British authorities said Thursday they had arrested a 27-year-old British-Iranian man in connection with the ongoing investigation into an alleged plot to carry out a terrorist attack on the Royal Air Force Fairford base that has been used by U.S. forces to launch bombing raids on Iran. 

Police had initially arrested five Britons in the case. All five, in their early to mid-20s, were released Monday on bail. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that the incident “clearly involves” a foreign actor, but he did not provide details. Iranian officials recently threatened that any base hosting U.S. forces, in the Middle East or beyond, is a legitimate target.

Foreign Affairs Correspondent Vaughn Cockayne reported in August on the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terror-for-hire network in several European countries. The network mainly focuses on silencing Iranian dissidents. But analysts say European proxies have become an essential piece of a broader campaign by Tehran that could carry on even after the U.S.-Iran war ends.

The withdrawal of the last remaining American forces from Iraq this week occurred against a complex Middle East security situation and the prospect of new escalation with Iran-backed proxies, specifically those based in Iraq that the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi has vowed to disarm and bring under the control of Iraq’s military.

Mr. al-Zaidi initially had set a Sept. 30 deadline for that disarmament. This week he announced the deadline has been moved to June 30, 2027. Threat Status Special Correspondent Joseph Hammond and Pentagon Correspondent Mike Glenn examine the situation in a deep-dive report, writing that hard-line armed groups such as Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba are not surrendering their weapons and integrating into Iraq’s armed forces.

“The real test for al-Zaidi will be whether he can convince the United States to stay the course in building a bilateral defense relationship and encouraging strong American investment while he buys more time to establish control over the militias that continue to resist disarmament,” said Alina Romanowski, a distinguished fellow at the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council think tank.

South Korea’s left-leaning administration is developing close ties with Communist China, raising national security concerns about its relations with the United States, Rep. John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on China, warned in a letter this week to Mr. Rubio. 

The American alliance with Seoul remains critical, and thus a “structural shift” by South Korea toward Beijing requires close monitoring and action, Mr. Moolenaar wrote. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung has developed close economic and political ties with China since taking office in June 2025. He has simultaneously sought to maintain tight U.S.-South Korea relations. Mr. Trump has spent recent weeks trying to court South Korean investments in U.S. energy infrastructure.

The House Armed Services Committee, meanwhile, also has voiced concerns about Beijing-Seoul relations. A version of the 2027 defense authorization bill passed by the committee contained a provision requiring the Pentagon to conduct an assessment of Chinese Communist Party malign influence in South Korea and the risks to U.S. defense interests. Roughly 30,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in South Korea.

The news that Russian businessman Umar Kremlev contributed a considerable sum of money to the wedding celebration of Donald Trump Jr. was “a sequel — in the tradition of the old KGB, now operating as the FSB — to the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting,” retired CIA Clandestine Services Officer Daniel N. Hoffman writes in his biweekly column for The Washington Times. 

“In that meeting, Mr. Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met with alleged FSB-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, former Soviet military officer Rinat Akhmetshin and pop star Emin Agalarov,” whose father is a “real estate mogul with close ties to Russian ruler Vladimir Putin,” writes Mr. Hoffman. “The Kremlin-connected Russians tempted Mr. Trump Jr. with an email from a British publicist, who dangled the possibility of acquiring incriminating information on the Clinton campaign.

“That is a classic KGB trap known as kompromat, or compromising material, which involves offering the unwitting target something valuable at no cost or risk,” Mr. Hoffman writes. “Now Mr. Putin has run back the same playbook against Mr. Trump Jr., who should have known from his experience 10 years ago that ‘free cheese,’ as the Russians are fond of saying, ‘can be found only in a mousetrap.’”

Iran can “change its behavior and seek to be removed from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism,” according to Joseph R. DeTrani, a former associate director of national intelligence. “That means stop supporting its proxies: the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip, as well as the Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria.”

The reality, however, is that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s Sept. 24 speech to the United Nations “did not mention Iran’s history of terrorism, the thousands of innocent victims it has killed or the thousands of its own people it has imprisoned,” Mr. DeTrani, a contributor to Threat Status, writes in an op-ed for The Times. 

The Iranian president also did not mention the “enrichment of uranium at levels close to 90% purity for nuclear weapons or the repeated denial of access to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to suspected Iranian nuclear sites,” Mr. DeTrani writes. “Mr. Pezeshkian said Iran was the victim. Russia and China apparently agreed.”

• Oct. 6 — How China and the U.S. will Regulate Artificial Models for Safety, Brookings Institution

• Oct. 7 — 25 Years Since the Anthrax Attacks: Where Are We Now? Center for Strategic and International Studies

• Oct. 7 — The Nuclear Energy Renaissance: The Challenges of Governance With the Advent of Artificial Intelligence, Stimson Center

• Oct. 12-14 — AUSA Annual Meeting and Expo, Association of the U.S. Army

• Oct. 15 — The Rise and Fall of the U.S.–Pakistan Relationship After 9/11, Stimson Center

• Oct. 21 — A Discussion with U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Andrew Puzder, Hudson Institute

• Nov. 20-22 — Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada, HFX