‘Nothing definitive’ reached about Iran during Netanyahu’s visit with Trump

United States President Donald Trump has concluded a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that “nothing definitive” had been reached during their exchange.

But he added that US talks with Iran would continue, as he pushes for Tehran to concede to a list of demands.

Recommended Stories

list of 3 itemsend of list

“It was a very good meeting, the tremendous relationship between our two Countries continues,” Trump said of Israel.

“There was nothing definitive reached other than I insisted that negotiations with Iran continue to see whether or not a Deal can be consummated.”

Wednesday’s meeting was Trump’s sixth time hosting Netanyahu in the US since the start of his second term. They have met a total of seven times — including once in Israel — since January 2025.

The latest visit came just days after US and Iranian officials held indirect talks in Oman aimed at diverting a military confrontation that could spill into the wider Middle East region.

While Arab leaders have largely advocated for deescalation, Netanyahu has repeatedly called for further military action against Iran.

A private meeting

Netanyahu’s latest visit took place behind closed doors. After their visit was over, Trump posted on his Truth Social account that it had been a “tremendous meeting”. He also wrote that he had hope a deal could be struck with Iran.

“If it can, I let the Prime Minister know that will be a preference,” Trump said. “If it cannot, we will just have to see what the outcome will be.”

Trump previously sided with Israel in a 12-day war against Iran last June. The conflict culminated with US strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, in a military operation dubbed “Midnight Hammer”.

In Wednesday’s post, the US president appeared to threaten further military action against Iran, pointing out that June’s attack came after talks on Iran’s nuclear programme failed to make progress.

“Last time Iran decided that they were better off not making a Deal, and they were hit with Midnight Hammer,” Trump wrote. “That did not work well for them. Hopefully this time they will be more reasonable and responsible.”

Netanyahu’s office, meanwhile, offered few details, saying only that the pair discussed Israel’s “security needs” and agreed to “continued coordination and close ties”.

Among the topics discussed were “negotiations with Iran, Gaza and regional developments”, the statement said.

Iran says ballistic missile ‘non-negotiable’

Trump has signalled optimism in the wake of Friday’s talks in Oman, which included US envoy Steve Witkoff, the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

The gathering came after the US surged military assets to the region, raising the prospect of a military entanglement.

Since January, Trump has pledged to strike Iran if the country’s security agents kill protesters involved in recent antigovernment demonstrations.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in turn, warned of a “regional war” in the event of a US attack.

Regional powers across the Middle East have pushed for a diplomatic solution to avoid a military clash.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has not been clear on the scope of its talks with Iran.

However, officials have told US media outlets that the recent negotiations hinge on three main demands: ending Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, curtailing its ballistic programme and cutting its support for regional proxies, a goal long held by Netanyahu as well.

The US had previously entered into an agreement to scale back Iran’s nuclear programme in 2015.

That multilateral deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), offered Iran sanctions relief. The United Kingdom, France, China, Russia, Germany and the European Union were all participants.

But in 2018, during his first term, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA. Ever since, he has unsuccessfully pursued a new agreement while re-imposing “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran.

Iranian officials have signalled they are open to reaching a new deal on their nuclear programme, which they have maintained is only for civilian purposes. But they maintain their ballistic missile capabilities should remain off limits.

“The ‌Islamic Republic’s missile capabilities are non-negotiable,” Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Khamenei, was quoted by state media as saying on Wednesday.

Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, meanwhile, said that his country was ready to prove the peaceful nature of its nuclear programme but would “not yield to excessive demands”.

Netanyahu brings ‘maximalist demands’

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Barbara Slavin, a fellow at the US-based Stimson Center think tank, said Netanyahu brought “maximalist demands” to his White House meeting.

“He considers Iran to be a mortal threat to Israel. He wants it weakened in any possible way. He would love to see regime change,” Slavin told Al Jazeera.

“But if he can’t have that, he would like to make sure that Iran has no nuclear programme whatsoever and that it has no missiles that could strike Israel.”

She added that the Israeli prime minister “clearly was worried, especially because Donald Trump said some rather optimistic things after the talks in Oman”.

