Category: American Empire

Opening of Strait of Hormuz and End to Israel’s Attacks on Lebanon Parts of Murky Details

By Jason Burke / The Guardian / Mon 15 Jun 2026

A framework peace deal between the US and Iran has been reached, Donald Trump and senior Iranian officials have said, bringing the 15-week conflict to a tentative end and offering hope of relief for the Middle East and the world economy.

The secretariat of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said war and military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon, would end permanently from Monday night.

The precise terms of the deal remain unclear but in a statement posted to Truth Social on Sunday evening, the US president announced the opening of the strait of Hormuz as well as the removal of the US naval blockade. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” he wrote.

Trump later clarified that reopening the strait would depend on the signing of an initial memorandum of understanding on Friday, which Pakistan, acting as mediator, said would take place in Geneva.

Leaked drafts suggest the memorandum will trigger an immediate 60-day period of intensive technical talks, during which the most contentious issues, including Iran’s nuclear programme, will be discussed. Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, confirmed that negotiators would seek to reach a broader agreement that would include sanctions relief for Iran.

4 Republicans — Including Bill Cassidy — Joined Democrats Led by Tim Kaine in Voting to Enforce War Powers Resolution

By Theodoric Meyer / Washington Post / May 19, 2026

The Senate voted Tuesday to advance a resolution to block President Donald Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran, defying the White House nearly three months into an unpopular war.

Four Republicans — Sens. Rand Paul (Kentucky), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Bill Cassidy (Louisiana) — joined Democrats in voting to discharge a war powers resolution from committee, the first step toward forcing Trump to end a war that Congress never authorized. Sen. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) was the lone Democrat to vote no.

The 50-47 procedural vote was a breakthrough for Democrats, but the measure still faces considerable hurdles before it could force Trump to end the war.

Top Lawyer at Treasury Resigns in Protest and Disgust at $1.8 Billion Grift

The Treasury’s most senior lawyer has dramatically quit, just hours after the Trump administration unveiled a vast $1.776 billion fund to enrich Jan. 6 rioters and other MAGA loyalists. Brian Morrissey, the department’s general counsel, stepped down a mere seven months after his Senate confirmation, three sources aware of his decision told the New York Times.

His abrupt departure came on the same day that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” Morrissey, who also served in Trump’s first administration, is a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a George H. W. Bush appointee.

Go to Daily Beast for more

Trump’s Justice Department announces $1.8 billion fund slammed as ‘slush fund’

By Steve Benen / Maddowblog / May 19, 2026

The fact that we knew the scheme was coming didn’t make it any easier to accept. Three months after Donald Trump filed a radical (and by any fair measure, frivolous) $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, the president’s lawyers announced Monday morning that they had agreed to withdraw the case.

Hours later, the other side of the agreement came to public light: In exchange for dropping his rather silly lawsuit, Trump’s own Justice Department announced the creation of a pool of money that it’s calling “The Anti-Weaponization Fund” — which Democrats and legal experts are more accurately characterizing as a “slush fund.”

Are you confused as I am about whether we’re still at war with Iran?

For me to even ask the question displays a lot about this particular moment. Are we at war still, after over 2 months of war? Who knows? I wish somebody would please tell us, to get us out of this confusion.

We have good reasons for our confusion. The Trump White House, Trump himself, and his cabinet secretaries all are saying different things. We aren’t at war, we are at war, it’s an “excursion,” a “blip”, it’s an operation, not war.

Yet, for good times, try this.

Supposedly, the White House and Iran are looking at an agreement spelled out in a one-page memorandum of understanding to end the war and set a framework for more detailed nuclear negotiations. On this news, the DOW shot up.

Then also Trump put Project Freedom on pause last night,

By Jordan Atwood / Nation of Change / April 30, 2026

A deadline written in the aftermath of Vietnam to prevent presidents from waging open-ended wars without congressional approval is colliding with President Donald Trump’s military campaign in Iran, raising the prospect of a constitutional test over whether Congress can still restrain unilateral war-making. On May 1, the 60-day limit established under the War Powers Resolution expires for military operations Trump initiated without formal authorization from lawmakers. Under the 1973 law, hostilities undertaken without congressional approval are supposed to end unless Congress authorizes the conflict or the president invokes a narrow extension tied to “unavoidable military necessity.”

That legal deadline has transformed what began as a fight over the Iran campaign itself into a broader struggle over presidential power, congressional authority, and whether statutory checks on war-making still have force.

By Steve Rodriguez

Up until last week, even critics of President Donald Trump found it hard to accept that his war rhetoric could get much more extreme, or his threats against both enemies and traditional allies more outrageous. However, recent news about the Pentagon’s interaction with the Vatican, along with Trump comments made in the past few days that are highly critical of Pope Leo XIV, have proven such concepts wrong.

Fortunately for the Vatican, I contend the Pope, a critic of Trump’s actions and words related to the Iranian War, does possess a unique advantage he can employ to escape our president’s wrath.

According to reports in the Free Press, the Vatican’s ambassador to the U.S. was summoned in January to the Pentagon, where he was advised the Vatican needs to play ball with the Trump administration’s efforts in the area of national security. Pentagon officials supposedly asserted the U.S. has the military power to “do whatever it wants” and that “the Church had better take its side.” while making references to “the period in the 1300’s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the Avignon Papacy.” The threat sounds right out of The Sopranos, something akin to a thug character threatening …“Nice Sistine Chapel you got there, padre. Be a real shame if it should be damaged in a bombing.”

