EXPERT OPINION — Rule by proxy just isn’t as simple as the Trump Administration wants to make it sound. While the long-term goals of the Administration in Venezuela are unclear, the tools they appear to want to use are not.

First, the Administration seems to want to dictate policy to the Delcy Rodriguez government through threats of force, which President Trump recently highlighted by suggesting that he had called off a second strike on Venezuela because the regime was cooperating.

Second, the Trump Administration has stated that it will control the oil sales “indefinitely” to, in the words of the Secretary of Energy, “drive the changes that simply must happen in Venezuela.”

Leaving aside the legality and morality of using threats of armed force to seize another country’s natural resources and dictate an unspecified set of “changes”, this sort of rule from a distance is unlikely to work out as intended.

First, attempting to work through the Venezuelan regime will drive a number of choices that the Administration does not appear to have thought through. Propping up an authoritarian regime that is deeply corrupt, violent, and wildly unpopular will over time increasingly alienate the majority of the Venezuelan people and undermine international legitimacy.

Regime leaders, and the upper echelons of their subordinates, are themselves unlikely to quietly depart power or Venezuela itself without substantial guarantees of immunity and probably wealth somewhere else. Absent that, they will have every incentive to throw sand in the works of any sort of process of political transition. Yet facilitating their escape from punishment for their crimes with some amount of their ill-gotten gains is unlikely to be acceptable to the majority of the Venezuelan people.

Elements of the regime have already taken steps to crack down on opposition in the streets. The Trump Administration is going to decide how much of this sort of repression is acceptable. Too much tolerance of repression will harm the already-thin legitimacy of this policy, particularly among the Venezuelan people, the rest of the hemisphere, and those allies the Administration hasn’t managed to alienate. Too little tolerance will encourage street protests and potentially anti-regime violence and threaten regime stability.

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Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has announced that she plans to return to Venezuela in the near future, which could highlight the choices the Administration faces. Some parts of the Rodriguez government will want to crack down on her supporters and make their lives as difficult as possible. The Trump Administration is going to have to think hard about how to react to that.

The tools of violence from a distance, or even abductions by Delta Force from over the horizon, are not well calibrated to deal with these dilemmas.

The Venezuelan regime appears to be heavily factionalized and punishing Delcy Rodriguez, which President Trump has threatened, could benefit other factions, for example, the Minister of the Interior or the Minister of Defense, both allegedly her rivals for power.

Unless the Administration can count on perfect intelligence about what faction is responsible for each disfavored action and precisely and directly respond, we are likely to see different factions, and even elements of the opposition, undertake “false flag” activity intended to cause the U.S. to strike their rivals.

Actions to punish or compel the regime also run the risk of collateral damage, in particular civilian casualties which will undermine support for U.S. policy both in Venezuela and abroad and potentially bolster support for the regime. And intelligence on the ground is not going to be perfect and airstrikes or raids will almost certainly cause collateral damage despite the incredible capabilities of the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. military.

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Secondly, assuming that the Administration doesn’t intend to use the proceeds of sales of Venezuelan oil to build the White House ballroom, it’s unclear what mechanisms they plan to use to ensure that those proceeds benefit the Venezuelan people.

The Venezuelan regime is deeply corrupt. Utilizing the Venezuelan government to distribute proceeds from oil sales is just a way of ensuring that regime elites continue to siphon off cash or use that money to reward their followers, punish their opponents, or coopt potential rivals by buying them off.

Assuming that the U.S. could, in fact, somehow track the vast majority of the funds from oil sales and ensure that they are not misused, this would again undermine the unity and inner workings of a regime built on buying off factions and elites. That would likely encourage those factions to find other ways of extracting funds—for example, increased facilitation of drug shipments or shakedowns of local firms supporting the reconstruction of the oil sector.

Yet the U.S. is not at all likely to have a granular view of what happens to that money. The U.S. intelligence community, while capable of a great many things, cannot track where most of these funds go or who is raking off how much.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. had tens of thousands of soldiers, spies, advisors, and bureaucrats and was directly funding large parts of those governments, staggering levels of corruption existed and at times, helped fund warlords and faction leaders who undermined stability. We even managed to fund our adversaries at times.

In Venezuela, by contrast, we might have an embassy.

Unless the problem of how to monitor where the money goes can be solved, the U.S. will be supporting and funding a corrupt regime that feathers its own nest and undermines the transition to democracy.

Ruling from a distance, or even trying to force a political transition from a distance, drives a number of choices that the Administration clearly hasn’t thought through. And the tools the Administration is choosing to use; force from over the horizon and the control over the flow of some funds, aren’t matched well enough or sufficiently nuanced to accomplish the ends they claim to want to achieve.

Given that, it’s unlikely this will end well.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — As Russia continues it's brutal bombardment of Ukrainian cities, talks between Moscow and the U.S. to end the war appear on very different trajectories. White House envoy Steve Witkoff is reportedly planning another trip to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin as Moscow's winter attacks continue unabated.

This week, Russia launched hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles on cities across Ukraine, killing at least four people and striking critical energy and heat infrastructure. In the capital, Kyiv, residents are facing temperatures as low as 10 degrees farenheit without electricity or water.

On December 30, 2025, Moscow claimed a Ukrainian drone attack targeted Russian President Vladimir Putin's residence. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov threatened his country's military would launch "retaliatory strikes" and said Moscow's "negotiating position will be revised” in ongoing talks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected the claimed drone attack as “a complete fabrication”, and sources say the CIA assessed that Ukraine was not targeting the Russian leader's residence in the attack.

President Trump said in December that the U.S. was “very close” to a deal. So, what's happening?

Throughout the latest push for peace, Russia seems to conveniently reset the clock, demanding further talks as it continues its bombardments and assaults across Ukraine.

“This Russian strike sends an extremely clear signal about Russia’s priorities,” Zelensky said in a post on X referring to a strike on December 23 that killed three people and injured 12. Zeleneky condemned the attack “ahead of Christmas, when people simply want to be with their families, at home, and safe.”

That strike came just days after Putin told Russian defense ministry officials that Moscow will persist in its mission to “liberate its historic lands” and achieve its war goals “unconditionally” — by negotiations for an agreement in Moscow’s favor, or through continued war.

The continued Russian attacks and Putin’s bellicose language underscore a pattern that has defined Russia’s position on “peace” throughout its full-scale invasion of Ukraine: not budging from maximalist demands, blaming Kyiv for the lack of progress, and leveraging Western fears of escalation to World War Three.

The hardline from Putin comes as Ukraine has offered significant concessions, including Ukraine dropping NATO membership ambitions, for at least the time being, as well as a potential withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the east and the creation of a demilitarized “free economic zone.” The latest reports say Russia still wants more, including more stringent restrictions on the size of Ukraine’s military.

“The Ukrainians have been saying for over a year that they are ready to come to an agreement. They are ready to be realistic and compromise,” Glenn Corn, a former senior CIA Officer told The Cipher Brief. “It’s the Russians that are not doing that. It’s the Russians that continue to push maximalist demands and that continue to scuttle the peace process — not the Ukrainians.”

Through the eyes of seasoned intelligence professionals who have studied Putin's actions for decades, the continued attacks despite peace talks are hardly surprising. “Putin has never been sincere about a negotiated solution to his ‘Special Military Operation,’” said Rob Dannenberg, former Chief of CIA’s Central Eurasia Division.

Russia is also continuing offensive pushes on multiple fronts, including in the regions it claimed to annex - Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk and Donetsk, where the embattled strategic city of Pokrovsk is - as well as in the northern Kharkiv region. Experts warn Putin’s ambitions go far beyond.

“We've got Putin on the other side of it and the reality is he has not taken one single step towards a temporary ceasefire or a peace deal whatsoever,” General Jack Keane (Ret.), who served as Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army and is a trusted advisor to President Donald Trump, told Fox News. “Where he is, he still believes that eventually he's going to break the will and resolve of the United States and the Europeans and the Zelensky government and he will eventually have his way here,” Keane said, adding that Putin’s ultimate war goal is to “topple the government of Ukraine and expand into Eastern Europe.”

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A Tested Playbook

Russia has long used the pretense of openness to negotiations as a tool to deceive, delay, and fracture Western support for those Moscow is targeting. The pattern was visible in Georgia in 2008 and again in Crimea in 2014, when Moscow signaled willingness to talk even as it consolidated military gains on the ground, buying time and weakening Western responses.

“I always use the example of Syria during the Civil War when they [Russian forces] were killing members of the Syrian opposition while they were drinking wine and coffee with American and European interlocutors in Europe, claiming that they were trying to find an agreement,” Corn told The Cipher Brief.

Indeed, behind any Russian statement of openness to engagement and dialogue, Putin has continued to assert that Ukraine is part of Russia, that the government of Zelensky is illegitimate, and that Russian forces can achieve victory on the battlefield to justify his stonewalling — despite mounting costs for Russia and limited territorial gains.

“Putin’s strategy has been consistent: advance false narratives; adopt a non-negotiable maximalist position and make ever-increasing demands for concessions; take deliberate actions to erode U.S., Ukrainian, and NATO resolve and perceived options; employ implicit and explicit threats and intimidation; and offer false choices,” former CIA Senior Executive Dave Pitts told The Cipher Brief.

“Taken together, these represent Russian ‘reflexive control’—a subset of cognitive warfare and a strategy designed to persuade adversaries to voluntarily adopt outcomes favorable to Russia,” Pitts told us. “In the face of unreasonable sovereignty and territorial demands placed on Ukraine and none placed on Russia, an emboldened and confident Putin will now likely demand even more.”

A Hesitant West

How did we get here? Some experts say a long-running pattern of Western hesitation in keeping Russia in check has emboldened Moscow. It’s not hard to remember that at the start of the full-scale invasion, Western countries were slow to provide full military support to Ukraine, concerned about a possible wider escalation.

Retired General Philip Breedlove, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, told The Cipher Brief, “We have taken precious little action to stop the fight in Ukraine and we still find ourselves saying, ‘We're not going to do that because we've got to give peace a chance and we don't want to escalate the problem.’ And that formula is not working now and has not worked for 11 years.”

“We have virtually enabled the Russian war on Ukraine by our lack of action in a more severe way. Many of us from military backgrounds say that we have built sanctuary for Russia. From that sanctuary, we allow them to attack Ukraine.”

Experts warn that while the goal should be, as President Donald Trump has said, “to stop the killing,” awarding concessions to a Kremlin that has yet to drop its maximalist war aims is not the solution.

“The Trump Administration’s desire to end the violence in Ukraine is commendable, but not at the price of setting the stage for the next war by giving victory to the aggressor,” Dannenberg told The Cipher Brief.

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The Road Ahead

With peace talks ongoing, it is proving difficult to come up with a deal that does not force Ukraine to give too much while ensuring the proposal does not push Russia to reject the deal outright.

But beyond the negotiating table, experts say there are ways to pressure Putin to peace.

Ukraine is not waiting, continuing strikes on Russian energy infrastructure to curb energy export revenues that fund Moscow’s war machine, and bringing the cost of the war back to ordinary Russians.

For the U.S. and Europe, major sanctions on Russia - including new measures against Russian oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil - are already in place and reportedly starting to take their toll, but experts say stronger enforcement is needed to make them truly bite.

Maintaining military aid to Ukraine is also essential. In mid-December, Congress passed a defense bill that authorizes $800 million for Ukraine - $400 million in each of the next two years - as part of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays U.S. companies to produce weapons for Ukraine's military. President Trump signed the measure into law on December 18. Meanwhile, while Europeans failed to agree to use frozen Russian assets to back a loan for Ukraine, the EU agreed to a 90 billion euro loan over the next two years, backed by the bloc’s budget.

"The Trump Administration should demonstrate its displeasure at Russia’s clear disregard for any so-called peace process by fully enforcing all existing sanctions, providing Ukraine with long-range weapons, and declaring that peace negotiations are suspended until Russia demonstrates it is serious about these negotiations," General Ben Hodges, former Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe, told The Cipher Brief. "Otherwise, the President’s efforts and those of his negotiators are clearly a waste of time and headed nowhere."

European countries have also fortified post-war pledges to Ukraine. Britain and France have committed to sending troops to a peacekeeping mission -- if a peace deal is reached. Experts U.S. intelligence, command and control, and logistics support is needed to give any European effort credibility.

The impact will be felt far beyond Ukraine, and long after the guns there go silent.

“For the United States, the best outcome will come from taking the longer, harder road that denies any reward for Russia’s illegal invasion, forces Putin to make reasonable concessions, and sustains the long-term sovereignty and independence of Ukraine,” Pitts said. “That longer, harder road also leads to stronger U.S. national security.

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OPINION — Current discussion of Russian "hybrid warfare" tends to revolve around concepts like disinformation, proxy militias, cyber operations, sabotage, and psychological manipulation designed to fragment, confuse, and demoralize Russia's opponents—and the respective roles these play in Russian military and national security doctrine. Yet one essential dimension remains underdeveloped in the broader debate: the organic integration of criminal structures and methods into Russia's strategic toolkit. Russia's system does more than merely operate in a "gray zone." It has become a gray state, sustained by an "Uber Krysha," a super-protection racket in which the Kremlin fuses its security apparatus with organized crime to project influence and intimidation both at home and abroad.

The enabling mentality behind this fusion can be directly tied to Russia's pre-revolutionary period. Although no longer ideologically communist, Russia's current ruling elite, led by President Vladimir Putin, has very much inherited the Bolsheviks' comfort with adopting criminal methods in the pursuit of regime objectives. Before 1917, Lenin's Bolshevik Party financed its operations partly through armed robberies justified as the expropriation of bourgeois wealth for the sake of the proletarian struggle. The Bolsheviks were revolutionary in ideology but gangster in practice, rationalizing robbery and violence not as moral lapses, but as necessary transgressions—crime rebranded as virtue in the service of power.

Furthermore, during the early years of the USSR, the communist regime was defiantly, even boastfully, dismissive in its rejection of “bourgeois” legal norms. Its November 1918 decree On Red Terror (yes, it was called that) is a good case in point. It formally authorized the secret police, the Cheka, to summarily arrest and execute perceived opponents of the revolution without trial, which it proceeded to do in the tens of thousands. In doing so, the new revolutionary state openly and unapologetically signaled to its people and to the world that it would not be bound by the ordinary moral limits of civilized life. Terror was not a regrettable excess, but a management tool. This was not moral confusion, it was moral disregard elevated to state policy, with a legacy that has left a deep imprint on the political DNA of contemporary Russia.

Even as the Soviet state engaged in its bloody ideological experiment, common criminality thrived in the workers' paradise. The inefficient Soviet economic system brought chronic scarcity, which, as it does everywhere, spawned smuggling and black-market behaviors. The state imposed tight controls, but the security services did not shy away from making expedient use of criminal gangs as instruments of control to help impose a brutal order among inmates in its sprawling GULAG camp system, or using petty thieves and prostitutes to report on dissidents and foreigners.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, however, these controls dissolved, and the roles suddenly reversed. In 1991 the Soviet security apparatus imploded, and many KGB and GRU officers migrated to the emerging oligarchic and criminal economy left in its wake. There they became security chiefs, "political technologists," oil traders, and gangsters, using their skills and muscle to help these entities provide a "krysha" (roof)—similar in meaning to "protection" in Western mafia parlance—by combining inside connections, intelligence tradecraft, violence, and financial engineering. When Putin—himself a KGB veteran whose purview over foreign trade and city assets as St. Petersburg’s Deputy Mayor brought him into contact with port rackets, fuel schemes, and the Tambov crime syndicate—rose to the presidency in 1999, he re-asserted state primacy not by dismantling this nexus, but by mastering it. Putin's Kremlin in effect became the Uber Krysha, the ultimate protection roof above the oligarchs, security chiefs, and crime bosses. The bargain was clear: enjoy your wealth and impunity, but serve the state—effectively Putin—when called. Loyalty was enforced not by law or shared purpose, but by leverage, fear, and mutual criminal exposure.

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What took place after 1991, however, was more than merely a case of inverted and re-inverted primacy. The unprecedented circulation of cadres that occurred during this period fostered a profound organizational and behavioral cross-pollination between intelligence, oligarchic, and criminal elements resulting in a qualitatively new and insidious mutation that is today’s Russia—Putin's Russia. The 1990s saw an outflow of KGB and GRU officers who "pollenated" the criminal/oligarchic economy with their tradecraft, tools, and government connections. Putin’s reconsolidation of state power in the 2000s then saw a return flow creating a "reverse-pollination" as ex-intelligence officers brought their new underworld relationships, financial channels, and expanded operational flexibility back to the security services.

