He was the third person shot recently by federal officers in Minnesota, where the Trump administration says they are conducting national-security operations.

Using a logo that resembles the United Nations’ but with a gold overlay, U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday launched a new “Board of Peace” that he initially pitched as a forum to resolve the Gaza conflict but has since described as a general international-relations body. On the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Trump said he will chair the board and allow its members to “do pretty much whatever we want to do.” 

At least 50 world leaders have been invited to join, and 25 have accepted, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff claimed on Wednesday. Officials from 19 countries stood beside Trump at a “signing ceremony” Thursday: Bahrain, Morocco, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Mongolia. “Few of the countries that have signed up for the board are democracies,” Reuters notes.

By contrast, the UN has 193 members from around the world and was established 80 years ago in the ruins of the Second World War. Since his first term as president, Trump has been openly hostile to what’s often referred to as the U.S.-led “rules-based order” that emerged after 1945, including NATO and the UN. 

Corruption watch: Members of Trump’s board can obtain “permanent” status by contributing $1 billion in cash within the first year, ABC News reported Tuesday when White House officials were promoting the organization ahead of Davos. Ordinary members will otherwise enjoy “renewable” three-year terms, which dovetails neatly with the conclusion of Trump’s second term in the White House. 

It’s unclear where exactly the board’s money will go or who will oversee it. One U.S. official told ABC, “Funds will sit only in approved accounts at reputable banks,” and claimed “Oversight is enforced through an Audit & Risk subcommittee and an independent annual external audit with published financials.” It’s also unclear how long Trump will serve as its chairman or what its status will be once he departs the White House.

Coverage continues below…

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Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2018, Trump launched a trade war with China, placing tariffs on Chinese solar panels and washing machines.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin offered to join Trump’s board and pay the billion-dollar “permanent” membership fee, but he said he wants to use Russian frozen assets held in the U.S. to cover the cost, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reported Wednesday from Moscow. 

The Brits said they’re not joining yet since Putin may be involved. Norway, Sweden and France also said they’re not interested. And China—like France and the UK, a permanent member on the UN Security Council—has not yet committed to participate either. 

And by Friday morning, Trump said he had withdrawn his invitation to Canada. Perhaps that’s because Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a speech at Davos Tuesday: “Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” in global affairs. “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” he said (emphasis added). Veteran journalist Jim Fallows called Carney’s address “a speech for the ages” and “a memorable discourse on America’s place in the world, by the leader of a U.S. neighbor and former friend.”  

Expert reax: The board “appears to be situated to supplant the United Nations, which is sort of a paradoxical situation, because Trump and his supporters tend not to like global government,” Monica Duffy Toft of Tufts University observed in a Defense One podcast interview that will post later today. 

Trump and his supporters “don’t like the UN, yet now he’s putting up this sort of parallel structure. So we’re in a liminal moment,” and the world appears to be a bit of a “laboratory” in terms of what international order may look like in the months to come, Toft said.  

Here’s some new and unusual reading inspired by Trump’s threats to Greenland and eight of America’s European allies ahead of and during events in Davos. Entitled “Hypothetical Legal Review of Use of the U.S. Military in Greenland,” it’s been drawn up by five experts and posted on Just Security Thursday. 

The authors caveat that it is not an official U.S. government document, though it deliberately resembles one—in particular, a “senior staff judge advocate’s legal analysis” that might arrive on the desk of a general at Special Operations Command or European Command. It was drafted and shared “to illustrate the kind of advice they would have given their commanders in each situation” concerning a U.S. military takeover of the Danish island. “We offer it in the hope that everyone who reads it will ask whether current or future uses of the United States military are supported by comparable legal analyses and, if not, why not,” they advise. 

In other notable commentary this week, “Don’t mistake Trump’s Venezuela raid for progress on fentanyl,” cautions Jake Braun, former White House acting principal deputy national cyber director, writing Thursday in USA Today. “If we want to stop fentanyl, we have to be honest about where the threat originates and how to defeat it,” he says. 

“Venezuelan cartels traffic oil, migrants and cocaine,” Braun writes. But “the center of fentanyl production…is in northern Mexico, particularly the ‘golden triangle’ region, which is the Sinaloa Cartel’s stronghold.” But Sinaloa is not a street gang,” Braun says. “It’s the size of a Fortune 500 company, with global supply chains, chemists, financiers and assassins. In some regions, it can even outfight the government.” 

His advice? Treat it like al-Qaeda, and after substantial surveillance, attack its networks and nodes, finances and communications. The U.S. will also need to “confront the Chinese chemical companies supplying fentanyl precursors. Targeting their investors, customers and access to Western markets would force a choice.” 

Our unofficial award for the most curious read of the week goes to “Betting on War: Prediction Markets and the Corruption of National Security,” written by Alex Goldenberg of the Rutgers University Miller Center on Community Protection and Resilience and published Wednesday at War on the Rocks. 

In additional commentary: “Bombing Iran would shore up its regime,” since such attacks have been shown to stir up nationalism and redirect public anger outward, warns Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at the Defense Priorities think tank. 

Additional reading: 

• “‘Pain, betrayal, sadness’: Danish veterans describe shock of Trump admin rhetoric,” NPR’s Barbara Sprunt reported Friday from Copenhagen; 
• “European Leaders to Propose Greenland Investment and Arctic Security Plans,” the New York Times reported Thursday from Brussels; 
• “British Lawmakers Unite in Anger Over Trump’s Afghanistan War Claim,” the Times reported Friday from London; 
• “Russian hybrid warfare has become indistinguishable from politics,” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Thursday; 
• And “France’s navy intercepts an oil tanker in the Mediterranean sailing from Russia,” the Associated Press reported Thursday from Paris. 

Around the Defense Department

As the White House prepares nearly 2,000 active-duty troops for possible deployment to Minneapolis, Vice President JD Vance visited the city rocked by violent and aggressive immigration raids and blamed the “far left” for unrest, AP reported Thursday. 

Despite calm in the city before ICE agents flooded the region with five times as many agents as police, Vance claimed Thursday, “We’re doing everything that we can to lower the temperature.” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz disagreed, and wrote on social media, “Take the show of force off the streets and partner with the state on targeted enforcement of violent offenders instead of random, aggressive confrontation.” 

AP reminds readers the Justice Department has launched an investigation into Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey “over whether they have obstructed or impeded immigration enforcement through their public criticism of the administration. Walz and Frey have described the investigation as an attempt to bully the political opposition.”

Regarding Trump possibly invoking the Insurrection Act for those 2,000 or so troops, “Right now, we don’t think that we need that,” Vance said Thursday. 

Survey says: 63% of Americans say they disapprove of how ICE is doing its job, and only 36% approve, according to new polling published this week from the New York Times. That includes 70% of independent voters who disapprove of ICE’s tactics in the wake of Renee Good’s death, a 37-year-old woman killed in Minneapolis by an ICE officer earlier this month.

Trump attacked the survey results on social media, writing, “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense.” He also claimed he would sue the Times for publishing the survey.  

Additional reading: 

• “Minneapolis ICE Standoff Has Become the Political Issue CEOs Can’t Ignore,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday;
• And “‘Enough Is Enough’: Hundreds of Minnesota Businesses Take Stand Against ICE,” the New York Times reported Friday.  

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is visiting Arkansas today while Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is in the Middle East helping negotiate next steps in the White House’s talks involving Ukraine and Russia, Politico’s Paul McCleary reports. Driscoll is in the UAE along with real estate billionaire and U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff; Witkoff reportedly requested Driscoll’s participation. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is tagging along as well. 

Hegseth is stopping by Camden, Arkansas, to deliver remarks and take photos as part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour across the states. “The tour will highlight the urgent need to rebuild our Defense Industrial Base (DIB) to ensure that we continue President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s peace through strength agenda,” Hegseth’s office said in a press release. 

By the way: Camden is where L3Harris’s solid rocket motor development takes place. 