Al Jazeera correspondent Nour Odeh also pointed to the prospect of early elections in Israel, which might further incentivise Netanyahu to push Trump to take a hard line.

“Toppling the government in Iran would make him the king of all kings, as far as Israeli policy is concerned, and that’s something he can take to the ballot and win with,” Odeh said.

“Netanyahu now needs to convince Trump that a deal is not something that will yield results and that Iran cannot be trusted.”

Still, Odeh explained that Netanyahu must also be prepared for the possibility that the US-Iran negotiations will succeed.

“If a deal is reached, he needs to make sure that this is up to par with what Israel can live with,” Odeh explained. “He wants Iran to be permanently disabled, and that, in effect, is a formula to ensure that Israel continues to be the hegemon in the region.”

Highlighting Gaza

In his post on Truth Social, Trump said he and Netanyahu also discussed the “tremendous progress being made in Gaza, and the Region in general”.

Since October 2023, Israel has led a genocidal war in Gaza that has killed an estimated 72,045 Palestinians and wounded 171,686.

But last year, the Trump administration advocated for a 20-point Gaza “ceasefire” plan that was adopted in October.

It has since announced in January that the plan was entering “phase two”, although major questions persist, including over the disarmament of Hamas.

Meanwhile, Israeli attacks have continued. On Wednesday, a Palestinian child was wounded by Israeli gunfire in the Batn as-Sameen area, south of Khan Younis, according to the Wafa news agency.

Israeli air strikes and artillery shelling also targeted areas under Israeli military control east of the city, Al Jazeera’s team in Gaza reported.

Since the first phase of the ceasefire agreement came into effect in October, 591 Palestinians have been killed and 1,578 injured, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

Also on Wednesday, Netanyahu signed a document establishing Israel’s membership in Trump’s controversial Board of Peace during a meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The board was initially designed to supervise Gaza’s ceasefire, but Trump has since pushed it to take on a wider role in resolving global conflicts. Some critics have accused the US president of seeking to create an alternative to the United Nations.

US FDA declines Moderna flu vaccine review amid vaccine guidance rollback

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has refused to review Moderna’s application for approval of a flu vaccine, raising concerns amid a recent rollback of longstanding vaccine guidelines.

In a letter to Moderna, the FDA pushed back on the Massachusetts-based biotech company’s rationale comparing its mRNA -1010, a product already on the market, to a standard dose for the seasonal flu, the company revealed on Tuesday evening.

Recommended Stories

list of 4 itemsend of list

The federal agency cited that as the reason it declined to review the application, which claimed there was a lack of “adequate and well-controlled” data. Moderna said the letter claimed that the FDA thought the biotech giant’s flu vaccine “does not reflect the best-available standard of care”.

The company has pushed back on the allegation, and CEO Stephane Bancel said the letter “did not identify any safety or efficacy concerns with our product”.

Experts say the lack of guidance isn’t helpful.

“If there are things that need scrutiny, a review process can address them. At the end of the review, they can identify the issues that need to be corrected. That gives the company an opportunity to make changes and adapt. When that guidance isn’t provided, it makes it very difficult for someone submitting materials to know how to proceed,” Bruce Y Lee, a professor of health policy and management at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, told Al Jazeera.

Last year, Moderna said that its mRNA-1010 vaccine is 26.6 percent more effective than an approved annual flu vaccine from GlaxoSmithKline.

“It should not be controversial to conduct a comprehensive review of a flu vaccine submission that uses an FDA-approved vaccine as a comparator in a study that was discussed and agreed on with CBER [Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research] prior to starting,” Bancel said.

In terms of the next steps for Moderna, William Soliman, CEO of the Accreditation Council for Medical Affairs, a healthcare trade group, said typically a company would need to go back and continue study in a case like the one facing Moderna.

“They [Moderna] would have to provide additional analysis or alter the study design and resubmit it for review. That’s typically how it works: they go back, address whatever the FDA is requesting, and then resubmit,” Soliman told Al Jazeera.

In 2025, Moderna withdrew its application seeking approval for its flu and COVID combination vaccine to wait for efficacy data from a late-stage trial of its influenza vaccine.

