"This Depraved Idiot Is Out of Control": With Middle East in Flames, Trump Eyes "Next Conquest"

 

 Donald Trump said late Wednesday that the American military is already looking ahead to its “next conquest” as the Middle East remains embroiled in a deadly military conflict that Trump and his ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unleashed six weeks ago.

In a late-night post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said US forces will remain “in place” and “around” Iran until a “real agreement” is reached to end the war, as the two-week ceasefire the president and Iranian leaders announced late Tuesday hangs by a thread due to Israel’s massive bombardment of Lebanon.

After threatening a “bigger, and better, and stronger” assault on Iran if peace talks collapse, Trump said the US military is “Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest”—even as senior administration officials expressed concerns that the president’s declarations of victory in Iran were premature.

Branislav Slantchev, an international relations expert who teaches political science at the University of California San Diego, wrote in response to Trump’s post that “this depraved idiot is out of control.” “We cannot live this way,” added journalist Marisa Kabas.

Trump, who has bombed more countries than any other president in modern US history despite campaigning on “no new wars,” did not name any potential targets of the American military’s “next conquest” in his Wednesday night post. But the president has lobbed threats against Cuba and Greenland repeatedly in recent months, threatening to seize both island nations by force. Last week, Trump asked Congress to approve a $1.5 trillion military budget for the coming fiscal year—a request that included tens of billions for new battleships and fighter jets.

During a speech at a Saudi-backed investment summit in Miami last month, Trump touted the US military’s illegal attacks on Venezuela and Iran before declaring, “Cuba is next.” “Pretend I didn’t say ⁠that,” the president added.

In a separate Truth Social post Wednesday night, Trump hit out at NATO and characterized Greenland, in all-caps, as a “BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE.”

Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, argued that Trump is “lashing out because his war on a whim did not result in the hoped-for ‘Venezuela’ in Iran but a historic debacle instead.”

The Intercept’s Nick Turse reported last month that amid the Iran war, a top Pentagon official “revealed that US wars in the Western Hemisphere are also expanding, unveiling an effort dubbed ‘Operation Total Extermination.’”

Joseph Humire, the Pentagon’s acting assistant secretary for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, told lawmakers that the US military “supported ‘bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border’” in early March, according to Turse.

“The US–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by ‘ricochet effect’ on March 3, leaving an unexploded 500-pound bomb lying in Colombia’s border region,” Turse reported. 

“In addition to his wars in the Western hemisphere, Trump has also launched attacks on Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during his second term—most of them sites of US conflicts during the war on terror.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams