{"id":640105,"date":"2026-03-08T03:56:16","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T03:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/640105\/"},"modified":"2026-03-08T03:56:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T03:56:16","slug":"donald-trump-is-seriously-interested-in-ominous-war-escalation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/640105\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump Is \u2018Seriously Interested\u2019 in Ominous War Escalation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The war with Iran could be on the brink of further escalation.<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump privately expressed interest in sending U.S. troops into Iran, according to several current and former officials who spoke to NBC News<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The idea came up in conversations with aides and Republican officials, where the president is said to have discussed what a post-war Iran might look like and floated the possibility of deploying a small contingent of U.S. forces for strategic missions rather than a full-scale ground invasion.<\/p>\n

\"PresidentPresident Donald Trump has reportedly expressed interest in sending U.S. troops into Iran. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n

Either possibility would run counter to Trump\u2019s repeated promises to keep the United States out of any new foreign wars.<\/p>\n

Some analysts say a limited deployment could involve missions targeting facilities that cannot easily be destroyed through air strikes.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could envision them doing some sort of special operations insertions if there were targets that they absolutely needed to take out or reduce but didn\u2019t lend themselves to bombardment,\u201d Joel Rayburn, a former Trump administration official and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told NBC News.<\/p>\n

Officials told NBC News that Trump has not made a final decision on whether to deploy troops to Iran, but the private discussions suggest he may be more open to putting U.S. \u201cboots on the ground\u201d than he has publicly acknowledged.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,\u201d Trump told The New York Post<\/a> in an interview this week. \u201cI say \u2018probably don\u2019t need them,\u2019 [or] \u2018if they were necessary.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The White House disputed the characterization of Trump\u2019s thinking.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis story is based on assumptions from anonymous sources who are not part of the president\u2019s national security team and are clearly not read into these discussions,\u201d White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said. <\/p>\n

\u201cPresident Trump always, wisely keeps all options open but anyone trying to insinuate he is in favor of one option or another proves they have no real seat at the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

Iranian officials have said they are prepared for the possibility of a U.S. ground invasion.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are waiting for them,\u201d Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told NBC News.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are confident that we can confront them, and that would be a big disaster for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The conflict began early Saturday morning, with U.S. and Israeli air strikes on Iranian targets.<\/p>\n

Six U.S. service members have so far been killed and 18 wounded in Iranian counterattacks since the fighting began, according to the Pentagon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"FORTOfficials say Trump has not made a final decision on whether to deploy troops to Iran. Anna Moneymaker\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

Araghchi said Iran has prepared for the possibility that the conflict could escalate further.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have prepared ourselves to confront with any scenario,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

During a visit to U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida, on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said there is \u201cno shortage of American will\u201d to sustain Operation Epic Fury.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got no shortage of munitions; our stockpiles of defensive and offensive weapons allow us to sustain this campaign as long as we need to,\u201d Hegseth said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur will is ironclad, which means our timeline is ours and ours alone to control.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hegseth\u2019s remarks underscore how open-ended the conflict may become, particularly as Trump continues to keep the possibility of ground troops in play.<\/p>\n

\"U.S.Pete Hegseth took shots at the press while the names of four of the six American troops killed in \u201cOperation Epic Fury\u201d were released. Elizabeth Frantz\/Reuters <\/p>\n

For now, the war has largely been fought from the air, with U.S. and Israeli strikes targeting Iranian military infrastructure. But Trump\u2019s private discussions about deploying American forces suggest the next phase of the conflict could look very different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The war with Iran could be on the brink of further escalation. President Donald Trump privately expressed interest…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":640106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[49714,77,83,7042,3097,1802,50,6986,80,37204,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-640105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","category-us","tag-defense-department","tag-donald-j-trump","tag-iran","tag-maga","tag-middle-east","tag-military","tag-news","tag-pete-hegseth","tag-politics","tag-trumpland","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116191545794625931","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}