US’s Own Intelligence Finds Further Strikes on Iran Are Futile, Report Says

The recent round of strikes has killed dozens in Iran and destroyed key civilian infrastructure.

By Sharon Zhang ,

Truthout

July 21, 2026

In this handout photo, a damaged bridge lies in a riverbed, following U.S. airstrikes carried out a day earlier, on July 17, 2026 in the southern Hormozgan Province, Iran.

Morteza Akhoundi via Getty Images


U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that further strikes on Iran aren’t likely to achieve any progress with regard to the U.S.’s war aims, a new report finds as the Trump administration approaches Congress to ask for $87 billion more to fund the war.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that intelligence analysts have “concluded that Tehran and Washington are, for now, stuck in an indefinite limbo between peace and war” that would not be resolved with further strikes. The report, largely prepared by the CIA, finds that there is little reason to believe that Iranian officials will be impacted, nor will further strikes change their positions at the negotiation table regarding provisions on sanctions or the Strait of Hormuz.

The findings come, nonetheless, on the U.S.’s 10th straight day of bombing Iran after President Donald Trump unilaterally declared the ceasefire. Dozens of people in Iran have been killed as a result of the strikes, including children, while three U.S. soldiers were killed by Iranian strikes this past weekend. The U.S. has targeted hundreds of sites across Iran, including civilian infrastructure like bridges, railways, and power facilities.


The U.S. is showing no signs of slowing, even as the war has already begun to escalate into an all-out closure of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, at the opening of the Red Sea, by the Houthis.

On Tuesday, during a meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, Trump once again threatened to strike Iran’s “Pickaxe Mountain,” a nuclear energy facility south of Tehran.

“We’ll be hitting that area pretty soon, and very heavily,” said Trump.

Trump also claimed, once again, that Iranian officials “want to meet desperately to try to end” the war, but then said that the U.S. won’t stop its attacks until Iranian officials are “ready to meet in a meaningful way.”

Secretary of State Pete Hegseth is also slated to testify before senators on Tuesday to push for the Trump administration’s request for an additional $87 billion to continue the war on Iran. The Trump administration has reportedly internally estimated that the war has already cost the U.S. between $80 billion and $100 billion.

Iranian officials have indeed expressed interest in negotiations in recent days. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has said that Iranian officials are eager to negotiate because they believe they have the upper hand.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, however, said in remarks to the press on Sunday that the U.S. is only open to negotiations if Iran stops attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

“As long as Iran insists on controlling an international waterway, we’re going to have to respond to that,” Rubio said. “They continue to send signals that they want to talk, that they want to negotiate, but their behavior is what we’re responding to. And their behavior is, they’re launching missiles and drones at ships.”

However, the U.S.’s insistence over the control of the strait is one of the major sticking points in the ceasefire negotiations, alongside provisions for sanctions relief for Iran. Rubio threw cold water on the sanctions relief proposals, too, on Sunday.

“One of the reasons why Iran is in shambles is because every penny that this regime there gets, be it in sanctions relief or through the oil they’re able to get out, they invest it in Hezbollah, they invest it in Hamas,” said Rubio, ignoring the U.S.’s position as the single largest spender on the military in the world. “They should be spending billions of dollars supporting the people of Iran,” he said.

Meanwhile, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed the U.S.’s strategic crude oil preserve to its lowest point since 1983, and gas prices have once again risen above $4 a gallon on average across the country.

Pentagon Slashed Civilian Harm Reduction Staff and Is Instead Using AI

CENTCOM, which oversees the war in Iran, has had its civilian harm reduction team slashed from 10 people to just one.

By Sharon Zhang , 

Truthout

July 20, 2026

In its first year under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon dramatically slashed its teams responsible for taking efforts to reduce civilian harm in military conflicts, new reporting finds — an undertaking that continued until as little as months before the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Minab, Iran, in one of the worst single incidents of a civilian massacre committed by the U.S. in modern history.

A report on the cuts to civilian harm reduction staff, reported by The Intercept, finds that, between January 2025 and the end of the year, the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence was slashed from 40 to just nine. In that time, the Pentagon also stopped developing a database that would have helped track incidents where civilians were harmed by U.S. actions.

These slashes to civilian harm mitigation and response, abbreviated as CMHR, were done across the Department of Defense.