Meanwhile at Georgia’s Fort Benning army base, U.S. military leaders at the forefront of troops’ training, health, and readiness are shifting their focus from creating “super-athletes” to building and maintaining the ability to wield the weapons and systems of an ever-more-robotified battlefield, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported this week on location. 

“We’re moving away from this kind of antiquated idea of very visceral combat experiences” that turn on “the ability to run and ruck,” said Drew Hammond, a human-performance specialist who has worked extensively with U.S. Special Operations Command. Hammond spoke at the Human Performance Symposium, which gathered human-performance leaders and experts at this Georgia base long known as the home of the infantry and more recently as the center of Army training for maneuver—the tactical movement of soldiers and equipment to gain an advantage over enemies. (The conference was organized by FBC, a corporate sister of Defense One.)

Why Fort Benning? All future company and troop commanders, as well as about two-thirds of platoon leaders, come through the base for training. That’s one reason why the fort is also the home to the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness Academy, which is to dramatically expand in the coming year. Continue reading, here. 

And lastly this week: The U.S. is looking for batteries with at least four times the juice. The Department of Energy’s research arm is giving six teams up to $15 million to produce prototypes of manufacturable next-generation energy storage within two years, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Thursday. 

“We want to develop a system, a battery system or an energy system, that has four times the energy density of lithium ion batteries that we have today,” said James Seaba, program director at Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E.

If successful, the technology could enable military drones, robots, and aircraft of far greater capability and use, Williams writes. Batteries have become indispensable on the battlefield, powering troop-carried systems, drones, and more. But many are made of materials and components from China, which is working on next-gen batteries of its own; and so the Pentagon is seeking new energy-storage technologies that can be made closer to home.

The competition includes teams from Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland – College Park, Illinois Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Connecticut-based Precision Combustion, and more. Read more, here. 

That’s it for us this week. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you again on Monday!

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They seek limits and accountability for the deadly immigration crackdown that the White House calls vital to national security.

The war of realities in 2026 will determine the reality of war in 2027.

Trump backs down from tariff war on Europe over Greenland. After a blustery and meandering speech in Switzerland Wednesday, President Trump said he will not impose an escalating barrage of tariffs on eight European nations on February 1, as he had…

U.S. President Donald Trump seems fixated on seizing Greenland, and propagated messages to that effect both before and after traveling to an annual economic summit in Europe on Tuesday. At 1 a.m. ET, he was posting cartoons on social media showing him planting a flag on the Danish island, which the illustration claimed was now American as of this year. The next morning, he was complaining to Europe about the U.S. stock market while repeatedly confusing the islands of Iceland and Greenland. 

Trump reiterated his ambition of taking Greenland during remarks to reporters Tuesday at the White House, declaring, “We need it for security purposes. We need it for national security and world security, it’s very important.” A reporter later asked the president, “Greenlanders have made it clear, they don’t want to be part of the U.S. What gives the U.S. the right to take away that self-determination?” Trump replied, “Well, I haven’t—I haven’t spoken—when I speak to them, I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.”

But in Switzerland, one Danish parliamentarian broke with decorum Tuesday to send a message in response directly to Trump. “Let me put this in words you might understand: Mr. President, fuck off,” Anders Vistisen said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He was later scolded for his colorful language. 

In Davos Wednesday, Trump declared of Greenland, “That’s our territory,” telling his European audience, “This enormous unsecured island is actually part of North America.” Later, he added, “When America booms, the whole world booms.” 

He told the crowd, “I won’t use force” to take Greenland. “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that.” 

“I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force,” Trump said, adding at a press conference later, “All we’re asking for is to get Greenland, including right, title, and ownership.” 

He also appeared to threaten Denmark and Greenlanders with retaliation for failure to comply. “So we want a piece of ice for world protection. And they won’t give it. They have a choice. You can say yes and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no and we will remember,” the president said. 

When it comes to the U.S.-led NATO alliance, “no nation or group of nations is in any position to be able to secure Greenland other than the United States,” said Trump. He also told the audience at Davos, “Without us, right now you’d all be speaking German”—the actual main language of Switzerland. “Until the last few days when I told [NATO] about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy,” said the U.S. president, mixing up Greenland and Iceland once more. 

Alliance forecast: “The next major security-related events are a NATO Defense Ministers Conference in Brussels on Feb. 12, then the Munich Security Conference” the next day, analyst Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners said Wednesday. NATO has also scheduled an exercise in northern Norway in mid-March, and 3,000 U.S. Marines are expected to attend. “If that exercise is cancelled, it could underscore deeper alliance strains and/or signal preparation for some sort of action,” he writes. 

Odds on Trump acquiring Greenland? Callan says he has a “40% conviction that Trump escalates [his verbal] threats, Europe responds, and then Trump backs down.” However, things could get much worse. Callan offered up a “35% conviction that the U.S. claims Greenland after reinforcing [its military base at] Pituffik (Thule),” after which “Denmark invokes Article 5, NATO is over, and the U.S. presence would then be settled by the 2026 or 2028 election.” Otherwise, he gives the odds Denmark agrees to sell Greenland to the U.S. at only 5%. 

“Our core belief is that Trump simply wants Greenland to enlarge the size of the U.S.,” Callan says. “We don’t believe his posturing is to extract some sort of yet-to-be-unveiled economic or security deal with Denmark over Greenland. Greenland’s security is already covered by NATO.” 

And in case you’re wondering: “The notion that China or Russia could seize it is ludicrous, in our opinion,” Callan writes. 

Trump also got around to mentioning the Golden Dome missile defense system again Wednesday in Davos. “The Golden Dome is going to be defending Canada. Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way,” Trump said. “They should be grateful but they’re not. I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful. But they should be grateful to us. Canada. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, next time you make your statements.”

About those remarks from Canada’s leader: “Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said in Davos on Tuesday. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false—that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient…This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.” But now, he said, “This bargain no longer works.” 

“But let’s be clear eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable,” Carney said. “And there is another truth. If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.”

“On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark, and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future,” he announced, and added, “Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.” Read over his remarks in full, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Trump’s Greenland demand has been a gift to U.S. geopolitical foes like Russia,” NPR’s “Morning Edition” explained in Wednesday’s broadcast; 
• U.S. “Military archbishop says it might be ‘morally acceptable to disobey’ orders to attack Greenland,” Task & Purpose reported Tuesday;
• The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace just released a survey of “What Americans Think About American Power Today” after speaking to 1,500 adults during the last week of November; 
• And former U.S. Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill just published what he calls “an alternative American grand strategy” that forges a new path from five prior approaches to U.S. power, affirming “military power is still central to geopolitics” while also treating “global institutions as important but useful only insofar as they advance those interests.” Find that over at the Council on Foreign Relations, here.   

Dive deeper: For several years, Trump donors have publicly discussed plans to profit from Greenland’s mineral deposits to build private cities governed by their own laws. Many developing these plans have enormous wealth generated from Silicon Valley. That includes Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale. And all of them are friends with Trump’s ambassador to Denmark, Ken Howery. The group also includes Praxis co-founder Dryden Brown, a college dropout who was fired from his last hedge fund job. He now plans to recreate Mars here on planet Earth and in Greenland, specifically, as TechCrunch reported in November 2024. 

“We must build a prototype of Terminus on Earth before departing for Mars,” Brown explained on Twitter. “I believe Greenland is the place,” he said, and tagged Elon Musk directly before referring to this approach as “A New Monroe Doctrine,” which he says presents an “opportunity to ring in a new age of expansion.” Beside his job title in his social media bio reads just one line: “Rome will still stand at the end.” 

The idea is to build a post-democratic—and essentially outlaw—“network state,” which is an idea centered around cryptocurrency and popular among wealthy male Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, a class some have referred to as a new “broligarchy.” Plans for these private cities have been floated or are already under development for several locations worldwide, including Honduras, Nigeria, the Marshall Islands, and Panama. The idea is often traced back to the former technology officer of Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan, who says he was motivated by Israel. And as a result, “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism—when a community forms online and then gathers in physical space to form a ‘reverse diaspora.’”

