The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment warns of a five-fold increase in missiles aimed at the American homeland, an Iran seeking revenge for the killing of its supreme leader, and a China racing to dominate artificial intelligence, while crediting Donald Trump, by name, for sealing the southern border and pulling two nuclear-armed states back from the brink.
On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard presented the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment to the Senate Intelligence Committee, a 34-page document compiled by eighteen American intelligence agencies that is, by design, one of the few intelligence products the United States government releases to the public in full. The report is traditionally an apolitical exercise: a clinical accounting of threats, written to inform policymakers rather than validate them. This year's edition is something slightly different. It warns of a world in which the threats facing the United States are multiplying faster than the responses to them, and it does so while crediting President Donald Trump, explicitly, and repeatedly, for specific achievements that prior editions would have attributed to policy rather than personality.