Among contemporary scholars, the historian and journalist Mark Galeotti stands out as the leading theorist and interpreter of this phenomenon, pointing out how modern Russia's power projection depends on cultivating deniability through criminal intermediaries. Galeotti's concept of the Kremlin as a "political-criminal nexus" and his description of its global "crimintern" offers a crucial corrective to more conventional security studies frameworks. Where others see diffusion of state control as a weakness, Galeotti sees design—a pragmatic outsourcing of coercion and corruption to actors who maintain loyalty through mutual dependence. In this arrangement, the lines between mafia, mercenaries, business, and ministries are blurred.

Russia's asymmetric tactics abroad leveraging smuggling networks, compromising criminal entanglement (kompromat), cyber hacking, illicit financing, and global shadow operations by semi-private mercenary groups, like the Wagner Group and the Africa Corps, extend this logic internationally. Liaisons between the Russian intelligence and crime groups across Europe also give Moscow access to local networks for espionage, intimidation, and assassinations that can act faster, at lower cost, and with more deniability than professional intelligence officers. But while most analysts tend to focus on this as a blending of tools—military, intelligence, cyber, informational— Galeotti’s insight is sharper: the blend itself is criminal in nature, structurally fusing coercion, corruption, and deceit into a governing logic—not as a breakdown of state power, but as its deliberate expression. Yet you will never find this asymmetric dimension acknowledged in Russian doctrinal writings despite its widespread exploitation in Russian actions.

Policymakers in the Western democracies struggle mightily to wrap their minds around this phenomenon. Their siloed agencies—CIA for HUMINT, NSA for SIGINT/cyber, DOD for military, and FBI for crime, etc.—operate under strict legal separations between these domains to protect civil liberties. Effective in their respective arenas, they are vulnerable when adversaries operate across boundaries. Russia’s mafia-state collapses these distinctions and thrives in the weeds, exploiting moral disregard and legal ambiguity to create jurisdictional confusion and cognitive overload that stymie efforts at response.

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And yet for all its advantages, the inherent pathologies of this criminal-state fusion contain the seeds of its own decay. Its reliance on criminal intermediaries corrodes institutional coherence. Loyalty is transactional, not ideological, and emptied of moral meaning. The fates of figures like Yevgeniy Prigozhin and various siloviki-linked oligarchs demonstrate how rapidly beneficiaries can become threats once their ambitions outgrow the tolerance of the Center. Moreover, by incentivizing enrichment over competence, criminal methods undermine professionalism within the military, intelligence services, government bureaucracy, and the private sector. Corruption pervades procurement, logistics, and governance, eroding capacity even as it funds loyalty. This was clearly evident in the shocking underperformance of Russia's military and intelligence operations in Ukraine.

Internationally, what appears cunning in the short term produces isolation in the long term. Russia's growing reputation as a mafia state alienates legitimate partners, of which it now has few, and hollows out whatever moral legitimacy it once had. Putin's Uber Krysha model is unsustainable in the long run because it requires continuous motion. It cannot stand on genuine law or trust, only perpetual leverage and fear, with tools that must be continuously re-coerced. The Russian people and others who are caught in its reach exist in an environment of moral blackmail that breeds cynicism rather than solidarity. Galeotti's moral edge, implicit in his scholarship, lies in showing that the criminal state is not merely a threat to others, it is a tragedy for Russia itself.

To fully understand Russian asymmetric warfare today, we must appreciate its blending of the state and criminal domains and recognize that Moscow hasn't simply rewritten the rules of war for the gray zone, it has blurred the lines between law and criminality and has itself become a gray state. It is the malignant ethos of this new Russian Uber Krysha state—the normalization of moral disregard—that, more than any cyber weapon or troll farm, has become its most dangerous export.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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EXPERT OPINION — I am closely watching the growing size and momentum of protesters across Iran’s cities, rural areas, and pious communities who are bravely and vocally rejecting the Supreme Leader’s broken policies. They have shined a light on Khamenei’s gross mismanagement of the economy and the severe multi-year drought; his constant agitation and hostile relations with neighbors; Iran’s loss of prestige and influence with coreligionist communities in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria; his failures against foreign attacks; and his misguided alliance with Russia against Ukraine. Even regime loyalists have begun murmuring such complaints.

Regime instability indicators and warnings are blinking. I believe Iran’s revolutionary facade is crumbling, but into an uncertain future.

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As more protesters demand a better future, I am watching for evidence of leniency from their fathers, brothers, uncles, and schoolmates who work in the IRGC, the police, and even in the Basij. If such cracks appear, new non-revolutionary leaders could emerge as quickly as al-Sharaa rose to power in Syria.

Protesters, however, most likely lack experience running cities, provinces, and the federal government. New non-revolutionary leaders therefore probably would look to the U.S. for assurance and support – and right away.

If the protests produce a new Supreme Leader under a revolutionary Velāyat-e Faqih theocracy model, however, the future looks quite dark. Crackdowns would probably be quite harsh and swift, the nuclear program would most likely march on, and Tehran undoubtedly would keep funneling money and arms to trusted proxies that threaten the U.S. and Israel.

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I’ve been working on Iranian issues since 1979 as an academic, diplomat, intelligence officer, and now as a professor of practice. Nothing, in my view, would stabilize the region between the Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf faster than a peaceful, non-nuclear and wealthy Iran that recognizes the state of Israel and distances itself from Russia.

Most pendulums eventually swing, and I am watching for this one to swing in support of the Iranian people finally having a chance to rejoin a community of free nations that value peace, prosperity, and democracy. If non-revolutionary leaders were to emerge, the West could finally and quickly work towards restoring a genuinely peaceful future that ends Tehran's nuclear weapons program; breaks its deadly alliance with Russia; terminates its costly support to Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis; and welcomes Iran into the community of nations as a responsible, wealth-producing global energy partner. May the pendulum swing decisively in these directions in 2026.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

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OPINION — “After long and difficult negotiations with Senators, Congressmen, Secretaries, and other Political Representatives, I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars. This will allow us to build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe.”

That was part of a Truth Social message from President Trump posted last Wednesday afternoon and illustrates the emphasis on increasing U.S. military power by him and top administration officials since the successful U.S. January 3, raid in Venezuela that captured its former-President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.

As it should, public attention has been focused on Trump’s apparent desire to project force as he publicly savors the plaudits arising from not only the Venezuela operation, but also the June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer bombing of three Iranian nuclear facilities.

Most focus this past week has been paid to remarks Trump made to New York Times reporters during their more than two hour interview last Thursday.

At that time, when asked if there are any limits on his global powers, Trump said, "Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Trump added, “I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.” Asked about whether his administration needed to abide by international law, Trump said, “I do,” but added, “it depends what your definition of international law is.”

Attention is also correctly being paid to remarks Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made last Tuesday during an interview with CNN.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”

It is against that Trump open-stress-on-power background that I will discuss below a few other incidents last week that could indicate future events. But first I want to explore Trump’s obsession with taking over Greenland, which was also illustrated during the Times interview.

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In 1945, at the end of World War II fighting in Europe, the United States had 17 bases and military installations in Greenland with thousands of soldiers. Today, there is only one American base – U.S. Pituffik Space Base in northwest Greenland, formerly known as Thule Air Base.

From this base today some 200 U.S. Air Force and Space Force personnel, plus many more contractors, carry out ballistic missile early warnings, missile defense, and space surveillance missions supported by what the Space Force described as an “Upgraded Early Warning Radar weapon system.” That system includes “a phased-array radar that detects and reports attack assessments of sea-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile threats in support of [a worldwide U.S.] strategic missile warning and missile defense [system],” according to a Space Force press release.

The same radar also supports what Space Force said is “Space Domain Awareness by tracking and characterizing objects in orbit around the earth.”

Under the 1951 U.S.-Denmark defense agreement, the U.S., with Denmark’s assent, can create new “defense areas” in Greenland “necessary for the development of the defense of Greenland and the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty area, and which the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark is unable to establish and operate singlehanded.”

The agreement says further: “the Government of the United States of America, without compensation to the Government of the Kingdom of Denmark, shall be entitled within such defense area and the air spaces and waters adjacent thereto to improve and generally to fit the area for military use.”

That apparently is not enough freedom for President Trump, still a real estate man. As he explained last week to the Times reporters, “Ownership is very important, because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

This long-held Trump view that he must have Greenland was explored back in 2021. After his first term as President, Trump was interviewed by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker for the book they were writing, and they asked Trump at that time why he wanted Greenland.

Four years ago, Trump explained, “You take a look at a map. So I’m in real estate. I look at a [street] corner, I say, ‘I gotta get that store for the building that I’m building,’ et cetera. You know, it’s not that different. I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this [Greenland], it’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’ It’s not different from a real-estate deal. It’s just a little bit larger, to put it mildly.”

For all Trump’s repeated threats to seize Greenland militarily, it’s doubtful that will happen. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is scheduled to meet with Danish and Greenland counterparts this week, and afterwards the situation should become clearer.

Context is another test for analyzing Trump statements, and that seems to be the case when looking at his call for a $1.5 trillion fiscal 2027 defense budget.

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Last Wednesday, hours before Trump made his Truth Social FY 2027 budget statement, the White House released an Executive Order (EO) entitled, Prioritizing The Warfighter In Defense Contracting. The EO called for holding defense contractors accountable and targeted those who engaged in stock buybacks or issued dividends while “underperforming” on government contracts. According to one Washington firm, the Trump EO represented “one of the most aggressive federal interventions into corporate financial decisions in recent memory.”

The EO caused shares of defense stocks to fall. Lockheed Martin fell 4.8%, Northrop Grumman 5.5%, and General Dynamics 3.6% during that afternoon’s stock exchange trading in New York. After the stock market closed, Trump released his Truth Social message calling for the $1.5 trillion FY 2027 defense budget and the next day, January 8, defense stocks experienced a sharp rebound. Lockheed Martin rebounded with gains of around 7%; Northrop Grumman rose over 8%; and General Dynamics gained around 4%.

Trump has not spoken publicly about the $1.5 trillion for FY 2027, but in his first message, he said the added funds would come from tariffs. He wrote, “Because of tariffs and the tremendous income that they bring, amounts being generated, that would have been unthinkable in the past, we are able to easily hit the $1.5 trillion dollar number.”

If that were not enough, Trump added that the new funding would produce “an unparalleled military force, and having the ability to, at the same time, pay down debt, and likewise, pay a substantial dividend to moderate income patriots within our country!”

What can be believed?

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) said the $500 billion annual increase in defense spending would be nearly twice as much as the expected yearly tariff revenue, and the spending increase would push the national debt $5.8 trillion higher over the next decade. CRFB added, “Given the $175 billion appropriated to the defense budget under the [2025] One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), there is little case for a near-term increase in military spending.”

I should point out that the FY 2026 $901 billion defense appropriations bill has yet to pass the Congress.

One more event from last week needing attention involves Venezuela.

Last Tuesday January 6, 2026, as Delcy Rodriguez, former Vice President, was sworn in as Venezuela's interim president, General Javier Marcano Tabata. the military officer closest to Maduro as his head of the presidential honor guard and director of the DGCIM, the Venezuelan military counterintelligence agency, was arrested and jailed, according to El Pais Caracas.

Marcano Tabata was labeled a traitor and accused of facilitating the kidnapping of Maduro by providing the U.S. with exactly where Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores were sleeping, and identifying blind spots in the Cuban-Venezuelan security ring protecting them, according to El Pais Caracas.

What’s the U.S. responsibility toward Marcano Tabata if the El Pais Caracas facts are correct ?

I want to end this column with another Trump statement last week that stuck in my mind because of its implications.

It came up last Friday after Trump, in the White House East Room, started welcoming more than 20 oil and gas executives invited to discuss the situation in Venezuela.

“We have many others that were not able to get in…If we had a ballroom, we'd have over a thousand people. Everybody wanted. I never knew your industry was that big. I never knew you had that many people in your industry. But, here we are.”

Trump then paused, got up and turned to look through the glass door behind him that showed the excavation for the new ballroom saying, “I got to look at this myself. Wow. What a view…Take a look, you can see a very big foundation that's moving. We're ahead of schedule in the ballroom and under budget. It's going to be I don't think there'll be anything like it in the world, actually. I think it will be the best.”

He then said the remark I want to highlight, “The ballroom will seat many and it'll also take care of the inauguration with bulletproof glass-drone proof ceilings and everything else unfortunately that today you need.”

Who, other than Trump, would think that the next President of the United States would need to hold his inauguration indoors, inside the White House ballroom, with bullet-proof windows and a roof that protects from a drone attack?

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DEEP DIVE — Federal prosecutors in Texas, in December, unsealed charges and related details exposing a sprawling scheme that quietly siphoned some of America’s most powerful artificial intelligence chips into China.

According to court filings, a Houston businessman and his company orchestrated a $160 million smuggling operation that moved thousands of NVIDIA’s top-tier processors overseas, evading U.S. export controls through falsified shipping records and shell transactions.

Hao Global and its founder, Alan Hao Hsu, pleaded guilty on October 10, 2025, to participating in smuggling and unlawful export activities, including knowingly exporting and attempting to export at least $160 million in Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs between October 2024 and May 2025. Investigators say the operation was funded by more than $50 million in wire transfers originating from China, and the U.S. has seized over $50 million in Nvidia hardware and cash as part of the broader investigation, with the seizures tied to the overall network, not solely this defendant’s operation.

The operation reveals a broader strategy: if you can’t build it, take it. With a blend of state-run espionage and corporate infiltration, China has turned technology acquisition into an art form. Their ‘all-of-the-above’ approach has allowed their AI sector to grow even as export bans tighten. By sourcing the hardware from elsewhere, Beijing has made the lack of domestic chip manufacture moot.

The Corporate Insider Pipeline

The same month that prosecutors announced the NVIDIA chip smuggling charges, the Department of Justice filed a superseding indictment against Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer accused of stealing over 1,000 confidential files containing trade secrets related to Google’s AI infrastructure. According to the indictment, Ding uploaded the files to his personal cloud account between May 2022 and May 2023 while secretly working for two China-based technology companies.

It is believed that the stolen materials included detailed specifications of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit chips and Graphics Processing Unit systems, as well as the software platform that orchestrates thousands of chips into supercomputers used to train cutting-edge AI models.

Ding allegedly circulated presentations to employees of his Chinese startup, citing national policies encouraging domestic AI development, and applied to a Shanghai-based talent program, stating that his company’s product “will help China to have computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level.”

Within weeks of beginning the theft, Ding was offered a chief technology officer position at Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology with a monthly salary of approximately $14,800 plus bonuses and stock. He traveled to China to raise capital and was publicly announced as CTO. A year later, he founded his own AI startup, Zhisuan, focused on training large AI models. Ding never disclosed either affiliation to Google.

After Google detected unauthorized uploads in December 2023, Ding vowed to save the files as evidence of his work. Nonetheless, he resigned a week later after booking a one-way ticket to Beijing. Security footage revealed that another employee had been scanning Ding’s access badge to give the appearance that he was working there during extended trips to China. Ding faces up to 175 years in prison on 14 counts: economic espionage and theft of trade secrets.

Ding has pleaded not guilty to the charges on multiple occasions. He entered a not guilty plea in March 2024 to the original four counts of trade secret theft, and again pleaded not guilty through his attorney, Grant Fondo, in September 2025 to the expanded superseding charges — including seven counts each of economic espionage and trade secret theft. Fondo has actively represented Ding in court proceedings, including a successful June 2025 motion to suppress certain post-arrest statements due to alleged Miranda violations, though no extensive public explanatory statements from the attorney or Ding appear beyond these court actions and pleas.

The federal trial in San Francisco began in early January 2026, with jury selection reported around January 8, and Ding remains presumed innocent until proven guilty.

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AI-Powered Cyber Espionage at Scale.

The threat escalated dramatically in September 2025 when Anthropic detected what it describes as the first fully automated cyberattack using artificial intelligence to breach corporate networks. Chinese state-sponsored hackers conducted the campaign, which Anthropic assessed with high confidence, targeted approximately 30 organizations, including technology firms, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies.

