Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, where the U.S.-Israel war against Iran is poised to enter its fourth week with no immediate off-ramps or allied military support in sight.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: the U.S. intelligence community’s latest global threat assessment, a top U.S. official’s resignation over the Iran war, and a temporary pause in hostilities between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report, where the U.S.-Israel war against Iran is poised to enter its fourth week with no immediate off-ramps or allied military support in sight.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: the U.S. intelligence community’s latest global threat assessment, a top U.S. official’s resignation over the Iran war, and a temporary pause in hostilities between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Assessing the Threats

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and isn’t an imminent threat,” U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress on Wednesday while testifying on the intelligence community’s 2026 annual threat assessment.

That report, in its own words, “reflects the collective insights” of the intelligence community and “focuses on the most direct, serious threats to the U.S. primarily during the next year.”

Gabbard’s dissembling came as she faced tough questioning from Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike about the Trump administration’s justifications for the war with Iran and the state of Iran’s nuclear program. (Read more on her testimony from our colleague Rachel Oswald here.)

As for the assessment itself, here’s what it says about the primary U.S. adversaries, conflicts, and threats in 2026.

Iran. The report states that prior to Operation Epic Fury—Washington’s nickname for the Iran war—Iran was “intending to try to recover from the devastation of its nuclear infrastructure sustained during the 12-Day War.” That assessment—like Gabbard’s oral testimony to the Senate—diverges sharply from the prepared remarks that she submitted to senators before the hearing, which said that Iran’s nuclear program was “obliterated” via U.S. strikes in June and that there have been “no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.” This directly contradicts one of Trump’s justifications for the war.

Beyond nuclear concerns, the annual threat assessment says that the intelligence community is continuing to determine how the “U.S.-Israel-Iran conflict” will affect the........

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