Typically every year the U.S. intelligence community produces one of the most somber reports an American security professional can read: the annual threat assessment.

Put simply, it’s a list and description of all the bad things lurking out there in the world that keep the CIA, FBI and 15-odd other intelligence agencies up at night.

This year’s was not so different, save for the addition of a deadly global pandemic to add to concerns about everything from Chinese efforts in space to more intense weather patterns.

Here are five factors that Code and Dagger wanted to highlight, but see the whole report [PDF] for more:

The Big Four

China is “increasingly a near-peer competitor.” Russia is “pushing back where it can.” Iran is a “regional menace” with “broader malign influence activities.” North Korea is a “disruptive player.”

For a report that covers a lot of ground, a good chunk of it is dedicated to the actions of those four countries.

“Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Pyongyang have demonstrated the capability and intent to advance their interests at the expense of the United States and its allies, despite the pandemic,” the report says in its Foreward.

As to China, U.S. analysts believe “Beijing sees increasingly competitive US-China relations as part of an epochal geopolitical shift and views Washington’s economic measures against Beijing since 2018 as part of a broader US effort to contain China’s rise.”

The report highlights concerns about China’s attempts to isolate Taiwan, to use cyber expertise to surveil opponents, its strategic push into space (a Chinese low-orbit space station is predicted by 2024) and its increasing cooperation with Russia.

Speaking of Russia, the report says Moscow “will continue to employ a variety of tactics this year meant to undermine US influence, develop new international norms and partnerships, divide Western countries and weaken Western alliances, and demonstrate Russia’s ability to shape global events as a major player in a new multipolar international order.”

And while analysts said they “expect Moscow to seek opportunities for pragmatic cooperation with Washington on its own terms, and [they] assess that Russia does not want a direct conflict with US forces,” they still warn Russia “will employ an array of tools — especially influence campaigns, intelligence and counterterrorism cooperation, military aid and combined exercises, mercenary operations, assassinations, and arms sales — to advance its interests or undermine the interests of the United States and its allies.”

Iran, the report says, is more of a regional player, but one that represents a threat to U.S. interests there, especially in Iraq. The report also notably says that Iran is not believed to be currently pursuing a nuclear weapon.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, believes eventually his pursuit of nuclear weapons will gain him stature in the international community, and it appears the “maximum pressure” campaign by the Trump administration did not force any change in that strategy. “North Korea will be a WMD threat for the foreseeable future,” the report says.

Years of ‘Aftershocks’ From COVID-19

It’s not just the disease itself, but the “aftershocks” for which the U.S. must be prepared, the report says.

“No country has been completely spared, and even when a vaccine is widely distributed globally, the economic and political aftershocks will be felt for years,” the report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [PDF] says. “Countries with high debts or that depend on oil exports, tourism, or remittances face particularly challenging recoveries, while others will turn inward or be distracted by other challenges.”

In developing countries, especially, the epidemic has caused “financial and humanitarian crises, increasing the risk of surges in migration, collapsed governments, or internal conflicts.”

COVID-19 has also provided America’s rivals’ a chance at “vaccine diplomacy” — a way for China and Russia to spread influence through vaccine assistance.

Climate Change and the Security Breakdown That Goes With It

Occupying increasing real estate in the minds of intelligence analysts is the threat of climate change, even if that threat is somewhat vaguely defined. For example, here’s the concern as laid out by the ODNI report:

“We assess that the effects of a changing climate and environmental degradation will create a mix of direct and indirect threats, including risks to the economy, heightened political volatility, human displacement, and new venues for geopolitical competition that will play out duringthe next decade and beyond.”

It adds that the specific “degradation and depletion of soil, water, and biodiversity resources almost certainly will threaten infrastructure, health, water, food, and security, especially in many developing countries that lack the capacity to adapt quickly to change, and increase the potential for conflict over competition for scarce natural resources.”

Adding to the concern is the greater likelihood of extreme weather events “including heat waves, droughts, and floods that directly threaten the United States and US interests, although adaptation measures could help manage the impact of these threats.”

ISIS, Al Qaeda Remain Threats, But Really Watch Out for Domestic Extremists

It may say something that the report doesn’t come to the section about the threat of global terrorism until page 23 of a 28-page publication. That’s because while the report says groups like ISIS and al Qaeda still hope to hit the U.S., counter-terrorism operations in recent years have “broadly degraded their capability to do so.”

Still, the report says that lone actors, inspired by the groups’ ideology, remain a threat to the U.S. homeland. It’s here where the report takes the opportunity to mention domestic extremists, a growing concern, according to the FBI.

“We see this lone-actor threat manifested both within homegrown violent extremists (HVEs), who are inspired by al-Qa‘ida and ISIS, and within domestic violent extremists (DVEs), who commit terrorist acts for ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as racial bias and antigovernment sentiment,” the ODNI report says.

Later the report dives more deeply into the DVE phenomenon:

“Of these, violent extremists who espouse an often overlapping mix of white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and exclusionary cultural-nationalist beliefs have the most persistent transnational connections via often loose online communities to like-minded individuals and groups in the West. The threat from this diffuse movementhas ebbed and flowed for decades but has increased since 2015,” it says.

Latin America Stresses to Get Worse

For anyone who’s kept up with the political instability sweeping Latin America, U.S. intelligence believes it’s only going to get worse. Like elsewhere in the world, the report says the politics in some Latin American countries are growing more polarized, potentially leading to contested elections and civil unrest. Add to that a global pandemic and a predicted increase in crime, and the outlook looks even more bleak.

“The Western Hemisphere almost certainly will see hotspots of volatility in the coming year, to include contested elections and violent popular protests,” the report says.

Overall, while the report offers a necessarily cynical view of what the U.S. intelligence establishment believes it’s up against, it also makes an important disclaimer:

“It is not an exhaustive assessment of all global challenges and notably excludes assessments of US adversaries’ vulnerabilities,” it says.

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