Trump calls Nato ‘very disappointing’, suggests it needs to have pressure placed on it to ‘understand anything’
Donald Trump has taken to his Truth Social platform again on Thursday to renew his criticism of the alliance.
The US president posted that “none of these people” (which people is unclear), including “our own, very disappointing Nato, understood anything unless they have pressure placed upon them!!!”.
Whether that relates to earlier reports (13.28) that Trump told the Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, he wanted to see concrete commitments within days from Nato members for helping to secure the strait of Hormuz remains to be seen.
Rutte is expected to speak at an event in Washington later today.
Published date: 8 April 2026 13:15 BST|Last update: 16 hours 42 mins ago
A massive wave of Israeli strikes hit Lebanon on Wednesday, killing at least 254 people, just hours after a ceasefire between Iran and the US was agreed.
Lebanon’s Civild Defense said at least 1,165 people were wounded across the country, with the capital Beirut hit by the most violent bombardment since the start of the current war.
The Israeli military carried out several simultaneous strikes on central Beirut and its suburbs without warning, triggering widespread panic on the capital’s streets.
A series of air strikes were also launched in several areas in southern Lebanon and the Beqaa in the east.
Bulldozers were clearing rubble from the streets to make way for ambulances transporting dozens of people to hospitals across Beirut.
The New ‘Avignon Papacy’? Pentagon Officials Reportedly Invoked Medieval Captivity to Threaten Vatican and Force Pope’s Support
Vatican officials interpreted the 14th century reference as a veiled threat to use military force against the Holy See
By Jim Manzon Published 09 April 2026, 10:29 AM BST
The Vatican cancelled Pope Leo’s US visit over Pentagon tensions, with the Pope instead spending the Fourth of July in Sicily, where he will visit migrants on Lampedusa. Bill Madden/X
A senior Pentagon official summoned Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador to a closed-door meeting in January and told him the United States ‘has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world’ and that ‘the Catholic Church had better take its side,’ according to accounts from Vatican and US officials briefed on the extraordinary encounter.
As the meeting grew heated, one American official invoked the Avignon Papacy, a 14th-century period when the French monarchy wielded military force to bring the Catholic Church to heel.
That era began with an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his death and ended with the papacy relocated from Rome to Avignon under French control for nearly seven decades.
Vatican officials interpreted the reference as a veiled threat to use military force against the Holy See, according to independent Vatican reporter Christopher Hale, who confirmed the meeting took place.
There is no public record of any Vatican official ever being summoned to the Pentagon before this encounter.
President Trump on Wednesday said he is considering the formation of a “joint venture” with Iran to set up tolls in the Strait of Hormuz after the Trump administration and Tehran agreed to a two-week ceasefire deal.
ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked Trump if he approved of Iran’s plan to charge vessels a fee for passing through the strait — a key channel through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil is transported.
“We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture,” the president told Karl, who shared Trump’s response on the social platform X. “It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Any “joint venture” was not part of Iran’s 10-point peace plan that the U.S. agreed to and the president previously called “workable.”
Earlier Wednesday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that there was “big money” to be made by the U.S. aiding in the “traffic buildup” in the Strait of Hormuz.
“We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds, and just ‘hangin’ around’ in order to make sure that everything goes well,” he wrote. “I feel confident that it will.”
The president also suggested Monday that the U.S. could impose its own tolls on vessels trying to transit through the channel. Leaders in Tehran signaled last week it would install a “toll booth” system to exert a price on ships seeking safe passage through the strait.
The Islamic Republic’s previous proposal to toll vessels drew criticism from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He blasted the potential “tolling system” as “illegal” and “dangerous for the world,” adding that the U.S. and European partners would have to have a plan to address that possibility. Rubio noted, however, that the U.S. would not lead that plan.
Funds raised by Iran’s toll system will go toward reconstructing the country, a regional officer told The Associated Press. Some of the accumulated fees would also be presented to Oman, though how the nation would use them is unclear.
Terrorism, according to ICE — yes, that ICE — “involves violence or the threat of violence against people or property to further a particular ideology.” The official website goes on to declare that “Terrorists do not care who they hurt or kill to achieve their goals.”
If you haven’t read Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from Sunday, above, take a minute to do so. Don’t rely on sanewashed descriptions in the media. And then tell me that Trump doesn’t perfectly fit his own officials’ definition of a terrorist.
