President Trump has attempted to marry infinite immorality with infinite power. Threatening to completely destroy the country of Iran by illegally bombing civilian power stations and bridges if the leadership doesn’t acquiesce to his demands, Donald Trump went one step further on Tuesday, April 7, when he announced that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” This is after his henchman Pete Hegseth put the attacks on Iran in biblical terms as a Holy War and compared the rescue of a downed airman to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Trump’s threat is itself a war crime under international law, in Article III of the Genocide Convention, signed by the US as a convention in 1948 and ratified as a treaty in 1988. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman immediately came out with this assessment:
First of all, any military commander given orders to start destroying civilian infrastructure in Iran should disobey that order, should say it, should not even quietly resign. This is a time to stand up and make it clear that this is totally unacceptable. This is a violation of everything that the military stands for. It’s a violation of everything that America stands for.
I mean, at some level, I think that the civilization that may be destroyed tonight is our own. I mean, are we civilized if we do this kind of thing? If America as a nation doesn’t stand up against this, what are we?1
After Trump rescinded his threat of utter annihilation, the consensus among military analysts was that Iran now has the upper hand. Their ten-point plan that apparently convinced Trump to drop his plan to kill their whole civilization and announce an immediate ceasefire gives them control over the Strait of Harmuz, the end of US sanctions, the removal of all US combat forces from bases in the region, and the ability for Iran to develop their ballistic missiles and drones, and even to continue to enrich uranium.
So, what has Trump’s bombing and bloviating achieved? We now have a more hardline version of the regime in power in Iran that is more than ever intent on developing a nuclear weapons capability, and we have completely alienated the civilian population in Iran that was mostly pro-American before all this happened.
Iran now has enough sixty-percent-enriched uranium, plenty of skilled scientists and engineers, and more than enough centrifuges to make a number (probably four to six) bulky, not very high yield nuclear weapons similar to the one we dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 that killed 140,000 people that year. And they now have another major weapon—control of the Strait of Hormuz—that they can use to disrupt world economies anytime they want. Meanwhile, Trump has dismantled NATO and the whole Western alliance and turned most of what used to be our allies into disgusted adversaries, as we now join the list of worldwide pariah states.