标签： North America

Six weeks after former U.S. President Donald Trump partnered with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to launch a military conflict that has left the Middle East mired in deadly violence, the commander-in-chief has stoked global alarm with a provocative late-night boast that the U.S. military is already eyeing its “next conquest.”

The controversial remark came in a Wednesday evening post to Trump’s Truth Social platform, where he outlined that U.S. forces would remain deployed near and within Iranian territory until Washington secures what he calls a “real agreement” to end the ongoing hostilities. The timeline of the comment comes just one day after a fragile two-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was announced, a truce that already hangs in the balance following Israel’s large-scale bombardment of neighboring Lebanon.

Trump doubled down on aggression in the same post, threatening that Washington would launch a “bigger, and better, and stronger” attack on Iran if negotiations fail to deliver his desired outcome. He then added that the U.S. military is “Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest.” The inflammatory statement has already sparked pushback even within his own administration, with multiple senior national security officials privately acknowledging that Trump’s claims of imminent victory in Iran are dangerously premature.

International relations scholars and political observers have roundly condemned the president’s remarks. Branislav Slantchev, a political science professor specializing in global affairs at the University of California San Diego, wrote in response to the post that “this depraved idiot is out of control.” Journalist Marisa Kabas echoed that outrage, adding simply, “We cannot live this way.”

Critics have long highlighted a stark contradiction in Trump’s foreign policy: despite running for office on a pledge of “no new wars,” he has ordered military strikes in more countries than any modern U.S. president in history. In his Wednesday post, Trump did not name a specific target for what he called the military’s “next conquest,” but context makes clear potential targets are no mystery. Over recent months, Trump has repeatedly issued violent threats against both Cuba and Greenland, openly threatening to seize both territories by force. In a separate Truth Social post the same night, Trump derided Greenland in all capital letters as a “BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE.”

Just last week, Trump submitted a formal request to Congress for a $1.5 trillion military budget for the upcoming fiscal year, a proposal that allocates tens of billions of dollars for new battleships and fighter jets. The expansionist rhetoric lines up with comments he made one month prior at a Saudi-backed investment summit held in Miami, where he celebrated past U.S. military strikes on Venezuela and Iran before bluntly declaring, “Cuba is next.” He quickly added, “Pretend I didn’t say that,” after making the remark.

Foreign policy analysts argue that Trump’s aggressive rhetoric is a reaction to a costly failure of his Iran war gambit. Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, explained 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.”

Reporting from last month by The Intercept’s Nick Turse adds context to expanding U.S. military operations even beyond the Middle East. Turse revealed that amid the ongoing Iran conflict, a top Pentagon official unveiled a new Western Hemisphere initiative dubbed “Operation Total Extermination,” targeting armed groups across the Americas. Joseph Humire, the Pentagon’s acting assistant secretary for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, told Congress that the U.S. military backed joint kinetic strikes against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border in early March. Turse’s reporting confirmed that the cross-border campaign has already spilled into Colombian territory: on March 3, a Colombian farm was hit by errant fire or a ricochet from the strikes, leaving an unexploded 500-pound bomb abandoned in the country’s border region. Since taking office for his second term, Trump has launched offensive military operations not only in Iran but also in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — most of which were long-running theaters of conflict from the post-9/11 war on terror.

Beyond his threats of new conquests, Trump has also lashed out at U.S. allies over their refusal to back his unauthorized Iran war, while simultaneously demanding they help clean up the geopolitical and economic disaster the conflict created. In his post attacking Greenland, he launched an all-caps tirade against NATO member states that declined to deploy troops to a conflict Trump launched without any prior consultation or alliance approval: “NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN.”

Just hours after that tirade, multiple sources confirmed to Bloomberg that Trump is now demanding NATO allies draft concrete plans to mitigate the crisis he created. According to Thursday’s Bloomberg reporting, Washington is pushing for “specific commitments from European allies on their pledge to help secure the Strait of Hormuz after the fighting in Iran stops,” and has given allies just days to present detailed operational plans for guaranteeing open navigation through the strategic waterway. This is not the first time Trump has pressured allies to deploy forces to the strait: last month, he attempted to strong-arm European nations into sending their navies to the region to support commercial shipping security, but every participating nation rejected the request.

