BREAKING: US To Send Thousands of TROOPS to Iran
Wajahat Ali
April 15, 2026
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JuaJzHi7Nk
#BreakingNews #Iran #USPolitics
The war just escalated. The U.S. is sending thousands of troops to the region as tensions with Iran rise, retaliation looms, and the situation grows more volatile by the hour. Joining the conversation is Vali Nasr, leading Iran expert and author, who breaks down what this escalation means, how we got here, and what could come next. This isn’t just another headline. It’s a moment that could reshape the region—and beyond thelefthook.substack.com
#BreakingNews #Iran #USPolitics #Trump #MiddleEast #War #Geopolitics #WorldNews #ValiNasr #Politics #CurrentEvents #News #Analysis #Global #crisis
Gerald Horne Around The Horne: Trump’s Iran War: A Strategic Blunder & End of US Global Dominance
Activist News Network
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April 15, 2026
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH9qPU0Vtaw
Around The Horne! The Weekly Internationalist News Update with Gerald Horne.
Check out the Around The Horne Substack, entitled Notes from Around the Horne:
https://notesfromaroundthehorne.subst...
And shout out and salute to comrade @Marc_Dub for creating, curating, updating and administering the Substack!
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World
Iran
US deploys 10,000 troops as Iran blockade tested | Sunrise
Sunrise
April 15, 2026
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPTSyvsFwkg
The United States has deployed 10,000 additional troops to the Middle East, bringing total military personnel connected to the Iran conflict to over 50,000. An American destroyer intercepted an Iranian ship attempting to evade a newly announced U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports. Nuclear weapons remain a central sticking point in negotiations, with Iran's leadership refusing to surrender enriched uranium or discuss their proxy network activities in the region, despite ongoing military and economic pressure from Washington.
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https://time.com/article/2026/04/15/amid-trump-s-blockade-threat-of-escalation-leaves-thousands-of-u-s-forces-on-high-alert/
World
Iran
Amid Trump's Blockade, Threat of Escalation Leaves Thousands of U.S. Forces on High Alert
by Brian Bennett
April 15, 2026
TIME
[Bennett is the senior White House correspondent at TIME.]
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is seen at the Pentagon participating in an honor cordon in Arlington, Virginia, on April 13, 2026.Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images
Thousands of U.S. troops in the Middle East are once again on high alert as a U.S. military blockade of the Strait of Hormuz that began Monday raises the specter of a new round of combat in the war against Iran.
President Trump ordered the U.S. Navy to block Iranian shipping through the narrow chokepoint after talks between U.S. and Iranian officials in Islamabad failed to land on a deal to end the war. For weeks, the Iranian military had effectively controlled the critical strait, blocking much of the traffic through the 21-mile-wide passage and disrupting the global economy.
The standoff has further undermined a shaky ceasefire that is scheduled to lapse on April 21 if the two countries don’t come to an agreement. Trump has declined to rule out deploying ground troops into Iran.
The array of troops in the region cover a wide range of specialties and backgrounds. In March, President Trump sent the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) to the region on board the USS Tripoli, an amphibious assault ship floating in the Arabian Sea south of the strait. Not far away is the firepower of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group—which includes F-18 strike fighter squadrons the “Tophatters,” the “Black Aces,” and the “Vigilantes,” and the Marine F-35 fighter attack squadron known as the “Black Knights.” The U.S. Navy has also arrayed eight Aegis guided missile destroyers in the Arabian Sea within striking distance of Iran. And Trump has ordered the 82nd Airborne elite paratroopers to deploy to an undisclosed forward base in the Middle East.
All of those forces remain in place, giving Trump options for additional actions if the ceasefire fails, a former U.S. special operations soldier who has close ties to Trump’s Pentagon tells TIME.
And even more U.S. forces are on the way. About 1,000 members of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit are headed to the region, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the planning. And the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier, which was recently off the coast of Africa, is also moving toward the Middle East, according to the US Naval Institute.
“Let us be clear: a ceasefire is a pause, and the joint force remains ready, if ordered or called upon, to resume combat operations with the same speed and precision,” Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon on April 8.
Trump and others in the Administration have discussed the prospects of an attack on Iran’s principal oil depot at Kharg Island or a ground operation to seize parts of the strait’s coastline inside Iran. Trump also requested an audacious, if unlikely, military plan for an aerial assault deep inside Iran to dig up enriched uranium buried under rubble by previous U.S. strikes, and then fly the uranium out of the country.
The 82nd Airborne and the Marines could be used to seize small areas inside Iran, experts tell TIME, but would not be able to hold territory for long on their own, especially against Iran’s arsenal of cheap, short-range, low-flying Iranian drones. Those drones, also known as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), have proven able to slip past expensive and sophisticated American anti-missile systems.