The attackers manipulated Anthropic’s Claude Code tool into executing 80 to 90 percent of the operation autonomously. Claude’s safety guardrails were bypassed by jailbreaking the system, disguising malicious tasks as routine cybersecurity tests, and breaking attacks into small, seemingly innocent steps that conceal their broader objectives. Once compromised, the AI system independently conducted reconnaissance, identified valuable databases, wrote custom exploit code, harvested credentials, created backdoors, and exfiltrated data with minimal human supervision.

“The AI made thousands of requests per second—an attack speed that would have been, for human hackers, simply impossible to match,” Anthropic stated in its analysis.

“This case is a huge concern for other companies that have almost fully adopted AI in their business operations,” JP Castellanos, Director of Threat Intelligence at Binary Defense, tells The Cipher Brief. “Instead of just using AI to draft phishing emails or assist human hackers, the perpetrators gave Claude direct instructions to carry out multi-stage operations on its own.”

The implications extend far beyond technical sophistication.

“An AI operator doesn’t have to sleep or take breaks moving at machine speed; the agent can do the work of dozens or more hackers, tirelessly and even without error, launching constant attacks that even human defenders would struggle to monitor, let alone counter,” Castellanos explained.

Chief Geopolitical Officer at Insight Forward, Treston Wheat, also noted the operational tempo represents a fundamental shift.

“AI-enabled operations can run reconnaissance, exploitation attempts, credential harvesting, lateral movement playbooks, and exfiltration workflows in parallel, iterating rapidly across targets,” he tells The Cipher Brief.

This shift not only changes how operations are conducted but also reveals the hidden supply chains that enable them.

DeepSeek’s Smuggled Silicon

In early 2025, it became impossible to ignore the connection between black-market chips and stolen IP. It was then that DeepSeek dropped the R1 model, claiming it could compete with OpenAI’s o1, but for significantly less. This, however, immediately set off alarm bells: How does a company hamstrung by U.S. sanctions move that fast without some serious ‘outside’ help?

Reports from The Information in December 2025 revealed that DeepSeek is training its next-generation model using thousands of NVIDIA’s advanced Blackwell chips — processors specifically banned from export to China. The smuggling operation reportedly involves purchasing servers for phantom data centers in Southeast Asia, where Blackwell sales remain legal. After inspection and certification, smugglers allegedly dismantle entire data centers rack by rack, shipping GPU servers in suitcases across borders into mainland China, where the chips are reassembled.

NVIDIA disputed the reports, stating it had seen “no substantiation or received tips of ‘phantom data centers’ constructed to deceive us and our OEM partners” while acknowledging the company pursues any tip it receives. The chipmaker is developing digital tracking features to verify chip locations, a tacit acknowledgement that there are enough smuggling concerns to warrant technological solutions.

Castellanos described China’s strategy as deliberately dual-track.

“China has been very open to being the lead in AI and semiconductors and the need for self-reliance in core technologies,” he said. “But also, externally, China relies on partnering with overseas institutions, building on top of Western open-source technologies, and acquiring advanced technologies through illegal means, such as through theft, smuggling, and forced transfers.”

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The FBI’s Losing Battle

Christopher Wray, the former FBI director, testified that the bureau oversees approximately 2,000 active investigations into Chinese espionage operations.

“Chinese hackers outnumber FBI cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1,” Wray testified before the House Appropriations Committee in 2023. “They’ve got a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations—big or small—combined.”

That scale reflects a long-running strategy rather than a sudden surge.

“U.S. officials say China has long relied on a multi-pronged strategy to lie, to cheat and to steal their way to surpassing us as the global superpower in cyber,” he said. “It’s not just cyber intrusions, we are concerned about, but also human insiders stealing intellectual property. In the realm of AI, this can include insiders siphoning source code, research papers, or semiconductor designs for China.”

The Chinese approach exploits multiple vectors simultaneously, according to experts. The Ministry of State Security operates human intelligence networks. The People’s Liberation Army’s Strategic Support Force conducts offensive cyber operations.

The Thousand Talents Plan, for example, then offers Chinese researchers financial incentives to transfer proprietary information to American institutions. By investing in and partnering with ostensibly private companies, state-owned enterprises gain access to sensitive technologies.

Export Controls Lag Behind Reality

The export control regime designed to prevent China from accessing advanced chips has proven inadequate in the face of Beijing’s evasion tactics. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security has repeatedly updated restrictions, most recently imposing sweeping controls in October 2023 on AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

The recent Texas case shed light on how these smugglers operate. There was more to it than simply shipping; they used crypto payments and paper-only shell companies to conceal the money trail. To pass customs, they even removed the Nvidia labels from the chips. By the time those processors reached China, they had been bounced through so many different countries that the original paper trail was basically gone.

“Export controls are not a complete solution to IP theft or technology diffusion. They are best understood as a time-buying and friction-imposing tool,” Wheat observed. “If the objective is to prevent all leakage, that is unrealistic; if the objective is to slow adversary capability development, shape supply chains, and increase acquisition cost and risk, they can be effective when paired with enforcement and complementary measures.”

The chip industry, analysts caution, is facing a structural nightmare. We’re restricting technology that’s already been stolen and studied. The $160 million operation out of Texas proved just how easy it is to game the system — they lied on customs forms hundreds of times over several months, and it still took nearly a year for authorities to notice anything was wrong.

Defending at Machine Speed

Security experts are calling this the most significant tech transfer in history, and it isn’t happening by accident. By stacking insider theft, cyberattacks, recruitment programs, and smuggling on top of each other, China has found a way to leapfrog ahead in AI. They don’t have the domestic factories to build high-end chips yet, so they’ve bypassed the need for ‘original’ innovation by taking what they need. It’s a massive operation that’s making traditional defense strategies look obsolete.

“The realistic U.S. approach is not to match China operator-for-operator. It is to win by asymmetry, such as scaling defense through automation, hardening the most valuable targets, and using public-private coordination to reduce attacker dwell time and increase attacker cost,” Wray said in his testimony.

Castellanos emphasized that defending against AI-enabled attacks requires matching the adversary’s capabilities.

“To have any hope to defend against this, we have to multiply effectiveness through automation and AI, so basically fight fire with fire,” he underscored. “Doing this requires significant investment, new skills, and perhaps most challenging, trust in autonomous defensive AI at a time when many organizations are still learning basic cyber hygiene.”

To prevent adversaries from acquiring sensitive technologies, the U.S. Government has, in recent years, implemented targeted responses, such as the Disruptive Technology Strike Force in 2023. Yet, even as FBI investigations increase and new indictments are filed, the fundamental challenge persists. Chinese intelligence services use unlimited resources, legal compulsion over Chinese nationals, and long-term strategic patience to operate in an open society with porous institutional boundaries.

“It’s a challenge for policy makers; a multi-layered response and defense in depth is needed to protect the US AI technology base better,” Castellanos added. “Harden insider threat programs, accelerate public and private intelligence sharing, modernize export controls and enforcement, increase the costs or impose costs for the offenders of these attacks and lastly innovate faster to ensure even if China steals today’s tech, the breakthrough is already in the pipeline for tomorrow.”

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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THE KREMLIN FILES / COLUMN — Ask any Russian intelligence officer about “naruzhka,” and you’ll see them nod knowingly. It’s the term for physical, trailing surveillance: watchers on the street who follow targets, track meetings, and report patterns. The Russians are experts at it, and they have been for centuries, dating back to the Tsarist Secret police, the Okhrana, and even further to Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki, the brutal enforcers of his regime. Surveillance is a subject that dominates Russian society and Russian espionage, and it also dictates how Russian intelligence officers (RIOs) conduct counter-surveillance and surveillance detection. The Russian intelligence services (RIS) still lean heavily on surveillance as both a protective and offensive tool. Given such an all-compassing presence in Russian society, the term "surveillance" and its connotations in Russia are worth exploring to better understand Russia, its state, society, and our adversaries.

Russians have a saying, “the walls have ears,” and sometimes follow it with “and the streets have eyes.” Studying in Russia in the early 1990s as an exchange student, I was repeatedly warned by my friends with this expression. It was their way of telling our group of American students that no matter how welcome we felt— and Russians have some of the best hospitality in the world when you are welcomed by them— the state was still suspicious. We came to understand very quickly that there were minders among us: Russian students and professors who reported on us back to the FSB, the successor of the KGB.

Some of our group of students were even “soft-pitched.” For example, in one case, a fellow student with a military background was asked whether he would like to meet with the FSB to discuss how interesting the Russian internal security service was (not exactly a soft approach, really). These blunt and clumsy attempts went unanswered, but the point was clear: the state was not just watching; they were operationally targeting our group of future soldiers, researchers, academics, and in at least one case, a future CIA officer.

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Anyone who has studied or lived in Russia over the past three decades no doubt has had similar experiences. But the bar of intimidation has risen dramatically in recent years. With dissidents, journalists, and even athletes targeted for intimidation, beatings, arrest, and even murder, there is no safe haven in Russia any longer for foreign citizens. They are used as targets to be entrapped for hostage exchanges with the West. The goal is to swap civilians for RIOs for the latter to escape their failings when arrested and convicted abroad.

Russians live in a state of constant fear, especially with the war in Ukraine, since opposition to the war, in any form, is now threatened by jail time. Anyone who may be a threat to the regime is subjected to overwhelming surveillance of their person, electronic communications, and contacts. The FSB has many resources at its disposal, including access to all ISPs and phone companies by law. In the early 2000s, the Russian Duma quietly passed laws giving the FSB access to all communication companies in Russia without the need for any warrants. It was the first step in creating their modern surveillance state and an early sign under Putin that democracy was dying.

Inside Russia, surveillance teams from the FSB number in the many thousands. Their origins lie in the old KGB 7th directorate. Still, their mission remains the same: monitor diplomats, suspected foreign intelligence officers, journalists, NGO workers, businesspeople, and ordinary Russians who cross the regime’s lines. The teams are, unfortunately, among the very best in the world at surveillance, given their long history of practice.

Surveillance schools in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), in particular, were known as the best in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Young surveillance team members from the KGB, GRU, and other services of the Soviet Union were trained in the art of on-foot and vehicle surveillance, effective radio communications, and spotting intelligence tells of possible espionage operations. Today, it is no different. The FSB, in particular, devotes considerable resources to surveillance work in Moscow and across Russia in every major city of its vast surveillance apparatus. They are increasingly assisted by technology and a vast array of cameras across the country.

In Russia, all universities, think tanks, and defense contractors, have assigned security officers, what the Russians call an “OB,” who monitor the foreign contacts, make Russians report on their foreign friends, and even many of their Russian ones. The OB is usually an FSB officer, but if not, they are a cooptee of the service, reporting directly to a UFSB or a regional office across Russia. The OBs, in turn, enlist networks of agent-reporters who are only too eager to report on the travel, potential misdeeds, disloyalty to the regime, or other offenses of all those they monitor. Russia today has a network of informers to rival Stasi East Germany, Nazi Germany under the Gestapo, or any other despotic regime, including North Korea and China of today (both of whom, admittedly, may also contend for the gold and silver on despotic modern surveillance states, together with Russia).

The all-encompassing nature of the Russian surveillance state, which includes monitoring by city cameras (supplemented by drones now too), communications, and in-person surveillance, makes it clear that RIS surveillance is not confined to diplomats or foreigners suspected of intelligence affiliation. Academics, journalists, and corporate leaders can find themselves under observation or pressure when Moscow sees strategic value in them. Awareness of surveillance indicators—and how to respond—remains essential.

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Unfortunately, for decades, Westerners traveling to Russia as academics, athletes, NGO workers, and others have been naïve on this score. The refrain is frequently that “I am no one of interest, they’ll leave me alone.” The RIS never did and never will. The pressure for the Russian services, in particular the FSB, to prove worthy of their giant bureaucracy and corrupt budget means they will manufacture spy cases when they can’t find real ones.

They map the routines of foreign officials, political or business leaders. Their goal is to decide if those targets are viable recruits, potentially, or targets for other operations, like extortion, “direct action,” or even assassination attempts in Russia and abroad. This leads to another underappreciated aspect of Russian intelligence and espionage that permeates their society: setups, tricks, and double-agent operations, which the Russians call “operational games.” (That will be the topic of a future “Kremlin Files” column in The Cipher Brief.)

On Russian surveillance, the warning remains clear, and the potential risks are stark. Unfortunately, for all the beauty to be found in Russian history, its cultural sites and heritage, and with their people, traveling to the Russian surveillance state under this corrupt and authoritarian regime holds incredible risk for foreigners, and even for Russian citizens themselves. It will not change until the RIS no longer has the dominant role in society. Laws and checks on power don’t exist in the Russian services. Surveillance, in fact, guides the functioning of the Russian state, and the streets continue to have eyes- everywhere.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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DEEP DIVE – As audacious and complex as it was for the U.S. to extract Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela – and to do so without a single U.S. casualty – the challenges ahead may be even harder. “We’re gonna run it,” President Donald Trump said Saturday, referring to a post-Maduro Venezuela. The president gave few details and no specific time frame, saying only that the U.S. would “run the country” until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” could be arranged. U.S. oil companies would return to Venezuela, investing “billions and billions” of dollars to reboot the oil sector and the country’s economy. American “boots on the ground” might be deployed in the interim.

It was a remarkable series of statements from a president who has criticized past American nation-building projects, and it raised questions about how exactly the Trump Administration would “run” a country beset by profound challenges. Venezuela, a country twice the size of Iraq, has endured decades of authoritarian rule, corruption, drug-related violence, and economic pain. And for the moment at least, the country’s leader still pledges allegiance to Maduro.

Miguel Tinker Salas, a Venezuelan historian, Professor Emeritus at Pomona College and Fellow at the Quincy Institute, said that when Trump spoke those words – “we’re gonna run it” – he was stunned.

“Initially, my jaw dropped,” Salas told The Cipher Brief. “Even at the height of U.S. influence in Venezuela, in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, they never said they wanted to run the country. And I don't think the Trump administration comprehends the complexity that they're dealing with for a country as diverse and as big as Venezuela.”

Even those who cheered the U.S. military operation warned of the difficulties that lie ahead. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who pronounced himself “delighted” by Maduro’s ouster, told NewsNation the mission was “maybe step one of a much longer process. Maduro is gone but the regime is still in place.”

“Maduro’s fall is good for Venezuela and the United States,” Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, posted on X. “It was a brilliant military operation and the world should be better off because of it. Whether it WILL in fact be better off depends on what happens next. One of the lessons of other regime-change operations is not to topple a government without a plan for what comes next. What comes next in Venezuela seems as vague as the plan for running postwar Gaza under a ‘Board of Peace’.”

The Venezuelans who might lead

At a news conference following Maduro’s capture, Trump said that Delcy Rodriguez, the regime’s vice president, would lead Venezuela as long as she “does what we want.” And he suggested the U.S. would enforce that arrangement at the barrel of a gun.

“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” Trump said, adding that the U.S. might deploy “a second wave” of forces if Venezuelan officials or troops don’t go along with Washington’s wishes. The U.S. naval presence near Venezuela remains in place – the largest such deployment in the region since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

A day later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio painted a slightly different picture of the U.S. role. “It’s not running — it’s running policy, the policy with regards to this,” he said.

But Rubio and Trump were clear about the overall approach: in essence, Do what we say, and things will be fine.

“We’re going to make decisions based on their actions and their deeds in the days and weeks to come,” Rubio told The New York Times. “We think they’re going to have some unique and historic opportunities to do a great service for the country, and we hope that they’ll accept that opportunity.”

It’s not clear that Rodriguez, the former Vice President, will be a pliant ally. She was sworn in Monday as interim president, after almost immediately accusing the U.S. of invading her country on Saturday. She called the operation “a barbarity,” and in an address to the nation said that Maduro was still Venezuela’s head of state.

“There is only one president in this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro Moros,” Rodriguez said, with other senior officials at her side. Venezuela, she said, would never agree to being a U.S. "colony."

A day later she struck a less defiant note, calling on the U.S. to work with her government on an “agenda of cooperation oriented towards shared development.” She added that “we prioritize moving towards balanced and respectful international relations between the United States and Venezuela."

It’s not at all clear that’s what Trump has in mind; he insisted that Rodriguez would comply with his wishes – one way or another. "She had a long conversation with Marco [Rubio], and she said, 'We'll do whatever you need,'” Trump said. “I think she was quite gracious, but she really doesn't have a choice.” On Sunday he upped the ante, telling The Atlantic that if Rodriguez “doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Experts said Rodriguez will have to navigate an almost impossible political tightrope.

