Using a logo that resembles the United Nations’ but with a gold overlay, U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday launched a new “Board of Peace” that he initially pitched as a forum to resolve the Gaza conflict but has since described as a general international-relations body. On the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Trump said he will chair the board and allow its members to “do pretty much whatever we want to do.” 

At least 50 world leaders have been invited to join, and 25 have accepted, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff claimed on Wednesday. Officials from 19 countries stood beside Trump at a “signing ceremony” Thursday: Bahrain, Morocco, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Mongolia. “Few of the countries that have signed up for the board are democracies,” Reuters notes.

By contrast, the UN has 193 members from around the world and was established 80 years ago in the ruins of the Second World War. Since his first term as president, Trump has been openly hostile to what’s often referred to as the U.S.-led “rules-based order” that emerged after 1945, including NATO and the UN. 

Corruption watch: Members of Trump’s board can obtain “permanent” status by contributing $1 billion in cash within the first year, ABC News reported Tuesday when White House officials were promoting the organization ahead of Davos. Ordinary members will otherwise enjoy “renewable” three-year terms, which dovetails neatly with the conclusion of Trump’s second term in the White House. 

It’s unclear where exactly the board’s money will go or who will oversee it. One U.S. official told ABC, “Funds will sit only in approved accounts at reputable banks,” and claimed “Oversight is enforced through an Audit & Risk subcommittee and an independent annual external audit with published financials.” It’s also unclear how long Trump will serve as its chairman or what its status will be once he departs the White House.

Coverage continues below…

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Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, a newsletter focused on developments affecting the future of U.S. national security, brought to you by Ben Watson. It’s more important than ever to stay informed, so we’d like to take a moment to thank you for reading. Share your tips and feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2018, Trump launched a trade war with China, placing tariffs on Chinese solar panels and washing machines.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin offered to join Trump’s board and pay the billion-dollar “permanent” membership fee, but he said he wants to use Russian frozen assets held in the U.S. to cover the cost, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reported Wednesday from Moscow. 

The Brits said they’re not joining yet since Putin may be involved. Norway, Sweden and France also said they’re not interested. And China—like France and the UK, a permanent member on the UN Security Council—has not yet committed to participate either. 

And by Friday morning, Trump said he had withdrawn his invitation to Canada. Perhaps that’s because Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a speech at Davos Tuesday: “Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” in global affairs. “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” he said (emphasis added). Veteran journalist Jim Fallows called Carney’s address “a speech for the ages” and “a memorable discourse on America's place in the world, by the leader of a U.S. neighbor and former friend.”  

Expert reax: The board “appears to be situated to supplant the United Nations, which is sort of a paradoxical situation, because Trump and his supporters tend not to like global government,” Monica Duffy Toft of Tufts University observed in a Defense One podcast interview that will post later today. 

Trump and his supporters “don't like the UN, yet now he's putting up this sort of parallel structure. So we're in a liminal moment,” and the world appears to be a bit of a “laboratory” in terms of what international order may look like in the months to come, Toft said.  

Here’s some new and unusual reading inspired by Trump’s threats to Greenland and eight of America’s European allies ahead of and during events in Davos. Entitled “Hypothetical Legal Review of Use of the U.S. Military in Greenland,” it’s been drawn up by five experts and posted on Just Security Thursday. 

The authors caveat that it is not an official U.S. government document, though it deliberately resembles one—in particular, a “senior staff judge advocate’s legal analysis” that might arrive on the desk of a general at Special Operations Command or European Command. It was drafted and shared “to illustrate the kind of advice they would have given their commanders in each situation” concerning a U.S. military takeover of the Danish island. “We offer it in the hope that everyone who reads it will ask whether current or future uses of the United States military are supported by comparable legal analyses and, if not, why not,” they advise. 

In other notable commentary this week, “Don't mistake Trump's Venezuela raid for progress on fentanyl,” cautions Jake Braun, former White House acting principal deputy national cyber director, writing Thursday in USA Today. “If we want to stop fentanyl, we have to be honest about where the threat originates and how to defeat it,” he says. 