Even the core objective of the ceasefire Trump announced last Tuesday remains unmet more than 24 hours later: the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints, remains completely closed to most commercial traffic, just as it has been since the war began more than a month ago. Bloomberg’s Thursday reporting confirmed that ship traffic through the strait has “remained blocked,” being “limited to a handful of Iran-linked ships, another sign that a fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran has yet to improve flows through the world’s key energy chokepoint.”

The ongoing closure has already shaken global energy markets: Brent crude futures initially dropped sharply when the ceasefire was announced, but have steadily climbed back toward the $100 per barrel mark as the closure continues.

Given that Trump has failed to deliver even the most basic outcome of his own ceasefire deal, many analysts and policymakers are questioning why U.S. allies should step in to resolve a crisis he created. Dominic Waghorn, international affairs editor at Sky News, observed that “neither a military escort nor military force can reopen the Strait, short of a full scale occupation of southern Iran – and even then insurgents could keep it closed with the threat of action.” Prominent economist Dean Baker has urged U.S. allies to outright reject Trump’s demand, writing that “The European countries should specifically commit to pay the toll Iran is requesting.” White House correspondent SV Dáte of HuffPost summed up Trump’s approach to the crisis in one blunt line: “I broke it, someone else can fix it.”

Last month, the White House issued a formal warning to all its employees prohibiting the use of non-public, insider information to place speculative trades on online prediction markets, according to multiple sources familiar with the internal communication. The cautionary email, first brought to public attention by the Wall Street Journal, was distributed to White House personnel on March 24. This timing came exactly one day after former U.S. President Donald Trump announced a five-day halt on his public threat to launch military strikes against Iranian power plants and national energy infrastructure. The advisory was prompted by existing press reporting that raised widespread alarms over potential improper activity by U.S. government officials on popular prediction platforms including Kalshi and Polymarket. When approached for comment by the BBC, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle pushed back on suggestions of any wrongdoing by administration members, noting that all insinuations of improper trading by current administration officials are unsubstantiated, baseless claims that amount to irresponsible journalism. Ingle further clarified that every federal employee working within the executive branch is already bound by strict federal government ethics regulations that explicitly ban the use of confidential insider information to secure personal financial gain. “The only special interest that will ever guide President Trump is the best interest of the American people,” Ingle added in his official statement. The BBC has reached out to both Kalshi and Polymarket to request their perspective on the warning and broader concerns around insider trading on their platforms, and as of this reporting, neither company has issued an official public response. This latest incident is not the first time prediction markets have come under regulatory and public scrutiny. Back in January, Polymarket faced intense public and congressional scrutiny after an anonymous gambler netted nearly half a million dollars from a bet that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would be captured, placing the wager just hours before the capture was officially announced to the public. To date, the identity of the bettor remains unknown, with the only trace of the account being an alphanumeric blockchain identifier tied to the transaction. The unconfirmed but widely discussed incident sparked major questions over whether the anonymous bettor had obtained advance insider knowledge of the U.S. military operation that led to Maduro’s capture, profiting illegally from non-public information. Prediction markets, which have seen explosive growth in mainstream popularity over the past 12 months, currently host more than $44 billion (equivalent to roughly £33 billion) in total cumulative trades across major platforms. While the majority of bets placed on these platforms center on major sports events and entertainment outcomes, users increasingly trade on high-stakes political and economic events, ranging from whether the U.S. Federal Reserve will adjust benchmark interest rates to the projected outcomes of local, state, and national elections.

A dramatic shift in the demographic and geographic origin of refugees admitted to the United States has followed former President Donald Trump’s sweeping overhaul of American refugee policy, newly released U.S. government data confirms, triggering escalating diplomatic tensions between Washington and Pretoria over the targeted resettlement of white South African Afrikaners.