The vaccine is currently under review in the European Union, Canada and Australia, with the company expecting potential approvals to come in late 2026 or early 2027.

Political undertones

The FDA action comes amid concerns over transparency within the organisation, raising questions among experts if the decision-making process to reject the application was merit-based or politically motivated.

“A big question is whether this is part of some type of political agenda. Many of the policies and decisions we’ve seen have been rolling back vaccine policies long supported by the science, again without clear explanation why, so the concern is that this is part of a larger trend,” Lee said.

According to the healthcare trade publication Stat News, career scientists were ready to review the application, including the head of the US agency’s vaccine office, David Kaslow, but were overridden by FDA commissioner Vinay Prasad, which the agency has disputed.

Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify the claims. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

In August, HHS, the federal agency that the FDA operates under, announced it would scale down mRNA vaccine development.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, who leads HHS, is a known vaccine sceptic. Since he was appointed health secretary, there has been a rollback in vaccine guidance, which included recommendations for routine vaccines on six infectious diseases, including influenza, and new guidance on childhood immunisation.

The rates of diseases otherwise preventable by vaccines have skyrocketed. In the US, there were more than 2,200 measles cases in 2025, the highest in nearly three decades, and so far this year, there have been more than 730 reported cases.

Wall Street strain

Moderna, which rose to prominence with its COVID-19 vaccine, has seen a sharp decline on Wall Street over the past year as vaccine sales dropped alongside falling case numbers. In its most recent earnings report, released in November, the company posted a $200m quarterly loss, with profits down $13m from a year earlier.

The company has struggled to regain its footing amid the slump in sales.

The FDA’s decision “throws a wrench into the company’s reliance on seasonal vaccines to reach its 2028 cash break-even goal,” Citi Research analyst Geoff Meacham told the Reuters news agency.

Moderna’s stock has fallen 29 percent in 2025 alone and is down more than 90 percent from its 2021 peak.

Will Thursday’s elections be a watershed moment for Bangladesh?

Millions of people are expected to cast ballots in the first polls since prime minister Sheikh Hasina was removed.

Following weeks of demonstrations, in August 2024, millions of young protesters in Bangladesh managed to topple the government of prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who had been in power for 15 years.

After a transitional period, voters there will now cast ballots in general elections and a constitutional referendum.

And many hope Thursday’s poll will transform the energy of those mass demonstrations into real political change and consolidate the foundations of democracy in Bangladesh.

But after decades of political instability, just how much of a challenge will that be?

Presenter: James Bays

Guests:

Ashikur Rahman – Political analyst and a principal economist at the Policy Research Institute of Bangladesh

Prapti Taposhi – Activist and a first-time voter in these general elections

Struggling to get by: Behind the US underemployment crisis

New York City, United States – For 14 years, BC Dodge built a career telling other people’s stories as a marketing and communications professional in the nonprofit sector in the Washington, DC area in the United States. But in late 2024, that stable career hit a speed bump.

He was laid off from his job amid a round of restructuring. The news landed without warning. One day he had a job, and the next he was sitting at home, staring at the numbers, trying to figure out how to keep paying the mortgage and putting food on the table.

Recommended Stories

list of 4 itemsend of list

He is married, and his partner is a teacher, but the math did not work. One salary might cover things for a little while, but not long enough to maintain long-term stability.

So he started applying for new work immediately. Over three months, he submitted 350 job applications. He got six interviews.

After months of searching, something moved.

He advanced in the hiring process for a Washington, DC–based nonprofit, making it far enough to sit across from senior leadership. It felt like he finally caught a break.

Then the ground shifted again. As Dodge was interviewing for a new job, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, was advising the administration of US President Donald Trump on how to shrink the federal government, and that meant cutting funding to agencies that provide contracts and funds to swaths of nonprofit organisations around the country. The effects rippled outward, and Dodge was caught in the crosshairs.

Contracts were cancelled and funding streams dried up. Nonprofits that depend on government support had to pull back and scale down ambitions — those very same nonprofits from whom Dodge sought employment.

“I got a call from HR saying they weren’t going to hire for the position, and that all hiring was on hold. I couldn’t argue with them, because I’d been hearing the same thing from organisations I’d spoken to since I started applying. ‘We were relying on federal funds, and now they’re gone,’” Dodge said.