“She claims to represent a socialist party opposed to U.S. intervention and to U.S. meddling in her internal affairs – so how does she rationalize this to her base?” Salas said. “This is a very difficult, challenging position for her to be in – to on the one hand promise social change reforms, a continuation of Maduro, and at the same time, now become compliant in providing oil to the United States.”

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Beyond Rodriguez, who serves as both Vice President and minister for oil, other Maduro regime leaders remain in place, including the military chief General Vladimir Padrino Lopez and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello. They have denounced Maduro’s abduction as well – Padrino vowed to resist “the most criminal military aggression” and ordered a mobilization of Venezuelan forces on land, sea, and air.

Experts have warned of splits within the army – between hardliners who may refuse to support anyone who bows to Trump’s demands, and others who will stand with Rodriguez no matter what. Such divides could lead to violence and – if Trump is true to his word – a deployment of U.S. “boots on the ground.”

Michael Shifter, a former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, said that while Rodriguez might be able to deliver on Trump’s demands to open up the oil sector, other critical tasks will prove more challenging.

“It will be exceedingly difficult if not impossible for her to tame the entrenched corruption and widespread criminality in the country while leaving the machinery of Chavista governance intact,” Shifter told The Cipher Brief, using a term for policies begun by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. “The risks that chaos, violence and instability will ensue are high, and under that scenario the U.S. would have no choice but to send in troops to stabilize the situation.”

“Control of the military is essential for control of Venezuela, particularly in this unstable moment,” Salas said. “And so far, the commanding general of the military, Padrino, has shown no disposition to break with the PSUV [Maduro’s party].”

Absent in the Trump plans for now is any role for the Venezuelan opposition. The main opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month, issued a statement urging that her political ally, Edmundo Gonzalez, be recognized as Venezuela’s president. Gonzalez was widely seen as the rightful winner of the 2024 presidential vote. “Today we are prepared to enforce our mandate and take power,” Machado said.

But in his news conference after Maduro’s capture, Trump never mentioned Gonzalez, and threw cold water on the prospects of a role for Machado.

"I think it'd be very tough for her to be the leader," Trump said. "She doesn't have the support or the respect within the country. She's a very nice woman, but she doesn't have the respect."

Those remarks left Machado in the odd position of having won her goal of Maduro’s exit, while failing to win the backing of Washington. Salas said Venezuelans he had spoken with “were disillusioned about the fact that Trump essentially threw her under the bus.”

Asked Saturday which American officials would “run” Venezuela, Trump nodded to Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who flanked the president during his news conference. “The people that are standing right behind me, we’re going to be running it,” Trump said.

That drew a rebuke from Elliott Abrams, a Senior Fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations and longtime hawk in terms of U.S. policy in Latin America.

“Venezuelans wanted Maduro out and voted against him,” Abrams wrote on the organization’s website. “They did not vote for U.S. rule, and pursuing that path will create instability—exactly what Trump does not want.”

The oil factor

In the months-long runup to Maduro’s capture, as the U.S. deployed naval forces to the Caribbean and attacked alleged drug traffickers from the air, the Trump administration justified its actions by invoking the drug trade and the illegitimacy of Maduro’s rule. Oil was rarely mentioned.

Now, as U.S. officials explain their post-Maduro plans, oil is front and center.

Over the weekend, Trump accused Venezuela of seizing U.S. oil assets in the country, and said U.S. companies would return to operate Venezuela’s state-controlled oil reserves, “spend billions of dollars” and “start making money for the country.”

U.S. oil companies have a long history in Venezuela, dating to the early 20th century, when they came at the government’s invitation to explore and develop oil reserves. Gulf, Shell, and Standard Oil were among the early arrivals, in what proved to be a symbiotic relationship: the companies earned billions of dollars, and Venezuela grew rich; by the mid-1970s, oil revenues had helped make it the wealthiest nation, per capita, in Latin America.

In 1976, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry, creating a state-owned company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), that continued to partner with foreign companies. More than two decades later, President Hugo Chavez renegotiated contracts with foreign oil companies to boost Venezuela’s share of the profits, a move that prompted ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips to leave the country.

Ultimately, Venezuela’s oil sector and its broader economy suffered the consequences – a deteriorating oil infrastructure, and U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and the PDVSA. Today, Venezuela produces fewer than one million barrels of oil a day, down from roughly 3.5 million in 1997, and more than 90 percent of Venezuelans live in poverty.

“Venezuela has been a problem both for the United States and for the Venezuelan people for over 20 years,” Paul Kolbe, a former Director of The Intelligence Project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, told The Cipher Brief. “For the Chavez years and then the Maduro years, they've driven a country that was once one of the wealthiest in the world, and certainly the wealthiest in South America…into the ground through corruption, poor leadership, poor decisions, and oppression of the people.”

Only one U.S. oil company – Chevron – has remained in Venezuela, operating under joint ventures with the PDVSA. Rubio’s and Trump’s remarks suggest that the U.S. intends to force Rodriguez, the interim leader, to offer favorable conditions to other American companies.

But experts aren’t sure the others will return.

Ali Moshiri, who oversaw Chevron’s operations in Venezuela until 2017, said the big oil firms won’t go back until they clear signs of change.

“Not many companies are going to rush to go into an environment where there’s not stability,” Moshiri told The New York Times. He also said that while Chevron and smaller operators could boost the country’s oil output slightly in the short term, a more robust expansion would take years, given the political situation, the state of the country’s oil infrastructure, and the time needed to reestablish operations in the country.

Salas echoed the point. “Exporting oil from Venezuela is a challenge,” he told The Cipher Brief. “The infrastructure has collapsed. The oil itself that has to be pumped out of the ground is heavy crude, which requires a lot of technology, and billions of dollars of investment. So I'm not convinced that American companies are going to be running in.”

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A long history of regime change

The Maduro mission came exactly 36 years after the surrender of another Latin American dictator – Panama’s Manuel Noriega – to face drug charges in the U.S. That operation had its detractors, but in the history of U.S. regime-change missions, it probably counts as a relative success story. The list of other cases is long – and while each episode had its own specific history, there have been few good outcomes.

To take three very different examples: The 2003 decapitation of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq – which involved a huge force of “boots on the ground” – was celebrated initially by President George W. Bush in a “Mission Accomplished” speech, only to unravel in a fierce domestic insurgency that lasted for years, cost more than 4,000 American lives, and led – indirectly – to the rise of the Islamic State. The Kennedy administration backed a coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963; Diem was later murdered, unrest followed, and in his memoirs, President Lyndon Johnson blamed the coup for the escalation of the Vietnam War. In Iran, the nationalization of the oil industry was at the heart of a coup orchestrated by the U.S. and Britain in 1953 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. That led to the return to power of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – and ultimately to the revolution that brought an Islamic theocracy to power in Tehran in 1979.

“I immediately am reminded of Iraq, where the military operation was well done and we removed Saddam Hussein pretty quickly in 2003, but then what came after was not great,” Glenn Corn, a former CIA Senior Executive, told The Cipher Brief. “So I hope we've learned that lesson and we're not going to repeat the mistakes we made there.”

Salas noted that one lesson of the Iraq War involved the perils of driving out the remnants of an ousted regime. “The lesson learned in Iraq was when they attempted to expunge the Ba’ath Party, they realized that they had utter chaos because there was no one there to run the government, no one with experience,” he said. “You had the nation fracture into particular sections, regions, strongmen, military individuals, and others. If that happened in Venezuela, it would be chaotic. The country's very big, very diverse. It has oil regions, it has urban areas, it has an industrial base. So you could imagine that happening on a national scale.”

To some, the Maduro operation was reminiscent of an earlier era of American “gunboat diplomacy,” when the U.S. military was deployed regularly to seize territory and resources. The New York Times’ David Sanger noted that Trump installed a portrait of William McKinley in the White House – and it was President McKinley who presided over the U.S. seizures of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.

“The U.S. operation, in seeking to assert control over a vast Latin American nation, has little precedent in recent decades,” Sanger wrote, “recalling the imperial U.S. military efforts of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Mexico, Nicaragua and other countries.”

What comes next

Given the uncertainties of the moment, experts said the next phase in Venezuela will hinge on answers to several core questions:

Does the Trump administration have an arrangement with Rodriguez and other Maduro regime officials to do the White House’s bidding? If not, how will the U.S. respond if they fail to oblige? Does the U.S. have a plan to remove those leaders? What might trigger that “second wave” Trump referred to, and the deployment of U.S. forces to the country?

What milestones must be met for the end of the interim period? Would elections follow – and would the U.S. organize or oversee those? What will the major U.S. oil companies do?

“Uncertainties abound in Venezuela about what comes next,” Shifter said. “For now, a framework of coerced cooperation between the Venezuelan regime, now led by Delcy Rodriguez, and the Trump administration, seems to be in effect. But it is far from clear whether that model is viable, much less sustainable.”

Fontaine said that “the default could well be to work with a compliant President Delcy and most of the existing government. It would be a head of state change more than regime change.” But he added that such an arrangement would do little to satisfy the opposition – the same people who have cheered the news of Maduro’s capture. “Many would-be supporters of this move hoped for the restoration of democracy in Venezuela, not just a different approach on drugs and oil.”

He also noted that Trump was hardly the first president to decry nation-building projects, only to wind up taking them on.

“For 25 years, every U.S. president has opposed nation-building abroad and then gotten involved in it,” Fontaine said. “Trump, with the commitment to run Venezuela, appears to be the latest. The welcome fall of Maduro is not the end, or the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.”

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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — In 2021, a fifteen-year-old in a small Texas town started something from his bedroom. He’d dropped out of school. He spent his days online, deep into violence and gore. He found others like him and built a network. He named it after his ZIP code: 764.

Within two years, it had spread to every continent. Members – a lot of them teenagers – were finding kids as young as nine on Minecraft and Roblox. They’d befriend them, earn their trust, then trap them. They forced children to hurt themselves on camera. To hurt animals. To do things I’m not going to describe here. That kid from Texas is serving eighty years now. But 764 didn’t stop. It splintered and kept growing.

The FBI currently has over 300 active cases in the U.S. – investigations running in every single field office across the country. They’re looking at more than 350 people tied to the network. Worldwide, authorities believe there are thousands of victims. Arrests connected to groups like 764 jumped nearly 500% in 2025 compared to 2024.

The FBI ranks 764 as a “tier one” threat. That’s the same level as ISIS. Last year, Canada became the first country to officially call 764 a terrorist organization. Not a crime ring. Not predators. Terrorists.

I ran the State Department’s programs against violent extremism. I’ve studied how terrorist groups find and recruit people for most of my career. Canada got this one right.

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What Canada Did

Calling something a terrorist organization isn’t just a label. It changes what governments can do. In Canada, the designation means that anyone who helps 764 – with money, with recruitment, with anything – is now committing a crime. Banks have to freeze assets. Immigration can block people at the border. Law enforcement gets access to tools they can’t use for regular crimes. It also sends a message. When a country puts a group on the same list as Hezbollah and the Islamic State, it tells allies, tech companies, and the public: this is serious. Pay attention.

Canada’s intelligence service says nearly one in ten of their terrorism investigations now involves a minor. Think about that. We’re not talking about kids as victims – we’re talking about kids as suspects in terrorism cases.

How They Find Kids

764 doesn’t stumble onto victims. They go looking for specific kinds of kids. Depressed kids. Lonely ones. Kids who get picked on at school. Kids who cut themselves or post about wanting to disappear. They hunt for these signs in Discord servers, on Roblox, in Minecraft – places your kid probably hangs out.

When they find someone, they’re patient. They don’t ask for anything. They just show up. They say “I get it” and “you’re not crazy” and “I’ve been there.” If you’re a thirteen-year-old who feels invisible, having someone actually listen? That hits different.

Weeks go by. Maybe months. They share darker stuff. Normalize it. Then they ask for a photo – something the kid wouldn’t want anyone to see. Once they have that, everything changes.

“Send more or we show everyone.”

Most blackmail is about money. Not 764. They want content. They make kids film themselves getting hurt. Humiliated. Some get pushed toward suicide attempts—on camera, while the network watches.

One mother told investigators her daughter carved a screen name into her arm with a razor blade. When she finished, the guy on the other end told her he loved her.

Her daughter said it back.

Victims Become Recruiters

Here’s what turns 764 from a bunch of predators into an actual network. Members earn status by producing “content.” The worse the content, the higher they climb. They keep files on their victims – records of what they made them do—and trade them like trophies. Kids who started as victims become perpetrators because that’s how you move up.

In Connecticut, a former honor roll student got caught up in 764. She ended up making bomb threats against her own school – threats phoned in by someone overseas who she thought was her friend. When police searched her devices, they found abuse images, photos of self-harm, and pictures of her paying tribute to the network. Her mom told ABC News, that “It was very difficult to process, because we didn’t raise her to engage in that kind of activity.” That’s the thing. Nobody raises their kid for this. These children get found, groomed, trapped, and turned. One researcher put it simply, “The most horrendous part is it’s minors doing this to minors.”

This Is Terrorism

I know – it sounds like the worst kind of predator ring. So why call it terrorism? Because it works exactly like the terrorist networks I’ve tracked for years. Find someone in pain. Give them a worldview that makes sense of that pain. Then get them to act on it.

764 finds broken kids and tells them the world deserves to burn. That cruelty is honesty. That hurting people is power. The ideology underneath is simple: chaos for its own sake. No political demands. No territory. Just destruction as the point.

Then they turn victims into recruiters – kids climb the ranks by trapping other kids. The ones who got groomed become the groomers. And it doesn’t stay online.

Last July, a 764 member in Minnesota stabbed a woman twenty times. In Germany, authorities arrested someone connected to the network on over 120 charges — including murder. In Finland, police are investigating whether two teen suicides are linked to 764. The network shares guides on how to plan real-world attacks. This isn’t abuse that sometimes leads to terrorism. It’s a terrorism pipeline that uses child abuse as its on-ramp.

Why the U.S. Hasn’t Moved

So Canada calls this terrorism. Why haven’t we? Our laws weren’t built for this. We’ve got tools to go after foreign terrorist groups. We’ve got tools to prosecute child predators. But 764 started in Texas, spread everywhere, and mixes exploitation with extremism in ways that confuse the system.

Right now, we’re going after these guys one at a time for the abuse. That puts individuals in prison. But it treats 764 like random criminals instead of a network with a shared playbook and a body count that keeps growing. The FBI calls it “one of the most disturbing things we’re seeing.” The Attorney General calls it “one of the most heinous online child exploitation enterprises we have ever encountered.” Meanwhile, kids keep getting trapped. The network keeps growing. And we keep treating each case like it exists in a vacuum.

Canada made a call. We should make the same one.

Cipher Brief Expert Dexter Ingram also publishes on Substack Code Name: Citizen

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CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT INTERVIEW – While the U.S. operation to detain Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro took just hours to execute, a full assessment of its global impact will take weeks or months to fully understand in part, because of the complicated dynamic connecting the country’s assets, allies and oil.

“Venezuela is what I would call one of those hyphenated accounts,” says Norm Roule, a global energy expert who also served as former National Intelligence Manager for Iran at ODNI. “Venezuela in and of itself is important, but it's also Venezuela/oil, Venezuela/Russia, Venezuela/China, Venezuela/Cuba. There are a lot of different accounts and issues that must be taken into consideration.”

Venezuela’s partners depend on it for various strategic reasons: Cuba for economic support, Iran for political alignment in Latin America, and China for a notable share of its oil imports. The United States, meanwhile, is signaling a major shift in how it intends to assert influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Cipher Brief Executive Editor Brad Christian talked with Roule, a leading global consultant on Middle East and Energy issues, about what is likely to happen next as the U.S. signals a major shift in how it intends to assert influence in the Western Hemisphere. Their conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Norman T. Roule

Norman Roule is a geopolitical and energy consultant who served for 34 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, managing numerous programs relating to Iran and the Middle East. He also served as the National Intelligence Manager for Iran (NIM-I)\n at ODNI, where he was responsible for all aspects of national intelligence policy related to Iran.

THE INTERVIEW

The Cipher Brief: The Trump administration recently released an updated national security strategy that weighed heavily on the Western hemisphere. Are we seeing perhaps the first kind of inclination that this is going to actually be something to pay close attention to?

Roule: Absolutely. And I think the national security strategy is something that every one of the Cipher Brief's readers and listeners should pull out today. Look at it again, because I can assure you that policymakers around the world - in both our partner and adversary countries - are certainly doing so. If you look at events in Venezuela and read that national security strategy, a number of themes come forward.