For instance, such staff at Central Command (CENTCOM), which directs military activity in the Middle East, were cut from 10 to one. When U.K. watchdog group Airwars tried to submit documentation of civilian casualties to Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which has directed the U.S.’s boat strike campaign in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the group was told that the command did not have the infrastructure to deal with such reports.

When it comes to the Minab massacre, in which the U.S. killed over 150 people with a Tomahawk missile, including over 100 children, those left at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence aren’t even allowed to investigate the incident, as well as other major incidents with civilian casualties, the report says.

Related Stor

Trump Dismisses Responsibility for Minab Massacre, Saying Photo Evidence Is “AI”
The US is widely acknowledged to be responsible for the strike, including within internal Pentagon investigations.  By Sharon Zhang , Truthout  July 15, 2026

Wes Bryant, who formerly oversaw the center’s civilian harm assessments, told The Intercept that the remaining staff have only been retained so that the department can keep up appearances, and that their findings are “being thrown into the wind.”

The reporting follows others that have found that the Trump administration sought to shutter the office before Donald Trump was even inaugurated in January 2025. Since then, Hegseth has made his vow to ignore what he calls “stupid rules of engagement” a central tenet of his identity as the military’s top official — and numerous scandals regarding civilian harm done by the U.S. have followed, including in the boat strike campaign, strikes on Yemen, and in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is trying to replace some of the duties of its civilian harm mitigation staff with AI, The Intercept notes. Military service members are instead using AI systems like Palantir’s Maven Smart System, as well as the military’s AskSage, to conduct assessments of the civilian environment.

This lines up with reports that service members used AI to help select the elementary school in Minab as a target, and bypassed warnings about faulty targeting in order to expedite strikes at the beginning of the war.

Top historian explains why Trump might 'fake' an 'act of terror'

REICHSTAG FIRE REDUX


Nick Hilden

July 21, 2026

ALTERNET

As the war with Iran flares back up, a leading historian and expert on authoritarianism warns that President Donald Trump might attempt to “fake” an “act of terror.” This is according to Yale historian Timothy Snyder, an expert on the fascist regimes, who on Tuesday raised a dire warning about Trump’s intentions regarding Iran.

“Trump is pursuing this war in the HOPE that Iran carries out an act of terror in the U.S.,” Snyder posted. “And even if it doesn’t, which I doubt it will, consider the possibility that Trump's people would fake one.”

Snyder made this statement along with a link to an article he wrote describing Trump’s “desire for terror,” which would provide the president with “a pretext to try to cancel or ‘federalize’ the coming Congressional elections.” The historian’s warning comes not only as the war resumes, but as Trump has ramped up his election denial claims and demands for states to surrender control over elections to the federal government.

According to Snyder, “Self-terrorism might not have been the initial aim; but as time goes by, and failures and atrocities mount, its appeal will grow. Trump could think that he has much to gain; the war itself makes terrorism more likely; there are plausible vectors of terror; and the United States has let down its defenses.” What’s more, “Trump has already telegraphed the move. We know that he is obsessed with the fall elections, which his party will almost certainly lose by spectacular margins, and that he fears the accordant loss of power. This is clear from his own statements and actions.”

Snyder notes that Trump has offered “incoherent” justifications for the war, writing that “it is as though the war itself is not the main goal, but that it was simply important to somehow get the thing started.” And if the president is hoping for an act of terrorism, “the Tehran regime is, so to speak, a convenient partner in the mutual provocation of terror. Trump seems to have anticipated this, without seeming to care about loss of life: ‘Like I said, some people will die.’ And if they do, he has his pretext.”

While there are a number of contexts in which Iran or a different U.S. adversary could attempt a terror attack, Snyder suggests that “another possibility is an American act of terrorism on the territory of the United States, either presented as an Iranian attack or not. Most terrorism inside the United States is domestic and is right-wing, and this war has been very divisive among American fascists. Historically, fascist competitions for power have been accompanied by internal violence.”

What’s more, according to Snyder, not only has Trump dismantled much of the anti-terror apparatus, but “domestic terrorists are also getting a pass if they are right-wing; the Department of Homeland Security has deprioritized domestic terrorism and is no longer keeping up its database. An unqualified but right-wing recent college graduate is in charge of its program designed to prevent domestic terrorism.” Snyder notes that several current high-level U.S. intelligence and anti-terror appointees lack experience, and are direct allies of Trump who have expressed desire to meddle in U.S. elections.

