Washington: The United States is continuing to surge military assets to Eastern Europe and the Middle East, fuelling speculation that President Donald Trump is headed for war with Iran despite both sides noting progress in recent talks.
Meanwhile, Trump again warned British Prime Minister Keir Starmer not to cede control of the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to Mauritius, saying the US may need to use the island and its air base to defend against Iranian attacks in the event the Islamic Republic decides not to make a deal.
The developments came as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said there were “many reasons” for a strike against Iran, though the president’s first preference was always diplomacy.
Flight tracking data indicated dozens of military aircraft, including refuelling tankers, left the continental US heading east, or moved across Europe, overnight into Wednesday (Washington time), adding to the growing military build-up in the region.
Popular tracking site FlightRadar24 said at one point overnight, all of its nine most-tracked flights were US Air Force Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers, an aircraft used to refuel other planes in midair.
Records show one such flight left Tampa, Florida, on Tuesday night bound for Sofia, Bulgaria. There was also a high level of activity around Mildenhall air force base in England, a key US military hub.
US news website Axios reported another 50 fighter jets headed to the region within 24 hours. Its prominent foreign policy correspondent, Barak Ravid, who is in direct contact with Trump, reported that “the Trump administration is closer to a major war in the Middle East than most Americans realise”.
At a think tank event in Washington on Wednesday, the director of the Middle East program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Mona Yacoubian, said the US military build-up “seems unprecedented, at least in recent memory”, with “all kinds of military assets being flooded into the region”.
The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier is already in the area, with the BBC tracking it to the Arabian Sea off the coast of Oman earlier this week using satellite imagery. Another strike group, led by the USS Gerald Ford, is on its way to the Gulf and could arrive within a week.
“Every aircraft carrier can hold at least 75 aircraft. That’s a big, big power,” said Susan Ziadeh, a former US ambassador to Qatar, at the CSIS event on Wednesday.
The ongoing buildup comes despite another round of indirect talks between the US and Iran this week in Geneva, mediated by Oman, which were led on the US side by Trump’s special envoy, Steve Wynn, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Both sides flagged a level of progress, with Iran saying there was agreement on “guiding principles”, and a US official saying the Iranians would present detailed proposals to address differences “in the next two weeks”.
However, analysts noted that when Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities in June, he had just two days earlier told Tehran he would decide “within two weeks”.
At a press briefing on Wednesday, Leavitt said there was some progress made in Geneva, but the two sides were still “very far apart on some issues”. The president would “continue to watch how this plays out”.
“There’s many reasons and arguments that one could make for a strike against Iran,” Leavitt told reporters. “The president has always been very clear [that] diplomacy is always his first option, and Iran would be very wise to make a deal.
“He’s talking to many people – of course, his national security team first and foremost. This is something that obviously the president takes seriously.”
While Leavitt was speaking, Trump posted that it would be a “big mistake” for the UK to lose control of Diego Garcia, its island in the Indian Ocean, which it is due to hand to Mauritius on a 99-year lease.
Should Iran not make a deal, Trump said, the US may need to use the island and its air base to “eradicate a potential attack by a highly unstable and dangerous regime, an attack that would potentially be made on the United Kingdom, as well as other friendly countries”.
That appeared to reverse a commitment made by the US State Department just a day earlier that said the US would support the UK deal. Leavitt said Trump’s post on Truth Social should be regarded as official US policy.
Middle East expert Aaron David Miller, who has advised several presidents, said Trump appeared to have “put himself in a box” through his rhetoric and the “staggering” build-up of military assets near Iran.
“He has now assembled an extraordinary degree of military power. You have the Gerald Ford carrier strike group probably due within a matter of days. You have F-22s, F-35s, F-15s. You’ve got defensive missile systems,” Miller said.
“Against all of this you have a negotiating process which at the moment seems to me to be unable to produce an outcome which would give the president a sense that the Iranians have really offered something.
“This is not a normal administration, this is not a normal American president, and what he’s contemplating with the amount of hardware that is out there is staggering.
“Climbing down from all that, how do you justify and rationalise doing nothing, or doing something that appears to be inconsequential?”
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.