Don’t tell me that his cause is just, that the Iranian regime is evil. That’s what terrorists always say, and even if it’s sometimes true, terrorism is defined by its means rather than its ends — by its attempt to achieve political goals by violently attacking the innocent.
And that’s exactly what Trump is doing: he’s threatening to attack civilian infrastructure if he doesn’t get his way. And since Trump is talking about targeting essential services — power plants! — this is a threatened attack on people as well as property.
Later on Sunday Trump told Axios that the U.S. is in “deep negotiations” with Iran. Forgive me for doubting that anything like that is happening. But he went on to say that if there isn’t a deal by Tuesday, “I am blowing up everything over there.”
He has issued these threats without even a pretense that we will be attacking military targets, and if anything he seems to relish rather than regret the death and suffering his actions will cause.
On second thought, however, I shouldn’t say that Trump is making a threat of violence; he’s promising violence. That vile post isn’t part of a negotiating strategy, since there is, after all, zero chance that Iran will open the Strait of Hormuz by tomorrow evening. The Iranian regime almost certainly couldn’t open the strait on short notice if it tried: Military control in Iran has, by all accounts, been decentralized to local commanders to limit the effects of U.S. and Israeli decapitation strikes. So there’s no way people in Tehran could order the whole Iranian military to stand down at short notice even if they wanted to.
And of course they don’t want to, because they think Iran is winning. And so do Trump and the people around him, even though they will never admit it.
For terrorism is a strategy of the weak. It’s what extremists do when they lack the ability to achieve their goals through military action or other non-criminal means.
And that’s where Trump and his officials find themselves. They inherited a powerful military (which they are rapidly degrading), but for all its firepower this military lacks the wherewithal to open the Strait of Hormuz to normal traffic. So the Trumpists are gearing up to impose suffering and death on innocent civilians instead, even though this suffering and death will do nothing to achieve America’s objectives.
I don’t know what Trump will do when his deadline passes and the Strait is still closed. He probably doesn’t know either. But he is promising to commit war crimes on a massive scale. And the duty of everyone with any influence who isn’t part of Trump’s inner circle is to do all they can to stop him.
Most immediately, military officers should be aware that they have the right and the duty to disobey illegal orders. It’s incredible that we have gotten to this point, especially so quickly, but here we are. You may recall that Admiral Alvin Holsey resigned in December, reportedly because he refused to be a party to illegal attacks on supposed drug boats. What Trump is now saying he will do is infinitely worse. And a refusal by senior officers to participate in war crimes may be the only thing that could stop this evil in its tracks.
Now is when we find out how completely our once honorable military has been corrupted.
Beyond the military, every politician, dare I say every public figure, in America should make it clear that Trump is not acting in their name.
This is not a time for Republicans who know — and most of them do know — that Trump has gone completely off the rails to remain obsequious for fear that he might endorse their primary opponents. One hopes that there are still a few genuine patriots left on that side of the aisle.
It is also not a time for Democrats to listen to strategists who urge them to stay silent on foreign policy and talk only about grocery prices. As it happens, that’s even bad political advice: Public disdain for Congressional Democrats has a lot to do with perceptions that they are weak and ineffectual, and ignoring Trump’s criminal madness will only reinforce that perception. And there has been no rally-around-the-flag effect from this war, which is growing more unpopular by the day.
But in any case, political considerations should take a back seat to civic duty.
The horrible but undeniable fact right now is that America has a terrorist president. And the whole world knows it. But we still have a chance to show the world that he is an aberration, that we are not a terrorist nation. And we can do that by standing up for the values that have always defined us.
As war crimes mean nothing to President Trump, today, 6th April 2026, Iran resists the ‘deal’ Trump demanded to open the Strait of Hormuz.
‘The entire country could be taken out in one night, and that could be tomorrow’…..Trump said in a speech as he boasted about US military achievements.
You can monitor the strikes, on both sides of the war, at this website:
Description at odds with early US intel, Joint Chiefs chairman
The U.S. strikes, carried out on the night of June 21, targeted three facilities: Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordo. They were hit with massive, 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs in what was the largest B-2 strike in U.S. history.
“Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” Trump said as he addressed the nation from the White House over the weekend.
But one key player said the total scope of the damage wasn’t immediately clear.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday it was “way too early” to know the full damage, though he said all three sites sustained “extremely severe damage and destruction.”
