The episode comes at a particularly sensitive moment, just as the Biden White House is dealing with one of the most far-reaching, and damaging, hacks into American infrastructure in the cyberage.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
Leaders of the big telecommunications companies were summoned to the White House to discuss strategies for overhauling the security of the nation’s telecommunications networks amid growing alarm at the scope of a Chinese hack.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said hackers listened to phone calls and read texts by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks that connect systems.
President-elect Donald J. Trump is considering nominees who fit more comfortably within his often erratic worldview, in which deal-making reigns over ideology.
For the past four years, President Biden has argued that the first Trump term was a blip in American history. The election has proved that President-elect Donald J. Trump was no aberration.
麦克马斯特没有发出那封贺信,这引起了特朗普的愤怒。根据麦克马斯特最近出版的回忆录《与我们自己为敌》(At War With Ourselves),他对前总统说:“普京几乎肯定会利用这封贺信让你难堪,”并减轻国际社会对斯克里帕尔事件的谴责。他还回忆说,他曾警告特朗普,贺信一旦公开,将“强化你在替克里姆林宫做事的叙事”。
A second Donald J. Trump presidency would almost certainly mark a return to an era of foreign policy decrees, untethered to any policy process, at a moment of maximum international peril.