As Dryden Brown described its potential application in Greenland, “With the ability to create laws and regulations, we could actually experiment with terraforming: for example, we could reflect more sunlight on the frozen terrain, and lengthen winter days. We can create rain when needed in the summer. And more. In a more hospitable climate, we could build a vast industrial base powered by nuclear, using locally-sourced Uranium.”

Others with investments eyeing Greenland include Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, who have thrown money into a company known as KoBold Metals, which uses artificial intelligence to scour government-funded geological surveys in search of rare earth minerals, as Reuters reported four years ago. Those algorithms have zeroed in on southwest Greenland in a quest for nickel, copper, cobalt and possibly lithium. Geologists had already known for decades that uranium deposits can be found in numerous locations across Greenland, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies pointed out in a new report just two weeks ago. 

“The entire island, three times the size of Texas, has only 93 miles of road,” CSIS reminded readers in that report. “Furthermore, Greenland has only 16 ports, each with only limited capacity,” which means “Significant investment in energy transmission and capacity will be a necessity for any mining operation,” Meredith Schwartz and Gracelin Baskaran write for CSIS. 

Another Greenland angle that is likely on Trump’s mind: The island may contain one of the world’s largest reserves of oil and gas, according to findings from a 2008 U.S. Geological Survey. One big obstacle: Regulations put in place by the Greenlanders who call the island home. Either seizing the island or essentially buying off its residents, as one recently-floated White House plan suggested, are a few possible ways around those obstacles. 

Advice from researchers at CSIS: Buying or invading Greenland is not the best way forward for long-term U.S. interests. Or as Schwartz and Baskaran put it, “The United States has a significant opportunity to deepen strategic ties with Greenland, not through direct purchase or military intervention, but through coordinated investment…While Greenland’s mining future faces steep logistical and political challenges, a targeted and respectful U.S. strategy could help ensure that Greenland becomes not just a mineral supplier, but a trusted Arctic partner.” Read more, here. 

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Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1903, Congress passed the Militia Act, essentially creating the modern National Guard.

Around the Defense Department

Shutdown odds plunge after Congress clinches $1.2 trillion spending deal. If the full Congress approves, the Defense Department would get $838.7 billion, a sub-1% increase, for the fiscal year that began 112 days ago. Read more from Government Executive, here.

Lawmakers bucks Pentagon by reviving Navy’s future fighter-jet effort. While the F/A-XX program was slated to get just $74 million by the National Defense Authorization Act signed into law last month, appropriators moved to give it another $897 million in a four-bill package, including the annual defense appropriations bill, on Tuesday. Appropriators lashed out at DOD’s decision to concentrate on the Air Force’s F-47 and slow-walk the Navy’s sixth-gen fighter effort—and demanded a 45-day report on timeline, budget, and development plans. Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports, here. 

Read more about that defense budget via Breaking Defense, here.

Defense tech

How AI companies joined the Pentagon. “At the start of 2024, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI were united against military use of their AI tools. But over the next 12 months, something changed,” WIRED writes, excerpting Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI, a new book by Nick Srnicek, lecturer at King’s College London. 

It’s largely about getting the funds to win market share, Srnicek reports, but AI companies have also appropriated national-security talking points. “Rhetoric about the threat of Chinese competition has been weaponized by a number of tech companies to resist regulation. And the major AI startups have also recently begun pushing the narrative of a zero-sum struggle between the US and China,” Srnicek writes. Read on, here.

Related:

• “Microsoft CEO Warns of Bubble if AI Doesn’t Spread Beyond Big Tech,” the commerce and economics website pymnts.com reported Tuesday from Satya Nadella’s address at Davos; 
• And “AI Completely Failing to Boost Productivity, Says Top Analyst,” Futurism reported Sunday.   

And ICYMI: “Trump’s rush to build nuclear reactors across the U.S. raises safety worries,” NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel reported last month. 

One chief example: Another startup leveraging Silicon Valley money—including Palmer Luckey and a former officer at Palantir—thinks it can build a 100-kw nuclear reactor by July 4. The company was founded by a self-described high-school dropout from Kentucky, and it broke ground on its nuclear project in Utah this past September. 

It’s called Valar Atomics—which, like Palantir and Anduril, is another defense-focused Silicon Valley reference to “Lord of the Rings” mythology—and they’re looking to capitalize on the data-center building boom linked to the enormous AI spending that’s largely propping up the U.S. economy during Trump’s second term. Valar is now part of a pilot program from the Energy Department, which is seeking to acquire self-sustaining nuclear reactors by the country’s 250th birthday this summer. 

The company is already trying to build a nuclear reactor “in the Philippines to avoid the regulatory delays of being licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” according to the Utah News Dispatch, reporting last July. They also joined a lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to drop safety requirements for testing, claiming “its technology was so safe that a person could hold the spent nuclear fuel from its reactor in their hand and get the same amount of radiation as one would expect from a hospital CT scan.” 

However, when an actual nuclear engineer assessed their claim and its data, “he saw that holding Valar’s spent fuel would result in a fatal dose in 90 seconds. Another nuclear engineer used a more advanced calculation method to argue the fatal dose would actually be as fast as 85 milliseconds.” Read more at the Utah News Dispatch, here. 

Additional reading: “US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains,” which is an illuminating multimedia feature published Tuesday in Nature using grant data and personnel terminations. There is perhaps no chart that more starkly shows the year-over-year changes to the federal science workforce than this graphic from that new report.

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On Saturday, Trump announced an economic war of coercion against more than a half-dozen U.S. allies in Europe, declaring “a 10% Tariff on any and all goods sent to the United States of America” from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Finland. “On June 1st, 2026, the Tariff will be increased to 25%. This Tariff will be due and payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland,” the president said on social media. 

America’s NATO allies are deploying troops to Greenland to deter a U.S. invasion. Those developments were made public last week, shortly before Danish newspaper Berlingske reported Monday that U.S. officials attempted to obtain details about “military installations, ports and air bases…that could be important in planning an American attack on or invasion of Greenland,” and avoided traditional Ministry of Defense channels during the solicitation of that information at some point in 2025.  

Developing: NORAD says it’s sending troops and aircraft to Greenland as well. The command’s Monday announcement cast it as part of “long-planned” operations “coordinated with the Kingdom of Denmark,” with these newly-arriving forces “operat[ing] with the requisite diplomatic clearances.”

Worth noting: It’s remarkable that NORAD needs to clarify that the U.S. troops have the required diplomatic clearance. But it’s all part of a rapidly developing picture of American power at a crossroads under Trump during his second term in office. 

Trump’s pace of disruption has accelerated since December, when the Supreme Court blocked his attempted deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago. Since then, he has abducted Venezuela’s leader, seized the country’s oil, intercepted at least a half-dozen tankers, sent more than five times as many ICE agents to Minneapolis as the city has police, threatened to invade Greenland, and last week threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act inside the U.S.

Trump’s message to Norway: “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” the president wrote in a highly unusual note to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. 

Trump said he has chosen to de-prioritize peace because he was not given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025, which Norway’s government has no say over at any rate. “I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you!” Trump wrote in the letter, which was made public on Sunday. 

Historian reax: “Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him,” warned Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic. She pointed out that at any point Republicans in Congress could move “to stop Trump from acting out his fantasy in Greenland and doing permanent damage to American interests.” Those lawmakers “owe it to the American people,” she said, “and to the world.”

Former Marine and Iraq war veteran Ruben Gallego agrees, and told CNN Trump “would rather just break whatever he can to get what he wants,” the Arizona Democratic senator warned. “Let’s be clear. The reason he’s there is because we have cowardly republicans in the Senate, in the House that are not standing up to this man…And if we pay in the process, we as Americans, he doesn’t care, right? This is the danger,” Gallego said, and moments later was even more blunt. “I’ve been very clear. He is a madman. He is insane. He’s only thinking about himself,” he said. “The man is threatening war against a NATO ally.” 

