The Iran War Expands - Even Before the Troops Arrive
From possible US deployments and mounting risks to oil chokepoints, to jet fuel fears in Asia-Pacific and fresh pressure on Europe over Ukraine, the conflict is already redrawing the geopolitical map
Multiple US news outlets, citing sources, are reporting that President Donald Trump is considering sending thousands of additional US ground troops to bolster operations in the Middle East, a move that would give Trump additional options in the war against Iran. The reports come as Trump himself on March 19 denied he was about to deploy more troops to the region, although he appeared to keep the door open. “I’m not putting troops anywhere,” he told reporters. “If I were, I certainly wouldn’t tell you. But I’m not putting troops. We will do whatever is necessary.” A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters: “There has been no decision to send ground troops at this time, but President Trump wisely keeps all options at his disposal.” Reuters, citing four sources, including two US officials, said additional troops would give Trump additional options, including the means to safeguard passage for oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. Such an operation would be carried out mainly by air and naval forces, the sources said, but it would also require deploying US troops to Iran’s shoreline. The US administration has also considered the possibility of deploying ground forces to Iran’s Kharg Island, the hub for 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, Reuters said, citing three people familiar with the matter and three US officials. One of the officials said such an operation would be quite risky, given that Iran has the ability to strike the island with missiles and drones. Newsmax, meanwhile, reported that the US military has already accelerated deployment of thousands of Marines and sailors to potentially help reinforce its forces fighting against Iran. Citing three officials speaking on condition of anonymity, Newsmax reported that the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group and the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit were deploying ahead of schedule from the West Coast of the United States. Newsmax reported there are 2,500 Marines in the deployment, bringing the total to about 4,000 service members aboard three amphibious vessels. They house F-35 fighter jets, missiles, and amphibious vehicles capable of launching from ships for a land assault. The administration has discussed the possibility of deploying US forces to secure Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium, one of the people familiar with the matter said told Reuters. Politico also reported that the Pentagon is considering sending more troops to the Middle East. Citing two people familiar with the talks, it reported that the size and scope of additional deployments are still evolving - RFE/RL
Vietnam, which imports nearly three-quarters of its aviation fuel, mostly from China and Thailand, warned this week that shortages could emerge as early as April. Vietnamese airlines are weighing fare increases and flight cuts to cope with rising costs and tightening supplies. Even at higher prices, securing additional fuel remains a serious challenge. “Access to fuel supplies is extremely difficult at the moment, as it depends entirely on external factors, particularly the conflict in the Middle East,” said Bui Ngoc Bao, chairman of the Vietnam Petroleum Association. For Australia, the current shock is a situation long flagged as a vulnerability because of the nation’s reliance on imports, including in the government’s own review. The country imports 90 percent of its fuel and had about a 32-day supply of jet fuel on hand in early March, according to the country’s energy minister. A local media report that at least one fuel tanker bound for Australia failed to load at a Chinese port in mid-March fanned fears that shortages were ahead. The chief executive of Sydney Airport, which accounts for 40 percent of the country’s jet fuel consumption, said last week that the airport typically held around a 25-day supply. But the reliability of that stock “depends on international shipping lanes, global refining capacity and geopolitical stability,” the executive, Scott Charlton, said in remarks at a summit on renewable fuels. Of the war now jeopardizing all those fronts, he said: “We’re reminded quickly how interconnected energy, aviation and geopolitics are.” - NYT
Europe’s stance on the Iran war risks US President Donald Trump walking away from the conflict in Ukraine, his former national security advisor, John Bolton, has told Euronews, criticising the EU’s reaction to the situation in the Middle East. Bolton, who also previously served as the US’s ambassador to the UN, branded the Iran conflict as “Europe’s war,” despite EU nations distancing themselves from the conflict which they say they did not choose or start.
“Europe is just as much, if not more, at risk from nuclear attacks if Iran gets nuclear weapons,” Bolton told our EU editor Maria Tadeo. “It has the missile capability to hit Central and Eastern Europe – not the United States.” He warned that EU leaders could be handing an “invitation” to Trump to decide that “Ukraine is not America’s war,” branding the lack of political will across the bloc to partake in the war on Iran as a “mistake”.
As the Iran war spills across the region and Israeli strikes intensify in Lebanon, the Committee to Protect Journalists says press freedom conditions are worsening fast, with journalists killed, injured, displaced and obstructed from reporting. CPJ said Lebanese journalist Mohamed Sherri, a senior Al-Manar TV figure, was killed alongside his wife in an Israeli strike on their apartment building in central Beirut on March 18; his son, also a journalist, was injured. The watchdog is also documenting broader threats, intimidation, reporting restrictions and attacks on media infrastructure, while mass displacement in Lebanon is forcing many journalists to work from unstable conditions — further choking the flow of independent reporting at a critical moment.
