Particular serious concerns in US-China relations include Chinese intellectual property theft, prepositioning of cyber tools in telecommunications networks (particularly Volt Typhoon operations in Guam), and these issues must be addressed even while pursuing rapprochement.

A significant unresolved debate exists in the technological, policy, and strategy communities (particularly in Washington DC) about what constitutes 'cyber warfare' and how to define it, with different countries using cyber tools for fundamentally different purposes.

Breiterman spent his entire Foreign Service career in the Arab world, learned Arabic, and spent a decade as a State Department Foreign Service Officer at various Middle Eastern embassies.

Breiterman was not publicly allowed to criticize the Iraq War invasion until the end of September 2023, when he retired from the CIA, suggesting prior institutional constraints on critical speech by active intelligence officers.