The daily news can’t adequately convey the administration’s sabotaging of our government, economy, alliances and environment

By Rebecca Solnit / The Guardian / April 12, 2026

The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled. All this is common knowledge, but because it dribbles out in news stories about this specific incident or department, the reports never adequately describe an administration sabotaging the functioning of the federal government and also trashing the global economy, international alliances and relationships, and the national and global environment in ways that will have downstream consequences for decades and perhaps, especially when it comes to climate, centuries.

Across the branches of government, the services that are supposed to protect us – nuclear stockpile monitoring, cybersecurity, counter-terrorism – are being undermined, understaffed or trashed. A different kind of protection that consists of public health, vaccination programs, food safety, clean air and water, social services, civil rights and the rule of law is also under attack. The federal government that serves us is being starved while the federal government that serves the Trump agenda and the oligarchy is glutting itself on taxpayer money, including the grotesque sums dumped on the Department of Homeland Security and the US military now being warped into Pete Hegseth’s twisted vision of a ruthless mercenary force. Hegseth has reportedly stood in the way of promotions for more than a dozen Black and female officers.

Postal Service Would Mail Ballots Only to Those on Official Voters List

By Jane C. Timm and Ryan J. Reilly / NBC News / March 31, 2026

President Donald Trump is again trying to exert control over American elections, signing an executive order Tuesday that aims to create federal lists of citizens and ask the U.S. Postal Service to transmit mail ballots to only those people.

The executive order, his second related to elections since he retook office last year, is sure to be quickly challenged in court. The U.S. Constitution gives states the power to set voting rules and administer their own elections, though Congress has the ability to set some regulations, too.

“That’s a big deal,” Trump said as he signed the order in the Oval Office, adding that he didn’t believe the courts could overturn it. “I think this will help a lot with elections. We’d like to have voter ID. We’d like to have proof of citizenship, and that’ll be another subject for another time. We’re working on that. You would think it’d be easy.”

Here is a quick overview on this 17th day of Trump’s war with Iran.

• Cost of war — it was estimated that in the first 6 days of the war, it cost the U.S. nearly $2 Billion a day. The Pentagon reported that the first week cost us $11.3 Billions, not counting the expenses of the build-up. Tomahawk cruise missiles, like the one the U.S. military used in that deadly strike on an Iranian girls’ primary school, cost $2.2 million each. It may be worth keeping these figures in mind as the Trump administration argues it doesn’t have enough money to make health care more affordable.
• Cost of gas — since the war started on Feb. 28, the average cost of gas has risen 25%; the cost of oil 40%.
• The war is unpopular with Americans; only 1 in 4 support it. A good portion of the MAGA base is seething over the war, since their guy ran against “endless wars.”

From The Washington Post / March 11, 2026

The Iranian elementary school building where scores of children were killed as the U.S. and Israel began their massive aerial campaign was on a U.S. target list and may have been mistaken for a military site, multiple people familiar with the strike told The Washington Post.

The deadly attack occurred in the first few hours of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran — just as parents were hurrying to the two-story schoolhouse to take their kids home to safety — and killed at least 175 people, many of them children, according to Iranian state media.

It is still not clear why the building was hit, but one person familiar with the school strike said the building had been identified as a factory and had been an approved strike target. A second person familiar said there was an arms depot target located in the same area and did not know if the United States hit the school by mistake, or if U.S. officials had the wrong intelligence and thought the building was the arms depot.

“Initially there was some confusion on why it was on the target list,” said a third person familiar with the strike. The individual would not go into further detail, citing the military’s ongoing investigation into the strike.

No one still knows  why these 4 American servicemembers had to die. Trump doesn’t know. Hegsleth doesn’t know. Rubio doesn’t know.

They were killed in an Iranian drone strike on Sunday, March 1.

Yet, here they are – as the Pentagon has identified them of the six US service members who have died. The multiple reasons that Trump and gang have given for attacking Iran since it all began have varied with the time of day and night. From “regime change” to wiping out missiles they don’t have, or to making the first strike before they did ….Trump still hasn’t addressed the nation on the widening war. 

CNN:

The soldiers are Capt. Cody Khork, 35; Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, 42; Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, 39; and Sgt. Declan Coady, 20. All four were assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command, an Army Reserve sustainment unit out of Iowa.

The two other soldiers who were killed in the strike on Sunday have not yet been identified.

CNN first reported that the suspected drone strike hit a temporary tactical operations center at the port of Shuaiba in Kuwait on Sunday. At the time of their deaths the soldiers were serving with 1st Theater Sustainment Command.

A source familiar with the situation described the operation center as a triple-wide trailer with office space inside; the building was surrounded by concrete barriers that are typically used to protect military structures overseas from things like car bombs and improvised explosive devices. However, there was nothing overhead that could shield the building from drones or missiles.

The outbreak of conflict between Israel and the United States against Iran, triggered by joint US-Israeli strikes across Iran, has drawn frantic calls for calm as deep consternation spreads across globe.

Criticism has mounted against Washington for taking part in the attacks while still engaged in nuclear negotiations with Tehran. Anger has also surfaced in Gulf states caught up in the conflict, as Iran launches retaliatory missile strikes against US military assets hosted on their soil.

Here is a breakdown of how countries and institutions are responding:

Israel

A senior Israeli defence official told the Reuters news agency the joint US-Israeli attacks had been planned for months, with a specific date set weeks ago. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the attacks aimed to remove an “existential threat” posed by Iran. He said the attacks would “create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their fate into their own hands”.

Iran

Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused Israel and the US of violating the United Nations charter with their attacks and pledged a harsh response, as the country waged retaliatory attacks on Israel as well as in several Gulf states that host US military assets, including Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait. “All American and Israeli assets and interests in the Middle East have become a legitimate target,” a senior Iranian official told Al Jazeera. “There are no red lines after this aggression.”