#foreign
12 entries with this tag
The Same Week a U.N.-Backed Panel Found "Reasonable Grounds" to Believe the United States Committed War Crimes in Trump's Iran War — Bombing an Elementary School and a Residential Area and Killing at Least 178 Civilians, Including Women and Children, With Missiles That Scattered Anti-Personnel Tungsten Pellets — Trump Told the Public, Yet Again, That Iran "Wants a Deal" and the War Was "Hopefully" Nearly Over, a Claim Iran Rejected the Same Day
On September 17, 2026, the U.N. Human Rights Council's independent fact-finding mission on Iran — chaired by the Bangladeshi jurist Sara Hossain — reported "reasonable grounds" to believe the United States committed war crimes in two airstrikes in southern Iran on February 28. The strikes killed at least 178 civilians, including women and children. One hit an elementary school in Minab; the other hit a sports complex and residential area in Lamerd with precision-guided missiles that scattered tungsten pellets, an anti-personnel effect designed to kill people rather than destroy structures. The panel's report is not binding, but it adds to the body of international evidence that could one day be used in court — and, notably, the same mission also accused Iran's theocratic government of crimes against humanity against its own people, so this is not a one-sided indictment. On the very day the war-crimes findings landed, Trump was telling the public something else entirely: that Iran "wants a deal" and the nearly seven-month war was "hopefully" nearing its end. Hours later, an Iranian official rejected talks until "Iran's conditions are met," and there have in fact been no negotiations since June. The juxtaposition is the entry. The war Trump launched on a threat the intelligence never found has now produced credible allegations of American war crimes — a bombed school, 178 dead civilians — and his response is to narrate a peace that the other side says isn't happening.
"This Is Imperialism": Eight Months After U.S. Special Forces Seized Venezuela's President in a Raid on Caracas, Trump Announced the United States Had Taken "Majority Control" of More Than 65 Billion Barrels of Venezuela's Oil — a Stake Second Only to Saudi Aramco — Struck With the Government That Replaced the Leader America Captured, to Paper Over the Record Gas Prices His Own Iran War Created
On August 28, 2026, Trump announced on Truth Social that the United States had secured "majority control" of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's proven oil reserves — through a new company, structured with private business, in which the U.S. would hold a 55% stake and the right to buy oil at cost, making it the second-largest corporate holder of proven reserves in the world after Saudi Aramco. He offered few details. The context is what gives the announcement its weight: in January 2026, U.S. special forces raided Caracas and seized Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, spiriting him to the United States to face narcoterrorism charges. The oil deal was then negotiated with the government that took his place, led by acting president Delcy Rodríguez. So the sequence is: the United States removed a foreign head of state by military force, and then took majority control of his country's oil from the government installed in his wake — to lower American gas prices driven to record highs by Trump's own war in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz standoff. Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, named it in three words on MS NOW: "This is imperialism." Other analysts called it "colonial" and urged Congress to stop it, while critics called it "yet another Trump grift." A superpower seizing a weaker nation's oil after decapitating its government is the oldest story in the imperial book, and the United States just told it out loud.
His Trade War With Canada Collapsing and His Talk of Annexing It as the "51st State" Going Nowhere, Trump Signed an Executive Order Renaming Lake Ontario — a Great Lake the United States Shares With Canada, Bearing a 400-Year-Old Indigenous Wendat Name That Predates Both Countries — to "Lake America," a Decree That Changes Nothing but a U.S. Federal Database and Which Canada Answered in Four Words: "Then, Now and Always"
On August 27, 2026, six days after trade talks with Canada collapsed and he slapped 50% tariffs on some $20 billion of Canadian goods, Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario — one of the Great Lakes, shared along its entire length by the United States and Canada — to "Lake America," effective "immediately." The order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to update the U.S. Geographic Names Information System so that "the lake once known as Lake Ontario will, from this day forward, be known as Lake America." It is the second time Trump has renamed an international body of water for his own country, after decreeing the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America." The trouble is that a president can rename a shared lake only in his own government's databases; he cannot rename it in Canada, which owns the other shore, or anywhere else on Earth. Lake Ontario's name is more than four centuries old, derived from the Wendat word "Ontari'io" — "the lake is beautiful, the lake is big" — predating both the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Canadian Confederation. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney answered that his country will call it Lake Ontario "then, now and always"; Ontario Premier Doug Ford agreed. As CNN dryly put it, Trump couldn't make Canada the 51st state, so he settled for renaming its lake. It is statecraft as tantrum: unable to win the trade fight or the annexation fantasy, he reached for the one thing he could do with a pen — erase a neighbor's name from an American spreadsheet and call it a victory.
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.