“He is destroying our world reputation or potentially our economic opportunity or economic might and power around the world because he is being petty,” Gallego said. “None of this is rational. Everyone needs to stop pretending this is rational.”

By the way, Trump’s Greenland aggression could spike U.S. borrowing costs and notably harm the dollar, writes Financial Times columnist Katie Martin. “Bad stuff is very clearly happening with regards to Greenland,” she says. And relatedly, there is “a strong hint that investors are doing two things: disregarding the dollar and Treasuries as safe retreats, huddling instead in the warm embrace of gold, and treating a U.S.-born shock as a reason to sell U.S. assets…It is a brave new world for the U.S., however, and one that will reinforce the urge among big investment firms to park a greater share of their resources in Europe, Asia and indeed anywhere else over time.”

Martin is hardly alone in her concerns about Trump’s apparent instability. The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Baker, former editor-in-chief of the paper with more than three decades of experience in journalism, wrote a column of warning Monday entitled, “A Look Back at the War That Is About to Begin.” He writes in a sort of speculative-fiction mode, describing in retrospect the damage to the world that may follow from a possible U.S. invasion of Greenland. 

“The fallout did almost as much harm to the U.S. as to Europe,” he writes. “The dollar sank, pushing up retail prices in America and causing a run on Treasury bonds that flattened mortgage lending and battered corporate finances. Seizing their opportunity, Russia and China demonstrated the value of allyship and pounced. Russia suspended its campaign in Ukraine and quickly moved on the Baltics. With NATO gone, Europeans were deeply divided about whether to offer support; but as a harsh winter descended, the desperate need for cheap energy soon forced them to assent to Russian control over large swathes of Eastern Europe.” 

According to Baker’s telling, China fairly quickly seizes Taiwan. Then the U.S., “along with its remaining three allies—El Salvador, Qatar and Senegal—it struck an uneasy peace, a tripartite charter that replaced the American-denominated global order with a condominium of Russia, China and the U.S. dominant in their respective regions.” Read the rest, here. 

A veteran U.S. diplomat warns, “Trump’s Greenland ambitions could wreck 20th-century alliances that helped build the modern world order,” writing Monday in The Conversation. 

In Denmark, protesters have begun mocking Trump’s MAGA slogan with “Make America Go Away” hats, the Associated Press reported Monday from Copenhagen. “The mock hats were created by Copenhagen vintage clothing store owner Jesper Rabe Tonnesen. Early batches flopped last year—until the Trump administration recently escalated its rhetoric over Greenland. Now they are popping up everywhere.” Story, here. 

In the Caribbean, “crew on board the United States’ newest aircraft carrier are growing increasingly frustrated by design flaws that lead to regular failures in the ship’s toilet system,” NPR reported Saturday about the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier, citing Navy documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. 

Additional reading: 

• “Top Catholic Clerics Denounce U.S. Foreign Policy,” the New York Times reported on Monday;
• “America vs. the World,” is how Robert Kagan described Trump’s foreign policy, writing Sunday in The Atlantic;
• “Splits Emerge Among Venezuelans as Revolutionary Dream Fades,” the New York Times reported Monday; 
• ICYMI, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Netanyahu ‘persuaded Trump to postpone airstrikes against Iran’,” the UK Times writes after the New York Times reported the allegation on Thursday, citing a U.S. official;  
• Relatedly, read “How Trump Went From ‘Locked and Loaded’ to Hitting Pause on Striking Iran,” the Wall Street Journal reported Friday; Axios has similar reporting, here; 
• And in Syria, “Clashes Erupt Around Syrian Prisons Holding Islamic State Fighters,” the Times reported Monday. 

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Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1972, Pakistan launched its effort to develop nuclear weapons; it would perform its first, and so far only, live tests in 1998.

Escalation watch: Troops in US cities

Developing: Pentagon readies 1,500 soldiers for possible deployment to Minnesota, unnamed officials told several news outlets over the weekend. 

Two infantry battalions of the Army’s 11th Airborne Division have been given prepare-to-deploy orders for the Midwest state, where thousands of federal agents have been conducting aggressive immigration raids. According to the Associated Press, “One defense official said the troops are standing by to deploy to Minnesota should President Donald Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, a rarely used 19th century law that would allow him to employ active duty troops as law enforcement.” Read more at the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal.

Analysis: The Trump administration’s actions amount to “state terror,” veteran terrorism analyst Adam Silverman wrote on Saturday: “I’ve seen a lot of terms thrown around for what the Trump admin is doing w/ICE, CBP, & other federal law enforcement (LE). The now largely out of use term is state terror.” 

The origins for the term come from “the Reign of Terror during the French revolution,” Silverman explains. “The outcome was to coerce the population through the threat & actual use of violence against victims who were not necessarily the target audience.”

How it works: “The power of the nation-state is being directed at the citizenry through threats [and] acts of violence, all done under the color of law, including extrajudicial executions, in order to coerce the citizenry into compliance through fear [and] intimidation. This includes using legal power/lawfare,” Silverman says. 

American precedents. “State terror in the U.S. is not a new thing that [Stephen] Miller concocted, it was the modus operandi of the Confederate in all but name Jim Crow states,” Silverman says. “It’s why in the Jim Crow states you have a variety of non-state actors from the genteel [and] seemingly legit white citizen councils all the way to a number of different white Christian supremacist terrorist groups like the Klu Klux Klan.” 

This time around the perpetrators are largely ICE in addition to militia groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. But also the U.S. military via Trump’s “attempts to use the National Guard,” which Silverman said, “makes sense as, like Robespierre’s movement, the Trump/MAGA movement is a revolutionary movement.”

Second opinion: “Lawful extremism,” is how extremism scholar J.M. Berger described what’s playing out in Minnesota and elsewhere in ICE raids. “What we’re seeing is anti-immigration extremists carrying out violence against in-group dissenters,” he wrote in response to Silverman’s analysis. 

Expert three: “We are a long way from Civil War, but the Minnesota National Guard is now wearing bright green vests to distinguish [them] from ‘other agencies,’” noted Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. “This is now ‘us’ versus ‘them’ combat forces.” 

“Trump is taking [the] U.S. to a very dark place,” Pape said, adding that it’s “Crucial that the [Minnesota National] Guard and ICE do not clash.”

Expert four: There’s no mistaking that Trump has “launch[ed] a paramilitary occupation of an American city” and is now “sending armed goons to spread state-sponsored violence against the local population,” warns German historian Thomas Zimmer, writing Tuesday. 

However, he pointed out, “Several times over the past twelve months, the regime pushed the country right up to the edge of the kind of authoritarian escalation that would have taken America across the line into full-blown autocratic territory,” but then officials “were either unable or didn’t dare to force that next step,” he writes with a note of optimism in an essay, “The Limits of Violent Authoritarianism.” 

“I am not trying to tell you that things are fine. The situation is acutely dangerous,” he continues. “The outcome of the current struggle against the authoritarian assault on democratic self-government remains undetermined. At the start of 2026, America is no longer a democracy.”

“What I am arguing is that being lawless, immoral, and violent does not make the Trumpists omnipotent,” Zimmer says. “Their authoritarian desires are limitless, but their ability to impose them on the country is not.” Read on, here. 

Some Army recruiters are wooing high-schoolers by saying enlisting could protect their families from ICE. CNN documents a pitch in Minnesota, adding to a similar New York Times report last week from Oregon.

Additional reading: 

• “ICE’s Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice,” 404 Media reported Monday; 
• “FBI opened probe on Minneapolis shooting; none exists now, Justice Dept. says,” the Washington Post reported Sunday; 
• “FBI Agent’s Sworn Testimony Contradicts Claims ICE’s Jonathan Ross Made Under Oath,” WIRED reported last week; 
• “Trump Warned of a Tren de Aragua ‘Invasion.’ US Intel Told a Different Story,” WIRED reported last week as well; 
• And “Trump’s Big Changes to Government Might Not Last,” says Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute, writing Tuesday in The Atlantic.

