INTREP360 INTELLIGENCE REPORT
05.08.2026
May 8th, 2026
Greetings!
It’s Friday. President Donald Trump is still waiting for an answer from Iran to his purportedly one-page Memorandum of Understanding.
In the void — especially as we head into Mother’s Day weekend, having already covered the Middle East in the context of Iran a lot in recent days & weeks — I am returning to our roots & am going to do a quick trip around the world highlighting the top stories & developments impacting U.S. national security.
Jon is off tonight after spending the day snorkeling with extended family that is in town visiting for the holiday. That’s one of the benefits — or hazards, depending on how you get along with your in-laws — of living in the Caribbean.
Let’s get started!
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MOTHER’S DAY NOTE
Time moves fast. In sitting down to write this, I realized that this will be my 6th Mother’s Day since my own Mom passed away.
Previously, Jon & I have mentioned the influence of our late Dads. His father was a Vietnam vet; my Dad was a World War II veteran. They were, and are, our heroes. But our late mothers –– especially as free roaming children of the 1960s — were our anchors.
They still are.
It took seeing a mother rabbit tonight — standing guard over an empty burrow — to remind me of that. While walking my German Shepherd — his name is Zeppelin — we saw the rabbit in the front yard looking for her missing baby bunnies.
Photo credit: Mark Toth. A mother rabbit keeps guarding an empty burrow.
Unfortunately, several days back, a predator — fox, hawk or snake? — found them. Yet still the mother rabbit keeps coming back.
It’s like that with moms. Whether here — or in heaven or, depending upon your beliefs if only in your thoughts — they keep showing up in our lives.
My Dad taught me how to be an American. My Mom? She taught me about what an American should be.
Photo credit: Mark Toth. Mark’s mother, Mary Toth.
When I was six, we moved to Japan due to my father’s work. It was the first time my Mom — who had grown up on a dairy farm in southwestern Missouri — had ever left the country. Initially we stayed at a hotel in Tokyo.
Every time we’d get in the elevator, if someone else was in it, my Mom would introduce herself as Mary Toth from St. Louis, Missouri. It wasn’t pride. It was her way of teaching us to remember that we in our own small ways represented our country.
It didn’t always go smoothly. One time — yet again in an elevator — she introduced herself to a gentleman. The man nodded, then said with a hint of wry sarcasm, ‘I know. You told me that this morning.’
Yet, like the mother rabbit searching for her bunnies tonight, my Mom just kept showing up. She is the one who taught me the value of being an ambassador — even as a six-year-old — of our country & its values.
I did so as an American. Not a Republican American or Democrat American or an independent American.
That early lesson from my Mom — a lifelong one — is why we take an apolitical approach to our national security analyses. Our intent — especially mine — isn’t to divide Americans but to bring us together as a people.
Granted — and we get it — our nonpartisan approach angers some readers & viewers because we don’t hold back criticizing presidents or officials regardless of party and the decisions that they collectively make as our country’s leadership.
Our sole guiding star — and this bears repeating from time to time especially as new readers join us — is U.S. national security and by extension that of our allies. We — like our mothers taught us to do — will keep showing up for that overarching principle.
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NORTH AMERICA — AI ON THE MARCH
Alexa & Siri move over. Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming to the Pentagon in force. Last week, the Defense Department announced that it had reached agreements with eight tech firms — including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Oracle & Reflection — to “deploy their AIs on its classified networks.”
The intent — according to the Pentagon announcement — is to establish “the United States military as an AI-first fighting force [that] will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare.”
Notably, Anthropic & its Claude AI that is already widely used by the Defense Department was not on the list. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration became embroiled in a very public spat with the company’s CEO Dario Amodei over the military’s use of his company’s Claude AI & Mythos AI models.
Drone warfare — as we & others have argued — represents a Revolution in Military Affairs and is the overt example. AI — on a rapidly expanding basis — is the subtle military revolution happening beneath the surface.
Stay tuned.
Tomorrow’s military will not be — as the Oldsmobile TV ad once opined — your father or mother’s fighting force.
***
NORTH AMERICA — CI FORTIFY
Many college students, including my youngest son, woke up yesterday to find out that Canvas, a university & K-12 school learning management system used by 9,000+ institutions, was under siege by a ransomware attack. Nearly 30 million Americans were impacted — including users at more than half of the higher education institutions in North America.
Canvas was — and is ahead of finals week for many students — a timely reminder that the U.S. needs to take cybersecurity far more seriously than we presently do. Only last week, The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was warning U.S. critical infrastructure operators — e.g., utilities, transportation, communication networks, etc. — to take steps to better safeguard its systems from foreign cyberattacks.
Ominously, CISA warned in a statement that U.S. adversaries — especially China, although it wasn’t named — have “successfully pre-positioned across critical infrastructure to disrupt and destroy the operational technology (OT) running the United States.” They also warned bad actors “could leverage access to telecommunications infrastructure to take out phone and internet services.”
To begin to confront this threat, CISA is launching CI Fortify to ensure security & to strengthen “resilience across critical U.S. infrastructure.” The threats — as evidenced by the Canvas breach — are very real & already dangerously embedded in the U.S.