Then it was back to the drawing board. He began searching yet again, but this time with a cloud of uncertainty looming over the entire industry he works in. Dodge finally took what he could get — part-time work in his field. The pay was well below what he had been earning before, but he accepted it anyway. Some income, he reasoned, was better than none.

The result is underemployment. Underemployment can manifest in several ways, often when workers are seeking full-time work but can only find part-time positions, or when the jobs they work do not fully utilise their skills and training. It is generally associated with industries like restaurants or retail, but it also reaches into fields with fewer resources and shrinking opportunities, including the nonprofit sector, where jobs are increasingly precarious and full-time stability is harder to find because of the wave of government funding cuts in 2025.

The upshot is lower incomes for underemployed workers, sometimes below the cost of living or even pushing them into the ranks of the working poor.

Underemployment has been on the rise, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which has tracked the rate of underemployment since 1978. Today, 8 percent of the US population is underemployed, up 0.5 percent from 2024 and it is up 1.1 percent from 2023.

At the same time, many in the US are seeing their expenses increase.

The impact of tariffs has hit low-to-middle-income earners harder than others. Analysis from the Yale Budget Lab found that lower-income households are paying a higher percentage of their post-tax income on goods subject to tariffs as opposed to higher-income households, all while costs for necessities like healthcare are increasing.

Earlier this year, Congressional leaders failed to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. Premiums increased by an average of 144 percent, according to analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“Some people have lost their jobs and found new ones that pay less, but others have kept their jobs, but their healthcare premiums have increased. Their electric bills have also gone up. Their salaries no longer cover basic living costs,” Jillian Hishaw, a personal bankruptcy lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina, said.

She said that because of increased costs like these and a stalling job market, she is seeing an increase in inquiries about personal bankruptcy filings in efforts by potential clients not to lose their homes to foreclosure.

“In one day last week, 85 foreclosures were filed in Mecklenburg County [where Charlotte is located]. Foreclosures happen daily, but 85 in a single day is unusually high. Two years ago, the daily average was 10 to 20, but now filings are approaching triple digits each day,” Hishaw said.

Shrinking options

The surging economic pressures hit workers across various sectors, including financial and administrative services. An Ohio-based accountant who did not want his name to be published, has worked a patchwork of accounting and administrative jobs over the past few years. In March, he was laid off from a research organisation in central Ohio.

After months of searching, he found new work, but not as an accountant, and the pay falls far short of covering his cost of living.

“I’m working as a sales coordinator, which I really don’t want to be doing, but it was the only thing I could land with how bad things are. It’s not enough to live on,” he said.

The labour market is under strain. Layoffs reached more than 1.1 million in 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, while job creation failed to keep pace, with just 584,000 jobs added. As a result, more workers are settling for underpaid or part-time work that does not meet basic living expenses, including Dodge and the accountant.

Michele Evermore, senior fellow at the National Academy of Social Insurance, says that economic uncertainty driven by tariffs and developments in artificial intelligence has put businesses across a wide set of sectors essentially on pause — maintaining the status quo or scaling back.

“People who are already at the margins are getting kicked out entirely, and that’s placing pressure on everyone who is clinging to a job,” Evermore told Al Jazeera.

In January, one of the key measures of underemployment, the number of people who work part-time for economic reasons, such as an inability to find full-time work or had their hours reduced, hit 4.9 million. It was a 453,000 decline from the month before, but is up 410,000 from this time last year, according to the January jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday.

Long-term unemployment jumped 386,000 from this time a year ago to 1.8 million, although it remains unchanged compared with the previous month.

The nonprofit sector has been hit particularly hard in the last year, losing 28,729 jobs in 2025, up sharply from 5,640 losses the year before, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Like the Ohio accountant, Dodge has been searching for new opportunities since he lost his full-time role a year and a half ago. He has applied for 460 jobs and only landed a handful of interviews.

Working weekends, washing dishes

The market is only getting tighter. US employers cut more than 108,000 jobs in January, while employers only announced intentions to hire 5,300 new roles for the month, the lowest on record since Challenger, Gray & Christmas started tracking that in 2009.