Around the Defense Department

Trump’s ‘battleship’ could be the most expensive U.S. warship in history. Congressional researchers said ThursdayThe first Trump-class “battleship” ordered up by the White House could cost as much as $22 billion, and could cut into the Navy’s plans for next-generation destroyers, iDefense One’s Thomas Novelly reports, here.

CNO drops hints about forthcoming ‘Fighting Instructions’ strategy. “That document will be my strategy for naval operations going forward,” Adm. Daryl Caudle  said during a speech at the Surface Navy Association symposium outside Washington, D.C. “It will explain how I view the Navy as the joint-force hedge for achieving our vital national interest.” That’s coming “in the near future,” a defense official told Defense One’s Meghann Myers, here. 

Etc.

China is building ‘full-stack’ defense-innovation cities. While the U.S. and others struggle to build rare-earth processing plants, magnet factories, and high-performance motor supply chains, Beijing is doing all of those at once, in city-scale clusters that will widen its advantage in next-generation technologies, write Tye Graham and Peter Singer in Defense One’s The China Intelligence column.

And lastly, it’s been one full year of President Trump’s second term in office, so CNN used the occasion as an opportunity to find out how Americans feel about their elected leader now. Among the findings: 

• 58% percent of Americans believe that Trump’s first year in office has been a failure;
• Americans worry most about the economy, but concerns about democracy come in second; 
• 66% think Trump doesn’t care about people like them;
• 53% think he doesn’t have the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president;
• And 65% said Trump is not someone they are proud to have as president.

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Trump’s ‘imperialist’ foreign policy: President Trump’s CIA director visited the Venezuelan capital for meetings with regime officials Thursday. The trip to Caracas by director John Ratcliffe was the first by a member of Trump’s cabinet since the U.S. military attacked the city and abducted the country’s leader Nicholas Maduro on Jan. 3, the New York Times reported Thursday.  

Ratcliffe met with Venezuelan oil minister Delcy Rodríguez, who is now the interim president after the CIA told the White House she is their best option to prevent the country from “descending into some chaotic situation,” a U.S. official told the Times. 

By the way: The U.S. military seized its sixth allegedly sanctioned Venezuelan oil tanker on Thursday. “In another pre-dawn action, Marines and Sailors from Joint Task Force Southern Spear, in support of the Department of Homeland Security, launched from USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) and apprehended Motor/Tanker Veronica without incident,” officials at the military’s Southern Command announced along with video of the interdiction. “The only oil leaving Venezuela will be oil that is coordinated properly and lawfully,” SOUTHCOM declared in a statement. 

Big-picture consideration: “The US wants to remake Venezuela’s oil industry. History stands in the way,” the Associated Press reported Thursday in an historical explainer. But history is not the only obstacle. “Venezuela’s oil is notoriously among the thickest, heaviest and dirtiest in the world. Handling heavy crude requires a lighter diluent—a light hydrocarbon fluid or oil, often naphtha or condensate—which is blended with the heavier crude to enable flow through pipelines.” And: “For American companies, political uncertainty and a history of asset seizures continue to raise concerns about whether contracts would be honored and who would ultimately control the sector,” AP reports.  

Echoes of—and lessons from—Iraq. A former Bush administration official has outlined what she says are five hard-learned lessons from Iraq that can help the Trump administration deliver a better outcome in Venezuela. Writing in Foreign Affairs on Friday, Meghan O’Sullivan, former Deputy National Security Adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan, argues there may be more similarities between the two interventions than many realize, and flags at least five dangerous mistakes:

• “First, Washington must not presume that a regime will survive after its top leader is removed; it therefore must have a plan to provide law and order in case they break down.” 
• “Second, it should prepare for the inevitable toxicity of the narrative that the United States is after oil alone and how that narrative can disrupt U.S. aims.”
• “Third, it must appreciate that the promotion of democracy might be needed—not out of a sense of altruism but to deliver stability.”
• “Fourth, it must be prepared to allocate resources to secure a better outcome, even if a country’s resources promise great future wealth.”
• “And finally, the United States cannot assume that its power will ensure positive results without the help and support of regional actors.”

Worth noting (as Lulu Garcia-Navarro flagged on Jan. 7): It is still “far too early to be complacent about the possibility of violence and looting” in Venezuela, O’Sullivan writes. “Venezuela’s institutions have been hollowed out after more than a quarter century of Bolivarian rule. Factor in 20 years of U.S. sanctions, chronic hyperinflation, and an estimated poverty rate of 80 percent, and it’s easy to see how the removal of a leader could stoke unrest.” To this end, “senior Trump officials have already cited the poignant lesson Iraq offers about not dismantling an authoritarian regime’s institutions,” she adds. 

And that’s partly why “Trump Chooses Oil Over Democracy” was a New York Times headline on Friday. “The challenge is not deciding whether to dismantle institutions; it is figuring out how to save the parts of the regime that remain functional and necessary while responding to—and trying to defuse—a fierce drive for retribution,” O’Sullivan writes. 

Advice for the White House: “The Trump administration appears to believe that American power is at an apex. But more than 20 years ago, when the United States was indisputably the world’s only superpower, the Bush administration overestimated its own power and erred badly by neglecting to bring other countries into decisions about Iraq’s fate.” This administration can try to avoid a similar fate. Continue reading at Foreign Affairs, here. 

Big picture: Trump’s foreign policy now appears to be openly “imperialist” and an echo of “19th-century colonial powers,” Reuters reported Thursday. 

After campaigning on an isolationist platform, “In practice, the president’s policies smack of neo-imperialism, not neo-isolationism,” Georgetown professor Charles Kupchan said. With his threats to Denmark and thus NATO, “the U.S. risks assuming the position of a rogue state within the international system,” Marc Weller of the Chatham House said. And Trump’s ambitions for war-torn Gaza look like “imperialism masquerading as a peace process,” United Nations advisor Jeffrey Sachs said. Read more, here. 

New: “The American public does not approve of Trump’s military forays,” according to a new survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Majorities across partisan lines oppose using military force to invade Greenland, overthrow governments in Latin America, occupy Venezuela, gain access to another country’s natural resources, or expand the territory of the United States,” they write in their topline summary. Among their findings: 

• 85% oppose invading Greenland to make it part of the U.S.;
• 80% say it’s not ok to use military force to compel governments to give the U.S. territory;
• 74% oppose using U.S. troops to occupy Venezuela if the new government refuses to cooperate; 
• 70% say it’s not ok to use the military to change the country’s political leadership and install a more pro-U.S. government (Republicans are split 48-48 on the question);
• And 72% say the White House isn’t focused enough on rising inflation.

Read over the survey in full, here. 

Update: European troops arriving in Greenland on Thursday included personnel from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway and Sweden, according to NBC News. 

A “relative success” offers lessons for dealing with Trump. That’s one European perspective after Wednesday’s meeting between officials from Denmark, Greenland, and the Trump administration. “While the meeting ended in an agreement to disagree and the establishment of a high-level working group to manage the issue, this move was not without risk and could have easily ended badly,” writes Rachel Ellehuus of the London-based Royal United Services Institute. This outcome “was not easily achieved. Behind it lies months of careful, well-orchestrated diplomacy that validates the value of statecraft and offers important lessons on how to deal with the current US administration and its single-minded President.” Read on, here.

Denmark feels betrayed by an America that has forgotten its steadfast sacrifice after 9/11, The Atlantic reports. “Denmark is small, with a population of just 6 million. But it has tried to uphold its end of the bargain. It lost more soldiers per capita than the United States did in Afghanistan. In all, there were 43 deaths, a sacrifice that Danes accepted as the cost of their international obligations. Sophia [Bruun, the gunner on a Piranha combat vehicle] was the first female soldier to fall in combat in Danish history, her death a ripple effect of the September 11 attacks, the first time that NATO’s mutual-defense clause was invoked. Triggering Article 5 obligated U.S. allies to assist, including by sending soldiers like Sophia to fight. This time, if Article 5 is invoked, the United States might be the aggressor.”