Should a terror attack occur, whether by Iran, Russia or some domestic entity, writes Snyder, “none of this requires any sort of grand plan in the White House, let alone a conspiracy. None of it even requires very much initiative. Self-terrorism is more a matter of allowing things to fall apart, and then grabbing opportunely at a bit of the falling wreckage, which is something that Trump does well.”

“Modern tyranny is terror management,” Snyder concludes. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.”

TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURIES (TBI)

Pentagon Has Been Hiding Reports on

Soldiers Injured During Trump’s Illegal Iran War

The report comes as Trump considers a “wider war” including a ground invasion that could require hundreds of thousands of US troops.


Stephen Prager
Jul 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

After months of downplaying the number of American casualties from President Donald Trump’s war in Iran, The New York Times revealed that the Pentagon once again hid dozens of US military injuries from Iranian strikes on bases in Jordan last week.

As the Times reported on Monday:
In the week leading up to the Iranian attack on Friday that killed two US soldiers and left one service member missing in Jordan, Iran carried out three other strikes against US forces in the country.

Those attacks injured dozens of US service members and damaged several helicopters, according to several US officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

But the Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage they inflicted.

The Pentagon’s failure to disclose full information about US casualties is not a new development.

In the early days of the war, Defense Department officials said fewer than a dozen American troops had been injured before abruptly acknowledging that more than 140 had been wounded after Reuters obtained the full figures.

After six American soldiers were killed during the war’s opening salvo, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth derided the press’s inquiries about the number of casualties, claiming they were only seeking “to make the president look bad.”

The Intercept’s Nick Turse found in April that US Central Command (CENTCOM) had repeatedly sent outdated and incomplete casualty figures to journalists in what one defense official referred to as a “casualty cover-up.”

As of April 1, Turse reported that more than 520 US troops had been injured, including more than 200 sailors being treated for smoke inhalation, without acknowledgment from the government.

Last week—prior to the deaths of two US soldiers in Jordan—CENTCOM said that a total of 414 service members had been injured since the war began, mostly from traumatic brain injuries. In total, 17 US personnel have now been killed, according to official counts.

CENTCOM spokesperson Maj. Emma Thompson said last week that she had no update on how many troops were seriously wounded, but claimed that “almost all” of those injured had returned to duty. She also did not say how many troops had been wounded enough to be evacuated from the region.

The Times report notes that CENTCOM is not required to disclose information about injured US service members publicly. And one military official argued that doing so would provide Iran with free information that would leave the US vulnerable to further attacks.

However, it does speak to the Trump administration’s ever-growing secrecy as it threatens to dramatically expand the unpopular conflict.

As the Times noted, the Pentagon has provided little information about the war in recent months, and the last major press briefing on the war took place in early May.

The administration has blown past its initial promises to end its operation against Iran in a matter of weeks and avoid a “forever war.” The conflict is now into its fifth month with no end in sight.

The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that in an effort to break Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz—where it began to restrict travel in response to the US-Israeli war—Trump is planning a “wider war” that may include a possible ground invasion of Kharg Island and other Iranian territory along the strait.

Experts have estimated that efforts to capture and occupy Iran’s coastline would likely require hundreds of thousands of troops.

Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on Russia

Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale


A soldier of the Unmanned Systems Forces prepares a drone “Salut” for flight by connecting cables to the system on March 31, 2026 in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
(Photo by Nikoletta Stoyanova/Getty Images)

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Sybil Fares
Jul 21, 2026

Common Dreams


In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.

The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.

The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.

Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.

The US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing.

This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.

Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite. Barack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.

Trump’s Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises

Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.

The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had “no cards,” and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.

In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon “must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones.” In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to “unleash” military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.

From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.

Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.

The Laboratory

Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.

At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs “most of the targeting” done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the “Brave1 Dataroom” to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to “transfer the war onto Russian territory.”

Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.

Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US

Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.

Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the “key partner;” and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.

The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Jeffrey D. Sachs
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
Full Bio >

Sybil Fares
Sybil Fares is a specialist and advisor in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN
Full Bio >

Donald Trump: An Atomic Bomb of a President

If his dreams (oh, sorry, nightmares) come true, he will certainly be known historically (if, of course, there is any “historically” then) as the president of the United States who did his best to end it all.