“Employers aren’t wanting to make any big investments right now, including increasing salaries to their workforce,” Evermore, who served as a policy adviser in the US Labor Department during the administration of former US President Joe Biden, added.

In December, labour market turnover remained stagnant. Amid economic uncertainty and a slowdown in new job growth, many Americans are hanging on to the jobs they already have. Job openings fell to 6.5 million, down 386,000 from the previous month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labour Turnover Survey (JOLTS).

Hiring and separations, which include layoffs and firings, were unchanged. That followed November’s report, which similarly showed little movement in both new hiring and the number of workers leaving their jobs.

Combined, that means that for the underemployed, finding a new role, either part-time to augment their existing income, or to replace it altogether, is increasingly difficult for people like the accountant.

“I’m also working weekends at a friend’s cafe, washing dishes, and I’m still applying and interviewing for other opportunities. But it’s the same story, no offers. At the same time, I’m debating whether to switch professions or even go back to school, even though I already have a master’s degree,” he said.

That shared distress has also created an unlikely sense of camaraderie among those struggling to get by, even as the outlook remains bleak.

Dodge finds it in late-night scrolls through Reddit, watching strangers narrate versions of the same stalled search.

“I doomscroll a lot,” he said, “getting depressed about the state of politics and the global economy, and taking some solace in knowing I’m not the only one struggling to find viable employment after 12, 13, 14, even 15 months.”

Beyond pressure: What is the Trump administration’s endgame in Cuba?

Cuba has been reeling, with the island nation of 11 million staggering under the yoke of major fuel shortages that have trammelled nearly every aspect of life.

The fomenting humanitarian crisis is a direct result of a new, aggressive approach by the administration of United States President Donald Trump in the wake of the US military abduction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. Trump has gone far beyond Washington’s decades-long embargo on the island, threatening crippling tariffs on any country that provides fuel shipments, and, in turn, stifling lifeline supplies from Venezuela and Mexico.

Recommended Stories

list of 3 itemsend of list

But as the impact of US policy on the lives of Cubans just 90 miles (145 km) away from the US state of Florida comes into increasing focus, the same clarity has not emerged on what the Trump administration actually hopes to achieve in its strategy, analysts have told Al Jazeera.

That comes as Trump has sent a contradicting message: He has both told reporters he seeks to “work a deal” with the communist government led by Miguel Diaz-Canel and, alternately, plans to make Cuba “free again”, hinting at the regime change long sought by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“One possibility is that they actually do come to some kind of a deal,” William LeoGrande, a professor focusing on US foreign policy in Latin America at American University, told Al Jazeera. “But the $64,000 question is, what would be the terms of such a deal be?”

“The second possibility, of course, is that this oil embargo causes social collapse on the island, no electricity, no gasoline, no fuel for anything, and the society literally begins to crumble,” he said.

A third possibility, LeoGrande explained, is that the US could adopt a Venezuelan-style approach, keeping the government in place while installing a more pliable leader.

“But I think even if there were such a person high enough up in the Cuban government that they could actually win the loyalty of the armed forces and the government and party bureaucracies, which I doubt, I don’t think the Trump administration has any way to identify them or to communicate with them,” he said.

‘Try and bend the Cuban government’

In the short term, Trump, who has long portrayed himself as the dealmaker-in-chief, appears to be leaning into messaging that calls for an agreement with Diaz-Canel’s strained government, according to Tiziano Breda, a Latin America and the Caribbean senior analyst at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED).

Trump has said both sides are in discussions, although the nature of any contacts and the terms of any proposal have not yet emerged.

“Trump has shown less interest and eagerness to engage with these left-wing governments on ideological battles,” Breda told Al Jazeera.”The circumstances give me the impression that Trump’s goal would be rather to try and bend the Cuban government, rather than prompting its collapse.”

Diaz-Canal, meanwhile, has said he was open to talking to the US, but would only enter dialogue “without pressure or precondition” and with respect to sovereignty.

In the same breath, he decried Washington’s “criminal policy against a country, as it affects food, transportation, hospitals, schools, economic production and the functioning of our vital systems”.