“Venezuelan cartels traffic oil, migrants and cocaine,” Braun writes. But “the center of fentanyl production…is in northern Mexico, particularly the ‘golden triangle’ region, which is the Sinaloa Cartel's stronghold.” But Sinaloa is not a street gang,” Braun says. “It’s the size of a Fortune 500 company, with global supply chains, chemists, financiers and assassins. In some regions, it can even outfight the government.” 

His advice? Treat it like al-Qaeda, and after substantial surveillance, attack its networks and nodes, finances and communications. The U.S. will also need to “confront the Chinese chemical companies supplying fentanyl precursors. Targeting their investors, customers and access to Western markets would force a choice.” 

Our unofficial award for the most curious read of the week goes to “Betting on War: Prediction Markets and the Corruption of National Security,” written by Alex Goldenberg of the Rutgers University Miller Center on Community Protection and Resilience and published Wednesday at War on the Rocks. 

In additional commentary: “Bombing Iran would shore up its regime,” since such attacks have been shown to stir up nationalism and redirect public anger outward, warns Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at the Defense Priorities think tank. 

Additional reading: 

• “‘Pain, betrayal, sadness’: Danish veterans describe shock of Trump admin rhetoric,” NPR’s Barbara Sprunt reported Friday from Copenhagen; 
• “European Leaders to Propose Greenland Investment and Arctic Security Plans,” the New York Times reported Thursday from Brussels; 
• “British Lawmakers Unite in Anger Over Trump’s Afghanistan War Claim,” the Times reported Friday from London; 
• “Russian hybrid warfare has become indistinguishable from politics,” Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Thursday; 
• And “France's navy intercepts an oil tanker in the Mediterranean sailing from Russia,” the Associated Press reported Thursday from Paris. 

Around the Defense Department

As the White House prepares nearly 2,000 active-duty troops for possible deployment to Minneapolis, Vice President JD Vance visited the city rocked by violent and aggressive immigration raids and blamed the “far left” for unrest, AP reported Thursday. 

Despite calm in the city before ICE agents flooded the region with five times as many agents as police, Vance claimed Thursday, “We’re doing everything that we can to lower the temperature.” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz disagreed, and wrote on social media, “Take the show of force off the streets and partner with the state on targeted enforcement of violent offenders instead of random, aggressive confrontation.” 

AP reminds readers the Justice Department has launched an investigation into Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey “over whether they have obstructed or impeded immigration enforcement through their public criticism of the administration. Walz and Frey have described the investigation as an attempt to bully the political opposition.”

Regarding Trump possibly invoking the Insurrection Act for those 2,000 or so troops, “Right now, we don’t think that we need that,” Vance said Thursday. 

Survey says: 63% of Americans say they disapprove of how ICE is doing its job, and only 36% approve, according to new polling published this week from the New York Times. That includes 70% of independent voters who disapprove of ICE’s tactics in the wake of Renee Good’s death, a 37-year-old woman killed in Minneapolis by an ICE officer earlier this month.

Trump attacked the survey results on social media, writing, “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense.” He also claimed he would sue the Times for publishing the survey.  

Additional reading: 

• “Minneapolis ICE Standoff Has Become the Political Issue CEOs Can’t Ignore,” the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday;
• And “‘Enough Is Enough’: Hundreds of Minnesota Businesses Take Stand Against ICE,” the New York Times reported Friday.  

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is visiting Arkansas today while Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is in the Middle East helping negotiate next steps in the White House’s talks involving Ukraine and Russia, Politico’s Paul McCleary reports. Driscoll is in the UAE along with real estate billionaire and U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff; Witkoff reportedly requested Driscoll’s participation. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is tagging along as well. 

Hegseth is stopping by Camden, Arkansas, to deliver remarks and take photos as part of his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour across the states. “The tour will highlight the urgent need to rebuild our Defense Industrial Base (DIB) to ensure that we continue President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s peace through strength agenda,” Hegseth’s office said in a press release. 

By the way: Camden is where L3Harris’s solid rocket motor development takes place. 

Meanwhile at Georgia’s Fort Benning army base, U.S. military leaders at the forefront of troops’ training, health, and readiness are shifting their focus from creating "super-athletes" to building and maintaining the ability to wield the weapons and systems of an ever-more-robotified battlefield, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported this week on location. 