 A satirical float of US President Donald Trump is displayed during the Rose Monday celebration in Cologne, Germany.
(Photo: via Ann Wright)

Tom Engelhardt
Jul 21, 2026

Common Dreams

Let’s face it: Donald Trump should be considered an atomic bomb of a president—potentially all too literally, even if in slow motion, thanks to climate change. When it comes to actual atomic weaponry, he’s been threatening for a while first to restart the testing of nuclear weapons, which the US stopped 33 years ago, and then (at least implicitly) to use just such a weapon against the Iranians. In April, in fact, he insisted that, if Iran refused to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back”—only to later deny that he meant he would ever consider using an atomic weapon against that country.

Of course, once upon a time in school (think the 1950s), the young Donald Trump, like me, must have “ducked and covered” under his desk in preparation for a potential Soviet atomic attack on our city (New York). During those Cold War years, of course, atomic testing was considered normal, while our country and the Soviet Union were indeed facing off globally in a remarkably threatening fashion. But no ducking and covering now, not from our president anyway.

Once upon a time, in the last century when I was an editor at Pantheon Books, I published Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. Then, at the invitation of the Japanese editor of that book, I actually visited Hiroshima and went to the museum there dedicated to my country’s nuclear devastation of that city and Nagasaki to end World War II. I’ll never forget that dead 12-year-old’s charred lunchbox or that human shadow etched in stone by the atomic blast. Of course, as a boy, I had all too typically grown up dreaming (in the sense of a nightmare) about mushroom clouds exploding over New York City.

But in all those years, I never quite imagined that there might be a slow-motion version of atomic warfare on this planet, which we’ve come to mildly label “climate change.” (It should, of course, be called something more like “climate catastrophe” or “climate hell.”) Nor had I ever quite imagined that we would elect a president seemingly intent on making it happen ever more quickly and severely. After all, he’s pushed remarkably hard to further fossil-fuelize our world. As Juan Cole noted all too aptly at his Informed Comment website, just as the 250th anniversary of this country’s founding was passing, “Trump’s promotion of coal burning and cancellation of wind turbines makes him the Benedict Arnold of America’s current struggle.”

When it comes to him and the possibility of either a potentially devastating nuclear war or a fossil-fuelized heat war on this planet, he seems perfectly willing to engage in world-ending activities.

These days, of course, nine countries have nuclear arsenals (enough weapons to wipe out any number of Earth-sized planets), and Donald Trump has recently been at war with Iran, the country he feared might become the 10th. And yet, in the 80 years since my country ended World War II by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people (including an estimated 38,000 children), consider it a miracle that another of those weapons (now horrifically more powerful) has never been used, although since the first nuclear test in 1945, there have been more than 2,000 other “tests” in which such weapons were exploded, which have, of course, sent cancer-causing radiation across the planet.

But don’t push that miracle idea too far, since it turns out that we humans proved all too capable of coming up with another way to devastate this planet, a distinctly slow-motion version of atomic warfare. In fact, at this very moment, I’m sitting in an air-conditioned room writing this piece, while the world more or less burns outside my window. Recently, high temperature records were tied or broken across 21 states in my country, including my own state, with worse potentially still to come in our future. (The same, by the way, has been true across much of Europe, the part of the planet reputedly heating fastest in this increasingly strange world of ours, with Spain only recently topping a record 113°F.) I’m thinking, of course, of climate change and, sadly, at this very moment, when it comes to that version of warfare—and it should indeed be thought of as a form of warfare!—against this planet, there really is no ducking and covering (unless you count air conditioning, which uses electricity and so only makes matters worse). If you happened to live in Europe recently or in the Midwestern and Eastern parts of the United States where temperatures rose to striking heights or simply went crazy (including hitting 104°F in my hometown, New York City), you would certainly know that.

In short, it’s increasingly hot, hot, hot, damagingly so on this planet of ours, and Donald Trump, the second time around, not only doesn’t give a damn (an all too appropriate term under the circumstances) but seems remarkably intent on making this planet hotter still. At least, to look on the bright side, climate change did make something of a mess of his celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, or was that the 250th anniversary of Glorious Donald? When it comes to him and the possibility of either a potentially devastating nuclear war or a fossil-fuelized heat war on this planet, he seems perfectly willing to engage in world-ending activities as long as they’re in slow motion and, at 80 years old, he (like me) won’t be around to experience the resulting holocaust, which he has, of course, termed a “green energy scam” and a “hoax.”