The U.S. will be the dominant power in the Western hemisphere. In Venezuela, we saw a display of massive U.S. power and skill in the form of our military intelligence and technology. This is very similar to the display that the world witnessed in Iran last June. So, this is coming very, very close to two sets of actions. And I think this is meant to be seen also, as the president alluded to in his press conference, as a visible reset of what he described as a previous erosion of U.S. military power in his predecessor's administration.

This is also showing that the U.S. is now capable of executing what was described by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as an extraordinarily large and complicated military and intelligence operation, without being leaked. This did not require foreign partners. And it also did not require the disruption of regional commercial air operations. If you listen to what the chairman talked about, this involved 150 aircraft from multiple locations descending upon another country. And other than closing the airspace for a short period of time, commercial air traffic was not disrupted. But you're seeing some other things that are also notable. The U.S. will undertake regime change when it perceives that the existing regime threatens core U.S. national security interests.

This also represents another U.S. blow against a Chinese partner in the Western hemisphere following the Trump administration's actions in Panama. The operation also took place on the anniversary of the killing of Iranian Quds Force leader General Qassem Soleimani in 2020 as well as the surrender of Manuel Noriega in 1990.

These are both examples of the long arm of the U.S. government. And certainly, the United States may have thought that the selection of this date would dampen any commemorations by the Iranian government for Soleimani's death in Tehran. Which would have been difficult enough given the ongoing demonstrations in Tehran. But the ripples from this Venezuela operation will be global. And I think the national security strategy puts some meat on the bone with this operation.

The Cipher Brief: Just looking at the intelligence that was needed to pull off an operations like this for a moment, what do you think this says about U.S. intelligence and what would have gone into that for this particular operation?

Roule: Well, it tells you a couple of things. It tells you that first, the intelligence was exquisite and up to date. But it also tells you that the intelligence was integrated into the military operation with an intimacy, with care, so that our military personnel were able to move with extraordinary speed to get to the location as quickly as humanly possible. We've seen this in the past with the operation against Osama bin Laden. This is just another example of the close integration between the U.S. intelligence communication and our amazing and extraordinary special forces personnel. I can't speak highly enough of those extraordinary and humble operators.

This also shows you the breadth of that intelligence community. The intelligence agencies that were cited included, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). So, you're getting a sense of some very broad intelligence capabilities which were brought to bear and then integrated.

The president, I believe, also mentioned that a house had been built in advance. I mean, you're just watching some incredible intelligence capability that was brought to bear by people on the ground over many months. It shows courage, it shows tenacity, it shows you the resources that were pulled together. And it also shows an ability to compartment this information and to prevent a leak. The U.S. government is doing what it's supposed to do. And in a world where we're often complaining about government, the American people and our partners should be gratified that our tax dollars are being well spent. And that the U.S. intelligence community and the military are performing superbly.

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The Cipher Brief: There's a lot of connective tissue between Venezuela and the rest of the world when you consider the oil industry, including China. As an energy expert, can you share what’s top of mind for you on the broader impact on the oil and energy markets?

Roule: Maybe the best way to answer that is to just explain a little bit about the Venezuelan oil system. First, the operation did not occur near Venezuelan oil production. Upstream oil operations are not located near Caracas, although exports and storage are highly sensitive to obviously, as you correctly put it, a U.S. maritime enforcement of a U.S. embargo.

Most of Venezuela's oil production, about two thirds, is derived from what is known as the Orinoco belt. And oil production from this Orinoco belt had fallen to about 498,000 barrels by the end of December, which is about a 25% drop from just a couple of weeks earlier. And it's been shutting down because they're running out of storage space because Venezuela can't export oil because of the blockade. So, they're trying to put the oil anywhere they can. They've put it in their own storage, they've put it in ships that are docked. They're putting it in almost in teacups at this point because they are running out of space to store the oil that they're producing.

Let's talk about the oil that is produced in Venezuela. They produce it from tar sands. It's extra heavy. It's a heavy type of crude oil and there are relatively few refineries that can process this grade of oil. It's difficult to extract. It's expensive to extract. Chinese refineries in 2025 tended to get a majority of Venezuelan exports. That amount ranged from 75 to 90% depending upon the amount. But even here, the Chinese tended to put much of that oil in their own storage. And China and Russia tend to be the two big players in Venezuela. For China, it is transactional. Chinese buyers look at it as a way to purchase cheap oil that they again put in storage. It's about 4% of China's exports and China again, has used a shadow fleet of intermediaries to purchase this oil. If China were to lose access to this, it's a problem. But because much of this has gone into storage and there are other suppliers out there in Saudi Arabia and other places, they could make this up.

Russia's a different story. Russia is an enabler of the Venezuelan oil industry. Because Venezuela's oil is so tar heavy, in essence, they need to import naphtha from Russia and this dilutes the ore and eco output and makes it blendable and then shippable. So, Russia sends in naphtha, it blends the stuff down and then stuff can then be exported. What would happen if suddenly Venezuela is opened up? Well, a couple of things.

First, because the oil market is relatively well supplied, people would look at it and ask, ‘where are the investment opportunities?’ If you look at the places where the world has changed suddenly and investment opportunities occurred, production didn't dramatically change. Let's take Iraq and Libya for example.

In Iraq, it took about a dozen years to get back to the level of pre-Saddam. And at that point, China was a major player. The U.S. is now returning to Iraq. In Libya, we're now a number of years after the fall of Gaddafi, and they are still about 25% below production levels under Gaddafi.

And again, the U.S. is returning. Much of it does depend upon the security of the country and the stability of the country. So, the president's comments about running Venezuela the right way really does strike at the heart of what happens in the oil industry.

The Cipher Brief: Devil’s Advocate here: how does it compete with Texas’ output? What does the U.S. do with that oil? Is it going to be sold to China?

Roule: The president and the Secretary of State have talked about stolen oil. What does this refer to? Is there a U.S. case there? I'll leave it to others to talk about the amounts and so forth but when this is talked about, this refers to a 2007 Venezuela expropriation of what I believe was then Conoco Phillips or ExxonMobil investments. That Venezuela did indeed expropriate. So, there is indeed a legal case of Venezuela nationalization of U.S. assets for which the U.S. was not compensated. If Venezuela's government did change and if U.S. oil companies were to go in, could the oil industry be dramatically changed? Yes, but it would depend upon security.

Maybe my final comment would be that Chevron has been heavily invested there, and they have maintained a very mature and stable outlook for the country. If you hear Chevron’s CEO speak about Chevron's investments, they've been very levelheaded and unflappable about national security events. So, I think you're going to see them stay there as well. And I think when you listen to the president's comments about how the U.S. would run Venezuela, he seemed fairly confident that the U.S. oil industry would play a role there. Which makes one think that there have been some sort of discussions in this regard playing out in some way in the background.

The Cipher Brief: At the most recent Cipher Brief Threat Conference, there was a lot of discussion around the idea of global conflict and some people believe that we are at the precipice of World War III. Certainly everyone agrees that global disruption is at fairly unprecedented levels. What is your thinking on this?

Roule: We are in a different world, but we're in a world of permanent gray zone conflict. But gray zone is defined and very, very differently. Gray zone was once defined by Iranian militias and it was defined by drone attacks or cyberattacks that were non-attributed. But we now have drone attacks or drone flights in Europe that come from God knows where, but they're Russian. We have Chinese routine harassment for more than a decade in the South China Sea. We have routine theft of intellectual property by China and North Korea, which in and of itself is a type of attack against our economy. But it's not necessarily a traditional gray zone attack. Because the people who are often involved in gray zone operations only see a certain number of colors on the palate. But the theft of intellectual property is just another form of attack.

We're in that kind of a world and the people who are running the countries, they don't need to launch a war per se. They need to launch a series of short, sharp conflicts. Or short, sharp attacks. Now they said these could lead to a war if people believe we don't care about certain areas. And I do think there is the issue of what could happen in Taiwan in 2026. That should be a worry for everyone.

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OPINION — “I knew the possible danger. It was a very dangerous operation. It was amazing that we had a few injured, but all are in good shape right now, but I knew there was great danger. You got off a helicopter. The helicopters were being shot out. They got on the ground amazing talent and tremendous patriotism, bravery. The bravery was incredible…They got off the helicopter and the bullets were flying all over the place. As you know, one of the helicopters got hit pretty badly, but that we got everything back. Got everything back and nobody killed,” meaning Americans.

That was President Donald Trump speaking Sunday aboard Air Force One on the way back from Florida about what he observed watching the early Saturday morning U.S. raid in Caracas that captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.

While events in Venezuela are still unfolding and I will discuss some below, I use that quote because it illustrates that deaths of American service members is one thing I believe is high in Trump’s mind as he has in recent months undertaken a series of worldwide military actions.

Trump almost regularly points out that no Americans have been killed in the four months the U.S. has been blowing up alleged narco-trafficking boats. No Americans were lost in the bombing of Iran nuclear facilities.

And despite Trump’s threat that he could put U.S. boots-on-the-ground if needed to “run” Venezuela, there is no immediate indication he has plans to do that.

Instead, it appears Trump’s plan is to “run” Venezuela using what remains of the corrupt Maduro military/police hierarchy as long as they do what Trump wants. To me it recalls Trump as a builder working with questionable union leaders and construction firms to get jobs done.

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Just why has President Trump spent time and money, first to negotiate with Maduro to get him to leave, and finally to dramatically oust the Venezuelan President from office?

I divert for a moment.

On Friday, the original beginning of this column was, “Most fentanyl and methamphetamine trafficking into the U.S. occurs through official ports of entry along the southwest border, according to DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency).”

That was a quote from a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report entitled, “Illicit Synthetic Drugs: Trafficking Methods, Money Laundering Practices, and Coordination Efforts,” that was sent to Congress and released publicly December 18, 2025.

The GAO’s report, including the finding cited above, focuses attention on fentanyl primarily coming into the U.S. through land ports of entry while the Trump administration made its anti-fentanyl focus on attacking narco-trafficking swift-boats initially from Venezuela, claiming they were headed for the U.S.

More recently, the attacks, and killing of those aboard, have been those in the eastern Pacific.

The New York Times published a story by Carol Rosenberg that discussed what happens when U.S. Coast Guard cutters intercept narco-trafficking boats, seize drugs and capture those aboard – but not kill 115 on 35 speedboats as the U.S. military did last year.

Putting together the December GAO report and the Times story raised some serious questions about the rationality of the Trump administration’s so-called anti-drug program.

Up to that time, interception of drug-carrying boats and interrogation of the crews gave valuable information on drug routes.

However, as The Times noted, “Attorney General Pam Bondi directed [U.S.] prosecutors in February to mostly stop bringing charges against low-level offenders in favor of bigger investigations.” According to The Times, “For the most part, people captured by the Coast Guard in the same smuggling routes the U.S. military is bombing are being repatriated -- either directly, before reaching the United States, or through deportation after briefly being questioned near U.S. ports.”

The Times noted that many earlier captured crew members were “poor, undereducated farmers or fishermen [who] would reach cooperation agreements that offered details of their engagement at the bottom rung of the drug smuggling business in exchange for possible leniency.”

The Times quoted Tampa-lawyer Stephen M. Crawford, who in the past had been assigned to represent defendants captured by the Coast Guard, who said the killing of crew members without prosecution amounted to very dangerous “political theater.”

I could say the same today for what I consider today’s ill-thought-out Trump actions in Venezuela.

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As many others have pointed out, returning democracy to the Venezuelan people was not uppermost in Trump’s mind.

On Saturday, in announcing the raid, Trump told reporters he had not been in contact with Venezuelan Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. He then went on to say, "I think it'd be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn't have the support or the respect within the country. She's a very nice woman but she doesn't have the respect."

What I believe Trump meant was that the Maduro power structure – the Venezuelan Army, Bolivarian National Police and urban paramilitary networks known as colectivos -- remain active and it is they that don’t “respect” Machado.

They are also probably the reason there are no U.S. boots-on-the-ground.

Instead, Trump seems to believe that by keeping major U.S. military forces near Venezuela, he can threaten additional military attacks to keep the ex-Maduro crowd in line.

As Trump put it Sunday on Air Force One, “Venezuela thus far has been very nice, but it helps to have a force like we have. You know, we were ready for a second wave. We were all set to go, but we don't think we're going to need it.”

Apparently it is Venezuela’s oil which is primarily on Trump’s mind.

As with other matters, Trump seems to be living in the past as illustrated when he told reporters over the weekend, “We [the U.S.] had a lot of oil there [in Venezuela]. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back.”

Nationalization was the culmination of a decades-long effort by Venezuelan administrations of both the right and the left to bring under government control an industry that an earlier leader had largely given away.

American oil companies, including Exxon and Mobil, which merged in 1999, and Gulf Oil, which became Chevron in 1984, were hit hardest. The Dutch giant Shell was also affected. The companies, which had accounted for more than 70 percent of crude oil production in Venezuela, lost roughly $5 billion in assets but were compensated just $1 billion each, according to news stories from that period.

On Sunday, Trump said, “The oil companies are ready to go. They're going to go in, they're going to rebuild the infrastructure. You know, we built it to start off with many years ago.

They took it away. You can't do that. They can't do that with me. They did it with other presidents.”

According to several sources, major oil companies are not eager to spend the years and money at the present time to revive the Venezuelan oil industry, but as with much about the Venezuelan situation, there’s little yet that is predictable.

One potentially dangerous outcome, looming already, is how Trump reads what he so far considers his military success.

On Sunday he made open threats to both Colombia and Cuba.

He called Colombian President Gustavo Petro “a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he's not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you?”

And as for Cuba, Trump said, “Cuba always survived because of Venezuela. Now, they won't have that money coming in. They won't have the income coming in.”

He then went on to point out, “You know, a lot of Cubans were killed yesterday. You know that. A lot of Cubans were killed…There was a lot of death on the other side.”

But then Trump quickly added, as I have pointed out before, “No death on our side.”

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CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT Q&A — President Donald Trump said the U.S. is "in charge" in Venezuela after U.S. forces detained President Nicolas Maduro on charges related to drug trafficking. President Trump is also demanding "total access" to Venezuela's oil infrastructure. Venezuela's de-facto leader Delcy Rodriguez said Caracas is seeking "balanced and respectful international relations" with Washington.

Intelligence professionals are reacting to this major development as it will have far-reaching consequences far beyond Venezuela, for the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere amid heightened tensions with adversaries such as Russia and China. Cipher Brief Executive Editor Brad Christian spoke with former CIA Senior Executive Paul Kolbe about what Maduro's capture signals for the national security landscape in 2026. The conversation has been lightly edited for length.

Paul Kolbe

Paul Kolbe is former director of The Intelligence Project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.  Kolbe also led BP’s Global Intelligence and Analysis team supporting threat warning, risk mitigation, and crisis response. Kolbe served 25 years as an operations officer in the CIA, where he was a member of the Senior Intelligence Service, serving in Russia, the Balkans, Indonesia, East Germany, Zimbabwe, and Austria.

Christian: How are thinking about what just happened in Venezuela? What's top of mind for you?

Kolbe: Venezuela has been a problem both for the United States and for the Venezuelan people for over 20 years. For the Chavez years and then the Maduro years, they've driven a country that was once one of the wealthiest in the world, and certainly wealthiest in South America, with unbelievable natural resources, particularly oil, and driven it into the ground through corruption, poor leadership, poor decisions, and oppression of the people. There's a reason eight million Venezuelans have fled the country. So, it's been a series of corrupt, horrible rulers. Not sorry to see Maduro go.

Venezuela has also been a foothold for Cuba. Very important for Cuba in terms of the oil that they get there, but also as a place to plant the flag and spread Cuban revolution throughout South America. It's been a base and source of money and money laundering for Hezbollah and Iran. Russia has had a long-standing relationship with Chavez and with Maduro, supporting them with weapons, with intelligence, with the Wagner Group. So, Venezuela has been both a thorn in the side of the U.S., and has been involved in so many different things that are against our interests — not sorry to see Maduro go.

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Christian: Last year, President Trump had authorized covert activity in Venezuela. There had been talk even recently, just days ago, of the CIA being involved in a strike against a target in Venezuela. We don't often see a military operation of this complexity that goes this smoothly. What does that tell you about the intelligence that was at play here and the level of cooperation with the military?

