Braxton Taylor
Spotlight on Trump
President-elect Donald Trump has seized headlines with another extreme suggestion: leaving open the possibility of using military or economic force to expand U.S. territory by annexing Greenland, Canada, and/or the Panama Canal. The president-elect brought it up 20 minutes into an hourlong press conference Tuesday in Florida. When asked about it a bit later, Trump confirmed his interest in keeping the option of invasions open.
David Sanger of the New York Times: “I wanted to touch on the world empire that you mentioned, but let’s start if we could, with your references to Greenland and the Panama Canal, so forth. Can you assure the world that as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?”
Trump: “No.”
Sanger: “Can you tell us a little bit about what your plan is? Are you going to negotiate a new treaty? Are you going to ask the Canadians to hold a vote? What is the strategy?”
Trump: “You’re talking about Panama and Greenland. No, I can’t assure you on either of those two, but I can say this. We need them for economic security. The Panama Canal was built for our military.”
Big-picture consideration: Annexing U.S. neighbors by force or by using tariffs to coerce close allies would be unprecedented for an American president in the contemporary era. But is there really a plan for such aggressive moves? Consider, for example, that Trump admitted during last year’s debates he doesn’t really have robust plans for much of anything, but rather “concepts of a plan” for issues like the future of affordable healthcare in America.
Second opinion: “Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario,” Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. “On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war,” he writes. “On the other hand, Trump constantly generated wild ideas during his first term, only for the traditional Republicans in his orbit to distract or foil him, with the result that the world never found out how serious he was about them.”
In context: “The imperialistic land grabs Trump is floating—which, if he follows through and succeeds, would represent the first major changes to the American map since Hawaii’s statehood in 1959—are a dramatic break from the foreign policy approaches of presidents in both parties in recent decades,” CNN political reporter Eric Bradner writes, noting Trump’s threats “come as Western leaders have opposed Russia’s attempts at expansion into formerly Soviet territory, including its war in Ukraine.”
Reaction from Ottawa: “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote on social media after Trump issued his threats. Foreign Minister Melanie Joly wrote in her own social media post, “President-elect Trump’s comments show a complete lack of understanding of what makes Canada a strong country. Our economy is strong. Our people are strong. We will never back down in the face of threats.”
Panama’s reaction: “Let it be clear: The canal belongs to the Panamanians and it will continue to be that way,” Foreign Minister Javier Martínez-Acha said at his own press conference Tuesday. “The sovereignty of our canal is nonnegotiable and is part of our history of struggle and an irreversible conquest,” he added.
Denmark reax: “Greenland is not for sale and will not be in the future either,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said Tuesday. “We need to stay calm and stick to our principles,” she said in an interview with Danish television station TV 2. “I don’t think it’s a good way forward to fight each other with financial means when we are close allies and partners,” she added Tuesday evening, according to Reuters.
Historian’s reax: The controversy is a useful distraction from campaign promises. Consider, e.g., “Trump ran on the promise that he would lower prices, especially of groceries. Yet in mid-December he suggested in an interview with Time magazine that he doesn’t really expect to lower prices,” Heather Cox Richardson wrote two weeks ago, when Trump began escalating his threats about a Greenland-Panama-Canada invasion on social media. “That promise [of lowering grocery prices] seems to have been part of a performance to attract voters, abandoned now with a new performance that may or may not be real.”
By the way, Russian propagandists praised Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward Panama, Greenland and Canada, Newsweek reported, with political scientist Sergey Mikheyev describing them as “especially interesting because it drives a wedge between him and Europe, it undermines the world architecture, and opens up certain opportunities for our foreign policy.” Another (Stanislav Tkachenko) said Trump “is teaching us a new diplomatic language. That is, to say it like it is. Maybe we won’t carve up the world like an apple, but we can certainly outline the parts of the world where our interests cannot be questioned.”
Like those Russians, at least one top Republican senator is savoring the attention Trump’s ideas are generating. Writing Monday on social media, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham said, “My only thought today as the states’ electoral votes were listed off: they skipped Canada. We’ll fix that next time!”
Panning out: Trump, the only felon to be elected president, may be angry about his legal issues. “One of the biggest things that stood out to me from that press conference, from moments when Trump got out there before he even started taking questions, is the level of anger,” CNN’s Kaitlin Collins said Tuesday.