The Iran War Trump Started With No Cause Is Now Fracturing His Own Movement: Tucker Carlson, Once His Loudest Media Booster, Calls the War "Disgusting and Evil," Accuses Trump of Betraying America First, Apologized for "Misleading" His Audience Into Voting for Him, and Has Quit the Republican Party to Build Organized Opposition
One measure of a war of choice gone wrong is when the people who cheered the leader loudest turn on him. Tucker Carlson — among Trump's most prominent media backers through the 2024 campaign, and a defining voice of the "America First" movement — has become one of his sharpest adversaries, and the breaking point is the Iran war. Carlson began criticizing the administration's foreign policy in 2025; after the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran in February 2026, the split became a rupture. He has called the war "disgusting and evil," accused Trump of putting Israel's interests ahead of America's, and in April 2026 apologized to his audience on his podcast for having "misled" them into voting for Trump. In June 2026 he announced he was leaving the Republican Party over the war, and his theatrical exit has hardened into organized opposition — with talk of a third-party push that could threaten Trump and the GOP. The specifics of Carlson's critique are his own, and some of his framing is inflammatory. But the political fact is the point: the war Trump launched on a threat the intelligence never found — a war his own top general now privately calls unwinnable — has cost him one of his biggest amplifiers and is fracturing the anti-war, "America First" base that put him in office. The coalition is cracking along the exact fault line the war created.
Trump's Own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Privately Concluded the Iran War He Started Has No Military Path to Victory and Is "Looking for an Off-Ramp" — Airpower Won't Make Iran Fold, the Only "Win" Would Take a Ground Invasion Costing Thousands of American Lives He Refuses to Order, and the U.S. Is Running Out of the Munitions to Keep Bombing
By August 2026 — nearly six months into the war Trump launched against Iran on a threat the intelligence never found — the man Trump put in charge of the entire U.S. military had privately concluded there was no way to win it. CNN reported that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine has told senior Trump advisers the United States needs an "off-ramp," because the available options to escalate could backfire into wider retaliation and airpower alone is unlikely to force Tehran to accept Trump's terms. The trap is of Trump's own making. He wants Iran to capitulate but refuses to order the only thing that could militarily force it — a ground invasion that officials and analysts estimate could cost thousands of American lives (retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey noted even 150,000 troops might not secure the Strait of Hormuz). So the U.S. bombs, and pauses, and bombs again, achieving no decisive result while its own stockpiles run dry: commanders are worried about depleted air-defense interceptors, precision munitions, and offensive missiles, much of it expended in the assault on Iran. It is what one four-star assessment called the "ultimate stalemate" — a war with no military solution inside the president's constraints, roughly 70% of Americans opposed, U.S. troops still dying, and the nation's top general quietly hunting for the exit his commander-in-chief won't take.
Trump Is Now in an Open Feud With the Pope — Demanding the First American-Born Pontiff Stop Criticizing His Wars and Deportations, Questioning Whether Leo XIV Was Even Legitimately Elected, and Summoning a Vatican Diplomat to the Pentagon for a "Bitter Lecture" to Get in Line
A diplomatic rift between the United States and the Holy See that began in early 2026 has escalated into an open feud between Trump and Pope Leo XIV — the first U.S.-born pope. Leo has criticized, on moral and humanitarian grounds, the administration's foreign and domestic conduct: the war on Iran, military action toward Venezuela, the Greenland and Cuba crises, the halting of foreign aid, and the mass-deportation operation known as Operation Metro Surge. Trump's response has not been to answer the criticism but to try to silence the critic. He has demanded that Leo refrain from criticizing U.S. policy, and has gone so far as to question the legitimacy of Leo's election as pope. A top Vatican diplomat was summoned to the Pentagon and given what was described as a "bitter lecture" demanding the Pope get behind Trump. The White House invited Leo to celebrate America's 250th birthday in Washington; he declined. Secretary of State Marco Rubio — himself Catholic — was dispatched to meet the pontiff to manage the damage. It is an extraordinary spectacle: the President of the United States pressuring the Vatican to stop making moral objections to his killing and deporting, and impugning the validity of a papal conclave because the man it chose will not bless his policies. A president confident in the morality of his actions does not need to lecture the Pope into silence.
Trump Declared a "Historic" Agreement to Disarm Hamas and Bring "Lasting Peace" to Gaza — Except Israel Never Publicly Agreed to It, Hamas Says It Won't Give Up a Single Weapon Until Israel Withdraws First, and the Actual Disarmament Plan Doesn't Exist Yet: They Have 14 Days to Try to Write One
On July 30–31, 2026, Trump announced through his U.S.-led "Board of Peace" that mediators from the United States, Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey had reached a "historic agreement" for the "complete disarmament of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza." He called it "a monumental step toward lasting peace and security" and a "major milestone" in his 20-point plan, to be "carried out in carefully structured phases." Read past the superlatives, though, and the announcement describes not a peace but an agreement to attempt to design one. The actual disarmament roadmap does not exist yet — the parties have 14 days to try to draft it, subject to an international verification body and the agreement of all sides. And the two parties who would have to carry it out have not, in fact, agreed on the thing that has sunk every previous round: sequencing. Israel has not publicly signed on to the latest proposal, and its officials remain deeply skeptical Hamas will ever surrender its weapons. Hamas says it will not implement any part of the deal unless Israel first fulfills its obligation to withdraw from Gaza. Disarm-first or withdraw-first is the exact chicken-and-egg that has broken talks for two years — and it remains unresolved under the "historic agreement." Americans have seen this move before: weeks earlier, Trump declared his Iran ceasefire a done, triumphant peace, and it collapsed within a month into the deadliest fighting of the war. The Gaza announcement may yet hold. But the gap between "historic agreement" and what the parties have actually committed to is the whole story.