Kolbe: Clearly it was highly professional and extraordinarily well-executed operation, both by the intelligence community and by the U.S. special operations forces that went in. Very pleased that there were no casualties, that we didn't suffer any losses. But the split that I would make is to ask if this is a very well-executed tactical operation that is without a larger strategy? And if there's a larger strategy, what is it? In particular, what's the follow-on? There's been a number of times where we've gone in and broken things and not done such a great job of fixing them or just leaving. You can look at Libya, at Iraq, and other places where that's not happened. Some folks will point to Panama and Grenada and try to use those as analogies for Venezuela, and they're very different cases. Venezuela's not Panama — much bigger, much different set of dynamics there — and it's certainly not Grenada.

So the follow-on of who's going to rule, what the transition is, how do you maintain stability? The narco-traffickers are still there, the narco-syndicates, the military is still there, the street gangs are still there. The paramilitaries, which have been supported by the military and have acted as the chief arm of oppression and brutality against the people, they're still there. There's a lot of generals that have an awful lot to lose. So, unless there's been a negotiated handover of power, I don't quite understand, yet, how we're going to run the country without boots on the ground or without a clear negotiated handover.

Christian: Russia's been described as a special type of enabler for Venezuela over the years. Russian officials have called the U.S. operation in Venezuela "unlawful'' and a violation of norms. There have been other Russia developments related to Venezuela recently. The ship, Bella 1, that the United States has been pursuing for the last couple of weeks was reported to have painted a Russian flag on it's hull on Dec 31, and Russia reportedly has asked the United States to stop pursuing it. What's your reaction to how Russia has publicly responded to these incidents?

Kolbe: I'll start with the irony of Russia's protestations against what they see as the invasion of sovereignty of another country and how awful that is put out there with no sense of irony. Russia is condemning something that is not analogous to what they've done in Ukraine, but also completely ignoring what they've done in Ukraine and the ongoing war that they continue to pursue against the Ukrainian people, against their infrastructure, against everything that stands there.

So, while Venezuela is going to capture a lot of attention over the next few days, I suspect that's also, perhaps, part of the purpose of it. It distracts from what I think is a far more strategic, far more important issue, i.e., What's going to happen in Ukraine in 2026? Will the U.S. abandon Ukraine? Will we stab them in the back, or will we be able to provide support that lets them fight Russia, preserve their sovereignty?

The story with the ship is a pretty interesting one. It feels like watching a sea-born version of OJ Simpson's escape in his Ford Bronco as this Coast Guard cutter trails this gigantic oil freighter, which is running away at the speed of 11 knots and is now in the North Atlantic and is claiming to have Russian protection. Russia has reportedly put out a diplomatic note dissuading the U.S. from taking any action on that. So it will be interesting to see what actually happens if the ship managed to make good on the escape or if we turn around and say, "Oh, nevermind."

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Christian: At the most recent Threat Conference back in October, there was a lot of talk of global conflict. And some people use the phrase, "World War III." Are we in it? Has it begun? There's been a lot of talk about gray zone, the level of gray zone activity, and the risk of major conflicts breaking out such as Taiwan or the situation in Europe growing beyond the borders of Ukraine. How are you thinking about the world as we start 2026 amid what is truly a dynamic national security backdrop?

Kolbe: I'm thinking about it as we're in a state of conflict without recognizing it. Just a couple of days ago over New Year’s, you saw China mount a blockade exercise, clearly practicing for a coming blockade of Taiwan. The signaling coming out of there is ever sharper and, it’s always been clear, but suggests a narrowing timeline for action on Taiwan. I don't believe anything's imminent, but clearly they're building the capability and then the intent, the decision, once they have the capability, can happen at any time.

Just a couple of days ago, we saw another communications cable cut between Estonia and Finland by a Russian ship that had left a Russian port that continues what is essentially low grade warfare on the European continent by Russia: sabotage, assassinations, misinformation, disinformation, and just a series of things which are clearly preparation of the battlefield, designed both to deter Europe and get Europe to self-deter, but also for the U.S., but also to put into place the capabilities that would be useful or used in conflict.

I think what is clear to me is that we, the US — as stated in the National Security Strategy that came out in December — are basically carving out Latin America as a U.S. area of influence and seeming to leave Europe and Central Asia to Russia and East Asia to China. And for me, that's very disturbing that America First looks to be coming to include South America First.

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OPINION — One of the things I loved about LEGO as a child was the ability to mix and match an endless amount of parts to create unique builds. Children (and some adults) gather around a bin of parts to create something new. Imagine being asked: “Build 10 houses in 30 minutes.” Everyone would come up with unique designs using various parts. Now, imagine a constraint: “You may only use red, 2x4, 2x2, and 1x2 bricks, white windows and doors, and it all has to fit on a green 32x32 baseplate.” Quickly, the limited supply causes a frantic scramble.

This scenario mirrors the recent call by the Department of War to field 300,000 drones over two years. The conflict in Ukraine exposed the U.S.'s lack of preparedness to equip forces with Purpose Built Attritable Systems (PBAS) at the scale of its peer competitors. Further, manufacturers are restricted by the requirement for critical components to be NDAA / BlueUAS compliant and, as of December 22nd, even more restrictions which demand non-critical components be U.S.-manufactured. The defense industrial base is struggling to meet unprecedented demand.

While numerous startups and giants have stepped up, the U.S. supply chain cannot sustain the required pace. Existing suppliers’ manufacturing capabilities are quickly surpassed as companies scramble to design, build, and market the requested systems.

sUAS are fundamentally basic, consisting of a flight controller (FC), electronic speed controller (ESC), motors, propellers, camera, radio/video transmitters, receivers, and a frame. The main problem is the availability of parts and, more critically, sub-components needed to make them. Manufacturers are all reaching into the same scarce “bin,” forcing suppliers to seek materials with increased vigor.

Motors, for instance, require neodymium and copper. The majority of motor production occurs outside of the U.S., where technology is mature, labor costs are lower, and the supply chain exists. However, the sUAS industry accounts for less than 8% of neodymium consumption in the U.S. Returning to the LEGO analogy, if a child asks for more 1x1 red bricks to make houses, LEGO, which (in this scenario) makes over 90% of its money on other parts, has little incentive to retool for large-scale 1x1 brick production.

Similarly, most FC and ESC boards are produced in Taiwan. While this was permissible under the original NDAA and BlueUAS frameworks, the new requirement for U.S. production necessitates standing up domestic manufacturing, likely to ensure production continues in the event that trade with Taiwan is disrupted. However, standing up U.S. companies, sourcing materials, hiring labor, and developing technology all create significant costs that are passed to the consumer. Since PBAS systems must remain attritable (affordable enough to be lost in combat), a higher cost per unit will force warfighters to be more judicious.

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Given the intense demand and additional domestic constraints, how can the U.S. remain competitive? There are a few ways.

Incentivize existing global manufacturers to stand up U.S.-based manufacturing. Companies with existing technology, design, manufacturing, and supply chains should be incentivized to establish domestic production of like products.

Encourage raw material companies to invest upstream. Critical material mining companies (e.g., for lithium and neodymium) currently lack incentive to ensure stable, consistent supply to manufacturers. Encouraging investment upstream offers supply chain guarantees for domestic manufacturing and additional revenue for investors.

Establish a “strategic reserve” of raw materials. The U.S. maintains strategic oil and gas reserves. For future conflicts, a strategic reserve of critical sUAS materials is vital given the global stranglehold countries like China have on the market to enable rapid manufacturing scale-up even if trade is disrupted.

Increase throughput of BlueUAS and NDAA compliant components from outside the U.S. Maintaining U.S. connectivity to the global sUAS marketplace is important. While the restrictions are righteous, isolating U.S. production strains the raw material supply chain, causes allies to follow suit, and increases the overall cost per unit, reducing attritability. The U.S. should use the BlueUAS framework, with increased throughput, to identify compliant vendors across a wide section of allies and trade partners.

Expedite current NDAA compliant components manufactured overseas through BlueUAS processes. As manufacturing shifts to the U.S., the U.S. could provide ‘provisional’ BlueUAS certifications with limited durations to cover companies during the transition.

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Without a temporary easement or an adequate transitional period, the U.S. drone market is likely to shift abruptly. Many companies cannot afford to stand up U.S. production, or the cost of compliance would render their price points untenable. This situation would likely result in defense giants acquiring the IP/technology from smaller companies at a steep discount, leveraging their supply networks, lobbying, and significant capital advantage to continue development and manufacturing under their umbrella, returning the U.S. defense ecosystem to its former exclusive state, prior to the recent tranche of reforms.

The U.S. is at a critical inflection point in its quest for American Drone Dominance. The foundation it establishes will define its final strength and resilience. Care must be taken to avoid supply chain degradation, continue providing affordable solutions for the warfighter, and remain flexible and responsive in future crises. Incentivizing domestic production without isolation will ensure the U.S. has all the pieces it needs to build successfully, brick by brick.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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OPINION — On February 14, 2022, with Russia poised to invade Ukraine, I questioned whether Vladimir Putin’s reign to that point had revealed him to be a strategic master or a strategic failure. Nearly four years later, the verdict is even more apparent. Putin, confident in his strategic calculus that the West would provide only token assistance to Ukraine, which would quickly fold under the weight and violence of Russian military might, fatefully launched his attack days later with disastrous consequences for Russia. The country he leads is now even poorer, more isolated, brittle, and dependent (on China) than before. Putin grossly underestimated Ukrainian will, overestimated the competence of his own military and intelligence apparatus, and misjudged Western cohesion. By the Fall of 2022, it was obvious even to Putin that his expected quick victory was unattainable. This was surely a bitter pill to swallow, but he quickly pivoted to a “wait and win” war strategy of grinding attrition, calculating that through sheer mass and perseverance--and Western impatience--time would be on his side. Most pundits, even those in the West, have tended to agree with him, much as they did in 2022 about the likelihood that Russia would quickly roll over Ukraine. This mindset, however--that time is on Russia’s side--risks a strategic misreading no less profound than his original blunder, because there is a strong argument to be made that Putin’s attrition strategy is eroding key foundations of Russian power faster and more deeply than it is eroding the Ukrainian front lines.

Thus far Russia has managed to sustain a high level of war spending, but there are growing signs of strain. Russia’s numerical troop advantage over Ukraine is maintained almost entirely through extraordinarily high financial incentives, but these are starting to drop steeply due to growing budget shortfalls, particularly in regional budgets on which such spending disproportionately falls. New contracts for soldiers in April-June 2025 were less than half the level of the same period in 2024, signaling a significant weakening in the effectiveness of financial inducements.

And it’s not just the money. The death toll for Russian soldiers is accelerating. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated in July of this year that the number of Russian dead for the first half of 2025 alone exceeded 100,000. This has likely contributed to a sharp increase in desertions, estimated to have doubled in 2025 with approximately 70,000 desertions, or approximately 10% of the force in Ukraine. Russia is increasingly reliant on coerced recruits, harsh punishments for desertion, including torture and extrajudicial executions, all signs of a military struggling to maintain sustainable, motivated troop levels. While tactical adaptations have allowed Russian forces to regain some initiative on the battlefield, they rest on a manpower model that burns through human capital, i.e., human beings, at a pace no country with Russia’s demographic profile can long sustain.

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As the war drags on, Russia is also becoming even more dependent on China. Post-2022 trade patterns show a Russia increasingly locked into an asymmetric partnership in which Russia humiliatingly relies on China for critical imports of technology, while Beijing gains leverage through discounted energy purchases and control over supply chains, making Moscow increasingly vulnerable to Beijing’s whims over time. For a leader obsessed with sovereignty, the long-term trajectory Putin has embarked on contains a glaring paradox: the longer he fights to keep Ukraine out of the Western orbit, the more he locks Russia into a subordinate position in China’s. Talk about strategic irony.

These financial strains and deepening dependence on China are compounded by the continued tightening of international sanctions on the Russian energy sector, a general decrease in the price of oil and gas on which Russia is so heavily dependent as the global economy cools, and the heavy depletion of Russia’s “rainy day” sovereign wealth fund, which has dropped by almost 60% and now mostly consists of Chinese Renminbi and gold, having exhausted its hard currency holdings. Maintaining current defense spending will thus increasingly require either higher borrowing from domestic banks or visible cuts in social spending and civilian projects, further eroding living standards and stoking popular war fatigue.

Putin’s war-of-choice with Ukraine has only intensified Russia’s pre-war weaknesses. Russia’s economy, already underperforming relative to its resource base and human potential, must now deal with permanent war spending and sanctions-induced inefficiencies. Its demographics, already fragile, are being further hollowed out by horrific war casualties and the emigration of skilled workers. Russia’s civic life, already stunted, is being further smothered by wartime repression. Finally, Putin’s invasion not only failed to restore a pliant Ukrainian “little brother”, it locked Russia into a costly struggle against the second largest country in Europe, after itself, and one that is moreover more anti-Russian, better armed, and more deeply integrated with the West than before.

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And now, by slow-rolling negotiations to end the conflict, Putin misreads the trajectory of this war in the same way he misread its opening act. He underestimates the cumulative effect of casualties and consequences of economic distortions and social fatigue inside Russia; he overestimates the degree that support of the Western democracies for Ukraine will collapse under the weight of their debates and divisions; and he also, again, overestimates his ability to break Ukraine by military force. In analyzing the arc of Putin’s rule, the war in Ukraine is not an aberration from Putinism, but its logical culmination. In strategic terms, it represents a transition from a condition of chronic underperformance to one of active and acute self-harm. Nearly four years after his decision to invade Ukraine, which more than anything else will define his reign, Putin is not outplaying history on a grand chessboard by doubling down on the war, he is sacrificing Russia’s future for the sake of victories and imperial fantasies that cannot be won, much less sustained. This is the definition of strategic failure.

As a self-proclaimed student of Russian history, Putin would be wise to remember the setting of Russia’s original regime-toppling “color revolution,” the February Revolution of 1917. This was the spontaneous Russian popular uprising that led to the abdication of the Tsar and formation of a Provisional Government, not the subsequent Bolshevik coup d’etat later that year. While popular discontent with the monarchy had long been rising, it was the accumulated privations of war that brought events to a boiling point. As with that war, time in this one is not on Putin’s side.

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Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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OPINION — On January 1, 2026, in his planned first message for the 59th World Day of Peace, Pope Leo XIV will reflect on peace, justice, and global harmony.

On December 18, 2025, Pope Leo published his first major peace message themed “Peace be with you,” in preparation for his and the Catholic Church’s annual January 1st exhortation on World Peace. Pope Leo’s December message urged the faithful to not surrender to the idea that fear and darkness are normal, but to see peace as not only possible but necessary. “When we treat peace as a distant ideal, we cease to be scandalized when it is denied, or even when war is waged in its name… and to justify violence and armed struggle in the name of religion.” Pope Leo called on believers of all religions to guard against the temptation to weaponize words and religion to commit violence in its name. He ended with two searing eyewitness accounts of European horrors: the Bosnian war and the domestic terrorism that tormented Italy in the 1970s and 1980s.

The World Day of Peace is an annual Catholic observance celebrated each January 1. Established in 1968 by Pope Paul VI, it is an opportunity for each pope to write a peace message and to reflect on peace, justice, and global harmony. The messages offer moral guidance to the Church and the world on how to pursue peace in a contemporary context.

For his first message for the 59th World of Peace, Pope Leo chose the theme “Peace be with you” as a call not only to desire peace, but to make it a lived reality. Indeed, peace is not just the absence of war, but rooted in justice, trust, dialogue, forgiveness, and shared humanity.

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Seeking peace in a world in disarray

The annual Preventive Priorities Survey, produced by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the more than six hundred American foreign policy experts who contributed to the survey, was just published and viewed five conflict-related scenarios as highly likely to emerge or escalate and to have high impact on U.S. interests in 2026.

The experts were most concerned about conflict-related risks in the Middle East and eastern Europe, including the potential for increased clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinians in the West Bank, renewed fighting in the Gaza Strip, and intensified attacks in the Russia-Ukraine war. Also, the possibility of direct U.S. military strikes in Venezuela and of an increase in political violence and popular unrest in the United States are similarly worrying scenarios.

Renewed armed conflict between Iran and Israel, artificial intelligence-enabled cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure and a cross-strait crisis between China and Taiwan are concerning. And North Korea was elevated to a Tier 1 concern for 2026 – a top-priority global threat due to its nuclear weapons, ballistic missile programs and potential to destabilize Northeast Asia.

“The world continues to grow more violent and disorderly. Last year’s unprecedented level of anxiety among experts about the rising risk of conflict remains undiminished, according to the director of the CFR survey.

