The D Brief: Trump threatens more countries after Maduro abduction; SCOTUS rejects Guard deployment; Nigerian-strike fallout; 2025 scorecard; And a bit more.
U.S. captures Maduro, Trump vows to run Venezuela. An ensemble of CIA and Army special forces abducted Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and his wife in a daring raid overnight early Saturday, sending shockwaves around the globe just hours before U.S. President Donald Trump praised the operation as an exciting opportunity for American oil companies while millions of Venezuelans were left in uncharted territory with no clear leader and a nearly unprecedented armada of American naval assets watching from the waters just outside their national border. On Saturday morning, Trump released a photo on his social media account showing a blind-folded Maduro aboard an aircraft bound for the U.S., where this week he’s expected to face new federal charges in a New York City courtroom.
“We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said Saturday, without mentioning the man who beat Maduro in Venezuela’s 2024 elections, former diplomat Edmundo González. “We don't want to be involved with, uh, having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,” Trump said. “So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”
Who is running Venezuela today? It’s hard to say. González has said it’s himself. But 56-year-old Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president and the country’s finance and oil minister, is now the country’s acting president. Reuters has a bit more on her bio. She released a cautious statement on Instagram after Maduro’s capture: “Our people and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war. That has always been President Nicolás Maduro’s position, and it is the position of all Venezuelans right now,” she said, adding in what observers interpreted as a subtle rebuke of Trump, “Our country aspires to live without external threats.”
Trump declared Sunday night, “We’re in charge,” when asked directly if he had spoken with Rodríguez yet. He added, “No, I haven't, but other people have,” and said “at the right time, I will” speak with her.
In justifying the operation on Saturday, Trump alleged Maduro “personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de los Soles, which flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans, the many, many Americans, hundreds of thousands over the years, of Americans died because of him. Maduro and his wife will soon face the full might of American justice and stand trial on American soil.”
Trump on Venezuela’s oil: “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
By the way: At least 16 sanctioned oil tankers are reportedly defying Trump’s naval blockade, “using fake ship names and misrepresenting their positions” via GPS spoofing, the New York Times reported Monday.
It’s been two weeks since we last landed in your inbox, and there’s a lot of ground to cover. Welcome to our first D Brief of 2026. If you’re new here, this is 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 1861, Star of the West sailed from New York with supplies for besieged Union troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The ship would be met with Confederate cannonballs, the first exchange of fire between North and South, though the Civil War would not begin for another four months.
Trump threatened further military action in Venezuela if things don’t go as he wants. “We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so,” he told reporters on Saturday. “We have a much bigger wave that we probably won't have to do. This partnership of Venezuela with the United States of America, a country that everybody wants to be involved with because of what we're able to do and accomplish, will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent, and safe,” Trump said.
Worth noting: Trump did not consult Congress before the abduction in Caracas, which observers noted appeared to violate international law. Relatedly, former President George Bush also did not consult Congress before launching Operation Just Cause in late 1989, which eventually captured Panamanian ruler Gen. Manuel Noriega on the same day as Maduro’s abduction, Jan. 3.
On Capitol Hill, the Senate is set to vote this week on a war powers resolution that could block Trump from taking additional military action inside Venezuela. In addition to co-sponsor Rand Paul, R-Ky., “Three more Republicans would need to vote for it to give it the 51 votes needed to pass,” The Hill reports. Those numbers strongly suggest the resolution would lack the veto-proof majority needed should it later advance through the House, which already failed to pass a similar resolution last month.
Big-picture consideration: “The operation is less a challenge to international law than an instance of total disregard for it,” Graeme Wood of The Atlantic wrote on Saturday. “It is an indulgence in precisely the behavior that international law theoretically constrains, namely the crossing of borders and use of force to meddle in what could plausibly be considered another country’s internal affairs.”
After developments in Caracas, many around the world wonder who’s next in Trump’s sights. Perhaps the most vocal among those concerned is Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who released a statement on Sunday warning Trump against trying to seize Greenland—a threat he first issued just days after taking office for his second term last year. “It makes absolutely no sense to talk about the US needing to take over Greenland. The US has no right to annex any of the three countries in the Danish kingdom,” she said.
- For what it’s worth, last Monday, the Pentagon’s arms-export agency announced the sale of three P-8A surveillance aircraft to Denmark for $1.8 billion.
But Trump again affirmed his imperial ambitions for Greenland, telling reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday that he believes the U.S. must take control of it to enhance America’s national security. “It's so strategic. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not gonna be able to do it, I can tell you.” (He repeated this goal in a separate interview with The Atlantic on Sunday.) Nevertheless, “We'll worry about Greenland in about two months. Let's talk about Greenland in 20 days,” Trump told reporters.
Greenland’s prime minister took a sharper tone on Monday. “Threats, pressure and talk of annexation have no place between friends,” said Jens-Frederik Nielsen. “That is not how you speak to a people who have shown responsibility, stability and loyalty time and again. Enough is enough. No more pressure. No more innuendo. No more fantasies about annexation.” Finland’s president also threw his nation’s support behind Denmark and Greenland. “No one decides for Greenland and Denmark but Greenland and Denmark themselves,” President Alexander Stubb wrote on social media. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, too, threw his support behind Denmark and Greenland—emphasizing in his remarks with Sky News that Copenhagen plays a key role in the NATO alliance.