“I wouldn't want to hold anything in the region until we fix our counter-UAS interceptor problem,” says retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, a fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
For now, the blockade is primarily being enforced by the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which is based on the western edge of the Persian Gulf at a U.S. naval base in Manama, Bahrain’s capital. For decades, the Fifth Fleet has been the U.S.’s principle bludgeon to ensure freedom of navigation through the strait. But now, Trump has given the fleet the opposite mission—to block Iranian shipments instead of ensuring safe passage for all vessels.
So far, 15 service members have died in combat during the Iran War, beginning with a drone attack against a U.S. logistics port in Kuwait on March 1 that killed six American troops. Another American service member was killed in Saudi Arabia on March 8, and six crew died in a crash of an air refueling plane in Iraq on March 12.
“If the United States did renege on the ceasefire and start using either the 82nd or the MEU for purpose—that would just open up further escalation,” says Brandan Buck, a former intelligence officer with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency who is now a foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute. Iranian military capabilities, he adds, “are good enough to make things hurt.”
Here’s a look at the forces the U.S. has in the region that could be deployed if the fighting starts up again.
US Navy's Fifth Fleet
A US Navy Martin UAV drone flies over the Gulf waters as Royal Bahrain Naval Force Abdulrahman Al Fadhel takes part in joint naval exercise between U.S. 5th Fleet Command and Bahraini forces, on Oct. 26, 2021. Mazen Mahdi—AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. Fifth Fleet is based in Naval Support Activity Bahrain, a naval base in Manama, Bahrain that hosts around 8,000 personnel. It is responsible for protecting maritime traffic in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, and is currently enforcing a blockade of the strait.
Iran understands the central role the base plays in the conflict. When the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran began on February 28, Iran targeted the base with missiles and drone attacks.
31st Marine Expeditionary Unit
U.S. Marine soldiers from 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, Battalion landing team deployed from Okinawa, Japan, participate in the U.S. and South Korean Marines joint landing operation in Pohang, South Korea in 2012. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
Based in Okinawa, the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit is capable of amphibious landings and overland assaults. The unit is onboard the USS Tripoli in the Arabian Sea and is also equipped to help with emergency evacuations, if needed.
82nd Airborne Division
Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division listen to Lieutenant General Christopher Donahue before a re-designation ceremony officially renaming Fort Bragg into Fort Liberty, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, on June 2, 2023. ALLISON JOYCE—AFP via Getty Images
Based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the 82nd Airborne Division trains to be able to deploy overseas with 18 hours notice. The soldiers can parachute into combat, or launch an overland assault. In late March, Trump ordered about 2,000 soldiers of the 82nd Airborne’s Immediate Response Force sent to the Middle East. The unit is still in the region, housed at an undisclosed base.
Special Operations Forces
Navy SEALs stationed on the East Coast jump from an MC-130J Commando II near Kodiak, Alaska, on Feb. 25, 2024. Salwan Georges—The Washington Post via Getty Images
There are U.S. special operations forces located on bases around the Middle East. The Air Force Pararescue jumpers, Navy SEALS, and the Army’s Delta Force were used in the missions to rescue two U.S. aviators shot down inside Iran in early April, and similar units were part of the complex mission to capture the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January. Those elite units are still on call in the Middle East and ready to deploy if ordered.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/10/opinion/trump-iran-psychotic-state-institutions.html
Guest Essay
April 10, 2026
New York Times
It has been clear for a long time that President Trump is a person with a disorganized mind and a disordered personality. What the past few months and especially the past few weeks have brought into focus is how his pathologies have cascaded downward and outward through his administration. They have become institutionalized. The reason the administration so often does not act coherently is that it cannot. The world faces something new and baffling and frightening in Mr. Trump’s second term: a psychotic state.
This does not mean that every individual in the government is emotionally or psychologically unstable. Nor is it a clinical diagnosis of the president. The issue is that the administration as a whole lacks a consistent attachment to reality and the ability to organize its thinking coherently. Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity, inconsistency and outright breaks with reality have become state policy.
In that respect, Mr. Trump’s second term is different from his first. In 2020 he could confabulate about the election result or babble about treating Covid with injections of disinfectant. But he could not translate his fantasies into reality — at least not usually. In the second term, by contrast, institutional psychosis has been on display since Day 1.
It is the Iran war that has most vividly demonstrated the scope of the problem. In this conflict, the most potent antagonist has been the administration’s own incoherence.
The Trump administration chose to wage a war without deciding on its aims, mapping out a strategy, planning for contingencies or even being able to explain itself. The goal was regime change — until it wasn’t. The demand was unconditional surrender — until it wasn’t. Deadlines were issued and then erased. Threats of total destruction were made and then pulled back. Iran’s nuclear program was a casus belli in February, despite the fact that we were told by Mr. Trump that it was “obliterated” last June. The president called for an international coalition to open the Strait of Hormuz, then said the United States could go it alone, then said the waterway would somehow “open itself.” He claimed that the United States had already won the war, that the war would end soon and that the war would end “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.” As a headline in The Times put it, the president’s position on Iran “can change by the sentence.”