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Pope Leo, the first American pope, has an opportunity to put words into action, in the pursuit of peace. Since his election in May 2025, “peace be with you all” has been the foundation for his peace mission. In October 2025, at an interreligious meeting in Rome, Pope Leo declared: “Peace is holy, not war”, urging religious leaders to act as “mothers” who encourage people to treat each other as family. And in December 2025 during a trip to Lebanon he met with Muslim and Druze leaders, stating that authentic unity and friendship are the only ways to “put aside the arms of war.”

Pope Leo could and should convene a meeting of interreligious leaders to draft a strategy to bring peace to a troubled world. This, obviously, would be a monumental task, seemingly beyond the reach of any person, nation, alliance, and religion. But a leader that has the respect of peers and the public could be the catalyst for such a “peace movement.”

Pope Leo has my vote.

This column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joseph DeTrani was first published in The Washington Times

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OPINION — Out with a “rules-based international order” and in with “U.S. core national interests”, according to the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2025. The NSS was not well-received by many of the 32 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Indeed, saying good-bye to the U.S. as the guarantor of global order will be difficult for many of our allies and partners, who will be expected to contribute more to their own defense and security.

Europe and the Middle East received lower priority in the NSS, with minimal criticism of Russia. The Western Hemisphere, however, is the primary security region for the U.S., under a modern “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine”, with a focus on border control, mass migration, narco-trafficking and international crime and terrorism as principal threats to our nation’s security.

The NSS correctly in my view focused on the importance of the Indo-Pacific region. It called for expanding commercial and other relations with India to contribute to Indo-Pacific security. The NSS called on the Quad – Australia, Japan, India and the U.S., — to align its actions with allies and partners to prevent the domination by any single competitor nation. The NSS cited the need for the U.S. to invest in research to preserve and advance our advantage in cutting-edge military and dual-use technology, to include undersea, space, nuclear, AI, quantum computing and autonomous systems and the energy to fuel these domains.

The NSS correctly focused on Taiwan and its dominance of semiconductor production and, also, Taiwan’s direct access to the Second Island Chain, splitting Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters, and the one-third of global shipping that passes annually through the South China Sea and its implications for the U.S. economy. The NSS is clear in stating that deterring a conflict over Taiwan is a priority, making it clear that the U.S. does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.

The NSS calls on our allies and partners to allow the U.S. military greater access to their ports and other facilities, to spend more on their own defense, and most importantly to invest in capabilities aimed at deterring aggression.

Japan and South Korea are encouraged to increase defense spending, with new capabilities to deter adversaries and protect the First Island Chain. The NSS says the U.S. will harden and strengthen our military presence in the Western Pacific. Indeed, preventing conflict requires a vigilant posture in the Indo-Pacific, a renewed defense industrial base, greater military investment from us and from allies and partners, and winning the economic and technological competition over the long run.

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The Indo-Pacific is the source of almost half the world’s GDP and will grow over the century. It will be “among the next century’s key economic and geopolitical battlegrounds.”

The conventional wisdom, as cited in the NSS, is that China duped us into believing that by opening our markets to China and encouraging American business to invest in China, starting in 1979 when China was a poor and backward nation, we would facilitate China’s entry into the so-called “rules-based international order.” And as the NSS mentions: “This did not happen. China got rich and powerful and used its wealth and power to its considerable advantage.”

But there were leaders in China in the 1980s and 1990s who believed in democratization and the rule of law and open elections. Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang was removed from his leadership position because he, like his predecessor, Hu Yaobang, believed in democracy and the rule of law. Mr. Zhao was removed in June 1989 because he supported the student demonstrators at Tiananmen, and Mr. Hu was removed, also by Deng Xiaoping, for indulging in bourgeois liberalization and advocating democracy. A few years later, Premiers Wen Jiabao and Zhu Rongji, like Messrs. Hu and Zhao before them, were advocates for democratization and free and fair elections. Currently, there may be other senior officials in China who advocate for democratization and the rule of law.

The NSS is a powerful document, focusing on the Western Hemisphere and the security threat to the U.S. emanating from that region. And the U.S. focus on the Indo-Pacific region and deterring aggression in the First Island Chain while ensuring no unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait are clear and unambiguous goals of the Trump Administration. Getting the support of regional allies and partners will be an important part of this national security strategy.

This column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joseph DeTrani was first published in The Washington Times

OPINION — The recent release of President Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), with its emphasis on “the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” and its resultant challenges, such as border security, migration, and narcotics trafficking, offer us an opportunity to closely examine leaders to watch in 2026. While previous similar columns in The Cipher Brief by this author had focused on adversaries such as Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi, North Korea’s Kim, and Iran’s Supreme Leader, today’s evolving geopolitical landscape (as described in the new NSS) suggests looking more closely at the motivations and leadership style of Venezuela’s adversary President Nicolas Maduro, Russia’s diplomatic emissary Kirill Dmitriev, and the deeply influential, newly elected Pope Leo XIV. And the gray zone is alive and well --- there are lots of ‘black swans’ flying around!

The influence of Pope Leo XIV, who has already shown himself to be a transformational Pope, is easily misunderstood. When Stalin famously quipped, “How many divisions does the Pope have,” today’s answer would be, 1.4 billion. Observers forget that the Vatican has one of the world’s oldest and formidable diplomatic and intelligence services. Several weeks ago, when Pope Leo visited the headquarters of the Italian Intelligence Service, he spoke eloquently, stating that intelligence professionals are entrusted with “the serious responsibility of constantly monitoring the dangers that may threaten the life of the Nation, in order above all to contribute to the protection of peace.”

Pope Leo – whose first words to the flock upon his appointment to the Papacy were “Peace be with you,” has shown himself to be an adept diplomat. American-born, raised, and educated, he then spent several decades in Peru, as well as 20+ years in Rome. Fluent in English, Spanish, and Italian, he is a true citizen of, and Pope for, this world.

His initial diplomatic meetings and trips, as well as his daily commentaries on Instagram and Twitter, have showcased his nuance, spirituality, faith, and promotion of diplomacy and interfaith dialogue as solutions to the world’s conflicts. In his first overseas trip to Turkey and Lebanon, he met with Turkey’s President Erdogan and emphasized Turkey’s role “as a bridge between East and West, Asia, and Europe.” The Pope’s statement highlights Turkey’s – and Erdogan’s – role (enhanced by his experienced Foreign Minister and former intelligence chief Hakan Fidan) as a potential mediator in conflicts such as Gaza and Ukraine.

Pope Leo has also weighed in on the current conflict between the United States and Venezuela, stating that President Trump should avoid a military solution, and instead utilize diplomatic and even economic pressure to resolve the conflict. Such statements are crucial, as earlier in the year, Pope Leo had met with Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (both are Catholic) shortly after his election. Given the Pope’s vast influence, President Trump and his national security team should thereby borrow a page from President Ronald Reagan’s 1980s playbook and forge a new ‘Holy Alliance’ with Pope Leo and the Holy See, to seek peace in Ukraine, Venezuela, and the Middle East.

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What most media and think tank commentary has missed with respect to Kirill Dmitriev’s role in diplomatic negotiations between Russia and the U.S., is why Russia’s President Putin would utilize Dmitriev in such a role, and what this portends for Russia’s negotiating posture and future in a post-war Ukraine and Europe. Dmitriev, who is young and Ukrainian-born, spent nearly 20 years in the United States as a high school student and subsequent graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Business School. Later, he worked on Wall Street for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Delta Capital, a U.S. government-funded investment fund, which later became the U.S.-Russia Business Fund. American businessmen whom I know who have worked with Dmitriev, describe him as brilliant, focused, and quite knowledgeable about the United States. In 2011, the latter entity became Russia’s Direct Investment Fund, which Dmitriev heads. It’s fair to say that this fund functions de facto as Putin’s ‘family office.’ This, along with Dmitriev’s closeness to Putin and his inner circle (Dmitriev’s wife and Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova are close friends), along with his prolific use of social media (X), suggests a high level of trust, as Dmitriev has led delicate Ukraine peace negotiations with President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Putin’s use of Dmitriev in his current diplomatic role may hint at Putin’s aspirations of a renewed, strategic, post-war relationship with Russia and the United States, one focusing on a variety of business deals. I’d argue that it goes further, and that Dmitriev is being groomed for more senior leadership roles in a post-Putin Russia. So, he is most definitely a figure to watch in 2026.

Following America’s recent designation of Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization (as was done earlier with respect to the Venezuelan transnational criminal organization, Tren de Aragua), President Trump has adopted a forceful approach towards Venezuela’s leader, President Nicolas Maduro. With the largest U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean since Panama (1989), as well as a covert action authorization, President Trump has also hinted at the possibility of a diplomatic resolution to the conflict between Venezuela and America; President Maduro has suggested diplomatic talks. This begs the question whether Maduro – the leader of Venezuela since 2013 - can be negotiated with. The answer to this question – yes, in my opinion – requires a keen understanding of Maduro’s leadership style.

Maduro’s history is well-known. As a high school graduate with socialist roots, he came up through party ranks early in his career, working first as a bus driver and unionist. Numerous media reports also note his close association with Cuba and his linkages to Cuban intelligence services. After the late Hugo Chavez’s failed 1992 military coup, Maduro became linked with Chavez, Venezuela’s President from 1998-2013, and was ‘anointed’ by the charismatic, populist Chavez as his successor, winning a narrowly contested election in 2013. Maduro has often been seen as lacking in personality, charisma, or gravitas, as compared to Chavez. And many have missed his ruthlessness, cleverness, cunning, resilience, and cruelty, as he became a dictator, overturning the results of last year’s 2024 election, won by Venezuela’s opposition, led by the courageous Nobel Laureate – known as Venezuela’s ‘Iron Lady’ – Maria Corina Machado. And his incompetent socialist economic and political policies led Venezuela – once the thriving gem of Latin America, with its democratic spirit, oil riches, natural resources, and a thriving middle class - to economic ruin, penury, and a brain drain of over eight million Venezuelans. Maduro now leads a vast ‘narco state’ and criminal enterprise, funded by drugs, rare earths, minerals, gold, and oil, and beholden to criminal elements in the military, intelligence services, and transnational criminal networks, as well as his close ties to America’s adversaries such as Iran, Cuba, Russia, and China. Maduro’s criminality – America has even put a $50 million bounty on him - is what now keeps him in power.

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Maduro’s negotiation skills merit attention. Earlier this year, he showcased his negotiating prowess in releasing six American hostages after meeting with Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell. Maduro has even written a recent letter to Pope Leo IV (who has called for dialogue and peace in Venezuela), stating, “I have great faith that Pope Leo, as I stated in the letter I sent him, will help Venezuela preserve and achieve peace and stability.”

President Trump has often shown a combination of negotiating flexibility with ‘Reaganesque’ strategic deterrence. Maduro must also be given an absolute deadline to shut down the Iranian drone base and to insist that all Iranian, Cuban, and Russian military and intelligence ‘advisors’ leave Venezuela within 24 hours --- or else! President Trump’s vast military buildup, military strikes on drug boats, seizure of Venezuela’s ‘shadow’ fleet of oil tankers, and designation of Venezuelan criminal organizations as foreign terrorist entities have boxed Maduro into a very tight corner. And America’s bold ‘exfiltration’ of Venezuela’s brave, courageous opposition leader and Nobel Laureate Maria Corina Machado sent a powerful, symbolic message to Maduro: we can get her out, and we can bring her back in, at will.

President Trump, as a former real estate CEO, can appreciate that regime change bears similarity to evicting a difficult tenant. Often, they must be bought out. Fortunately, there is ample precedent in American diplomacy in this regard. In 1991, America, working closely with the late Israeli diplomat Uri Lubrani and Ethiopia’s late Kassa Kebede (a former foreign minister and Ambassador to the UN/Geneva), paid $35 million ($83 million in 2025 dollars) – which was never fully accounted for! - to Ethiopia to allow 15,000 Beta Israel refugees to depart Ethiopia for Israel, and Ethiopia’s dictator Haile Mengistu to go into exile. Similar considerations might be considered with respect to Maduro, especially when America has spent over $1 billion USD in its current military buildup in the Caribbean.

So as 2026 approaches, all eyes are on President Trump. It’s his move. Given his and America’s prestige on the line, there is no margin for error.

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EXPERT OPINION / PERSPECTIVE — We are currently witnessing a mobilization of technical ambition reminiscent of the Manhattan Project, a realization that data and compute are the new defining elements of national power. I am deeply energized by recent bold moves in Washington, specifically the White House’s launch of the "Genesis Mission" this past November—an initiative designed to federate vast federal scientific datasets for integrated AI training—alongside the real-world deployment of GenAI.mil.

Yet, when I look at the velocity of the commercial sector—from OpenAI launching its dedicated Science division and NVIDIA attempting to simulate the planet with Earth-2, to Google DeepMind aggressively crossing their AI breakthroughs into the geospatial domain—it becomes clear that we are still aiming too low. These projects are not just modeling data; they are attempting to model reality itself. American technical leadership is paramount, but that leadership is meaningless if it is not ruthlessly and immediately applied to our national security framework. We must take these massive, reality-simulating concepts and focus them specifically on the GEOINT mission.

A perfect example of this is that earlier this year, in July 2025, the geospatial world shifted. Google DeepMind released the AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) model, and through the hard work of the Taylor Geospatial Engine (TGE) and the open-source community, those vector embeddings are now publicly available on Source Cooperative.

From Google

The excitement is justified. AlphaEarth is a leap forward because it offers pixel-level embeddings rather than the standard patch-level approach. It doesn’t just tell you “this 256x256 square contains a city”; it tells you "this specific pixel is part of a building, and it knows its neighbors."

But as I look at this achievement from the perspective of national security, I see something else. I see a proof of concept for a capability that the United States is uniquely positioned to build—and must build—to maintain decision advantage.

Google has the internet’s data. But the intelligence community holds the most diverse, multi-physics, and temporally deep repository of the Earth in human history.

It is time for the United States to propose and execute a National Geospatial-Intelligence Embedding Model (NGEM).

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The Proposal: Beyond RGB

The AlphaEarth model is impressive, but it is limited by its training data—primarily commercial optical imagery. In the national security domain, an optical image is just the tip of the spear. We don't just see with light; we see with physics.

I am proposing that we train a massive, pixel-level foundation model that ingests all of its holdings. We aren't talking about just throwing more Sentinel-2 data at a GPU. We are talking about a model that generates embeddings from a unified ingest of:

• Multi-INT Imagery: Electro-optical (EO), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Infrared/Thermal, Multispectral, and Hyperspectral.
• Vector Data: The massive stores of Foundation GEOINT (FG)—roads, borders, elevation meshes.
• The Critical Missing Modality: Text. We must embed the millions of intelligence reports, analyst notes, and finished intelligence products ever written.

The Approach: "The Unified Latent Space"

The approach would mirror the AlphaEarth architecture—generating 64-dimensional (or higher) vectors for every coordinate on Earth—but with a massive increase in complexity and utility.

In AlphaEarth, a pixel’s embedding vector encodes "visual similarity." In an NGA NGEM, the embedding would encode phenomenological and semantic truth.

We would train the model to map different modalities into the same "latent space."

• If a SAR image shows a T-72 tank (through radar returns), and an EO image shows a T-72 tank (through visual pixels), and a text report describes a "T-72 tank," they should all map to nearly the same mathematical vector.
• The model becomes the universal translator. It doesn't matter if the input is a paragraph of text or a thermal signature; the output is a standardized mathematical representation of the object.

The Outcomes: What Does This Give Us?

If we achieve this, we move beyond "computer vision" into "machine understanding."

1. The "SAM Site" Dimension In the AlphaEarth analysis, researchers found a "dimension 27" that accidentally specialized in detecting airports. It was a serendipitous discovery of the model's internal logic. If we train NSEM on NGA’s holdings, we won’t just find an airport dimension. We will likely find dimensions that correspond to specific national security targets.

• Dimension 14 might light up only for Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) sites, regardless of whether they are camouflaged in optical imagery, because the thermal and SAR layers give them away.
• Dimension 42 might track "maritime logistics activity," integrating port vectors with ship signatures.

2. Cross-Modal Search (Text-to-Pixel) Currently, if an analyst wants to find "all airfields with extended runways in the Pacific," they have to rely on tagged metadata or run a specific computer vision classifier. With a multi-modal embedding model, the analyst could simply type a query from a report: "Suspected construction of hardened aircraft shelters near distinct ridge line." Because we embedded the text of millions of past reports alongside the imagery, the model understands the semantic vector of that phrase. It can then scan the entire globe’s pixel embeddings to find the mathematical match—instantly highlighting the location, even if no human has ever tagged it.