“We're moving away from this kind of antiquated idea of very visceral combat experiences” that turn on “the ability to run and ruck,” said Drew Hammond, a human-performance specialist who has worked extensively with U.S. Special Operations Command. Hammond spoke at the Human Performance Symposium, which gathered human-performance leaders and experts at this Georgia base long known as the home of the infantry and more recently as the center of Army training for maneuver—the tactical movement of soldiers and equipment to gain an advantage over enemies. (The conference was organized by FBC, a corporate sister of Defense One.)

Why Fort Benning? All future company and troop commanders, as well as about two-thirds of platoon leaders, come through the base for training. That’s one reason why the fort is also the home to the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness Academy, which is to dramatically expand in the coming year. Continue reading, here. 

And lastly this week: The U.S. is looking for batteries with at least four times the juice. The Department of Energy’s research arm is giving six teams up to $15 million to produce prototypes of manufacturable next-generation energy storage within two years, Defense One’s Lauren C. Williams reported Thursday. 

“We want to develop a system, a battery system or an energy system, that has four times the energy density of lithium ion batteries that we have today,” said James Seaba, program director at Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E.

If successful, the technology could enable military drones, robots, and aircraft of far greater capability and use, Williams writes. Batteries have become indispensable on the battlefield, powering troop-carried systems, drones, and more. But many are made of materials and components from China, which is working on next-gen batteries of its own; and so the Pentagon is seeking new energy-storage technologies that can be made closer to home.

The competition includes teams from Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland – College Park, Illinois Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Connecticut-based Precision Combustion, and more. Read more, here. 

That’s it for us this week. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you again on Monday!

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State leaders who want to curb the increasingly violent arrest tactics of immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere are struggling to push back.

They’ve promised civil rights legislation that could offer alleged victims another route to courts, ordered up official tribunals to gather video and other records, or asked cities to refuse requests to cooperate with raids. But for the most part, states looking for concrete ways to push back find themselves largely hamstrung.

Violence in immigration enforcement is on the rise. A federal immigration agent’s killing of Renee Good in Minnesota on Jan. 7 was one of half a dozen shootings since December. An immigrant’s death in a Texas detention facility this month was ruled a homicide. And detention deaths last year totaled at least 31, a two-decade peak and more than the previous four years combined.

There also have been dozens of cases in the past year of agents using dangerous and federally banned arrest maneuvers, such as chokeholds, that can stop breathing.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks and tactical vests have been recorded firing pepper spray into the faces of protesters, shattering car windows with little warning, punching and kneeing people pinned face down on the ground, using battering rams on front doors, and questioning people of color about their identities.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has defended many recorded incidents as legitimate uses of force against dangerous people. And some Republican state lawmakers have said they’ll work to bolster ICE’s work within their borders.

Some lawmakers, legal experts and immigrant advocates worry about whether a lack of oversight from the federal government and the weak positions of state governments could give rise to even more violence as President Donald Trump continues his push to arrest immigrants who are living illegally in the United States.

Previous administrations have prioritized arresting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally who also have criminal records, but that isn’t the case in Trump’s second term.

“You can’t go after a murderer and a garden-variety immigration violator like a poor nanny or a poor landscaper with equal emphasis. This administration has abandoned all discretion and all priorities, and you create this narrative that you’re doing this patriotic, godly thing,” said Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney and policy expert at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Chishti said there has been a surge in abusive tactics that comes from a series of federal policies. He cited the massive infusion of inexperienced officers under heavy pressure to make arrests, the military-style tactics meant to create spectacle and fear, and the harsh rhetoric aimed, he said, at instilling warlike hostility toward immigrants and protesters.

More agents, more incidents

The number of ICE law enforcement agents doubled in less than a year, with Homeland Security announcing this month it has hired 12,000 new agents out of some 220,000 applicants. More agents have surged into cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis, their semiautomatic weapons, bulky vests and balaclavas often contrasting with local police officers wearing name badges and carrying sidearms.

Noem has insisted that ICE and other officers are the real victims of increased violence, citing instances like one on Jan. 14, when a man was shot in the leg by an ICE agent. She said in a news release that bystanders struck an officer with a snow shovel and broom handle in Minneapolis as the officer tried to catch a fleeing suspect. Noem called it “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” in which, “ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired a defensive shot to defend his life.”

