Republican Sen. Tom Cotton on Tuesday issued a stark warning about China, saying many of the threats the U.S. faces “are truly existential.”

Cotton, who represents Arkansas and is chairman of the Select Committee of Intelligence, detailed growing concerns about China’s military activities and the implications for security.

“Communist China is actively working to replace the United States as the world’s dominant superpower,” Cotton said during opening remarks at the Senate’s annual Worldwide Threat Assessment hearing. “China uses coercive military, economic and influence operations — short of war — to shape a world favorable to its interests and hostile to ours.

“These methods include the biggest peacetime military buildup in history, rapidly expanding its nuclear forces, providing critical assistance to help Russia withstand U.S. sanctions, obscuring its role in acceleration its spread of COVID-19 beyond Wuhan, turning a blind eye to Chinese companies that enable the production of fentanyl flooding into the United States, and putting space weapons on orbit, among other tactics.”

At the hearing, Cotton went on to say he thinks the U.S. intelligence community is “inadequate” when it comes to providing President Donald Trump, as well as Congress, with the information they need to protect the nation. Cotton also said Iran “still aims to destroy” the U.S. and Israel.

Iran, he added, is pressing on with its decades-long effort to develop surrogate networks inside the U.S. as a way to threaten American citizens. He said Iran is “actively developing” multiple space-launch vehicles, which he said a “flimsy cover” for an intercontinental ballistic missile program that could hit the U.S. in “a matter of years.”

But, he said, because of Trump, the leader of Iran is now faced with two choices — he can fully dismantle his nuclear program or he can have it dismantled for him.

Cotton also said for the first time, the Annual Threat Assessment notes foreign illicit drug actors — including the Mexican cartel — as prominent threats to the U.S. More than 52,000 Americans, he said, were killed in 2024 because of illegal drugs smuggled into the country.

“Given these threats, we have to ask, ‘Are our intelligence agencies well postured against these threats?’ I’m afraid the answer is no, at least, not yet,” Cotton said. “As the world became more dangerous in recent years, our intelligence agencies got more politicized, more bureaucratic, and more focused on propagating opinions, rather than gathering facts. As a result of these misplaced priorities, we’ve been caught off guard and left in the dark too often.

“I know that all of you agree that the core mission of the intelligence community is to steal our adversary’s secrets and convey them to policy makers to protect the United States. At the same time, it’s not the role of the intelligence agencies to make policy, to justify presidential reaction, or to operate like other federal agencies,” he added. “After years adrift, the intelligence community much recommit to its core mission of collecting clandestine intelligence from adversaries, whose main objective is to destroy our nation and our way of life.”

The hearing comes a day after The Atlantic magazine reported that top national security officials for Trump, including his defense secretary, texted war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen to a group chat that included the magazine’s editor-in-chief in a secure messaging app.

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