Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report. John is extremely excited that Liverpool FC is one point away from securing the Premier League title. Rishi, however, is not. But in spite of this—and the fact that his beloved Manchester United will finish the 2024-25 season with its lowest points total of the Premier League era—Rishi is admirably soldiering on to deliver you the week’s most essential national security news. (Co-author’s note: John wrote this intro while Rishi was eating lunch.)

Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: Pete Hegseth is in hot water (again), Steve Witkoff goes to Russia (again), and negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program move forward.

Chaos has been swirling around Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He’s at the center of the escalating Signalgate scandal, his inner circle at the Pentagon recently imploded, and there’s growing speculation that he could soon be out of a job. In what may have been a Freudian slip, Hegseth’s ex-colleague at Fox News, Brian Kilmeade, inadvertently referred to him as the “former” defense secretary at the start of an interview on Tuesday. Ouch.

Hegseth is drowning in negative headlines. And though Hegseth recently had a makeup studio installed at the Pentagon, no amount of concealer could cover all of this up.

If you’ve been struggling to follow the rapidly evolving course of events surrounding the embattled Pentagon chief—don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

Hegseth and Signalgate. The Signalgate controversy first emerged last month when it was reported that Hegseth shared sensitive military information on upcoming U.S. strikes against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen in a Signal group chat with other top officials that accidentally included a journalist.

Then, on Sunday, it was reported that Hegseth shared essentially the same sensitive information on the Yemen operation in a separate Signal group chat with his wife (who is not a Pentagon employee) as well as his brother and personal lawyer. The latter two are Pentagon employees, but it’s not clear why they’d need to be aware of upcoming U.S. strikes.

Communicating about U.S. military actions in an unsecured group chat on an app like Signal, despite the fact it’s encrypted, is a big no-no. Hegseth and the White House have maintained that there was nothing improper about these communications and no classified information was shared.

But national security veterans say there’s virtually no way that the information, which included operational details such as the schedule of the strikes, was not classified. Moreover, some of the details Hegseth reportedly shared were first sent to him by Army Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command, via a system for sensitive and classified information.

Hegseth was also reportedly warned by an aide against sharing sensitive information on an unsecure messaging platform just days ahead of the Yemen strikes.

Despite the Trump administration’s best efforts to portray Signalgate as a nothingburger, the scandal refuses to go away. The Pentagon’s acting inspector general is investigating Hegseth’s use of Signal. There are also rising calls from Democrats for Hegseth to resign or be fired. And GOP Rep. Don Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, suggested President Donald Trump should fire Hegseth—calling the Pentagon chief an “amateur person.”

Pentagon pandemonium. Hegseth is also dealing with internal strife at the Pentagon and is now without some of his closest advisors. Along these lines, he dismissed the latest Signal story as emanating from “disgruntled former employees.”

Three top Pentagon aides were recently ousted amid an investigation into leaks: Dan Caldwell, who was a senior advisor to Hegseth; Darin Selnick, who was Hegseth’s deputy chief of staff; and Colin Carroll, who was the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg.

Caldwell, Selnick, and Carroll issued a joint statement on Saturday expressing incredible disappointment at the manner of their dismissals. They said unnamed Pentagon officials “slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door.” In an interview with Tucker Carlson on Monday, Caldwell fervently denied involvement in leaks.

Their dismissals reportedly came in the face of heated infighting that was largely driven by another Hegseth hire, Joe Kasper, who until recently served as the defense secretary’s chief of staff. Hegseth initially Kasper would be reassigned. But Kasper on Thursday announced he’s exiting the Pentagon.

Former Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot, a longtime supporter of Trump who worked in his first administration, also recently resigned (the Pentagon says he was asked to resign).

Ullyot raised alarm over the “disarray” in the Pentagon under Hegseth in a blistering op-ed for Politico published Sunday and said it was “hard to see” the defense secretary “remaining in his role for much longer.” Ullyot also accused Pentagon officials of falsely smearing the recently axed aides as leakers.

Will Hegseth keep his job? The White House this week denied reports that it’s considering replacing Hegseth, who was a controversial pick for Pentagon chief from the start and widely seen as a profoundly unqualified choice to oversee the world’s most powerful military.

Trump on Monday said Hegseth is doing a “great job” and that “everybody’s happy with him.”

Given it was so hard to get Hegseth confirmed, Trump is likely reluctant to let him go—and also probably doesn’t want to be seen as caving to all of the bad press his Pentagon chief is receiving. But Trump and those around him also have a record of expressing confidence in people shortly before they’re fired. If Hegseth is ultimately pushed out, it will follow a broader trend surrounding Trump, whose first administration saw a historic level of cabinet turnover.

