By Tom Nichols
Tuesday, April 07, 2026
The president of the United States is losing his head,
and that means the rest of us must keep ours. At 8:06 a.m. eastern daylight
time, Donald Trump posted this on his Truth Social site:
A whole civilization will die
tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it
probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change,
where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something
revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one
of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47
years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the
Great People of Iran!
The world, unfortunately, has gotten used to Trump’s
overheated rhetoric, and to dismissing the commander in chief as something of a
crank who (as the French
president recently advised) should perhaps keep more of his thoughts to
himself.
But the president’s statements are policy, and he has now
made it the policy of the government of the United States that at 8 p.m.
Washington, D.C., time (3:30 a.m. in Tehran), he will order the U.S. military
to destroy Iran and its entire civilization—permanently—unless his terms are
met. (He did not specify those terms, but on Easter Sunday, he posted a
frenzied and obscenity-laden message
on Truth Social demanding that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz.) Whether the
president is saying this with full control of his faculties or has well and
truly lost his mind is irrelevant: He is still the president, and so we must
consider the meaning of this policy.
First, Trump is vowing to eradicate a nation of 92
million people and their entire culture, “never to be brought back again.” No
leader standing in front of a court at The Hague would be able to finesse that
language: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back
again” doesn’t leave a lot of room for charitable interpretations. Even Richard
Nixon, the author of the “madman theory”—the notion that a president might seek
advantage over an enemy by appearing to be irrational—never publicly threatened
to wipe out Vietnam. Trump could argue that his threats against bridges and
electricity plants might not be war crimes, if they have a military use, but
his promise to erase a civilization from the Earth is a flat threat of
genocide.
Second, the most important aspect of Trump’s threat is
that it implies the use of nuclear weapons. Trump did not explicitly invoke
nuclear arms, and he claims to abhor the idea of using them. (He has also, of
course, asked
why America has them if they can’t be used.) But the United States could launch
every conventional munition it has, and although that kind of onslaught would
immiserate the people of Iran, result in many deaths, and make reconstruction a
long-term nightmare, Iranian civilization would survive. German civilization
survived years of bombing so intense that the firestorms melted glass and
asphalt; Japanese civilization survived similar incendiary attacks and two
nuclear bombs. A threat to destroy an entire civilization in one night,
assuming he means it, can be fulfilled only with the wide use of nuclear
weapons.
The president now sounds no different from the
authoritarian rulers of the world’s worst regimes. North Korea, when it was
pursuing nuclear arms, would threaten to turn cities into “lakes of fire”;
Iran, of course, has often threatened to “wipe Israel from the map,” which is
why the world has been trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Now
Trump is making those same kinds of threats—and he has nuclear weapons.
In the past, Trump’s sycophants in the conservative media
have tried to wave away his bellicosity as just the way he talks and dismiss
concerns as pearl-clutching from people who just don’t get him. But
would any American offer the same grace to Kim Jong Un or Iranian Supreme
Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, if they used the language Trump employed today?
Imagine how the United States would react if the leader
of a major nuclear-armed power made a similar threat—if Russian President
Vladimir Putin said something like Ukraine must submit to my demands by 0800
hours, or I will eradicate Ukrainian civilization, or if Chinese President
Xi Jinping said, Taiwan must accept Chinese rule by sundown, or Taiwan, in
one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the
world, will be gone and never return. At the least, the United States would
likely go on heightened military alert—and might even raise the readiness of
its nuclear forces—because we would have to assume that such statements from a
national leader are not mere bluster.
Even during the Cold War, American planners avoided such
pronouncements. U.S. nuclear strategy prioritized targeting enemy nuclear
weapons, command and control, military assets, and the enemy government. There
were good reasons for this list of priorities: Those targets mirrored what the
Soviets would strike in the United States. Had World War III erupted, the net
effect would have been something akin to what Trump is threatening now, but as
the horrifying consequence of a nuclear exchange, not as an intended goal. (In
1967, Robert McNamara, in a moment of exasperation with some hawkish
questioning from Congress, blurted out that the Kremlin’s leaders knew that if
they attacked America, we’d kill 120 million Soviets; he was trying, however,
only to reaffirm the deterrent logic of mutual assured destruction, not
advocating for such action.)
If Trump did give an order to attack civilian targets
that have no military value as a means of collectively punishing the Iranian
people, he would be ordering war crimes. If he directs the widespread and
irrevocable destruction of Iranian civilization—that is, if he commands a
genocide and especially if he approves the release of nuclear weapons—the U.S.
military should refuse such blatantly illegal orders.
In a better world, Trump would face a revolt in his
Cabinet over such orders. Unfortunately, his Cabinet is stocked with needy
courtiers who, to date, have preferred to enable the president’s reckless
schemes rather than argue with him or resign in protest. Indeed, they were
chosen not for the strength of their character but for their pliancy: People
such as Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard exist as national political figures only
because they circle Trump like dwarf moons around a gas giant. They are not going
to stop him.
Only Marco Rubio’s resignation would matter. Rubio, as
secretary of state (and, concurrently, national security adviser), has a
certain amount of political gravitas left, and if he spent it by threatening to
walk out of the White House tonight as a private citizen, he might sway Trump
from his mad threats. If Trump wishes to follow through on his threats, and the
Cabinet declines to stop him, Congress could in theory convene and attempt to
restrain him—but that seems even less likely to happen, despite some panicky
concern from a few GOP senators.
Should Trump persist in his threatened course of action,
then only a mass resignation of senior officers would stand between the
president and a campaign of genocide. By this, I do not mean a mutiny or coup.
The answer to Trump’s lawlessness is not more lawlessness. But American
officers have a positive duty to refuse illegal orders, and the destruction of
an entire civilization with nuclear weapons—which poses no similar threat to
the United States—is as illegal as it gets. We must all hope that Trump’s message
was an early-morning rant that got loose in the wild before anyone could stop
him. But it’s out there now, and we are just hours away from his deadline. He
is the president, and his words have meaning, and he has publicly committed the
United States to the extermination of an entire nation.
If Trump gives that order, the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff should lay his stars down in front of Trump. Then, each general
who gets the order should do likewise, and each man—and it will be men, in
Hegseth’s Pentagon—promoted as a replacement should do likewise, until Trump
has a pile of stars and eagles on his desk. Trump may eventually find someone
to fulfill his orders, but people of honor and duty need not be the unwilling
instruments of so great a sin.
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