Even as the bombs fell, the administration, concerned about gasoline prices, waived sanctions on some Iranian oil, “giving Iran’s war effort against the U.S. a boost,” as The Washington Post reported. Area experts were shocked when the administration proved unprepared for Iran’s partial closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a tactic experts had anticipated for decades. The administration might have been readier had it not chopped back the State Department’s Middle East desk, gotten rid of its oil and gas experts and eliminated its dedicated Iran office. The administration handicapped its own National Security Council by firing staff members, some at the behest of a conspiracy-minded internet personality, and undercutting its independence — not a good idea before starting a war. Trump’s social media posts seemed self-contradictory and borderline demented.
Incoherence is not incidental in this administration; it is the administration’s modus operandi. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency caused chaos in federal agencies by sacking, then sometimes rehiring employees without any evident rationale — and without making a serious dent in government spending. Mr. Trump flipped from “no more wars” to waging war (in Iran) and using and threatening military force (Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba), seemingly every other month. The policy toward Ukraine was simultaneously supportive and not. Tariffs went up and down and on and off, reflecting the president’s whims. In February he bragged that gas prices were low, then in March that they were high.
This is far from normal.
Normal administrations set up policy processes that assemble evidence from varied sources, collate viewpoints and priorities across multiple agencies and ensure rational deliberation before options reach the president. One of us served in three Republican administrations and participated as interagency reviews took place in a cabinet department, in an executive agency and in the White House itself. A single line in a presidential foreign policy statement might require the input of 20 or more people from the Defense Department, the State Department, the C.I.A., the Department of the Treasury and more.
The policy review process can be tortuous and sometimes mistaken. It can’t substitute for wise presidential judgment. But it is vital. It asks hard questions and assesses competing arguments. It ensures expert input in specific domains, anticipates how policies may ramify and prepares for contingencies.
In all those ways, the systematic review of policy amounts to an institutional mind: a cognitive process that organizes the government’s deliberations to keep them rational and anchored in reality. You might think of it as the government’s equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for high-level executive functions such as impulse control and long-term planning. In Mr. Trump’s second term, those functions still exist, but they can be disrupted, circumvented or just plain abandoned at any moment on the say-so of the president and his senior officials. In that respect, the Trump administration is mindless.
Policy judgments should be made by the president, not by subordinate agencies and experts. But irrational processes produce inexplicable outcomes, and that is what we have seen, again and again. The only rhyme or reason is the principle that Mr. Trump proclaimed when explaining his policy toward Cuba: “I think I can do anything I want with it.” That is the principle by which his administration governs.
When an agency goes haywire, the administration might rush to stabilize it — for example, at the Department of Homeland Security, where chaos and brutality led to the killing of two American citizens right on the street in Minneapolis. But until a coherent policy process is restored under a chief executive who understands the need for it, we should expect geysers of mindlessness to keep erupting in unforeseeable ways and places.
Understandably, scholars, journalists and politicians have attempted to fit Trump 2.0 into any number of at least somewhat rational frameworks: populism, isolationism, unilateralism, nationalism, transactionalism, the madman theory, spheres of influence, imperialism and more. Some of those frameworks can help illuminate the president and the people around him. As one of us has argued, he is a patrimonialist — a leader who believes the state is his personal property. And both of us have said that his administration displays hallmarks of fascism. Ultimately, however, institutional psychosis defies rational categories. Predicting this administration’s behavior is impossible under any framework. And if Mr. Trump becomes more desperate as he grows more unpopular, the danger only increases.
Which leaves everyone wondering: What are the implications if the administration of the world’s most powerful country is chaotic in its thinking, unpredictable in its actions and not reliably in touch with reality? It’s impossible to know. America and its allies have dealt with a lot of presidential imperfections and failings, but there is no precedent or even category for the institutional psychosis displayed by the second Trump administration. Precisely because the psychotic state is so unpredictable, setting up systems to manage it will not work.
This puts the country and its allies in the precarious but not hopeless position of overrelying on the rational guardrails that remain. Some of these guardrails are within the executive branch: in the federal bureaucracies and the military services, where nodes of ordinary practice and process carry on as best they can. Still more important are guardrails in the other branches of government. The courts have remained independent and tethered to reality. Congress has quietly nixed some of Mr. Trump’s wildest nominees and overruled some of the administration’s destructive impulses, such as its attack on the science budget. State governments, especially in blue states, have been using the courts and their own policies to resist Mr. Trump’s agenda and demand accountable behavior from Washington.
Perhaps most important, the public supports effective and responsive government, not the wild swings of a fugue state — and it is making its feelings known.
Institutional psychosis is ultimately self-defeating and unsustainable. Reality checks will return because reality always reasserts itself. But severe damage will have been done, damage that may take a generation or more to repair.
As the Trump era winds down, the country may relearn something that never should have been forgotten. Institutions need to be reformed, not destroyed; governing well requires skill and careful attention to detail rather than leaders acting on impulse and ignorance; and character and mental stability matter perhaps most of all