***
SOUTH AMERICA — VENEZUELAN URANIUM
Earlier today, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration announced that it had successfully removed “all remaining enriched uranium from a legacy research reactor in Venezuela.”
In collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) & Venezuela’s own Institute for Scientific Research “safely removed 13.5 kilograms (about 30 pounds) of uranium from the RV-1 [nuclear] reactor.”
Photo credit: National Nuclear Security Administration (NISA). NISA experts supervised the removal from the RV-1 reactor in Venezuela.
It was then shipped to the U.S. for processing at the Savannah River site in South Carolina, near Augusta, Georgia.
***
CARIBBEAN — CUBA SQUEEZE
Last week, the White House upped the ante on Havana by imposing new broad sanctions on foreign Cuban nationals owning property in the U.S. On May 5th, Secretary of State Marco Rubio signaled it was coming when he said, “the only thing worse than a communist is an incompetent one. And those are the people who run Cuba.”
Two days later he delivered. Rightly or wrongly, it is clear — once the war in Iran is done — that Cuba is next on Team Trump’s agenda.
Until then, the White House is content to put the economic squeeze on Cuba — and its military, political & economic leaders.
***
EUROPE — RUSSIA-UKRAINE CEASEFIRE
Earlier today, Trump announced a 3-day ceasefire between Russia & Ukraine. The ceasefire, if it holds, will cover Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day Parade — it marks the defeat of Nazi Germany — on May 9th.
Trump claimed he made it, but given the Kremlin’s accumulating military setbacks and casualties on the front lines in Ukraine — not to mention Kyiv’s pummeling Russia’s domestic oil & energy sectors — it is more likely than not that Putin came to Team Trump hat-in-hand to plead for a ceasefire.
As it was, Moscow had already downsized its Victory Parade — once a grand display of Soviet, then Russian military might. Plus, most global leaders turned down invites likely fearing Ukrainian deep strikes.
That was highly unlikely to ever happen. Nonetheless, in a masterclass trolling of Putin today, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that he was agreeing to the ceasefire –– and then in Decree No. 374 acknowledging it, he explicitly cited the GPS coordinates of Red Square in Moscow.
Screenshot credit: Office of the President of Ukraine. Decree No. 374.
Now that is cheeky. The bloody hunter — meaning Putin — as we penned here earlier this week has indeed become the hunted.
***
AFRICA — RUSSIAN SETBACKS IN THE SAHEL
In late April, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an Al Qaeda-linked group, alongside the Azawad Liberation Front — a group dominated by Tuareg rebels — launched a series of coordinated attacks across Mali.
Significantly, they also included Bamako, the nation’s capital. Elsewhere, Mali’s defense minister, Sadio Camara, was killed by a suicide car bombing. Russia — and its mercenary paramilitary forces — have been fighting in support of Assimi Goïta, the president of Mali, and his pro-Moscow government.
Goïta has met with Putin multiple times, including in June 2025. After Camara was killed, Igor Gromyko — Russia’s ambassador to Mali, made a show of support by appearing alongside Goïta in his first post-assassination appearance.
Photo credit: The Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Mali President Assimi Goïta at the Kremlin in 2025.
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INDO-PACIFIC — BALIKATAN
Exercise Balikatan, which in Tagalog, an Austronesian language spoken primarily in the Philippines, means ‘shoulder to shoulder,’ wrapped up today. The 19-day exercise involved 17,000+ soldiers from 20+ nations.
Hosted by the Philippines, it “is designed to strengthen regional security through combined air, land, sea, cyber and space operations featuring maritime drills, coastal defense training, joint live-fire exercises and humanitarian projects.”
Its messaging is aimed at Beijing — and squarely at Chinese President Xi Jinping as he continues his military buildup in the Indo-Pacific.
China got the message.
In response — according to reporting by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) — “the PLA Navy (PLAN) conducted two major deployments in the South China Sea and the West Pacific.” The ISW noted — and we agree with its assessment — that Beijing “likely aims to demonstrate that Indo-Pacific regional military cooperation invites increased PLA military activity.”
Washington and its Indo-Pacific allies remained undeterred. Ditto Taiwan which is squarely in Xi’s crosshairs.
***
PROGRAMMING NOTE
On Sunday, at 2:40 PM ET or 21:40 CET, Mark will be appearing on TVP World to discuss the latest on the war in Ukraine, Putin’s Victory Day Parade & the current state of U.S.-European transatlantic relations.
You will be able to watch it here. This segment will be in English.
***
Thank you for reading. We will see you Monday. Please subscribe, comment & share. We truly appreciate it!
Lastly — but most importantly — Happy Mother’s Day to mothers everywhere, including the mother of my sons!
Mark
Follow Jon on X at @JESweet2022 or on Bluesky at @JonSweet.bsky.social. Follow Mark on X at @MCTothSTL or on Bluesky at @MarkToth.bsky.social.
How far we have come !
Putin feeling the need to essentially get permission from President Z to have a seiously diminished parade in Red Square.