President Trump threatened Colombia with tariffs and sanctions after the country’s leader briefly halted U.S. Air Force deportation flights over the weekend, demanding U.S. officials treat the deported migrants with dignity instead of transporting them in shackles and chains.
Rewind: “A migrant is not a criminal and must be treated with the dignity that a human being deserves,” President Gustavo Petro wrote on social media Sunday morning. “That’s why I turned back the US military planes that were carrying Colombian migrants,” he said. Trump responded with a 25 percent tariff threat on all Colombian imports, and promised to raise that to 50 percent after a week. Petro responded with his own retaliatory tariffs of 25 percent on U.S. imports, and later wrote that those tariffs would rise to 50 percent.
“You don’t like our freedom, fine,” Petro wrote online. “I do not shake hands with white enslavers,” he said, and added in his own warning, “Overthrow me, President, and the Americas and humanity will respond.” However, just hours later, Petro had changed his tune publicly and agreed to accept the detained migrants.
- By the way: “Early on Friday, Guatemala received two U.S. Air Force jets carrying around 160 deportees in total, making it one of the first countries to publicly receive such flights,” the New York Times reports.
Colombia will now use its “presidential plane ready to facilitate the return of Colombians who were going to arrive in the country this morning on deportation flights,” Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo said in a statement Sunday evening.
So what changed? The deported Colombians will be sent in “decent conditions, as citizens subject to rights,” Murillo said. He also noted he will travel to the U.S. in the coming days for further talks with officials in Washington.
The White House says Colombian officials agreed to “unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay,” according to its own statement Sunday evening. Reuters notes “The statement did not specifically say that the agreement included military flights, but it did not contradict the White House announcement.”
Big-picture messaging: Trump’s Colombia’ threats are “a warning to US allies and adversaries alike,” the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher and Ione wells report. And that warning is “If you don’t co-operate with the US, the consequences will be severe,” the two journalists explain.
Update: The 101st Airborne Division says it’s sending military police to the U.S.-Mexico border region to “work together with the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection.” That includes the division’s 716th Military Police Battalion. More, here.
Trendspotting:
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and Patrick Tucker, with Bradley Peniston. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2010, Apple introduced the iPad.
Trump 2.0
Trump and SecDef Hegseth’s first military target: DEI. With several new executive orders, President Trump will soon formally end diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the U.S. military, and he plans to reinstate service members who refused COVID vaccines, Reuters reported Monday morning from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s first day on the job.
ICYMI: Hegseth’s nomination was confirmed in a close, late-night Senate vote Friday, with Vice President JD Vance providing the tiebreaking vote.
Trump will also soon formally ban transgender service members from serving, the New York Post reports. CNN confirmed their reporting, citing two White House officials.
Shortly after arriving to the Pentagon Monday, Hegseth told reporters, “Today, there are more executive orders coming, we fully support, on removing DEI inside the Pentagon, reinstating troops who were pushed out because of Covid mandates, Iron Dome for America — this is happening quickly, and as the secretary of defense, it’s an honor to salute smartly as I did as a junior officer and now as the secretary of defense to ensure these orders are complied with rapidly and quickly,”
You may wonder: What is “Iron Dome for America”? Veteran nuclear policy wonk Joe Cirincionne explored the idea over the summer in a commentary for Defense One, here.
Return of the confederacy? Also on Monday, “Hegseth referred to Fort Moore and Fort Liberty by their previous names, Fort Benning and Fort Bragg,” Reuters writes, and notes these were Hegseth’s first remarks to reporters as America’s new Pentagon chief. (After five years living there, one of your correspondents is still conditioned to call the latter Fort Bragg, and it often takes a moment to update the old habit.)
By the way, Air Force officials did an about-face over the weekend in terms of teaching new recruits about the Tuskegee Airmen. The Associated Press reported Sunday that the service “removed training courses with videos of its storied Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs—the female World War II pilots who were vital in ferrying warplanes for the military—to comply with the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.”
But after a public uproar, service officials reportedly vowed to immediately restore the clips for its basic training curriculum. The San Antonio Express News has more.
Who are the Tuskegee airmen? Black U.S. Air Force pilots whose segregated 332nd Fighter Group compiled one of World War II’s best bomber-escort records.
For those who still read books, there are several good ones about the Airmen, including general histories, a timeline, and a memoir. Those wishing to learn more about the exploits of the Women Airforce Service Pilots should check out 2021’s The Women with Silver Wings.
Related reading:
Ukraine developments
New commander takes over in Ukraine’s east. Ukraine’s military replaced the commander of its eastern forces after Russia captured another town. Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi, commander of ground forces, will take over for Brig. Gen. Andriy Hnatov, following an announcement that Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from Velyka Novosilka in the country’s eastern region of Donetsk. Reuters has more.
View from Kyiv: In an address Sunday night, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the move as a means of “strengthening of the command structure” of the forces in the east. Drapatyi will keep his position as commander of land forces.
Panning out: It’s the third time in a year that Ukraine has replaced the commander of forces in the eastern hub of Pokrovsk.
Bigger picture: In September Zelenskyy said that the winter months would prove critical for Ukraine. “I believe that this winter is a turning point, and it can lead to the rapid de-occupation of Ukraine,” he said. “If we were a little stronger with weapons we would de-occupy faster.”
Developing: North Korea is on the brink of sending more troops to Russia, South Korea’s military announced Friday, according to Yonhap news agency. An assessment from South Korea’s spy agency says that North Korea has lost 300 troops and seen 2,700 wounded of the 11,000 sent to Russia.
Industry
Has China hit an AI Sputnik? The newest entrant to the generative AI field, a Chinese-based app called DeepSeek, has investors worried The Wall Street Journal and Reuters say. Why? AI companies are attracting billions of dollars to build out computing infrastructure to run generative AI models but DeepSeek’s models work as well as OpenAI’s on many tasks, according to a paper from company officials and researchers, and do so with a fraction of the chips (the company’s claims are not independently verified.)
It’s hammering Nvidia stocks and suggests that the United States may be losing ground in the quest to more powerful, cheaper AI programs. Following a surge in sign-ups over the weekend, DeepSeek is reportedly limiting new users to those with a mainland China phone number.
Commentary: The U.S. military is adopting AI way too fast, according to a New York Times op-ed from the AI Now Institute’s Heidy Khlaaf and Sarah Myers West.
Building off of their previous research, Myers and Khlaaf note that integrating large language models into military operations can speed up combat, but that acceleration can come at the price of accuracy. For example, “A 2021 test of one experimental target recognition program revealed an accuracy rate as low as 25 percent, a stark contrast from its professed rate of 90 percent,” they note.
And lastly: The CEO of General Atomics sent a letter to Elon Musk’s advisory panel on government efficiency (PDF) one week after the CEO of L3harris sent his own letter to Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. In the letter, CEO Linden Blue identifies “areas that deserve special interest” that can be fixed to improve how the Pentagon buys and builds weapons. His suggestions: use special contracting authorities to make contracting faster and simpler; fix foreign military sales so that fewer officials (across both the Defense Department and the State Department) are responsible; and reform the the Missile Technology Control Regime to focus rules more on weapons of mass destruction and less one drones.
Read the full article here
