iran, the U.S. and their allies ending military operations; and Iran agreeing that it will never develop nuclear weapons and that Tehran will give up its stockpile of enriched uranium.

Russia’s military forces carried out a large-scale drone and ballistic missile attack on Kyiv overnight, a day after Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned Mr. Rubio by telephone Monday that the Trump administration should move quickly to evacuate all American diplomatic personnel from the Ukrainian capital. 

Mr. Rubio, who is on a diplomatic visit to India, did not indicate in remarks to reporters Tuesday that the State Department was pulling diplomats from the Ukrainian capital. But he said the overnight strikes underscored the risk of “escalation” in Ukraine, as well as the threat of the war “spreading into something new.”

The Trump administration has tried for more than a year to engineer a peace deal in Ukraine. The Associated Press reports that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Monday that the sophisticated American-made air defense systems that Ukraine needs to stop Russian ballistic missiles are in short supply because of the Iran war.

Polish Deputy Defense Minister Pawel Zalewski tells Defense and National Security Correspondent John T. Seward that, in behind-the-scenes meetings, Warsaw has offered to build the infrastructure necessary to host a permanent U.S. troop presence in a bid to “clarify the situation” between the two longtime NATO allies.

The offer to host U.S. troops permanently — including a full military station that could house service members’ families — was part of broader discussions between high-ranking U.S. and Polish officials, Mr. Zalewski said in an interview last week shortly before Mr. Trump made global headlines by announcing that Washington is sending an additional 5,000 U.S. troops to Poland.

Poland is a crucial hub for the movement of weapons into Ukraine amid the ongoing assault by Russia. The Trump administration’s announcement of additional U.S. troops was an abrupt change of course for the administration, which had initially said it was canceling a U.S. troop training rotation to Poland. The cancellation had drawn fire from congressional Republicans and NATO allies.

Hudson Institute China Center Director Miles Yu takes issue with narratives pushed by the Chinese Communist Party about the recent summit between Mr. Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, beginning with the “Thucydides Trap,” which he describes as a “historically erroneous” and “tired mythology” claiming a U.S.-China conflict is inevitable because a rising China is displacing a declining America. 

“Perhaps the biggest falsehood of all is the claim that the CCP represents China and the Chinese people,” writes Mr. Yu, an opinion contributor to Threat Status. “It does not. The CCP is a Leninist ruling apparatus of European origin that maintains power through censorship, surveillance, coercion and fear.

“Chinese civilization is thousands of years old; the CCP has ruled for less than eight decades,” he writes in a column in The Washington Times. “Millions of Chinese citizens themselves seek freedom, dignity and opportunity outside party control. To criticize the CCP is not to attack China. On the contrary, separating China from the CCP is essential to understanding both.”

Donald Kirk, a longtime journalist covering East Asia, critiques last week’s announcement from acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao that the Trump administration is “doing a pause” on the sale to Taiwan of $14 billion in arms — a sale that was previously approved by Congress.

“It would have been nice to think, after all the Americans have done for Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, that the commitment of arms to the island nation was ironclad,” Mr. Kirk writes in an op-ed in The Times.

“Instead,” he writes, the administration is “putting off a sale that would help guarantee the freedom of Taiwan from mainland control and reassure America’s East Asian allies — Japan, South Korea and the Philippines — that Washington will live up to its obligations.”

• May 26 — Warfighting and War Winning in Space, Center for Strategic & International Studies

• May 29 — A Framework for U.S.-Japan Cooperation in the Arctic, Atlantic Council

• June 2 — War at Arm’s Length: How America Can Build Effective Partners Through Military Assistance, Brookings Institution

• June 3 — Stolen Revolution: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran, Brookings Institution

• June 12 — Winning the Innovation Competition (Featuring Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael), Hudson Institute

• 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