Time to start drinking? On Wednesday, Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, “privately told lawmakers the state of the world meant it might be a ‘good moment’ to start drinking,” Politico reports.

For your radar: Ukraine’s future may hinge on upcoming votes in Congress. That’s because U.S. funding will not materialize until lawmakers pass a full-year defense appropriations bill, writes David Bortnick, a former staff member on the House Appropriations Committee and former analyst at the Office of Management and Budget. He’s now vice president of a government affairs firm known as SMI. That’s because even though the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which was signed into law last month, authorized $400 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, the NDAA is only an authorization bill. 

Current estimates put possible Ukraine funding through USAI between $300 million to $400 million. “Does this funding matter? Yes, both symbolically and substantively,” argues Bortnick, writing Thursday in Defense One. “For Congress, the question is not whether Europe should carry more of the burden,” he says. “The question is whether the United States will provide a modest but reliable amount that keeps Ukraine in the fight, keeps Europe at the table, and keeps the U.S. strategy credible. Without that credibility, Russia has little reason to strike a peace deal.” Continue reading, here. 

Developing: In an apparent new first, Russian troops in Ukraine seem to have hooked one of Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals to a one-way attack drone, according to Ukrainian Serhii Flash, who posted photos of the BM-35 drone on Telegram Thursday after it was shot down by Ukrainian forces. 

Why it matters: “UAVs with this type of control are not susceptible to electronic warfare” and are more likely to strike their intended target, Flash warned in his post. He speculated that it’s only a matter of time before Russia uses similar methods on their Iranian-designed Shahed drones. 

Previously, Russia was only believed to have attached Starlink terminals to their Molniya-2 fixed-wing first-person UAVs, which greatly expands their attack range—around 230 kilometers compared to 50 kilometers—and targeting efficiency, as analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War noted Tuesday. 

Also: Catch a glimpse of “The Ukrainian war cemetery that can’t stop growing,” via photography this week from the Kyiv Independent, reporting Thursday on location. 

Additional reading: 

• After reporting emerged of U.S. troops’ possible use of an acoustic weapon during their January 3 attack on Venezuela, “Serbia let Putin’s spies zap dogs with ‘sound cannons,’” Politico reported Thursday;
• “Cuba mourns 32 soldiers killed in US attack on Venezuela,” Reuters reported Thursday from Havana;
• And the Pentagon wants to upgrade a Peruvian naval base for $1.5 billion; the U.S. military’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency has details, here.

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Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1979, the U.S.-installed Shah of Iran fled amid mutiny and violent demonstrations that enabled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to take control of the country.

Deportation nation

After threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act on Thursday, Trump’s “threat stands out against the law’s long history,” the AP reported in another historical explainer this week. Trump issued the threat in response to protests against increasingly aggressive immigration raids by ICE agents around Minneapolis. 

If he follows through, “he’d be the only commander in chief to use the 19th-century law to send troops to quell protests that started because of federal officers the president already has sent to the area—one of whom shot and killed a U.S. citizen,” AP’s Bill Barrow writes. 

Expert reax: Should he follow through, it “would be a flagrant and particularly dangerous abuse of the Act—one that would threaten the rule of law and public safety alike,” writes Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice. “Presidents have thus used the law sparingly, only 30 times in US history. In virtually every case, either the governor requested assistance because local law enforcement was overwhelmed or the state was actively obstructing federal civil rights laws,” she explained in a social media thread. 

One notable difference this time: “The chaos in Minneapolis is of the federal government’s own making,” Goitein says. “The violence and lawlessness is overwhelmingly coming from ICE. Agents have been filmed smashing windows, ramming vehicles, and forcibly entering homes without warrants.” She continues, “Minneapolis is not L.A. in 1992, where riots killed 63 people and caused $1 billion in damage. Nor is it Detroit in 1967, where the death toll was 43 and 400 buildings were destroyed. The unrest in Minneapolis could easily be handled by police under normal circumstances. Instead, it’s being handled—violently—by ICE.” 

“The administration seems intent on escalation rather than deescalation, ‘reminding’ ICE agents (falsely) that they have absolute immunity for the actions they take against Minnesotans who get in their way,” Goitein writes. “Sending troops to Minneapolis under current circumstances would, of course, inflame tensions and lead to more protests, which would presumably trigger further ICE aggression,” she worries. 

“The military should never be used to enable violence and lawlessness by the federal government. That would be an abuse of the Insurrection Act, a threat to public safety, and an incredibly dangerous precedent.” She ends by asking rhetorically, “Congress… where are you???”

Second opinion: “It’s hard to think of another instance in which a president would deploy troops to enable further federal deprivation of people’s rights,” Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, said in a statement Thursday. “The real risk to people’s safety comes from ICE and other federal agents’ violence against our communities, and the killing of Renee Good starkly shows what happens when ICE operates without accountability.” 

Reporting update on the killing of Renee Good: According to video evidence available so far, there is “no indication that the [ICE] agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over,” the New York Times visual forensics team reported in a detailed, seven-minute video analysis Thursday (gift link). Their reporting “also establishes—millisecond by millisecond—how Mr. Ross put himself in a dangerous position near her vehicle in the first place.” 

And according to the Minneapolis Fire Department’s incident report on the day of the shooting, “Good was found with gunshot wounds to the chest, arm and head after a federal immigration officer shot her,” the Minnesota Star Tribune reported Friday. 

Developing: U.S. guards may have choked a man to death inside an ICE tent encampment near the Mexican border on Jan. 3, the Washington Post reported Thursday, citing a phone call from the medical examiner’s office. The man had three children and had been in the U.S. for 30 years. 

Surveillance-focused defense contractor joins ICE ops: “Palantir is working on a tool for Immigration and Customs Enforcement that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address,” 404 Media reported Thursday. 

It’s called “ELITE,” or Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement. And agents can use the app “in bulk, selecting up to 50 people at once.” 

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon: The app “makes a mockery of the idea that ICE is trying to make our country safer. Rather, agents are reportedly picking people to deport from our country the same way you’d choose a nearby coffee shop.”

FWIW: “Neither Palantir nor DHS responded to multiple requests for comment,” 404 reports. More, here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Revealed: Four Businesses with Ties to [white nationalist] Patriot Front Operating in North Texas,” the Texas Observer reported Thursday;
• And ICYMI, Tennessee GOP congressman Rep. Andy Ogles shared a war-like message of Christian nationalism on his Facebook page two weeks ago.

Around the Defense Department

The Pentagon leans into drone swarms with a $100M challenge. On Tuesday, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit announced the Orchestrator Prize Challenge, seeking “technologies that allow humans to work the way they already command–through plain language that expresses desired effects, constraints, timing, and priorities—not by clicking through menus or programming behaviors,” said Lt. Gen. Frank Donovan, who leads the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group. Defense One’s Patrick Tucker has more, here.

Reminder: One of the president’s sons is now a defense contractor with a focus on drones, thanks to a Florida-based venture called Unusual Machines that has a $620 million deal with the Pentagon, as the Financial Times reported in late October. 

The Pentagon has approved all but 23 of the 2,463 companies and schools that have asked to bid on up to $151 billion worth of work on the Golden Dome missile-defense program, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reports.

Additional reading: “There’s a Lootbox With Rare Pokémon Cards Sitting in the Pentagon Food Court,” 404 Media reported Thursday after a photo of the device was posted to Reddit.

Finally: Pentagon Press Association files brief in lawsuit against the Defense Department. The PPA represents journalists who work at the Pentagon—or rather, worked there until October, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth instituted new rules that he falsely claimed stemmed from professional misconduct. On Thursday, the PPA filed an amicus brief to the New York Times’ lawsuit over the matter “to assist the Court in understanding the long history of reporters working at the Pentagon, the significant value this access has provided to both the public and the Department, and the fundamental threat to press freedom posed by the Department’s attempt to change how reporters have worked at the Pentagon for over 80 years.” Read that, here.