Yes, make no mistake about it, while he’s officially ended that 33-year moratorium on nuclear testing, that may be the least of our problems. Whatever other recent presidents have (or haven’t) done in terms of climate change, he seems remarkably intent on doing so much worse by wildly promoting fossil fuels, while doing everything he can to dismiss anything that might make this planet less hot, including wind and solar power of any sort. (In the process, he’s giving imperial decline a new meaning by turning what’s left of imperial power on this planet over to China, which now controls so much of green energy development and production.)

If his dreams (oh, sorry, nightmares) come true, he will certainly be known historically (if, of course, there is any “historically” then) as the president of the United States who did his best to end it all (even if in slow motion).

Under the circumstances, we should consider Donald Trump the human equivalent of a slow-motion atomic bomb.

THE POLITICS OF CRUELTY

‘Frankly Sickening’: Reports Highlight Brutal Impact of Trump-GOP Cuts to SNAP Food Aid

“States are absolutely contemplating a world in which SNAP isn’t available.”

People walk after receiving food from volunteers with Pasadena Community Job Center at the Mano a Mano Pantry food distribution program on July 10, 2026 in Pasadena, California.
(Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Jul 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS


Several reports published this week highlight the brutal impact cuts made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in Republicans’ 2025 budget law are having on Americans’ access to food.

A lengthy Tuesday report in The New York Times zeroed in on the bill’s impact in Arizona, where roughly 440,000 people have been dropped from the program even though many of them are still eligible to receive assistance.

The GOP-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act established severe penalties for states that have high error rates when awarding SNAP benefits, and Arizona has responded by vastly increasing the paperwork applicants must file to qualify for the program in order to avoid making mistakes that could result in the loss of federal funding.

According to the Times, this has created “bureaucratic chaos” that has caused many otherwise eligible people to lose aid.

“It can take months to reach besieged caseworkers, and offices have gone as far as asking people with panhandling income for verification from strangers dropping cash in their jar,” reported the Times. “Arizonans losing SNAP say they are skipping meals, quarreling over food, and missing rent payments to restock pantry shelves.”

One former SNAP beneficiary featured in the Times story was Dee McDonald, a 65-year-old cancer survivor who reported skipping meals to ensure that the three grandsons she’s raising have enough to eat.

According to the Times, McDonald has been scrambling from one local food pantry to another to ensure there is enough food in the house for the whole family, a process she told the paper has left her “exhausted.”

“I go to sleep thinking about what are we going to have,” McDonald said.

Michael Wisehart, director of the Arizona Department of Economic Security, told the Times that it’s “frankly sickening to me the number of individuals” who are suffering due to the bureaucratic hurdles the state is enacting.

However, Wisehart said that if Arizona doesn’t add these bureaucratic layers, it could risk seeing its SNAP program completely destroyed.

“It’s an existential threat,” he explained. “States are absolutely contemplating a world in which SNAP isn’t available.”

Another state facing this dilemma is Arkansas, which the local news station KATV reported on Monday is scrambling to lower its SNAP error rate that, under new rules, could cost the state $55 million per year.

Keesa Smith-Brantley, executive director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and former deputy director of the Arkansas Department of Human Services, told KATV that the financial penalties imposed on the state could create a downward spiral in which state officials have fewer resources to effectively lower the SNAP error rate.

“It is very concerning that we may not have a SNAP program in years to come if the state can’t come up with the funding,” said Smith-Brantley.

A Tuesday report in Axios examined how the GOP’s SNAP cuts have impacted Virginia, where 100,000 fewer residents are now enrolled in the program compared to a year ago.

Aaron McClung, chief development officer at Feed More, an umbrella organization for food banks in the central part of the state, told Axios that visits to food pantries have increased by more than 20% since the passage of the GOP budget law last year.

While food banks have tried to fill the gap, McClung said, they are no substitute for SNAP, which he described as “the nation’s most effective, dignified, and scalable tool for reducing food insecurity.”

Jacqueline Mott, Virginia state manager for the Save the Children Action Network, expressed a similar sentiment, telling Axios that “charitable food assistance was never designed to replace SNAP.”

‘Imagine All the Better Things That Could Have Been Done’: Trump Has Blown $37.5 Billion on Iran War

“THIS from the administration that said there was no money for food assistance, Medicaid, and healthcare tax credits.”

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testifies during a Senate Committee on Appropriations hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on July 21, 2026.
(Photo by Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jul 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

While economists have warned for months that the true cost of President Donald Trump’s illegal war on Iran could be trillions of dollars, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth estimated on Tuesday that it’s currently about $37.5 billion.

