China will pressure Taiwan to join the mainland. North Korea will continue to develop nuclear weapons. The Islamic State and al Qaeda provide asymmetric threats dedicated to stifling Americans in the Middle East. And that was all before Russia invaded Ukraine.
So says the newly declassified annual threat assessment from the United States Intelligence Community, released Monday by the House Intelligence Committee. Written by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the report is signed off on by all 17 national security agencies. Because it was written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the report doesn’t examine the implication of the attack, but it does note Moscow’s determination to dominate regional nations.
“In the coming year, the United States and its allies will face an increasingly complex and interconnected global security environment marked by the growing specter of great power competition and conflict, while collective, transnational threats to all nations and actors compete for our attention and finite resources,” the report says.