China’s Shadow Over Tehran: Reports of 16 Chinese Military Cargo Aircraft Landing in Iran Raise Fears of a New Iran-Israel Escalation
Unconfirmed reports of a rapid Chinese military airlift into Iran involving up to 16 cargo aircraft are fuelling fears of a strategic shift in the Iran-Israel confrontation, raising urgent questions over Beijing’s growing role in Middle Eastern security dynamics.
(DEFENCE SECURITY ASIA) — The sudden emergence of unconfirmed but persistent reports claiming that approximately 16 Chinese military cargo aircraft landed in Iran within a compressed 56-hour period has injected a new and deeply destabilising variable into an already combustible Iran-Israel confrontation, with the scale and speed of the alleged airlift immediately raising questions about Beijing’s willingness to directly alter the Middle Eastern military balance under the cover of strategic ambiguity.
Embedded within these reports is a broader strategic warning articulated previously by a China watcher who cautioned that “we know this isn’t good, because those planes are turning off their transponders as they approach Iranian airspace,” a statement that, when viewed against China’s expanding expeditionary airlift capabilities, underscores growing concern that Beijing may be testing the limits of covert military power projection beyond East Asia.
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The reported aircraft movements also resonate with a June 2025 observation that “aviation experts have noted that the type of plane used are commonly used for transporting military equipment and weapons,” reinforcing concerns that the flights may have carried high-value defensive systems rather than civilian or humanitarian cargo.
At the centre of this emerging narrative lies China’s Y-20 strategic airlifter, a platform symbolising Beijing’s transition from regional power to global military logistics actor, and whose involvement would signal a deliberate decision to leverage logistics dominance as a geopolitical instrument rather than a purely operational enabler.
If substantiated, this operation would represent the largest compressed military airlift from China to Iran ever reported, surpassing previous isolated incidents involving two to five aircraft and signalling a qualitative shift from opportunistic assistance to structured strategic support.
The revolution that built a garden-parliament had begun with sugar.
In December 1905, the price of sugar spiked across Tehran — a convergence of a bad harvest, trade disruption from the Russo-Japanese War, and a cholera epidemic that strangled supply lines. Tehran’s governor, Ala al-Dawla, responded by ordering the bastinado — public foot-whipping — of two respected sugar merchants. One of them was a sayyed, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.
That was the match. It united the two most powerful non-state forces in Iran: the mosque and the bazaar. An attack on commerce AND religious dignity simultaneously. The ulama declared the punishment an insult to Islam. The bazaaris declared a general strike. Together, they formed a coalition that no shah could suppress by force alone — because the mosque controlled the narrative and the bazaar controlled the economy.
But the sugar was only the trigger. The fuel had been accumulating for decades.
In 1891, Naser al-Din Shah had sold a monopoly over Iran’s entire tobacco trade to a British company — the Tobacco Régie. Grand Ayatollah Mirza Shirazi issued a fatwa from Samarra declaring tobacco use tantamount to “war against the Hidden Imam.” The boycott that followed was so total it was observed even in the Shah’s own harem — his wives put down their water pipes. The Shah canceled the concession.3 An entire nation had organized against foreign exploitation and won, fourteen years before the constitutional movement began.
The Tobacco Protest proved three things that would become the architecture of 1906: religious authority could mobilize the masses beyond the reach of the state; collective action across class lines could force a monarchy to capitulate; and the fundamental issue — foreign powers extracting Iranian resources while Iranians had no say in their own governance — was a wound that would not heal without structural change.
Kuwait power, water desalination plants damaged by Iranian attack
Story by Jubair Alansari
• 14h
Riyadh:
Two Kuwaiti power and water desalination plants were damaged by a drone attack from Iran, the electricity and water ministry said Sunday.
The attack resulted in “significant material damage and the shutdown of two electricity generating units”, the ministry said in a post on X, adding there were no deaths or injuries.
Earlier, the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation said a fire broke out in its Shuwaikh oil sector complex, which houses the oil ministry and KPC headquarters, after a drone attack, the Kuwaiti state news agency reported early on Sunday.
I just watched Professor Ansari talking to Fareed Zakaria on CNN. I intend to educate myself, through his work, about Iranian history which this man has devoted his career to doing, and who is desperately sad to see the current tragedy unfolding in the Middle East.
borderslynn 
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