Note: We’ll be away on Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Enjoy the time away, and we’ll see you again on Tuesday! 

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“Provocative military activities are intensifying,” Japan’s defense minister said.

Crisis at home, crises abroad. As President Trump threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act over protests against aggressive immigration raids in Minnesota, NATO allies are dispatching military reinforcements to Greenland to counter the U.S. president’s threat to invade the Danish island against the wishes of its residents and elected leaders. 

Germany, France and Sweden announced plans to send troops, military aircraft, and ships to Greenland after a Wednesday discussion at the White House failed to alter Trump administration officials’ desire to acquire the territory. 

The talks between officials representing Greenland, Denmark, and the Trump administration “did not succeed in changing the American position” on possible annexation, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said in Washington, D.C. Instead the U.S. and Danish delegation agreed to form a “high-level working group” to meet “within a matter of weeks,” said Rasmussen, who added, “We therefore still have a fundamental disagreement, but we also agree to disagree.”

Danish Minister of Defense Troels Lund Poulsen warned during a separate press conference Wednesday that “security tensions have spread to the Arctic.” As a result, “in close dialogue with the Greenlandic government, we have agreed to increase our military presence and exercise activity in the Arctic and the North Atlantic in cooperation with NATO allies,” Poulsen said. He told the Danish news outlet Berlingske that increased ships, planes, and soldiers would all be necessary, and the outlet reported that Denmark will send the army’s 1st Brigade.

The U.K. has signaled a willingness to send troops to Greenland, according to a Bloomberg report this week, and Norway’s prime minister also issued a statement of support for Denmark earlier this month, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. 

New: More than seven in 10 Americans think it’s a bad idea to militarily seize Greenland (71%), and less than one in five (17%) overall support Trump’s general effort to acquire the island, according to survey results published Wednesday by Reuters/Ipsos. 

Only 4% think a military invasion of the island is a good idea. 

• Note: Four-percent polling is occasionally called the “Lizardman’s Constant”: insincere feedback revealed in opinion polling that has found, e.g., “four percent of Americans believe lizardmen are running the Earth.” 

Two-thirds of those surveyed worried Trump’s efforts on Greenland will damage NATO and America’s relationship with European allies; that included 91% of Democrats and 40% of Republicans. 

For what it’s worth, “About one in five respondents in the poll said they had not heard of the plans to acquire Greenland,” Reuters reports. 

Notable: The White House posted a neo-Nazi message aimed at Denmark and Greenland on Twitter just before the meeting Wednesday. “Which way, Greenland man?” the post asked, showing an illustration of a sled-dog team with an apparent choice of paths leading either to the White House or to Russia and China.

Expert reax: “This is a key concept in neo-Nazi and white supremacist subculture,” Heidi Beirich, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian. “Western man is code for white man, and one of the most popular racist books in these subcultures is Which Way Western Man, which has been featured in a [Department of Homeland Security] post celebrating manifest destiny.” 

“The idea appeals to racists and white supremacists who think only white people should be in positions of power,” Beirich said. 

• Related viewing: “Under Trump, federal agencies’ social-media posts include racist, extremist allusions,” PBS Newshour reported in their Monday broadcast. 

Update: Experts disagree with Trump’s claim that U.S. control of Greenland is critical for the Golden Dome missile defense initiative, and say it ignores longstanding diplomatic agreements that would likely already permit the project’s expansion on the Danish-controlled island, Defense One’s Thomas Novelly reported just hours after Trump made the claim on his social media feed Wednesday. For example, they said Trump’s statement ignores the U.S. military’s existing, and crucial, presence on the island at Pituffik Space Base. The work at that base is already focused on missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite command and control missions.

“What he is saying is detached from reality,” said Todd Harrison, a defense and space policy expert with the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s like he doesn’t realize that for decades we’ve had a major base in Greenland that is critical to homeland missile defense and space surveillance.”

Under a decades-old agreement between the two countries, the U.S. government has the right to “to improve and generally to fit the area for military use,” “to construct, install, maintain, and operate facilities and equipment,” and “provide for the protection and internal security of the area,” according to the agreement’s text. 

Historically, the U.S. had no issues securing its national security priorities, said Mikkel Runge Olesen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. “That means that de facto, it has been a very, very wide agreement in terms of allowing for the U.S. to take care of its security needs,” Olesen said, adding that any future Greenland-related Golden Dome initiatives would more than likely be accepted. “A U.S. request concerning a key security issue for them would almost certainly be considered very favorable,” he added. Continue reading, here. 

Second opinion: Trump’s Greenland fixation his “Most Dangerous Obsession,” argues former Naval War College professor Tom Nichols, writing Wednesday for The Atlantic. Their headline: “Trump Is Risking a Global Catastrophe.”

How so? “Imagine that Denmark, following some intemperate claim from Trump, demands that U.S. forces in Greenland remain confined to their bases, and Trump, incensed at the insult to his putatively unlimited power, tries to force the issue and tells American servicepeople to act as the island’s de facto police, including suppressing any demonstrations or resistance from the population,” Nichols writes. “Someone might be killed. The death of a Greenlander, a Dane, or a member of any other military there as a show of support for Denmark—Sweden has already sent troops to Greenland and Britain is considering similar moves—would incinerate the NATO alliance. Then the real nightmare begins.”

“As the American military chases Trump’s ever-changing Sharpie lines across the world’s maps,” Nichols warns in a culmination of his concerns, “the West’s enemies will be tempted to take advantage of the fact that the United States has obliterated the most powerful alliance in history while scattering American forces around the globe in showpiece operations that have more to do with Trump’s vanity than with sound strategy.” 

Under these circumstances, Putin may invade the Baltics. China may move on Taiwan; Trump already made public his apparent indifference to that consideration in an interview with the New York Times last week. “And although no one should try to predict what North Korea’s bizarre dynasty would do, South Korea and Japan would have to begin planning for the risks that will come during, and after, America’s voluntary strategic immolation, most likely with crash programs to develop nuclear arms,” Nichols writes. “And all this could happen—for what, exactly?” he asks. 

By the way: “Russia nearly shut down Poland’s power grid in December cyberattack,” Euromaidan Press reported Wednesday after a Tuesday interview with Polish Minister of Digital Affairs Krzysztof Gawkowski. “Everything indicates that we are dealing with Russian sabotage, because it must be called by its name, which was supposed to destabilize the situation in Poland, Gawkowski said. Read more at The Moscow Times

View from Capitol Hill: “For the past year, Vladimir Putin has mocked the Ukraine peace process by steadily escalating his attacks on his neighboring country,” said Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and chair of the Armed Services Committee, speaking on the Senate floor this week. “He’s recently launched the biggest air attack the conflict has ever seen and shown repeatedly that he is not interested in peace talks. He gives lip service to peace talks, but his acts show that he’s not interested.” 

Wicker continued: “Putin even echoes the likes of Adolf Hitler. Putin routinely talks about ‘liberating’ the Russian-speaking Ukrainians living in the Donbas, and other areas of Ukraine. This is the same vile, absurd pretext that Adolf Hitler used when he invaded the German-speaking regions of neighboring countries including Poland. That’s who Vladimir Putin is.”Trump to Reuters: “Zelenskiy, not Putin, is holding up a Ukraine peace deal.”

Additional reading: 

• “The U.S. Is Pressing Mexico to Allow U.S. Forces to Fight Cartels,” the New York Times reported Thursday from Mexico City and Washington; 
• “The U.S. Military Can’t Do Everything at Once,” warns Nancy Youssef at The Atlantic. 

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Welcome to this Thursday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1911, Lt. Myron Crissy of the U.S. Army Coast Artillery Corps dropped a live bomb from an airplane for what’s believed to have been the first time ever. “Experiment proves aviation will figure in war,” the San Francisco Call reported.

