#ego-foreign-policy
2 entries with this tag
As the Iran Ceasefire Expired, Trump Threatened to "Bomb the Shit Out Of" Oman — the Neutral Country That Has Quietly Hosted the U.S.-Iran Back-Channel for Years and Is Best Positioned to Broker an End to His Own Faltering War — and Declared the Strait of Hormuz Should Become U.S. Territory
On August 17, 2026, as a 60-day U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement expired, President Trump threatened — according to Fox News reporter Trey Yingst — to "bomb the shit out of" Oman if it "gets in the way." Oman is not an adversary. It is the discreet, trusted neutral that has hosted the back-channel for U.S.-Iran diplomacy for years — the intermediary both Washington and Tehran rely on precisely because it talks to everyone and threatens no one — and it controls one side of the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important oil chokepoint. Threatening to bomb the single government best positioned to help end Trump's own faltering, unwinnable Iran war is the opposite of strategy: it is aimed at the peacemaker, not the enemy, at the very moment his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has been privately hunting for an off-ramp. Trump paired the threat with a separate declaration that the Strait of Hormuz should become U.S. territory — a casual assertion of annexation over an international waterway split between two other sovereign nations, echoing his musings about seizing Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada. It all landed as Iran's army chief announced bounties on American military personnel and the ceasefire lapsed, deepening a war the United States has no military path to win.
Trump Gutted the Joint Military Exercises Defending Ally South Korea — Hours Before They Began — Because Kim Jong Un Is "Unthreatening and Respectful" and "I Understand Him," and to Punish Seoul for Refusing to Join His Iran War, Rewarding the Nuclear Dictator Who Flatters Him at a Democratic Ally's Expense
On August 16, 2026 — hours before they were set to begin — Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to "substantially reduce" the long-scheduled Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military exercises with South Korea, the roughly 18,000-troop drills that keep the mutual-defense alliance ready against a North Korean attack. His reasons: his "very good relationship" with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, and South Korea's refusal to join his war in Iran. The exercises, Trump complained, "send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful." He praised a "very wise and reasoned" Kim decision and said, "I understand him. He understands me." Every premise is false or backwards. Kim Jong Un is not "unthreatening": he has declared North Korea is and always will be a nuclear power, keeps testing missiles, and calls South Korea a hostile enemy. The drills are not a provocation; they are the routine readiness of a seventy-year treaty alliance. And cutting them to punish Seoul for declining an unrelated war treats a democratic ally's defense as a chip to be revoked when it won't follow Trump into a conflict it wants no part of. Asian allies were left visibly nervous — watching an American president weaken a treaty commitment because a nuclear dictator was nice to him.