Trump vows to bomb Iran into Stone Age this month; proposes $1.5tn defense budget
(Originally published April 3 in “What in the World“) Trump is asking taxpayers for even more money to, as his “Secretary of War” put it: “kill bad guys.”
The White House asked Congress Friday for $1.5 trillion in defense spending next year. The Pentagon is asking it to toss in another $200 billion extra just for the war in Iran to help replenish the 11,200 munitions, worth an estimated $26 billion, that the U.S. and allies expended in Iran in just the first 16 days of the conflict.
How much longer will it go on? Trump is keeping everyone guessing. After suggesting the U.S. would pull out of the conflict in two to three weeks and might even do so before re-opening the Strait of Hormuz, Trump said in a 19-minute televised address Wednesday that the U.S. would “hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.” So maybe it’s a dash to a (Trump-defined) finish? Trump now says he aims to bomb Iran “back into the Stone Ages,” and after his threat to start attacking Iran’s civilian infrastructure, a U.S. airstrike Thursday destroyed a highway bridge near Tehran. Iran fired drones and missiles at targets in Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, igniting at least two refineries and downing a U.S. fighter over Iran Friday.
Trump is, meanwhile, negotiating with Denmark to gain U.S. military access to three bases in Greenland. Two of the bases, the deepwater port of Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland and the runway at Kangerlussuaq in southwestern Greenland, were host to U.S. forces in the Cold War but were turned over to the Danes.
China is also expanding its bases not in the Arctic, but on coral reef in the South China Sea. The latest is at Antelope Reef, part of an atoll in the Paracel Islands about 275km southeast of China’s Hainan island and 325km from the cost of Vietnam, which claims the territory along with Taiwan. So far, satellite images reveal that China has built a helipad, jetties, and reclaimed coastline for what appears likely to become a runway.
Normally, there’s a U.S. carrier group steaming back and forth in those waters, conducting what the U.S. calls “freedom of navigation” exercises. These don’t prevent China from fortifying reefs but are meant to retard its efforts to establish maritime control over the South China Sea, the entirety of which it claims, or to menace Taiwan militarily. But Trump moved the last carriers in the neighborhood, the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Tripoli, to the Middle East to fight Iran.