Collins pointed to “the sentencing that he is facing on Friday that so far is still Judge [Juan] Merchan has denied efforts to delay it. His attorneys are still working to do so,” Collins said. “And two, it’s this report by [special counsel] Jack Smith that we are told is imminent and is going to come out. Trump was informed during that that Judge [Aileen] Cannon down in Florida has tried to temporarily block that. Well, it’s not a settled matter. We’ll see if it’s successful. But his level of anger over that is unmistakable. He has not been this angry since he won the election.”
The press conference also underscored the many conflicts of interest Trump is bringing to the White House. He led off the press conference by touting projects by a longtime Middle East business partner of his. He later “pointed out that one of his sons, Eric Trump, who has been pushing new Trump tower deals in the Middle East, was in the back of the ballroom, as well, on the same day that LIV Golf, the Saudi-financed golf league, disclosed that it intends to host another tournament this year at the Trump National Doral resort near Miami. This means that money tied to the Saudi government will continue to flow to the Trump family, even when Mr. Trump is back in the White House,” the New York Times reported.
What’s wrong with conflicts of interest? In 2021, the good-government non-profit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington wrote that “the line between the Trump Organization and the Trump administration has blurred so much that it is unclear where President Trump’s public responsibilities end and his private financial interests begin. Unlike any other modern president, Trump has forced the American people to ask if the decisions and policies his administration is implementing are because they’re the best policies for the nation, or because they personally benefit him—either by helping his businesses directly or the special interests spending money there.”
Also on Tuesday: the Trump Organization’s “other major Middle East business partner, Dar Al Arkan, disclosed that it planned to start building projects in the United States for the first time, according to a report by Reuters.”
And: “It all comes as Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, recently disclosed that he has raised an additional $1.5 billion from Middle East investors for his private equity company. The firm he started after he left his position in the White House in 2020 now has more than $4.5 billion, mostly from oil-rich sovereign wealth funds.” Read on, here.
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Welcome to this Wednesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2023, supporters of far-right former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro sought to overturn his election loss by storming the Supreme Federal Court, the National Congress Palace and the Planalto Presidential Palace in what would ultimately be a failed coup.
Around the Defense Department
Ukraine military-aid donors aim to set Kyiv up through 2027. The nearly 50 nations sending military aid to Ukraine will attempt to map out a way to sustain the war-torn country’s defensive efforts through 2027, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports ahead of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s final meeting with the group later this week in Germany.
The allies’ roadmaps focus on Ukraine’s air force, armor, artillery, de-mining, drone, integrated air and missile defense, information technology and maritime security needs, a senior U.S. defense official said Tuesday. Developing: U.S. Transportation Command is in a “surge operation” to get promised aid to Kyiv in the coming days and weeks, the official said. Ukrainian officials have frequently complained that promised aid has been slow to arrive, and that some weapons, such as long-range ATACMS missiles, were delivered years after Kyiv requested them, out of U.S. escalation fears that did not bear out. Read more, here.
The U.S. military carried out precision airstrikes against more Houthi locations inside Yemen on Tuesday. The operation targeted two underground “advanced conventional weapon storage facilities,” which the Iran-backed terrorist group had used “to conduct attacks against U.S. Navy warships and merchant vessels in the southern Red Sea and Gulf of Aden,” Central Command officials said Tuesday with little elaboration.
AI-infused terrorism: The U.S. Army special forces soldier who exploded the Cybertruck in Las Vegas last week used generative AI to derive his explosives cocktail he detonated in the back of the truck, authorities said Tuesday.
“This is the first incident that I’m aware of on U.S. soil where ChatGPT is utilized to help an individual build a particular device,” Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill said, calling the development “a concerning moment.”
Among the new details police discussed publicly Tuesday: The soldier “stopped during the drive to Las Vegas to pour racing-grade fuel into the Cybertruck, which then dripped the substance,” the Associated Press reports. “The vehicle was loaded with 60 pounds (27 kilograms) of pyrotechnic material as well as 70 pounds (32 kilograms) of birdshot but officials are still uncertain exactly what detonated the explosion,” noting “it could have been the flash from the firearm that Livelsberger used to fatally shoot himself.”
Police are also sitting on “a six-page document that they have not yet released because they’re working with Defense Department officials since some of the material could be classified,” AP reports. Investigators also have a laptop, mobile phone, and smartwatch to examine. Read on, here.
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