The D Brief: Trump’s Greenland fixation undermines alliance; Cui bono?; Lawmakers set flat defense budget; How AI went DOD; And a bit more.

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. “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. 

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.