According to data compiled by the U.S. Refugee Processing Center, between October 2025 and the end of the first quarter of 2026, just 4,499 refugees total have been resettled across the United States. Strikingly, all but three of these arrivals — who came from Afghanistan — are South African nationals. This data stands in stark contrast to the final full fiscal year of the Biden administration, which ran from October 2023 to September 2024, when the U.S. welcomed 125,000 refugees from 85 different countries across the globe.

After returning to the presidency, Trump implemented a full pause on all refugee admissions to the U.S., even halting processing for applicants fleeing active war zones and humanitarian crises. The only explicit exception carved out in this policy was for Afrikaners, a white ethnic minority in South Africa who Trump has repeatedly claimed face systemic persecution. This framing has been uniformly rejected by the South African government, which has pushed back aggressively against the U.S. policy.

When announcing the policy shift, Trump framed the change as a measure to bolster U.S. national security and protect domestic public safety. Official policy guidance issued by his administration specified that refugee processing priority would be granted to Afrikaner South Africans alongside what the order called “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”

Diplomatic relations between the two countries have deteriorated rapidly since Trump’s second term began. Just over 12 months ago, South Africa’s ambassador to the U.S., Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled from the country after he publicly accused Trump of “mobilising supremacism” and using the narrative of white victimhood in South Africa as a racial dog whistle to energize his political base.

Tensions boiled over into a high-profile public confrontation during a May 2025 Oval Office meeting between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. During the talks, Trump repeated unsubstantiated claims that white South African farmers were the targets of systematic persecution and what he called “genocide.” Ramaphosa directly refuted these false claims, and received public backing from John Steenhuisen, the white leader of South Africa’s Democratic Alliance — a major political party that is part of the country’s current coalition government.

Steenhuisen told Trump that the vast majority of both commercial and smallholder white farmers in South Africa have no intention of leaving the country, and remain committed to building their lives and livelihoods there. In October 2025, the South African government issued an official rebuke of the U.S. policy to prioritize Afrikaner refugee claims, noting that the widespread narrative of a so-called “white genocide” in South Africa has been repeatedly discredited by independent researchers and lacks any credible, verifiable evidence.

The South African government further pointed to an open letter signed by prominent members of the Afrikaner community itself — including leading academics, business leaders, and even descendants of prominent apartheid-era political figures — that rejected the persecution narrative. Multiple signatories of the letter went so far as to label the U.S. resettlement scheme a fundamentally racist policy.

The first cohort of resettled Afrikaner refugees, numbering 68 people, arrived in the U.S. in May 2025. Arrival numbers have surged sharply in early 2026, with 2,848 South African refugees entering the country between February and March alone. The resettled refugees have spread across the U.S., with the single largest concentration of 543 people establishing new homes in Texas.

In an unexpected, unscripted appearance at the White House on Thursday, former first lady Melania Trump issued a direct, public denial of any personal or professional connection to disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, demanding that all unsubstantiated rumors linking her to the case stop immediately.\n\nAddressing reporters on the South Lawn, Melania Trump pushed back against widespread online conspiracy theories that claim Epstein played a role in introducing her to her husband, former president Donald Trump. She labeled these claims as deliberately malicious attacks designed to damage her personal reputation, calling them “mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation.”\n\nIn a clear, firm statement, she laid out her position on the Epstein case explicitly: “I have never had any knowledge of Epstein abuse of his victims. I was never involved in any capacity. I was not a participant.” She also confirmed that she herself was never victimized by Epstein, reiterating that her connection to the convicted trafficker is entirely non-existent, stating “I never had a relationship with Epstein” and adding that all claims suggesting otherwise “need to end today.”\n\nIn a surprising turn, the former first lady also used the appearance to call on Congress to launch formal hearings centered on the needs and testimonies of Epstein’s survivors of sex trafficking, a move that caught many political observers off guard. As of this report, no clear explanation has emerged for what prompted the sudden public statement, which comes amid renewed public interest in the Epstein case and lingering conspiracy theories surrounding his 2019 death in federal custody.\n\nThis is a developing story, with additional details expected to emerge in the coming hours as reporters follow up on the announcement and congressional leaders respond to Melania Trump’s call for hearings.