The D Brief: US bombs ISIS in Syria; Iranian protests swell; Execs rebuff oil plan; Meet the Army’s dronemakers; And a bit more.

U.S. President Donald Trump declared himself Venezuela’s new leader on Sunday evening, two days after the Defense Department announced it had seized the fifth tanker of alleged Venezuelan crude oil since December. In a social media post, Trump referred to himself as “acting president” of the South American nation, using what appeared to be a screenshot of a webpage from Wikipedia. 

About that fifth seized tanker: Early Friday, U.S. forces “launched from the USS Gerald R. Ford [aircraft carrier] and apprehended Motor/Tanker Olina in the Caribbean Sea without incident,” military officials at Southern Command said on social media. A 40-second video accompanied the post, and appeared to show armed U.S. forces boarding the tanker via helicopter and spreading out before the video panned out and stopped. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shared a much longer video of the incident on her social media feed, and said the tanker was “suspected of carrying embargoed oil” and “had departed Venezuela attempting to evade U.S. forces” before the U.S. Coast Guard took control of the vessel. In his own social media post about the incident, Trump claimed the interception was conducted “in coordination with the Interim Authorities of Venezuela,” but he did not elaborate. 

Venezuela’s interim leader, oil minister Delcy Rodríguez, reportedly asked the U.S. military to seize the tanker because it “left the country without permission,” the New York Times reported Saturday, citing satellite imagery as well as Venezuelan officials, who released a statement about the episode Friday claiming the tanker departed before paying for the crude onboard.

The ship was one of at least 16 that attempted to evade Trump’s naval blockade of Venezuelan oil tankers, the Associated Press reports. “U.S. government records show that the Olina was sanctioned for moving Russian oil under its prior name, Minerva M, and flagged in Panama.” The vessel had been traveling since November with its transponder turned off. 

For what it’s worth, “the Olina is loaded with 707,000 barrels of oil, which at the current market price of about $60 a barrel would be worth more than $42 million,” AP adds. 

Alert: “U.S. citizens in Venezuela should leave the country immediately,” according to an American embassy warning issued Saturday from Caracas. The embassy also discouraged Americans in Colombia from traveling through Venezuela for the foreseeable future. 

“There are reports of groups of armed militias, known as colectivos, setting up roadblocks and searching vehicles for evidence of U.S. citizenship or support for the United States,” the warning reads, and advises U.S. citizens in Venezuela to “remain vigilant and exercise caution when traveling by road.” What’s more, “Intermittent power and utility outages continue throughout the country,” the statement reads. 

By the way: ExxonMobil’s CEO said Venezuela is “uninvestable” following a meeting Friday between Trump and 17 other U.S. petroleum executives at the White House. “We've had our assets seized there twice, and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we've historically seen here,” CEO Darren Woods told the president Friday, adding, “If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela today, it's uninvestable.” 

Trump’s reply: “I'll probably be inclined to keep Exxon out,” he told reporters Sunday. “I didn't like their response. They're playing too cute,” the president said. 

Another company, ConocoPhillips, said it wants to recoup its roughly $12 billion loss from the 2007 nationalization of Venezuelan companies. Trump said he wasn’t interested in that. 

“We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault,” Trump said. “That was a different president. You’re going to make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.”

Relatedly, “On Saturday, Trump signed an executive order to block courts or creditors from seizing revenue tied to the sale of Venezuelan oil held in U.S. Treasury accounts,” Reuters reports. It’s unclear how that may play out in courts or how Congress will react. Read more at Quartz, Politico or Axios. 

And ICYMI: The Project on Government Oversight filed a lawsuit for the Pentagon to release the unedited footage of SOUTHCOM’s September 2 boat strike, which killed two survivors of the initial U.S. military attack. Lawmakers have seen the footage, but the Defense Department won’t release it publicly. “We want to shed light on what really happened here, because the public deserves to know,” POGO said in a short statement Friday. 

Additional reading: 

• “Imagery from Venezuela Shows a Surgical Strike, Not Shock and Awe,” a half-dozen analysts from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies reported Friday using Airbus and Vantor (previously Maxar) satellite imagery;  
• “$400,000 payout after Maduro's capture is putting prediction markets in the spotlight,” the Associated Press reported Sunday. 

Welcome to this Monday 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 1991, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of military force to attack Iraq in Kuwait’s defense.

Greenland developments

Apparently eager to capitalize on his Venezuelan takeover, Trump said Friday, “We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not. Because if we don't it, Russia or China will take over Greenland. If we don't do it the easy way we're gonna do it the hard way.”

He repeated that Sunday evening, telling reporters on Air Force One, “We’re talking about acquiring, not leasing, not having it short-term, we’re talking about acquiring and if we don’t do it, Russia or China will and that’s not going to happen while I’m president…we have to have ownership. You really need title, as they say in the real estate business.”

“What you are essentially talking about here is the United States going to war with NATO, the United States going to war with Europe,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Chris Murphy, D-Conn., warned in a video Friday after Trump’s remarks. To be clear, he added, “You’re talking about the U.S. and France being at war with each other over Greenland.” 

Latest: British and German officials are drawing up plans to boost troop levels on Greenland “to show US President Donald Trump that the continent is serious about Arctic security and to try to tamp down American threats to take over the self-ruling Danish territory,” Bloomberg reported Sunday. 

Those discussions have involved French officials as well, the UK’s Telegraph reports, writing, “The plans, still at an early stage, could involve British soldiers, warships and planes being deployed to protect Greenland from Russia and China.”