Cuba, Diaz-Canel added in statements last week, sought peace, but was developing a defence plan “in case we have to move to a state of war”.

Unclear terms

Several analysts assessed that some type of new agreement between the US and Cuba remained on the table, but any terms seen as an existential threat to the government in Havana would be non-starters.

It remained unclear what extractions Trump would consider satisfactory.

Cuba has far less to offer economically than Venezuela, a South American country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves. However, it contains significant deposits of rare and critical earth minerals, including the world’s third-largest reserve of cobalt, a key mineral used in lithium-ion batteries and other advanced technologies.

“Economically, Cuba has little to offer beyond agreements on the tourism industry or some trade deals,” according to Breda, although he added that Trump may try to pressure Havana to “give in on certain conditions, such as migration, the presence of US competitors in the country, and security cooperation between Russia and China”.

In an executive order declaring Cuba an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the US last month, Trump focused heavily on relations between Russia and China, which both cooperate with Cuba on defence, but do not have known military bases on the island.

The order, which also highlighted crackdowns on dissent by Cuba’s government, further accused Havana of hosting what Washington considers “transnational terrorist groups”, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

Cuba experts have regularly dismissed the threat posed by Cuba as overblown, while noting there is scant evidence to support the “terrorist group” claims.

That has raised further questions over what tangible concessions the government could offer Trump, if his order is seen as a prelude to negotiations.

Regime change?

To be sure, Trump’s stated desire to pursue talks with Cuba’s current government puts him at odds with the decades-old ideology of the US Republican Party writ large, which has long eschewed any form of engagement with the communist government founded by Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 1959.

That approach has been particularly championed by Trump’s top diplomat, Rubio, who is himself the son of Cuban immigrants with a political career predicated on a hawkish approach to the island.

Rubio has for months pushed the notion that the government in Havana is on the verge of collapse, laying the groundwork for Trump’s current pressure campaign. His stance dovetails with an influential Cuban-American voting bloc, which has been a key part of the Republicans’ electoral coalition.

“Rubio’s goal is to get rid of this regime in Cuba,” LeoGrande said, “so he would not be happy with any kind of deal like that Trump has cut in Venezuela, particularly if it were more or less a permanent deal.”

LeoGrande, meanwhile, downplayed the likelihood of Trump deploying boots on the ground in Cuba, noting the president has so far avoided prolonged military engagement.

A more surgical operation like the one targeting Maduro also remains unlikely, he assessed, with top roles in the armed forces still dominated by direct appointees of former President Raul Castro, who served as the Communist Party’s top official until his death in 2021.

Instead, according to ACLED’s Breda, any approach to topple the government would likely result in a continuation of the current pressure campaign to fuel dissent among a population beleaguered by shortages.

“But it remains to be seen whether Rubio will be able to convince Trump that there would not be great consequences in terms of migration, instability and violence in the island, and that this cannot have a spillover effect,” Breda said.

What comes next?

Discerning Trump’s motives may be akin to reading tea leaves, according to Louis Perez, a professor who has long focused on Cuban history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who notes that “deep historical antecedents” to his current actions may help illuminate what comes next.

Perez pointed to US policy that preceded the Cuban Revolution in 1959, reaching back to the US-established military government in Cuba in the early 20th century, and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which first sought to assert US influence across Latin America.

“So widening the screen and pulling back, one sees the long view of a remarkable continuity of policy that reveals itself in many iterations,” he told Al Jazeera. “But the thread that links all of these iterations together in one package is the determination to deny Cuba sovereignty and self-determination.”

The Trump administration has recently elucidated its own goal of restoring US “pre-eminence” in the Western Hemisphere, what Trump and his allies have dubbed the “Donroe doctrine”.

“The American political leadership want the Cubans to say ‘uncle’, to surrender, to acquiesce,” Perez said. “This sounds simplified, but somewhere deep inside the US national psyche, this is driving policy, especially in an administration that is now presuming to redefine the ‘Donroe doctrine’.”

A prolonged impasse, meanwhile, could have unintended consequences for Washington, including driving Cuba closer to Russia and China.