Kristina Wong, a reporter for the right-wing news outlet Breitbart, has been appointed chief spokesperson for the U.S. Navy, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced in a post on X.

What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.

Witkoff heads to Russia. Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, is scheduled to travel to Moscow for yet another round of talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin about ending the war in Ukraine, with the two men expected to meet on Friday. Yet peace negotiations remain contentious, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday rejecting a U.S. proposal to recognize Russia’s control of the Crimean Peninsula—which Putin invaded and annexed in 2014—and bar Ukraine from joining NATO.

Trump slammed Zelensky’s response in a post on Truth Social, saying the Ukrainian leader had “no cards to play” and should sign a deal to end the war. But the U.S. president also directed some criticism toward Putin for Russian airstrikes on Kyiv on Thursday that people and injured dozens more. “Not necessary, and very bad timing,” Trump posted about the strikes. “Vladimir, STOP!”

Putin has previously told Witkoff he would be willing to halt fighting at the war’s current front lines as part of a deal, the Financial Times reported this week.

Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio skipped a Wednesday negotiation in London that was instead attended by Trump’s Russia and Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg.

A way out for Iran? Rubio and Witkoff are also involved in another major negotiation with Iran on the fate of its nuclear program, with Rubio suggesting in a podcast interview that Washington might allow Tehran to retain its civilian nuclear program if it imports uranium rather than enriching it. “[T]here’s a pathway to a civil, peaceful nuclear program if they want one,” Rubio said.

But the Trump administration also slapped fresh sanctions on Iran this week, targeting a key exporter of Iranian natural gas who is a source of millions of dollars of revenue for Tehran’s regime. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson criticized those sanctions as showing a “lack of goodwill and seriousness” from Washington in their ongoing negotiations, which are set to resume in Oman on Saturday.

Caine visits the border. The new chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen. Dan Caine, made his first visit to the U.S. southern border in Arizona over the weekend, where he was briefed on the military’s border security operations, the joint staff said in a social media post on Tuesday.

The Trump administration has deployed thousands of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border this year to aid enforcement and stop migrants from crossing.

The wife of Sameer Guha, an Indian tourist killed by gunmen near Pahalgam in Kashmir, mourns during her husband’s funeral in Kolkata, India, on April 23.Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP via Getty Images

“All they’ve done is create a situation where the U.S. and China are now locked in a game of economic chicken,” Evan Medeiros, a former China hand on the National Security Council and special assistant to President Barack Obama, told a small group of reporters (including SitRep) in a briefing this week on Trump’s trade war against China.

Medeiros said the biggest obstacle to successful negotiations is that the Trump administration has not set out clear goals for the tariffs or clear expectations for Beijing, setting the stage for rapid escalation and face-saving attempts on both sides. “The two largest economies in the world, the two largest trading powers, are now in a competition to determine who can withstand more pain and who is willing to blink first,” he said. “That’s an incredibly, incredibly dangerous place to be.”

Thursday, April 24: NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte visits Washington.

Monday, April 28: Canada holds early parliamentary elections.

Brazil hosts a meeting of the BRICS foreign ministers in Rio de Janeiro.

Saturday, May 3: Australia holds federal elections.

Sunday, May 4: Romania hosts a re-run of its controversial presidential election, which was annulled in December over allegations of Russian interference.

“Yet another surrender to a murderous dictator … from the Neville Chamberlain of our time.”

—Sen. Adam Schiff in a post on X reacting to Trump’s criticism of Zelensky, comparing Trump’s overtures to Putin with former U.K. Prime Minister Chamberlain’s infamous appeasement policy toward Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

55—the current score given to U.S. democracy by a survey of more than 500 political scientists known as Bright Line Watch, with a 0 score representing full authoritarianism and 100 representing perfect democracy.

The U.S. score has plunged from 67 at the time of Trump’s election in November and is projected to drop below 50 in the next two years.

• Trump Is Losing Asia by Robert A. Manning
• How Generations of Experts Built U.S. Power by Jeremi Suri
• Why Authoritarians Attack Universities First by John Haltiwanger

Forgetting your AirPods at home could soon prove extremely costly if you take a train or a bus in England. The country’s Liberal Democrat party is proposing a ban on playing music or videos loudly on your phone while taking public transport, with potential fines up to £1,000. The days of all we hear being radio ga ga and radio blah blah may now be numbered.