That figure came from a line of questioning by US Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), as Hegseth appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee to support Trump’s June supplemental funding request, which includes tens of billions for the Pentagon.

Hegseth told Durbin that the $37.5 billion estimate includes what’s been spent so far, plus some projected spending through the end of the fiscal year in September—an exchange quickly met with fury by various critics, many of whom pointed out the range of ways that money could have been better spent by an administration allegedly dedicated to combating “waste, fraud, and abuse.”



“Imagine all the better things that could have been done with $37.5 billion,” Jonathan Cohn, political director for the group Progressive Mass, wrote on Bluesky.

Noting that the Strait of Hormuz “is still closed,” progressive writer Alex Cole similarly said, “Imagine what $37.5 billion could’ve done for veterans, schools, or healthcare.”

Congressman James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) specifically noted: “That could cover a full school year of free lunches for 30 million children. Or a full year of childcare for nearly 2 million kids.”

“Trump finds money for war while families get excuses,” he added, as working people struggle with rising costs of housing, groceries, and gasoline—the price of which has soared due to Iran restricting strait traffic over US attacks.



The liberal political group American Bridge 21st Century highlighted how Trump and congressional Republicans have attacked programs for working families while giving more tax cuts to billionaires and waging war on Iran.

“THIS from the administration that said there was no money for food assistance, Medicaid, and healthcare tax credits,” the organization said.

Since Trump joined with Israel to start bombing Iran on February 28, most congressional Democrats, legal experts, and other critics have argued that the war—for which the president never secured support from Congress—is not only foolish but also unlawful under both international and US law.

Citing Trump’s attempts to evade limits of the War Powers Act of 1973, Congressman John Larson (D-Conn.) said Monday that he is preparing legal action against the administration and a new bill to cut off funding for the war on Iran, which has killed over 3,000 people according to the Iranian government.



Previous war cost estimates from the US Department of Defense have been met with scrutiny. After Pentagon comptroller Jules “Jay” Hurst offered the $25 billion figure in April, Stephen Semler, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, estimated that the government spent at least $71.8 billion during the first two months of the war, or around $1.2 billion per day.

As for the US death toll, at least 17 service members have been killed and many more wounded. The New York Times revealed Monday that the Pentagon hid dozens of American military injuries from Iranian strikes on bases in Jordan last week.

Two Iranian-Americans, a US veteran, and a nurse disrupted Hegseth’s Tuesday appearance before the Senate, according to CodePink. In addition to that anti-war group, the protesters were from the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) and Vets About Face DMV.



“Pete Hegseth and this administration will be remembered for the killing of innocent civilians and children. They have protected neither the American people nor our security, only the interests that have lined their pockets,” said Bella of NIAC, who joined the protest, in a statement.

“While Americans struggle to afford their lives, this government always finds billions to bomb our families in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and elsewhere,” Bella added. “This is a repugnant betrayal of humanity. It is illegal, and the American people will hold them accountable.”

Raskin Launches Investigation Into Evidence Epstein Was ‘Foreign Agent’ Working to Influence Trump Policies

“Numerous recently released documents now show he acted aggressively on behalf of multiple foreign governments... in order to influence policies of the first Trump administration.”



This photo illustration from February 5, 2026, shows released documents from the US Justice Department files on Jeffrey Epstein.
(Photo Illustration by Vladislav Nekrasov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Jul 21, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, launched an investigation Monday into whether the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein worked on behalf of foreign governments to influence President Donald Trump during his first term.

In a letter addressed to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche; Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton; and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Raskin (D-Md.) said that files provided to the Judiciary Committee show “substantial evidence” that Epstein acted to advance the interests of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, advised the Russian government on its dealings with Trump, and worked as a consultant to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

“Jeffrey Epstein never registered as a foreign agent,” Raskin said. “Yet numerous recently released documents now show he acted aggressively on behalf of multiple foreign governments, including several with interests adverse to the United States, in order to influence policies of the first Trump administration.”

Epstein, a convicted sex criminal who was found dead in his jail cell in 2019 after being charged with trafficking minors, has long been surrounded by questions about his relationships to foreign governments. But this is the first time an inquiry from the US Congress has expressly focused on them.

Raskin called attention to a trip taken by Epstein to Riyadh in November 2016, the week of Trump’s first election, during which he met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) before sending one of his representatives an email offering to become the “financial confidant” to members of the Saudi government. “I am happy to represent [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] interests. period,” he said.

