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Thousands of people gathered outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Friday evening to protest Trump’s takeover of the building and his threat to shut it down or even demolish it unless his name goes onto the facade. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of the District of Columbia has ordered the board of the center to give 30 days’ notice before making any major physical changes to the building.
Recognizing the leeway the courts have given him over anything that falls under “national security,” Trump this morning decided to take a proactive approach to making sure the courts don’t stop his triumphal arch. He announced on social media:
“At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!”
This is the same justification he made for his ballroom where the East Wing used to be. When it became clear that his claim to need an entertainment space up to his aesthetic standards would not fly, he began to claim that the ballroom is imperative for national security. We have since learned that there already is a secure space under the White House, built in secret during President Barack Obama’s administration.
Dan Diamond reported in the Washington Post last Wednesday, September 16, that officials from the National Park Service have agreed that the construction will adversely affect Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, and several dozen other historical sites, but urged those concerned about historic preservation to sign on to the project through a memorandum of agreement that will stand as approval by noon tomorrow anyway.
The document asserts that the arch is supposed “to celebrate 250 years of American independence by honoring America’s founding principles.” Now Trump says the arch is imperative for “National Security purposes” and will have drones and snipers.
Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, responded to the request to sign the document: “This is not consistent with NPS practice, NPS regulations, or the intent of the National Historic Preservation Act.”
While Trump suggests he will defend the United States from atop his triumphal arch, our European allies are much more concerned with Russia’s drone strike last Sunday on a passenger train traveling from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Warsaw, Poland. The train was just over a mile—two kilometers—from the Polish border when the drone hit at a border crossing. The drone hit just after a convoy carrying former leaders and high-level diplomats, including former U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson, had passed through.
The train operators were warned of the coming drone and no one was hurt, but European leaders widely interpreted the strike so close to Poland as, in the words of Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative for foreign and security policy, “clearly a message to the western world.”
Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Twelve nations founded NATO in 1949 to resist Soviet aggression. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO’s mission shifted toward crisis management, and then to resisting the aggression of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
Over the years, NATO has grown to include 32 countries, 30 of which are in Europe (the U.S. and Canada are the two NATO countries in North America). The success of their collective defense system rests on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack against any one member of NATO will be treated as an attack against all of them. So a threat to Poland threatens all the NATO countries.
Russia has been pushing NATO countries with what European leaders call “hybrid attacks.” Rather than launching classic military attacks, Putin has been allowing drones to go into NATO airspace, cutting undersea telecommunications networks on which European countries depend, and possibly placing bombs on a train in France.
Russia has been a bad actor for years, destabilizing NATO countries by flooding them with disinformation that affects elections, paying for political parties, bribing politicians, and so on. But the increase in Russian provocations now seems to be related to Putin’s attempt to undercut European support for Ukraine as Ukraine’s drones have brought the war home to Russia’s oil industry and to the Russian people.
In a speech on Wednesday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, former prime minister of the Netherlands, noted that “Russia wants to stop us helping Ukraine—but their actions will only lead us to do more for Ukraine.”
Kurt Volker, who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush, told NPR’s Elissa Nadworny that President Trump “has largely looked at all of this and said, that’s a European problem. He doesn’t feel a threat to the United States from Russia, and he doesn’t see a need for the U.S. to increase its pushback on Russia at all.” “I disagree with this,” Volker said. “I think that we have a vested interest in freedom and free people everywhere being safe and prosperous. It creates a better world for us.”
Trump’s stand is interesting in light of news that Russia has been helping Iran in its fight against the United States, sending upgraded munitions as well as satellite imagery and targeting data to hit U.S. forces in the Middle East.
Last week, CNN reported that fourteen Russian spy satellites moved over the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, used by the U.S., two days before a devastating March 27 attack by Iran. A CNN investigation showed that the spacecraft had access to a large spectrum of data. U.S. officials and international intelligence sources told CNN that the information the satellites gathered helped Iranian forces conduct some of its most precise attacks against American forces and assets.
Two months later, a Russian close to Putin footed the bill for a three-day celebration for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding to Bettina Anderson. According to Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica, Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the event, held on private islands in the Bahamas.
On Tuesday, September 15, the Department of Justice announced charges against five people working for Russian intelligence “to conduct attacks and murders around the world, including in the United States.” The indictment alleges that a network of Russian hit men has operated since at least 2024 and has recruited U.S. citizens to surveil and murder people, intending to target “all the countries that are helping Ukraine.” As Daniel Boffey and Andrew Roth of the Guardian note, it was an unwritten rule of the Cold War that Russia would not attack people in the U.S. (although Russian agents are widely believed to be behind the murder of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov in Moscow in 2004).
On September 16, Congress passed a major sanctions package targeting Russian officials, the energy sector, financial institutions, and the “shadow fleet” of tankers that get around sanctions by using shell corporations and flying under the flags of countries with a loose regulatory system. The measure is named the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, in honor of the late South Carolina senator.
But on Thursday, September 17, Anton Troianovski of the New York Times reported that Trump is suggesting Putin will be more willing to end his war if the U.S. makes business deals with Russia regardless of whether it stops its assault on Ukraine. In February, Troianovski reported that Gentry Beach, a Texas investor with ties to the Trumps, signed an agreement last fall with one of the biggest energy companies in Russia to develop Alaska’s natural gas resources.
According to a September 14 piece by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker, the Trump administration has essentially privatized U.S. foreign policy for their own interests. The “generally held view,” a former U.S. official told Filkins, is that Russia has offered administration officials and their allies business deals in exchange for their supporting Russian demands against Ukraine. A classified report a European intelligence agency provided to Filkins lists Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, special envoy Steve Witkoff, former envoy Richard Grenell, and Gentry Beach as people who might participate in any of ten money-making ventures on the table.
The world, and the place of the United States in it, is changing fast. In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “shameful” that European allies did not help the U.S. attack on Iran and said the U.S. would review its military commitments to Europe. On September 17, Dan De Luce, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, and Abigail Williams of NBC News reported that the Pentagon is weighing a plan to pull tens of thousands of troops and weapons, ships, and planes out of Europe despite the warnings of NATO allies about Russia’s increasingly aggressive moves.
In Wednesday’s speech, Rutte outlined what he called NATO 3.0. If NATO 1.0 was the phase of the organization that pushed back against the Soviet Union and NATO 2.0 was the period from then until now, he said, NATO 3.0 is one in which the weight of NATO shifts away from the United States and toward the United Kingdom, Europe, and Canada.
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Notes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b432bfa4-ff64-4fed-8543-337490a98a5a.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/06/russia-iran-intelligence-us-targets/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/us/trump-putin-russia-sanctions.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/us/politics/trump-russia-deals-novatek.html
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/us-troops-europe-nato-3tpm5hqw2
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/09/21/jared-kushners-dollar-diplomacy