Trump also said Colombia could be next. Colombia is “run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States,” Trump said regarding President Gustavo Petro. “He’s not going to be doing it for very long,” Trump told reporters. When asked if Trump may target Colombia like he did in Venezuela, he replied, “It sounds good to me.” Earlier on Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the son of Cuban immigrants—told NBC that Cuba is the “next target” because the government there “is a huge problem.” However, Trump said later that day, “I don’t think we need any action” in Cuba. “It looks like it’s going down” at least in part because he said the Cubans “got all their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil.”
Trump also threatened Iran with more U.S. military attacks as the country reels from protests over worsening economic conditions. “If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States,” Trump said.
Many Ukrainians saw a double-standard in Trump’s actions against Maduro, according to Andrew Kramer of the Times, reporting Sunday from Kyiv. After all, there was evidence Russian leader Vladimir Putin also rigged elections in his country, yet Trump had the U.S. military literally roll out the red carpet for Putin during his visit to a military base in Alaska this past August.
Back in 2019, former National Security Council Senior Director Fiona Hill testified to Congress in 2019 regarding the Trump administration’s attention on Venezuela during his first term. Hill told investigators there seemed to have been an agreement in the works to leave Ukraine to Putin in exchange for inaction on Venezuela. “The Russians at this particular juncture were signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine,” Hill recounted in her testimony. “In other words,” she said, “to preempt what they were obviously taking to be some kind of U.S. military action, they were basically signaling: You know, you have your Monroe doctrine. You want us out of your backyard. Well, you know, we have our own version of this. You're in our backyard in Ukraine. And we were getting that sent to us, you know, kind of informally through channels.” Obviously, no U.S. military action took place then. And it’d be another three years before Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
For what it’s worth, the raid elicited a raft of false claims and AI-generated imagery on social media. The BBC’s Shayan Sardarizadeh rounded up as much as he could find of all that slop in a social media thread here.
Also: The Maduro capture operation took place early on Jan. 3, which was also the legal deadline for the Justice Department to send Congress a written justification for redacting and withholding documents from the Epstein files.
Boat strike update: There have been at least six more attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats since our last newsletter just before Christmas. Those strikes occurred on Dec. 29 (one boat destroyed), Dec. 30 (three destroyed) and Dec. 31 (two destroyed boats).
Those strikes raised the U.S. military’s death toll in these strikes to at least 115 people, with an unspecified number of additional survivors reportedly left in the water during the Tuesday strikes, according to military officials at Southern Command.
Additional reading:
- “Cuba says 32 Cuban officers were killed in US operation in Venezuela,” the Associated Press reported Sunday from Havana;
- ICYMI the “C.I.A. Conducted [a] Drone Strike on Port in Venezuela,” the New York Times reported one week ago on what is believed to have been the first U.S. strike inside Venezuela;
- And don’t miss before the raid, “How Oil, Drugs and Immigration Fueled Trump’s Venezuela Campaign,” also via the Times reporting Dec. 27.
Strikes in Nigeria
Gunmen kill dozens of villagers in Nigeria, a week after U.S. forces launched air strikes against alleged ISIS targets. NYT: “Dozens of people were killed and several abducted when unidentified gunmen attacked two neighboring villages in Nigeria, government officials said on Sunday.”
That followed Christmas Day strikes on what U.S. officials said were ISIS targets. More than a dozen Tomahawk missiles were fired at two alleged IS camps in an effort to protect Christians in Nigeria, U.S. officials told the NYT. Trump told Politico the following day that he had chosen the date. “They were going to do it earlier,” the president said. “And I said, ‘nope, let’s give a Christmas present.’”
Update: At least one Tomahawk fell miles away from apparent terrorist activity, the Times reports from the northwest Nigerian village of Jabo.
The Trump administration carried out attacks in at least eight countries in 2025, journalist Wesley Morgan noted in a year-end tally posted to social media. That included more than 1,000 strikes inside Yemen—where a spat has broken out between Saudi Arabia and the UAE as their proxies fight over contested territory in the south.
And ICYMI, nine capital cities around the world were attacked by other countries in 2025, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Paul Stares pointed out in our latest Defense One Radio podcast. Stares recently released CFR’s annual “Conflicts to Watch” forecast for 2026, which you can review here.
Troops in US cities
SCOTUS rejects Trump on National Guard in Chicago. Two days before Christmas, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's argument over federalizing National Guard troops around Chicago. “At this preliminary stage,” the court said, “the Government has failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to execute the laws in Illinois.”
Expert reax: National security law professor Steve Vladeck called the SCOTUS National Guard decision “without question, the most significant setback for the Trump administration at the Supreme Court at least since the justices repudiated its effort to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for summary, mass removals back in April.” Read more from his analysis, here.
One week later, Trump announced that he ordered troops out of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. However, he vowed, “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again - Only a question of time!” That same day (Dec. 31), the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals returned control of 300 California National Guard troops to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Notable: The National Guard is still deployed in Washington, New Orleans and Memphis.
Additional reading:
- “64 days in Chicago: The story of Operation Midway Blitz,” via the Guardian reporting Dec. 28;
- “ICE plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires,” the Washington Post reported Wednesday;
- And the “US removal of panels honoring Black soldiers at WWII cemetery in the Netherlands draws backlash,” AP reported Tuesday on location.