3. Vector-Based Change Detection AlphaEarth showed us that subtracting vectors from 2018 and 2024 reveals construction. For the intelligence community, this becomes Automated Indications & Warning (I&W). Because the embeddings are spatially aware and pixel-dense, we can detect subtle shifts in the function of a facility, not just its footprint. A factory that suddenly starts emitting heat (thermal layer) or showing new material stockpiles (hyperspectral layer) will produce a massive shift in its vector embedding, triggering an alert long before a human analyst notices the visual change.

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The Intelligence Use Cases

• Automated Order of Battle: Instantly generating dynamic maps of military equipment by querying the embedding space for specific signatures (e.g., "Show me all vectors matching a mobile radar unit").
• Underground Facility Detection: By combining vector terrain data, gravity/magnetic anomaly data, and hyperspectral surface disturbances into a single embedding, the model could "see" what is hidden.
• Pattern of Life Analysis: Since the model is spatiotemporal (like AlphaEarth), it learns the "heartbeat" of a location. Deviations—like a port going silent or a sudden surge in RF activity—become mathematical anomalies that scream for attention.

Conclusion

Google and the open-source community have given us the blueprint with AlphaEarth. They proved that pixel-level, spatiotemporal embeddings are the superior way to model our changing planet.

But the mission requires more than commercial data. It requires the fusion of every sensor and every secret. By building this multi-modal embedding model—fusion at the pixel level—we can stop looking for needles in haystacks and start using a magnet.

This is the future of GEOINT. We have the data. We have the mission. It’s time to build the model.

Follow Mark Munsell on LinkedIn.

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Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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EXPERT OPINION — For about a week we experienced significant controversy over the first military attack on alleged narco-trafficker small boats off the coast of Venezuela (and later Ecuador). The controversy began with news that the Secretary of Defense had ordered the Special Operations Command Task Force commander to, “Kill them all.” This was linked to reports that the boat was attacked not once, but twice; the second attack launched with full knowledge that two survivors from the first attack were hanging on the capsized remnants.

Critical commentary exploded, much of it based on the assumption that the “kill them all” order had been issued, and that it was issued after the first strike. Even after the Admiral who ordered the attacks refuted that allegation, critics continued to assert that the attack was, ‘clearly’ a war crime as it was obviously intended to kill the two survivors.

The public still does not know all the details about these attacks. What is known, however, is that Congress held several closed-door hearings that included viewing the video feed from the attacks and testimony from the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the Admiral who commanded the operation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the reaction to these hearings has crystalized along partisan lines. Democratic Members of Congress and Senators have insisted they observed a war crime and called for public release of the video. Republicans, in contrast, have indicated they are satisfied that the campaign is based on a solid legal foundation and that nothing about the attacks crossed the line into illegality.

What is less obvious than the partisan reaction is how what began as a problem for the administration has ended up becoming a windfall. When Senator Roger Wicker, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, announced after the second closed door briefing that he was satisfied with the administration’s legal theory and saw no evidence of a war crime, it provided a signal to the administration that this Congress is not going to interfere with its military campaign. Democrats will try: they will continue to demand hearings, they have asserted violation of the War Powers Act and propose legislation requiring immediate termination of the campaign, and they will continue to insist the U.S. military has been ordered to conduct illegal killings. But so long as the Republican majority is tolerant of this presidential assertion of war power, there is virtually nothing to check it. This so-called ‘double tap’ tested the political waters, and it turns out they are quite favorable for the President.

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From a legal perspective, the reaction to this incident has reflected overbreadth and misunderstanding from both ends of the spectrum. For example, characterizing the second attack as a war crime – or rejecting that conclusion – implicitly endorses the administration’s theory that it is engaged in an armed conflict against Tren de Aragua, an interpretation of international law that has been rejected by almost all legal experts. Equally overbroad has been the assumption that the second attack must have been intended to kill the survivors from the first attack – an assumption that renders that attack nearly impossible to justify, even assuming it was conducted pursuant to a valid invocation of wartime legal authority. But even release of the video would be insufficient to answer a critical question in relation to this assumption: was the second attack directed against the survivors, or against the remnants of the boat with knowledge it would likely kill the survivors as a collateral consequence? Only the Admiral and those who advised him can answer that question. And if the answer is, ‘the remnants, not the survivors’, other difficult questions must be addressed: what was the military necessity for ‘finishing off’ the boat? And, most importantly, why wasn’t it operationally feasible to do something – perhaps just dropping a raft into the water – to spare the survivors that lethal collateral effect?

But the true significance of this incident and the reaction it triggered extends far beyond the question of whether that second attack was or was not lawful; it is the implicit validation of the foundation for the legal architecture the administration seems to be erecting to justify expanding the conflict to achieve regime change in Venezuela. In this regard, it is important to recognize that the Trump Administration is implicitly acknowledging it must situate its campaign and any extension of this campaign within the boundaries of international law, even as it seeks to expand them beyond their rational limits. Understanding this consequence begins with two essential considerations. First, the Trump Administration’s consistent invocation of international legal authority for its counter-drug campaign - albeit widely condemned as invalid – indicates that any expansion of this campaign will be premised on a theory of international legality. Second, that theory will have to align with the very limited authority of a state to use military force against another state enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.

That limited authority begins with Article 2(4) of the Charter, which prohibits a state’s threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any other United Nations member state. This prohibition is not, however, conclusive. Instead, the Charter recognizes two exceptions allowing for the use of force. First, military action authorized by the Security Council as a measure in response to an act of aggression, breach of the peace, or threat to international peace and security. Such authorizations have been used since creation of the U.N., one example being the use of force authorization adopted in 2011 to establish humanitarian safe areas in Libya; the authorization that led to the Libyan air campaign. The reason such authorizations have been infrequent is because any one of the five permanent members of the Security Council (the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Russia) may veto any resolution providing for such authorization for any reason whatsoever. It is inconceivable the U.S. could garner support for such authorization to take military action in and/or against Venezuela, much less even seek such an authorization.

The second exception to the presumptive prohibition on the threat or use of force is the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense enshrined in Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. That right arises when a state is the victim of an actual or imminent armed attack. Furthermore, the understanding of that right has evolved in the view of many states – and certainly the United States – to apply to threats posed by both states and non-state organized armed groups like al Qaeda.

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From the inception of this counter-narcotics campaign the Trump administration has asserted that the smuggling of illegal – and all too often deadly – narcotics into the United States amounts to an ‘armed attack’ on the nation. This characterization – coupled with the more recent designation of fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction – is obviously intended to justify an invocation of Article 51 right of self-defense. As with the assertion that TdA is engaged in an armed conflict with the United States, this invocation has been almost universally condemned as invalid. But that seems to have had little impact on Senators like Wicker or Graham and other Republicans who have indicated they are satisfied that the campaign is on solid legal ground.

To date, of course, the campaign based on this assertion of self-defense has been limited to action in international waters. But President Trump indicated in his last cabinet meeting that he intends to go after ‘them’ on the land – ostensibly referring to members of TdA. So, how would an assertion of self-defense justify extending attacks into Venezuelan territory, and what are the broader implications for potential conflict escalation?

The answer to that question implicates a doctrine of self-defense long embraced by the United States: ‘unable or unwilling.’ Pursuant to this interpretation of the right of self-defense, a nation is legally justified in using force in the territory of another state to defend itself against a non-state organized armed group operating out of that territory when the territorial state is ‘unable or unwilling’ to prevent those operations. It is, in essence, a theory of self-help based on the failure of the territorial state to fulfill its international legal obligation to prevent the use of its territory by such a group. And there have been numerous examples of U.S. military operations justified by this theory. Perhaps the most obvious was the operation inside Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. Many other drone attacks against al Qaeda targets in places like Yemen and Somalia are also examples. And almost all operations inside Syria prior to the fall of the Asad regime were based on this theory.

By implicitly endorsing the administration’s theory that the United States is acting against TdA pursuant to the international legal justification of self-defense, Republican legislators have opened the door to expanding attacks into Venezuelan territory. It is now predictable that the administration will invoke the unwilling or unable doctrine to justify attacks on alleged TdA base camps and operations in that country. But, unlike other invocations of that theory, it is equally predictable that the territorial state – Venezuela, will reject the U.S. legal justification for such action. This means Venezuela will treat any incursion into its territory as an act of aggression in violation of Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, triggering its right of self-defense.

In theory, such a dispute over which state is and which state is not validly asserting the right of self-defense would be submitted to and resolved by the Security Council. But it is simply unrealistic to expect any Security Council action if U.S. attacks against TdA targets in Venezuela escalate to direct confrontation between Venezuela and the U.S. Instead, each side will argue it is acting with legal justification against the other side’s violation of international law.

What this means in more pragmatic terms is that there is a real likelihood a U.S. invocation of the unable or unwilling doctrine could quickly escalate into direct hostilities with the Venezuelan armed forces. At that point, we should expect the administration will treat any effort by Venezuela to interfere with our ‘self-defense’ operations as a distinct act of aggression, thereby justifying action to neuter Venezuela’s military capability.

It is, of course, impossible to predict exactly what the administration is planning vis a vis Venezuela. Perhaps this is all part of a pressure campaign intended to avert direct confrontation by persuading Maduro’s power base to abandon him. But the history of such tactics does not seem to support the expectation Maduro will depart peacefully, or that any resulting regime change will have the impact the Trump Administration might desire. One need only consider how dictators like Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega resisted such pressures and clung to power even when U.S. military action that they had no chance of withstanding became inevitable. Or perhaps the administration will bypass the ‘unable and unwilling’ approach and simply initiate direct action against Venezuela to topple Maduro based on an even more dubious claim of self-defense now that he has been designated part of another foreign terrorist organization.

One thing, however, is certain: the options for extending this military campaign to Venezuela are built upon the feeble foundation that the U.S. is legitimately exercising the right of self-defense against TdA. And now, because of an attack that triggered congressional scrutiny, the administration is in a stronger position politically than ever thanks to Republican legislators endorsing this theory of international legality.

The real issue that was at stake during those closed door hearings was never really whether a possible war crime occurred, although the deaths that have resulted from the ‘second strike’ (like all the deaths resulting from this campaign) are highly problematic. The real issue was and remains the inherent invalidity of a U.S. assertion of wartime legal authority and a congressional majority that seems all too willing acquiesce to an administration that seems willing to bend law to the point of breaking to advance its policy agenda.

Nicolas Maduro is a tyrant who has illegitimately clung to power contrary to the popular will of the Venezuelan people. His nefarious activities and anti-democratic rule justify U.S. efforts to force him out of power and enable restoration of genuine democracy in that country. What it does not justify is constructing a legal edifice built on an invalid foundation to justify going to war against Venezuela to achieve that goal. But now that the Trump administration has tested the political waters, that seems more likely than ever.

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OPINION — China uses a layered approach in the South China Sea that blends military power, paramilitary forces, legal instruments, and political signaling. Beijing has asserted “historic rights” over most of the waterway in the past two decades or so, via the nine-dash line strategy. This strategy overlaps the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of several Southeast Asian states. A 2016 international law tribunal convened under UNCLOS ruled overwhelmingly against these claims. However, China rejected the ruling and continues to behave as before, trying to assert de facto control in the area. This strategy is reinforced by the use of 'official maps', textbooks, and diplomatic statements aiming to slowly set down the notion that the territorial waters there are under a Chinese sphere.

In the Spratly and Paracel Islands, China has transformed reefs since the early to mid 2010s into large artificial islands, where it constructs airfields, ports, radars, and missile sites, dramatically expanding China’s ability to monitor and, if necessary, contest and harass surface and air traffic across much of the South China Sea. They also serve as logistics hubs that support the constant presence of Coast Guard, navy, and militia vessels.

China is testing just how much military risk the United States is willing to face in order to protect its regional allies. Their primary target? The Philippines, an avid American ally in the region.

Chinese coercion directed at Manila is carried out daily not just by destroyers but by white-hulled Coast Guard ships and ostensibly civilian vessels organized as a maritime militia. These platforms ram, water-cannon, block, or sideswipe Philippine vessels and increasingly use tools like signal jamming and close-in maneuvers against Philippine resupply missions to Second Thomas Shoal and patrols near Scarborough Shoal. Actions are calibrated to be intimidating, sometimes injurious, but still below the threshold of what most governments would label “armed attack.”

These efforts go beyond short-term tactics. They are strategic in nature. China appears less focused on legal recognition than on practical control. If foreign militaries and commercial operators must factor in Chinese reactions for transiting, fishing, or exploration, Beijing achieves much of what formal sovereignty would deliver.

For Beijing, the South China Sea is part of the “near seas” in Chinese maritime doctrine, making it a defensive bastion that must be secured. But by employing artificial island bases and sending out to sea a number of maritime patrols, China seeks to disrupt American and allied activities in the South China Sea while advancing its own power projection further east and south, into the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

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Control over “blue national territory” is tightly linked to Chinese Communist Party narratives of national rejuvenation. By standing firm in the South China Sea, it bolsters PRC leadership legitimacy and makes compromise politically costly internally. Essentially, Xi Jinping appears to be aiming for a Sino-centric maritime order in which neighboring states de facto - if not de jure at some point - accept Chinese rule as a fact of life and where outside powers operate only on terms that Beijing deems acceptable.

Washington’s declared aims in the South China Sea are the preservation of the freedom of navigation and overflight according to international law.

To achieve these goals the United States uses a combination of naval power, alliance creation and military capability development. The United States Navy ships often come close to Chinese-held land and other maritime areas that China or others claim illegally. It does the latter to demonstrate that America will not tolerate any of these claims. These are high-profile but relatively short-lived operations. The above policy is enforced by the U.S. 7th Fleet (based in Japan). There are also more bases throughout the region in partnership with the Philippines.

Big, complicated exercises and joint patrols with the Philippines, Japan, Australia and others build interoperability as well as signal that any serious conflict would not take place strictly on a bilateral basis.

American officials who point out to the 2016 decision, stress that disagreements must be settled in compliance with international law and publicly reiterate that the United States - Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty pertains to American armed forces, public ships or aircraft coming under attack in the South China Sea. This has been a more frequent trend in recent years.

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What the U.S. Should Do

The United States should embed U.S. presence in sensitive missions, when Manila consents. Instead of sending out stand-alone destroyer transits, the U.S. ought to incorporate freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) as part of logistics missions or surveillance patrols and multilateral exercises. Publicly, Washington should continue to declare that significant attacks on Philippine government ships and aircraft comes under the Mutual Defense Treaty. The U.S. should reiterate privately to Chinese officials what responses it may evoke from the United States - economic sanctions, change in military posture, joint deployments - so that Chinese leaders know where they are headed if they keep these tactics up.

In addition to donating patrol boats, the United States and allies should also assist the Philippines and potentially other claimant states in fielding new coastal defense missiles, unmanned systems and integrated maritime domain awareness networks. Such instruments make it easier for frontline states to detect and respond to incursions with both greater speed and credibility.

China likes to negotiate one on one — and that’s when it has its own leverage. The United States needs to cultivate overlapping coalitions rather than a simple hub-and-spoke model. Institutionalize 'mini-lateral' groupings; U.S. - Japan - Philippines and U.S. - Australia - Philippines patrols, exercises, and intelligence-sharing agreements would make it more difficult for China to pressure any one state without having to face several others.

Communication links with Beijing such as political and operational hotlines should be tested to ensure they will work under stress. The aim is to be predictable and resolute, to minimize the chances that miscalculation leads to uncontrolled escalation.

The South China Sea has turned into a laboratory for the interaction among power, law and norms in an age of strategic contention. China’s use of maritime power looks to transform disputed waters into a zone over which China can make effective, if not legally exclusive, rules and enforce them through militarized outposts, continuous presence, and the narrative fiction of historical rights.

U.S. policy has preserved core principles - freedom of navigation and treaty commitments - but has not prevented Beijing from strengthening its position or normalizing gray-zone coercion. Washington’s task is not to contain China in absolutist terms, but to ensure that coercive changes to the status quo do not become the region’s operating default. That requires more concrete deterrence at key flashpoints, deeper empowerment of frontline states, and a denser web of regional cooperation - combined with realistic crisis planning to manage the risks that come with sustained great-power competition at sea.

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Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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