Russia, already under heavy US sanctions, has not increased oil deliveries to Cuba in recent weeks, but could choose to do so as the US pressure campaign continues, American University’s LeoGrande explained. China and other regional allies could provide alternative forms of aid, freeing funds for energy purchases.

“The more pressure the United States puts on Cuba, the more threatening the United States is towards Cuba, the more incentive Cuba has to look for patrons among US adversaries,” he said.

ACLED’s Breda, in turn, pointed to the toll of a prolonged diplomatic stalemate, which could lead to further hardship under a government long accused of cracking down on internal dissent.

“The main risk is to trigger a humanitarian crisis within the island, which could have repercussions for outbound migration and also trigger a wave of unrest,” he said.

CBO: US Federal deficits and debt to worsen over next decade

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s 10-year outlook projects worsening long-term United States federal deficits and rising debt, driven largely by increased spending, notably on Social Security, Medicare, and debt service payments.

Compared with the CBO’s analysis this time last year, the fiscal outlook, which was released on Wednesday, has deteriorated modestly.

Recommended Stories

list of 4 itemsend of list

The CBO said that the deficit for fiscal 2026 – President Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year in office – will be about 5.8 percent of GDP, about where it was in fiscal 2025, when the deficit was $1.775 trillion.

But the US deficit-to-GDP ratio will average 6.1 percent over the next decade, reaching 6.7 percent in fiscal 2036 – far above US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s goal to shrink it to about 3 percent of economic output.

Major developments over the last year are factored into the latest report, including Republicans’ tax and spending measure known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” higher tariffs, and the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, which includes deporting millions of immigrants from the US mainland.

As a result of these changes, the projected 2026 deficit is about $100bn higher, and total deficits from 2026 to 2035 are $1.4 trillion larger, while debt held by the public is projected to rise from 101 percent of GDP to 120 percent — exceeding historical highs.

Notably, the CBO says higher tariffs partially offset some of those increases by raising federal revenue by $3 trillion, but that also comes with higher inflation from 2026 to 2029.

Rising debt and debt service are important because repaying investors for borrowed money crowds out government spending on basic needs such as roads, infrastructure and education, which enable investments in future economic growth.

CBO projections also indicate that inflation does not hit the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target rate until 2030.

A major difference is that the CBO forecasts rely on significantly lower economic growth projections than the Trump administration, pegging 2026 real GDP growth at 2.2 percent on a fourth-quarter comparison basis, fading to an average of about 1.8 percent for the rest of the decade.

Trump administration officials in recent weeks have projected robust growth in the 3-4 percent range for 2026, with recent predictions that first-quarter growth could top 6 percent amid rising investments in factories and artificial intelligence data centres.

CBO’s forecasts assume that tax and spending laws and tariff policies in early December remain in place for a decade. The government’s fiscal year starts on October 1.

While revived investment tax incentives and bigger individual tax refunds provide a boost in 2026, the CBO said that this is attenuated by the drag from larger fiscal deficits and reduced immigration that slows the growth of the labour force.

Jonathan Burks, executive vice president of economic and health policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center said “large deficits are unprecedented for a growing, peacetime economy”, though “the good news is there is still time for policymakers to correct course.”

‘Urgent warning’

Lawmakers have recently addressed rising federal debt and deficits primarily through targeted spending caps and debt limit suspensions, as well as deploying “extraordinary measures” when the US is close to hitting its statutory spending limit, though these measures have often been accompanied by new, large-scale spending or tax policies that maintain high deficit levels.

And Trump, at the start of his second term, deployed a new “Department of Government Efficiency”, which set a goal to balance the budget by cutting $2 trillion in waste, fraud and abuse; however, budget analysts estimate that DOGE cut anywhere between $1.4bn to $7bn, largely through workforce firings.

Michael Peterson, CEO of the Peterson Foundation, said the CBO’s latest budget projection “is an urgent warning to our leaders about America’s costly fiscal path.”

“This election year, voters understand the connection between rising debt and their personal economic condition. And the financial markets are watching. Stabilising our debt is an essential part of improving affordability, and must be a core component of the 2026 campaign conversation.”