Trump Is Bombing Iran to Stop It From Enriching Uranium — and in the Same Week Signed a Deal Giving Saudi Arabia a Path to Enrich Uranium, Reversing Decades of U.S. Nonproliferation Policy, Handing the Technology to the Crown Prince Who Ordered Khashoggi's Murder, and Then Denying on Truth Social That His Own Signed Deal Allows Any Enrichment at All
On July 22, 2026 — as U.S. forces waged the deadliest stretch of a war against Iran that Trump justifies as preventing Tehran from enriching uranium — the administration signed a landmark civil-nuclear "123 agreement" with Saudi Arabia that opens a path for the kingdom to enrich uranium itself. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed the 30-year deal, under which U.S. companies would help build the Saudi program, including a potential uranium-enrichment facility pending a joint feasibility study. It reverses the longstanding U.S. "gold standard" that required partner nations to forgo enrichment and reprocessing — the exact capability Trump is dropping bombs on Iran to deny it. Critics called the double standard staggering: Sen. Ed Markey said the administration is "allowing Saudi Arabia, a belligerent and authoritarian nation, to develop nuclear weapons technologies while starting a war with Iran under the guise of preventing an Iranian nuclear bomb." Former Sen. Claire McCaskill, reacting on MSNBC, put it plainly: "It's nuts!" Then Trump contradicted his own government: after officials and the agreement text referenced enrichment, he posted on Truth Social, "There will be no enrichment of material!" He also said the deal hinges on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel. The recipient is the government of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom U.S. intelligence concluded ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The agreement takes effect unless both chambers of Congress pass resolutions to block it within 90 days — meaning it would need a veto-proof supermajority to stop, and almost certainly stands. The message to the world: America's friends may enrich uranium; its enemies get bombed for it — a precedent that guts the nonproliferation regime and hands Iran every reason to seek the bomb.
Trump Announced a 50% Tariff on Canada as Punishment for Wildfire Smoke Drifting Across the Border — Blaming Canada for "Invading" America With "Filthy, Polluted, and Unhealthy Air" — and the Plan Includes a 50% Tariff on the Canadian Firefighting Aircraft the U.S. Relies On to Fight Its Own Wildfires
On July 18, 2026, with more than 900 wildfires burning across Canada, President Trump announced that the United States would hit Canada with a 50% tariff — as punishment for the smoke drifting south. He accused Canada of failing to maintain its forests and declared that the U.S. was being "invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air," saying the "pollution cost" must be added to the tariffs Canada already pays. There are two problems with tariffing a country over smoke. The first is that smoke is not a traded good; it is the product of a hotter, drier climate the administration denies exists, and it crosses the border on the wind regardless of any tariff schedule. The second is worse: the administration's plan includes a 50% tariff on — and potential decertification of — the Canadian-made aircraft that the United States itself depends on to fight wildfires. The specialized water-bombers that Canada builds are contracted by U.S. states and federal agencies precisely because America does not have enough of its own. Making those planes too expensive to keep under contract would degrade U.S. wildfire response — meaning Trump's answer to Canadian wildfire smoke is a policy that would leave America less able to fight the fires, Canadian and American alike, that produce it. It is a tariff on the weather, backed by a tariff on the firefighters.
The Iran Ceasefire Trump Signed and Paraded as a Historic Triumph Collapsed Within Weeks Into Nine Straight Nights of U.S. Airstrikes — Iran Firing Missiles at American Bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, Its New Supreme Leader Calling Trump's Signature "Worthless," and the U.S. Death Toll From a War That Never Had a Reason Still Climbing
The ceasefire and memorandum of understanding Trump signed with Iran last month — and touted as a signature achievement — has collapsed. After an Iranian drone struck a ship in the Strait of Hormuz in early July, Trump declared the ceasefire "over," and the United States launched what became nine consecutive nights of airstrikes across Iran, hitting military command centers, air defenses, coastal surveillance, missile and drone sites, communications networks, and bridges. Iranian health officials reported at least 46 killed and more than 400 wounded since the fighting resumed. Iran retaliated by firing missiles and drones at U.S. bases in the Gulf — including the Ali Al Salem base in Kuwait, where it said it hit an ammunition depot and a Patriot radar — and at facilities in Bahrain and Jordan, injuring Kuwaiti military personnel. Iran announced it was suspending its commitments under the agreement, and its new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei — who succeeded his father Ali Khamenei after the elder was killed in the war's opening U.S.-Israeli strikes — derided Trump's signature on the deal as "worthless" and warned of "unforgettable lessons." Since the war began in late February, at least 16 U.S. service members have been killed and more than 430 wounded. Pakistan and Qatar are scrambling to restart talks. It is the predictable unraveling of a war that, as documented here, was launched without a defensible cause — intelligence had found no imminent Iranian threat — and a "peace" that was announced for the cameras before it was ever secured on the ground.