Court papers released Jan. 20 included an officer’s account of only two assailants, the suspect and a friend who owned the car he had been driving, and said the injured suspect was trying to escape into the apartment building and that tear gas had been used to force the men to surrender.

Noem, who claimed Monday that more than 10,000 immigrants have been arrested in Minnesota, has described some people living in the U.S. illegally as “foreign invaders.” She characterized Good’s shooting as self-defense against “an act of domestic terrorism.”

And in a press briefing Tuesday, Trump told reporters that the people being deported “make our criminals look like babies. They make our Hells Angels look like the sweetest people on Earth.”

Such descriptions have become a tool that incites violence, Chishti said.

“When they say that they were doing God’s work with Renee Good, that she was a domestic terrorist, when you frame it that way from the highest leadership of the agency, you’re basically sending a signal that there’s no accountability,” he said.

Democrats push back

State leaders who say they’re worried about violence are trying different approaches, though they can’t completely curb federal policies.

New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul said state resources would not be used to assist in immigration raids, citing the shooting of Good. But local agencies in New York could still use other funds to help with raids.

New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called for curbs on immigrant detention in the state, though two of three existing detention centers there could still continue to operate.

Colorado has launched a new system for claims of misconduct by federal agents, including ICE agents.

Some Republican-led states are taking the opposite tack, with Tennessee proposing legislation that would go beyond cooperation with federal immigration by setting up its own state immigration laws. If enacted, it would test the limits of a 2012 Supreme Court decision that struck down state-based immigration enforcement based on a similar Arizona law.

Tennessee is using White House guidance to draft the legislation, and other states are likely to follow. That would create new civil rights concerns if states pick up some of the same tactics as the federal government.

“That’s another way of unleashing the states, not only to work with the federal government, but also to acquiesce in the states’ enactment of their own immigration enforcement, detention, and removal regimes,” said Lucas Guttentag, a Stanford Law School professor who runs a project tracking federal immigration policy, speaking in a May interview published by Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law.

Combating the federal moves is already fraught, said Guttentag, who has served in immigration policy positions in the Obama and Biden administrations.

“No single political strategy can change it,” Guttentag told Stateline this week. “But litigation has proven both critical and effective in limiting some of the most egregious violations. The violence is a clear violation.”

It’s hard to police an administration that constantly pushes legal boundaries, Guttentag added.

“It’s like a ‘catch me if you can’ administration. They adopt tactics and basically challenge anyone to try to stop them.”

Two former federal prosecutors, Kristy Parker and Samantha Trepel, argued for state civil rights legislation and investigation in a Jan.14 op-ed published in The Guardian with the headline “Cities and states must hold ICE accountable for violence. The feds won’t.”

Accountability commissions — like one created by Illinois in October after ICE operations there — can help, they wrote, preserving evidence and gathering testimony in the face of federal obstruction, like the blocking of a state investigation into Good’s death in Minnesota.

Potential civil-rights legislation

Another method mentioned by the former prosecutors: State civil rights legislation could theoretically give people harmed by federal agents a hearing in state court under a legal concept called “converse-1983.”

New York’s Gov. Hochul has proposed such legislation. A similar Wisconsin measure died in July when the Republican majority on the Assembly judiciary committee would not give it a hearing, said Democratic Rep. Andrew Hysell, the bill’s sponsor.

“It’s a positive approach to preserving our rights here in Wisconsin, our constitutional rights, because you can no longer count on the federal government to do that,” Hysell said. “In the situations we’ve seen in Minnesota, the federal government is crossing the line into what appears to be violations of constitutional rights.”

However, the idea of “converse-1983” has yet to be used successfully to sue a federal agent, and might never succeed, said John Preis, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

“I would be shocked if converse-1983 [lawsuits] went anywhere,” Preis said. “States may not enact laws that impede federal officers who were doing their jobs. A converse-1983 action would seem to do this.”

However, in some cases, such as the shooting death of Renee Good, victims may be able to successfully sue the federal government without such a state law, Preis said. The process is difficult but the lawsuit could succeed if a constitutional civil rights violation can be proven, he said. Attorneys for Good’s family announced Jan. 14 that they were considering a lawsuit.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

This story was originally published by Stateline.

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