Epstein also apparently offered to represent Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in the US and serve as an adviser to a development project overseen by MBS. The crown prince’s response to the proposal has not been provided to the committee, according to Raskin.

Several emails to friends and confidantes indicate that around the same time, Epstein was regularly boasting of his visits to Trump Tower and meetings with “Trump people” during the presidential transition, which he said presented “lots of opportunity.”

Other correspondence seems to indicate that Epstein coached the emir of Kuwait on how to deal with Trump. In May 2017, prior to a summit of Gulf states in Riyadh, Epstein wrote to an unnamed political figure that he had “much to do around the Trump trip.”

The figure responded that he wanted “tips on how we should communicate with Trump,” specifically on the Saudi-led war against Yemen; Kuwait had played host to three months of UN-led negotiations related to the conflict the year before.

It is unclear from the records which US officials, if any, Epstein intended to engage on Kuwait’s behalf.

Raskin also highlighted what is perhaps Epstein’s most well-documented foreign government contact, Ehud Barak, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 1999 to 2001 and later its minister of defense.

According to a trove of leaked emails published by Drop Site News last year, Epstein worked to create a backchannel between Barak and the Russian government and helped him to pursue a meeting with President Vladimir Putin in 2013 as he pushed for Russia to abandon its support for then-Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which was a major national security priority of Israel.

Epstein also provided information about US officials to Barak as he tried to push the Obama administration to take a harder stance toward Iran and Syria.

It is one of many instances in which Epstein and Barak worked to advance Israeli interests across the world, including brokering security and surveillance agreements with the governments of Mongolia and Côte d’Ivoire and helping to build the relationship between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Other emails reveal Epstein advising high-ranking Russian officials on how to deal with Trump as they sought to avoid sanctions placed by the US over its interference in the 2016 election and its aggression toward Ukraine.

Raskin said that Epstein seemed to be consciously acting as a foreign agent despite never registering as one under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The congressman pointed to exchanges in which Epstein appeared to advise Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon on how to avoid FARA reporting requirements.

Raskin argued that Epstein’s deep well of knowledge about Trump and his apparent access to members of his circle “posed a major national security liability.” Epstein often bragged that he had leverage over the president and said he was “the one able to take [Trump] down.”

The congressman argued for transparency in light of the administration’s efforts to delay the release of the files and withhold information despite congressional requirements.

Beyond potentially embarrassing revelations about Trump, he said the repeated use of the White House Situation Room to discuss the Epstein scandal indicated that it posed possible national security concerns that have not been disclosed to the public.

Raskin called on the Department of Justice and State Department to release all files referencing Epstein and other foreign nations and information that may point to his efforts to avoid FARA requirements.

‘McCarthyite’ Rubio Report Ripped as Attempt to Justify Trump Invasion of Cuba

Critics panned the publication for not only its warmongering but also “unfounded claims seeking to tar domestic movements for social change as agents of a foreign government.”


Protesters demonstrate against the Trump administration’s invasion of Venezuela and threats against Cuba in London, England on January 10, 2026.
(Photo by Matthew Chattle/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Jul 20, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

While some Republicans in Congress cheered the US Department of State’s Monday report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” American and Cuban critics blasted it as part of both President Donald Trump’s push to invade the island and his authoritarian crackdown on domestic dissent.

“For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,” the report begins, “that has infiltrated the highest reaches of the US government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”

Sharing the document on social media, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio—the son of Cuban immigrants and a longtime advocate of regime change on the island—similarly claimed that Cuba’s government “has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States. The State Department is exposing the full history of Cuban espionage and subversion in our country. The American people deserve to know.”



Some of the critics responded directly to Rubio, calling the report “justification for the military invasion of Cuba and the new COINTELPRO,” a reference to the Federal Bureau of Investigation program targeting US organizers over half a century ago.

Defense Priorities fellow and Chicago Tribune foreign affairs columnist Daniel DePetris wrote: “This report actually states, in all seriousness, that Cuba’s main goal is to conquer the United States. It’s about as dumb as dumb gets. Don’t be fooled: This is the State Department trying to build the foundational case for US military action, should Trump decide to do it.”

Andreas Krieg, a senior lecturer at King’s College London and fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, urged Rubio, “Before building another casus belli for Cuba, try to solve the strategic disaster that is the Iran War you started but cannot win.”

