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imperialism
‘This Depraved Idiot Is Out of Control’: With Middle East in Flames, Trump Eyes ‘Next Conquest’
"We cannot live this way," wrote one journalist in response to President Donald Trump's ominous threat to start another new war.
Apr 09, 2026
US President 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."
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Hegseth Says Trump Has Vision of 'Greater North America.' Critics Alarmed by 'Greater Israel' Parallel
"Right now the US and Israel are realizing 'Greater Israel' by attacking-invading Lebanon and Iran," said one professor. "Hegseth is saying it's Greenland, Cuba, Canada, and Mexico next."
Mar 30, 2026
Alarm mounted Monday over the Trump administration's "Greater North America" plan, a geopolitical blueprint for US imperial hegemony from Greenland to Guyana that's drawing comparisons with a messianic project being pushed by President Donald Trump's far-right allies and war partners in Israel.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth first unveiled the plan earlier this month, telling reporters: "Trump has drawn a new strategic map, from Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal and its surrounding countries. At the Department of War we call this strategic map the Greater North America."
"Why? Because every sovereign nation and territory north of the Equator, from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana, is not part of the 'Global South,'" Hegseth added. "It is our immediate security perimeter in this great neighborhood that we all live in."
Graeme Garrard, a Canadian professor at Cardiff University in Wales, said Monday on social media in response to Hegseth's comments: "By 'Greater North America' he means 'Greater United States. The US is now and has long been a menace and threat to the sovereignty and independence of its hemispheric neighbors."
Numerous observers have compared Trump's "Greater America" with the "Greater Israel" movement, whose most zealous proponents want to conquer everything between the Nile and Euphrates rivers—that is, all of Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan; most of Syria and Kuwait; large parts of Egypt and Iraq; and some of Turkey—for Israel.
"Hesgeth's 'Greater North America' should be taken VERY seriously as a real threat," University of Lausanne professor Julia Steinberger, who is Swiss-American, said on social media. "Right now the US and Israel are realizing 'Greater Israel' by attacking-invading Lebanon and Iran. Hegseth is saying it's Greenland, Cuba, Canada, and Mexico next."
Based on the biblical boundaries of ancient Jewish kingdoms, Greater Israel is rooted in the supremacist supposition that the Abrahamic deity figure God promised the Jews all of the lands between the Nile and Euphrates.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—and other prominent right-wing Israelis support the Greater Israel vision and are working to make it a reality by accelerating the illegal settler colonization and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, preparing to annex the dwindling Palestinian territories, and planning to occupy—perhaps permanently—parts of Syria and Lebanon.
For nearly two centuries, claims of divine favor have also underpinned US expansionism, most famously expressed in Manifest Destiny and mid-19th century plans to annex lands "from the Arctic to the Tropic." This notion drove the US conquest of half of Mexico, as well as later takeovers of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The US also took control over the Panama Canal, which it built at the cost of thousands of laborers' lives, most of them from Barbados and other West Indies isles.
"It is part of the great law of progress that the weak should give way to the strong, and that the superior should displace the inferior races," one New Orleans newspaper opined in 1848.
Nearly 178 years later, Hegseth echoed this supremacist ideology, telling Latin American leaders that the region must remain "Christian nations under God" and stand united in the face of "radical narco-communism."
Like the 19th century US imperialists, Trump has also repeatedly expressed his goal of "taking Cuba"—an objective that goes back over 200 years, when Thomas Jefferson, then a former president, called the island “the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states."
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Cuban President Vows 'Impregnable Resistance' to Any Trump Attempt to Seize the Island
"The US publicly threatens Cuba, almost daily, with overthrowing the constitutional order by force," said Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Mar 18, 2026
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on Tuesday condemned US President Donald Trump's open threat to forcibly seize control of the island nation and vowed that any such aggression would be met with "impregnable resistance."
"The US publicly threatens Cuba, almost daily, with overthrowing the constitutional order by force," Díaz-Canel wrote on social media. "And it uses an outrageous pretext: the harsh limitations of the weakened economy that they have attacked and sought to isolate for more than six decades."
"They intend and announce plans to seize the country, its resources, its properties, and even the very economy they seek to strangle to make us surrender," the Cuban president added. "Only in this way can the fierce economic war be explained, which is applied as collective punishment against the entire people. In the face of the worst scenario, Cuba is accompanied by a certainty: Any external aggressor will clash with an impregnable resistance."
Díaz-Canel's statement came a day after Trump said from the Oval Office of the White House that he believes he will have "the honor of taking Cuba" as it faces a grave humanitarian crisis fueled by the administration's oil embargo, which began shortly after the US abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in early January.
"I think I can do anything I want with it," Trump said of Cuba on Monday.
The New York Times reported earlier this week that Trump administration officials are demanding Díaz-Canel's ouster as part of any negotiated deal between the two countries.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and a longtime supporter of regime change on the island, said publicly on Tuesday that Cuba "has to get new people in charge." Trump said earlier this month that he's "going to put Marco over there and we’ll see how that works out."
A YouGov poll out this week shows that more Americans disapprove than approve of the US embargo on Cuba. The same survey found that only 13% of US voters would support attacking Cuba, and a mere 18% would support using military force to overthrow the country's government.
Trump's threats came as his oil embargo and the broader, decadeslong, and illegal economic warfare against Cuba continued to take their toll on the island's population, most recently in the form of an island-wide blackout that lasted nearly 30 hours.
On Wednesday, the first delegation of the Nuestra América Convoy arrived in Havana as part of an effort by individuals and organizations to deliver critical humanitarian aid to the Cuban people as the US besieges the island's economy and threatens its sovereignty.
Nathan J. Robinson and Alex Skopic, editors of the left-wing magazine Current Affairs, announced Wednesday that they are heading to Cuba to cover the mission, which they characterized as part of a "proud tradition of internationalism" on the American left.
"Beyond food, medicine, and energy infrastructure, this mission sends a message," Robinson and Skopic wrote. "As Americans, we want to make it crystal clear that the Trump administration does not speak for us when it talks about 'taking over' Cuba, and we’re sickened by what Trump and Rubio are doing to the Cuban people in the name of U.S. foreign policy. But we’re determined to do what we can, and we’re going to make sure the people of Cuba do not stand alone."
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