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A furious row erupted at the European Council after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán refused to lift his veto on a proposed €90 billion EU loan package for Ukraine, deepening a standoff that now leaves Brussels with no clear fallback plan. According to Euronews reporting from Brussels, European Council President António Costa delivered some of the sharpest criticism yet of Orbán, warning: “Nobody can blackmail the European Council. Nobody can blackmail the European Union institutions.” Diplomats described the debate among leaders as “fiery,” with frustration boiling over at Hungary’s insistence on linking support for Ukraine to the restoration of Russian oil flows through the Druzhba pipeline. Kyiv says the pipeline was damaged in a Russian drone strike in late January, but Orbán has alleged sabotage and continues to demand guarantees over the safety of crude transit into Hungary and Slovakia. Costa reportedly noted the impossibility of such demands while Russia continues its missile and drone attacks on Ukraine. In a gesture toward compromise, Ukraine allowed an EU-led inspection of the pipeline site just days before the summit, despite President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s stated opposition to restoring Russian oil transit during wartime, arguing it would only help refill the Kremlin’s war chest. Orbán, meanwhile, has cast the dispute as political interference ahead of Hungary’s 12 April election, claiming EU institutions want regime change in Budapest. With no Plan B yet on the table, the EU now appears trapped between two unattractive options: wait four to six weeks for oil transit to resume, or hope Hungary’s election changes the political math. Ukraine’s Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko called the veto “definitely not welcome news from Brussels,” but said he remained confident the bloc would eventually approve the loan.
As the US Congress begins shaping its Fiscal Year 2027 budget, a small but symbolically powerful provision has emerged from both chambers: $15 million dedicated to tracking Ukrainian children abducted by Russia -- a program whose funding was cut by President Donald Trump’s administration last year but that advocates say is essential for future war crimes prosecutions and, ultimately, bringing those children home. Buried in early drafts of the State and Foreign Operations (SFOPS) appropriations bills in both the House and Senate, the funding reflects rare bipartisan alignment in an otherwise polarized Washington. Of that total, $5 million is earmarked for the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), a key player in documenting the forced transfer of Ukrainian children into Russia’s custody, sources told RFE/RL. Yet in a stark illustration of how Washington’s slow-moving funding machinery can collide with urgent realities on the ground, the lab itself may not survive long enough to receive the money after US State Department cuts last year. “We are entirely grateful for the bipartisan effort,” Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, told RFE/RL in an interview on March 18. “But right now we only have enough money to continue the Ukraine work at Yale HRL until May 1, 2026. So we are desperately in need of something to continue.” He traced the disruption in funding to a confluence of political transition and bureaucratic hesitation following the 2024 US election. Senior congressional aides in both chambers, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss ongoing negotiations, described the new funding as a deliberate signal -- both to Moscow and to allies -- that accountability for child deportations remains a US priority. A Senate aide familiar with the provision told RFE/RL that lawmakers view the documentation effort as “foundational to any credible war crimes case that could emerge in the future,” adding that without sustained data collection, “you lose the evidentiary chain, and with it, the possibility of justice.” - RFE/RL
From the Gulf and Ukraine to the Philippines and southern Africa, the geopolitical dots are multiplying by the day.
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Belarus freed 250 political prisoners on Thursday following negotiations with the United States, while Washington agreed to remove sanctions on several Belarusian companies in return, a U.S. official said. The prisoner release, the largest in years, came hours after U.S. envoy John Coale met Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk. U.S. President Donald Trump has sought to build ties with Belarus, a close ally of Russia, since taking office last year, easing sanctions on the country and welcoming it to his “Board of Peace.” The authoritarian state in eastern Europe has released dozens of prisoners in recent months, largely due to U.S. efforts. Among those released on Thursday were human rights activists Valentin Stefanovich, Marfa Rabkova and Anastasiya Loika, Belarusian rights group Viasna reported. Belarus still holds hundreds of political prisoners in its jails, many of whom were arrested after a disputed 2020 election that triggered widespread protests. - Moscow Times
Tech mogul Mark Zuckerberg is abandoning ship on a social media project once envisioned to be a cornerstone of Meta’s leap into the metaverse. Horizon Worlds is winding down as a social network and game space meant for users of the Quest virtual reality headset. The decline of this much-hyped VR product is happening at breakneck speed, with the app turning into a 2D mobile app at the end of March. This is just the latest setback for Zuckerberg’s stumble into the metaverse, which motivated the name change from Facebook to Meta. The company laid off more than 1,000 employees from its metaverse division, Reality Labs. The tech CEO initially had high hopes for the metaverse. “Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg once said. But, as CNBC reports, this goal has faced strong headwinds as customers are skeptical of the 3D world. Reality Labs reported billions of dollars of losses as a result, prompting the company to look instead to advancing its artificial intelligence offerings - The Daily Beast
The UK-based Observer has offered its entire workforce voluntary redundancy as the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper grapples for direction following its sale by The Guardian. The Telegraph has learned that the weekly title has offered voluntary redundancy to all 140 staff, with bosses warning that the cuts could become compulsory. The redundancy has been offered on the same terms as the scheme presented to staff before its takeover by start-up Tortoise Media just under a year ago. At the time, around a third of the Sunday title’s 70 journalists either took redundancy or jobs at The Guardian instead of working for The Observer under new ownership. The proposed cuts signal a significant restructuring of the newspaper, which was founded in 1791, after a bitter takeover battle. Journalists staged a four-day strike in 2024 over plans to hand the title to Tortoise, a loss-making start-up founded by James Harding, the former head of BBC News. Staff were in open revolt over the sale, accusing the Scott Trust, The Guardian’s owner, of “betrayal” and raising concerns over the newspaper’s financial sustainability under its new owners. Many also feared the takeover by Tortoise, which specialises in “slow news”, would effectively transform the newspaper into a weekly magazine.
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