Trump in recent months has ramped up the United States’ decadeslong and deadly economic assault on Cuba and suggested that he may try to take over the island. However, he’s also signaled such action may come only after an end to his illegal war on Iran, which has been revived in recent days following a failed ceasefire.

In an apparent show of support for Trump taking military action against the island nation, Congressman Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) declared on social media Monday, “Cuba is next!”



Meanwhile, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla said in Spanish that “the latest fallacy from the US Department of State against Cuba forms part of the construction, by the secretary of state, of a pretext for sustaining its cruel and criminal economic war that punishes every Cuban family, and its aspiration to militarily aggress Cuba, for which it desperately seeks the support of US citizens. It is further evidence of the macabre plan designed by that US politician from South Florida, who only satisfies the interests of those who have always paid him.”

US Congresswoman Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), who recently traveled to Cuba to hear firsthand accounts of the humanitarian crisis, said that “Secretary Rubio’s deranged ‘analysis’ leaves out the fact that for more than six decades, the United States’ policies have destabilized our neighbors in Latin America—including Cuba—through sanctions, embargoes, military coups, land control, and colonization.”

“Today, the Trump Department of State, led by Rubio, continues that imperialist tradition while doing what authoritarians do by criminalizing dissent,” she continued. “US foreign policy is responsible for death, destruction, and destabilization. We can change that. We CAN become good neighbors.”

About halfway through the State Department report, it complains about a “constant stream of Western left-wing activists, influencers, and organizers” participating in “solidarity delegations” as well as events such as the March 2026 “Nuestra América Convoy,” which delivered humanitarian aid to everyday Cubans suffering due to the Trump administration’s intensified blockade.

“Participants included a suite of influential progressives from the United States and across the world, including Hasan Piker; Amazon Labor Union founder Christian Smalls; a delegation from the Democratic Socialists of America; former UK Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn; former Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias; several other current and former members of European Parliament; and Isra Hirsi, campus activist and daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.),” the report states. Elsewhere, it takes aim at groups including the peace organization CodePink, Communist Party USA, the National Lawyers Guild, and others.



Some targeted individuals and groups responded to what CodePink called a “conspiracy theory that masquerades as a report on Cuba,” full of “baseless smears and imaginary, contrived links to Russia, China, and Iran.”

“The report attempts to paint the tiny island as a threat but says nothing about the US blockade that starves and punishes 10 million people,” CodePink said. “This latest attempt by the State Department is just one of many politically motivated witch hunts designed to silence anti-war voices who dare to challenge US militarism. It’s about justifying even more aggression against Cuba while turning advocates for peace into suspects. We’ve seen this playbook before. It’s McCarthyism, plain and simple.”

“CodePink is currently under investigation by the Treasury Department simply for bringing medical supplies to serve children’s hospitals in Cuba. We live in a world where, sadly, the people delivering medicine—not those who are enforcing the policies that deprive Cubans of medicine, food, fuel, and electricity—are under investigation,” the group noted.

The organization also nodded to the dozens of United Nations General Assembly votes against the decades of American sanctions, saying that “we stand proudly with the global majority, including 187 UN member nations, who oppose the inhumane US blockade of Cuba. We will not be intimidated for delivering humanitarian aid and advocating for diplomacy over war.”

“End the blockade. End the sanctions. End the economic warfare. End the threats of military intervention,” CodePink declared. “Let Cubans determine their own future. Hands off Cuba.”



Although not mentioned in the administration’s new document, Defending Rights & Dissent joined the organizations publicly lambasting it, with policy director Chip Gibbons saying that his group “objects to the State Department’s McCarthyite report on Cuba, which makes unfounded claims seeking to tar domestic movements for social change as agents of a foreign government.”

Throughout its 100 pages, the publication “goes so far as to cite reports from the long-discredited House Un-American Activities Committee, in order to revive absurd Cold War conspiracy theories and update them for the present,” noted Gibbons the author of The Imperial Bureau: The FBI, Political Surveillance, and the Rise of the US National Security State.

“The report smears activists, organizations, and even elected officials using guilt-by-association techniques. It appears designed to justify both domestic political repression and regime change in Cuba,” he added. “Congress must not only condemn the report but hold hearings examining its authorship and to determine if the claims behind it have been used to facilitate the surveillance of American activists.”


This article has been updated with comment from Congresswoman Delia Ramirez.