Venezuela developments

Senate war powers resolution fails by one vote. GOP Senators Josh Hawley and Todd Young flipped their votes from last week, blocking a war powers resolution on Wednesday that would have curbed Trump’s military operations in Venezuela. GOP Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul joined all Democrats in support, leading Vice President JD Vance to cast the deciding vote.

“In short, this means the Senate will NOT pass the resolution to require Trump to get approval from Congress in order to take military action in Venezuela,” Sahil Kapur of NBC News reported. 

GOP dissent in the House: “It’s shameful that senators in safe seats can’t stand up to the political pressure of this President and his henchmen, even when they know what’s in the best interests of the United States and what their oath to the Constitution requires of them,” Kentucky’s Thomas Massie wrote on social media, adding, “Ambition is their downfall.”

That vote came after news had surfaced that the White House just netted $500 million for its first sale of Venezuelan oil, and is holding at least some of the proceeds at a “main account” located in Qatar, according to administration officials who spoke to Semafor Wednesday. 

Background: On Friday, Trump signed an executive order aiming to “block courts or creditors from tapping any revenue from those oil sales,” Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Eleanor Mueller write. “Venezuela owes international bondholders, oil companies and others as much as $170 billion—one reason why US firms have been reluctant to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure.”

Second opinion: “If we’re asserting that the money is safer in Qatar than the U.S., that suggests that it is being protected because Qatar has something the U.S. lacks—presumably a lack of accountability to American courts and Congress,” author and former Washington Post columnist Philip Bump wrote online Wednesday.

“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told Semafor last week, and added, “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”

Others were more blunt. “Looks like Donald Trump used the military to do a smash and grab for his personal benefit,” Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times observed on social media. 

More dissent from Capitol Hill: “There is no clear path forward, no timeline, and no explanation of how the Trump Administration intends to avoid further instability or escalation” in Venezuela, said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon “Instead, the Administration appears to be prioritizing profits for Big Oil over democracy and the rule of law.”

“It is not America’s responsibility to go around the world using our military to push regime change when there is no imminent threat to our national security and then running foreign countries when we have our own serious problems here at home,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois. “Senate Republicans had an opportunity to block the President from further escalating military force against Venezuela, reassert our Constitutional authority and send an important message that he must end his march into another reckless forever war with no justification and no end state. It’s shameful that instead of taking this critical opportunity, they again chose to take the word of the least trustworthy President in history” rather than do what she says is in “the best interest of our nation’s servicemembers and the American people.”

Related reading: “Hundreds of Big Post-Election Donors Have Benefited From Trump’s Return to Office,” the New York Times reported one week before the Venezuelan invasion and abduction of Maduro. 

Developing: The White House is preparing to use “private military contractors to protect oil and energy assets in Venezuela rather than deploying U.S. troops,” CNN reported Thursday. 

Among those floated to participate: Former Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Another is Grey Bull Rescue Foundation, which is “a group that helped opposition leader & Nobel laureate María Corina Machado,” Zachary Cohen reports. Story, here. 

Update: We’ve learned a little more about a previously-secret Justice Department memo authorizing Trump’s attacks on Venezuela. The memo admits regime change in Caracas was the goal, and claims the White House had “no contingency plan to engage in any substantial and sustained operation or occupation of Venezuela and that the envisioned operation would be limited to a level short of what would require going to Congress,” Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported Tuesday. 

The memo also claims killing people in alleged drug-trafficking boats is okay because they are “civilians directly participating in hostilities such as by assisting in war-sustaining activities, or civilians who are present at legitimate targets provided that the harm is not excessive in relation to the military advantage gained.” 

Iran developments

U.S. carrier to the Middle East? In the wake of Trump’s threats to punish the Iranian regime for its deadly crackdown on protestors, NewsNation says the Abraham Lincoln and its strike group have been diverted to the Middle East from Asia, but that remained unconfirmed at press time.

Here are the approximate known locations of the Navy’s carriers, per independent ship-tracker Ian Ellis. 

CNO cautions against extending carrier’s deployment for Iran ops. Adm. Daryl Caudle said Wednesday that his office would push back against the idea that the USS Ford should be sent to the Middle East. The carrier is bumping up against its planned seven-month deployment after being diverted from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean for operations against drug boats and the leader of Venezuela. Caudle said he’d be happy to suggest other options, and that the carrier would be honored to carry out any orders. Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports from the Surface Navy Association conference, here.

U.S. analysts’ forecast: “The unprecedentedly brutal crackdown that the regime is conducting has broadly suppressed protest activity and may get the protests under control if no other factors intervene,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote Wednesday. 

For what it’s worth, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s personal plane has reportedly departed the region amid fears of a possible new conflict in Iran. 

In case you missed it: Saudi Arabia greenlit several Trump real-estate projects after MBS’s White House visit. On Nov. 18, Trump gave Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a few things he had long sought, including status for Riyadh as a “major non-NATO ally”; a promise to sell 300 Abrams tanks and an unspecified number of F-35 fighter jets (previously sold in the region only to Israel); and the U.S. president’s personal approbation for the man U.S. intelligence concluded had ordered the murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post journalist. 

Now, “MBS appears to be returning the favor,” reports Popular Information’s Judd Legum. “The Trump Organization announced it would be partnering with Dar Global to build a $7 billion “Trump-branded hotel and golf course” in Saudi Arabia. The development in Diriyah “will include 500 mansions, priced between $6.7 million and $24 million.” Read more, here.

Around the Defense Department

The Navy’s recent announcement to build a Trump-class “battleship” caught the service by surprise, Rear Adm. Derek Trinque, the Navy staff’s surface warfare director since June, said Tuesday at the Surface Navy Association symposium outside Washington, D.C. 

​​“I did not expect to be told to build a battleship when I got this job,” Trinque said. 

Background: The Navy was not planning to unveil a new class of ship last year, much less two, but November and December brought the cancellation of a frigate program, the launch of another, and the comeback—at least in name—of a type the service had largely deactivated by 1947, Myers reports. The nascent Trump-class “battleship” will basically be a next-generation guided-missile destroyer “on steroids,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, chief of naval operations, said Wednesday at the symposium. 

As the service was trying to figure out how to best equip the DDG(X), they were running out of space on the ship, having to make the choice between outfitting it with the new Conventional Prompt Strike missile and a tried-and-true gun system. So “when national leaders announced that they were interested in building a battleship, this was a great opportunity for us,” Trinque said. Continue reading, here. 

On the Hill: SOUTHCOM and NSA/CyberCom noms are testifying. Marine Lt. Gen. Frank Donovan is up for nomination to lead Southern Command along with Army Lt. Gen. Josh Rudd, who has been nominated to be the next director of Cyber Command and the National Security Agency. Catch that over at the Senate Armed Services Committee’s livestream here. 

Read more: “Experts see NSA nominee’s Pacific experience as a boost to US cyber posture on China,” Nextgov’s David DiMolfetta reported Wednesday. 

And lastly today: The CBO says Trump and Hegseth’s Defense Department-to-War Department name change would cost between $125 million to at least “hundreds of millions of dollars.” The larger estimate would stem from a formal renaming by Congress, which would likely be closer to the $2 billion NBC News reported in November, citing six people with knowledge of the potential costs all across the military. 

“In CBO’s assessment, it would cost about $10 million for a modest implementation of the order if the name change primarily occurred within the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” the Congressional Budgeting Office said in a new report made public this week. On the other end, “A statutory renaming could cost hundreds of millions of dollars depending on how Congress and DoD chose to implement the change.” Read more in their full report (PDF) here. 

Additional reading: 

• “Lawmakers propose $2.5B agency to boost production of rare earths and other critical minerals,” the Associated Press reported Thursday; 
• And former Pentagon official “Sen. Elissa Slotkin says she’s under federal investigation after video about refusing illegal orders,” NBC News reported Tuesday. 

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