Bigger picture: Trump’s “pursuit of the territory has plunged Nato into crisis and prompted speculation that the 75-year-old alliance could fall apart,” the British newspaper notes. “The Telegraph also understands the European Union is drawing up plans for sanctions on US companies should Mr Trump reject the offer of a Nato deployment.” That could include restrictions on Meta, Google, Microsoft and X, as well as unnamed U.S. banks and financial institutions. 

“A more extreme option could be to evict the US military from its bases in Europe, denying it a key staging post for operations in the Middle East and elsewhere,” though that indeed seems quite extreme. Read more, here. 

For what it’s worth, the British tabloid Daily Mail alleged Saturday, “According to sources, Trump has asked Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to prepare the invasion plan, but it is being resisted by the joint chiefs of staff on the grounds that it would be illegal—and not be supported by Congress.”

Another consideration: While a U.S. military invasion of Greenland would be an unprecedented violation of values among the U.S.-led NATO alliance, and it would arguably be unconstitutional, such orders may not necessarily be “illegal” for American troops. “Manifestly illegal orders would be [to] wipe out all civilians, murder pows, [or] torture prisoners,” attorney in international law Jennifer Elsea observed on social media. “Jus ad bellum and the constitution are not for the military to decide,” she added. And though an invasion of Greenland “might persuade some GFOs to resign rather than follow such orders, but I doubt they would be in serious legal jeopardy if they don’t,” she suggested.  

Next on the radar: The foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland, Lars Lokke Rasmussen and Vivian Motzfeldt, are headed to Washington for talks with Trump officials. 

Middle East

The U.S. military says it “conducted large-scale strikes against multiple ISIS targets across Syria” on Saturday. The strikes came in response to an ISIS attack on U.S. and Syrian forces in Palmyra on Dec. 13 that killed two American soldiers and one U.S. civilian interpreter, military officials at Central Command said in a statement.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Warplanes and drones dropped more than 90 bombs on roughly three dozen targets, according to Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command. Targets included ISIS infrastructure, smuggling routes and weapons caches, he said. The Jordanian military also took part in the strikes.”

Trump administration mulls military action as hundreds die in Iranian protests. As “the country’s supreme leader that he would expand a government crackdown on some of the most widespread demonstrations in the Islamic Republic’s history,” the Washington Post reported, Trump officials are reported weighing their options, which could include “lethal force or nonlethal options, such as cyberattacks that curtail Iran’s ability to limit internet access for protesters who are organizing against the regime in Tehran.” On Friday, Trump threatened lethal action if the Iranian regime continues to kill protestors.

About 490 protesters and 48 state-security personnel have died in the past two weeks, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, the WSJ reports. The group also “tracked 10,000 arrests, as the Islamic Republic has been cracking down on protests that started when merchants in Tehran began striking after a precipitous drop in the currency and has since spread to more than 96 cities.”

Iran returns the threats: “Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Iranian Parliament, said in addition to hitting U.S. bases, Iran would strike Middle Eastern shipping lanes and Israel.” Read on, here.

Senators from both sides of the aisle doubt U.S. military intervention would help. “I don’t know that bombing Iran will have the effect that is intended,” Republican Senator Rand Paul said on ABC News on Sunday. Paul and Democratic Senator Mark Warner said that a U.S. military attack on Iran, far from undermining the regime, could “rally the people against an outside enemy”—as happened in 1980, when an invasion by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein helped the then-new revolutionary government cement control in Tehran. Reuters has more. 

Commentary: “Five conditions determine whether revolutions succeed. For the first time since 1979, Iran meets nearly all of them,” Karim Sadjadpour and Jack A. Goldstone write at The Atlantic.

Around the Defense Department

Army’s noncommittal procurement strategy is creating quandaries for vendors. “The Army’s new acquisition strategy—buy fast, in small quantities, then maybe buy a lot more—is causing headaches for at least one of the vendors working on the service’s new medium-range reconnaissance drone,” reports Defense One’s Meghann Myers, here.

Meet the dronemakers of the Army’s 25th Infantry Division. More and more, the division is relying on the soldiers of its Lightning Lab to produce the cheap and cutting-edge drones it needs. Defense One’s Jennifer Hlad visited the unit’s HQ in an old movie theater at Hawaii’s Schofield Barracks. Read, here.

‘National security’ in the homeland

The U.S. military has a recruiting program that claims to offer protection for the immigrant parents of American citizens, which was launched in 2013 and is known as Parole in Place. Greg Jaffe of the New York Times travelled to rural Oregon to learn more from Army recruiters. Story, here (gift link). 

Big-picture consideration: “ICE, and the use of the National Guard to protect ICE, has been covered as immigration story, but America’s immigration and customs agents aren’t only being used for that purpose,” warns in a new podcast episode of “Autocracy in America” from The Atlantic. “The Trump administration is also using ICE and the National Guard to project power, to demonstrate that it can operate without restraint, and in defiance of the law.”

Applebaum: “How is the deployment of these agents and soldiers legal? Has anything like this ever happened before? It seems any American can now be detained or harassed, or even killed. The American National Guard can be used as puppets in a presidential game—is that legal too?” Listen in at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube to learn more. 

For what it’s worth, Trump said last week that he regrets not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election, the New York Times reported after its four-hour interview with the president on Wednesday.

Relatedly, a Coast Guard “Veteran says he was seized by immigration agents on cruise in case of mistaken identity” just last week, Task & Purpose reported Friday. 

Additional reading: 

• “SOCOM exploring how AI can process biometrics, other data gathered by operators,” Defense Scoop reported Thursday; 
• And “After Trump Attack, RTX Decides That Winning Move Is Not to Play,” Bloomberg reported Saturday.