One day after the delusional U.S. president spoke about the possibility of changes to Iran’s geographic borders, he took another major step in political brazenness and this time explicitly threatened the entire nation and civilization of Iran. Early Tuesday morning, Donald Trump threatened that if the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz were halted, he would carry out attacks that would make the reconstruction of the Iranian nation impossible. On his official social media page, he wrote: “If Iran does anything that stops the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the United States will strike them twenty times harder than anything it has done so far.” He also claimed: “In addition, we will target objectives that are easily destroyed, which will effectively make the reconstruction of Iran as a nation impossible—death, fire, and fury will prevail over them.”
Trump’s arrogant—and indeed delusional—remarks once again expose the lawless and unethical nature of international politics in today’s world. His repeated references to changing borders and to the destruction of a nation should naturally alert fair-minded people across the world to his expansionist and savage disposition and compel governments that claim moral authority to respond. Yet the polluted atmosphere of international politics prevents countries and global organizations from taking a clear stance. This is a bitter reality that has appeared before on the stage of world politics, particularly in the silence of the international community regarding the two-year crimes committed by Zionists in the massacre of the oppressed people of Gaza.
The return to the language of threatening and destroying a nation is not a sign of power but a clear indication of the loss of control and rationality in the exercise of power politics. When a power-obsessed and arrogant actor speaks, in front of the world, about “striking until the destruction” of a nation, he in fact reveals his own strategic anxiety and begins to disregard the very international order he once claimed to defend. An existential threat against a country with a long history and ancient civilization is a language of erasing rules. In the theory of securitization, existential threat discourse is a tool for transforming crises into a pretext for extraordinary measures. A politician who speaks of the complete destruction of a nation or civilization is essentially attempting to create a “state of exception,” a space in which moral rules, human rights, and international law are no longer regarded as binding. Despite its appearance of strength, such language is in fact a sign of an inability to persuade or reason; real power lies in the ability to manage crises through logic and diplomacy, not through denying the existence of others.
At the same time, such remarks reveal the threat-oriented psychology of their speaker. The language of annihilation cruelly attempts to target its audience not merely with weapons but by instilling a sense of helplessness. This rhetoric seeks to create what it imagines as “strategic terror” among the Iranian people in order to undermine their psychological deterrence. Yet historical experience—particularly the historical struggles of the Iranian people—shows that this strategy often produces the opposite result. A threatened nation usually does not succumb to fear; rather, it moves toward cohesion, identity formation, and the reactivation of its civilizational memory. Meanwhile, the moral credibility of the threatening party suffers in global public opinion, and the legitimacy of its hard power is weakened.
Such threats differ little from state terrorism. In international law, threats of force against the territorial integrity and national and civilizational identity of countries are prohibited. Any discourse that promises the physical or cultural elimination of a nation moves along the boundary of state terrorism. When a government abandons the language of law in favor of the language of elimination, it in effect destroys the very pillars of the global order it claims to uphold. At the same time, annihilatory threats are an attempt to conceal weakness behind a display of verbal violence.
The twenty-first century is the age in which media shapes meaning. In this environment, every word can function as either a bullet or a shield. A policy that speaks of denying the existence of nations produces neither civilization nor security; instead, it engineers the destruction of its own legitimacy. For societies with deep historical and cultural roots such as Iran, the effective response to arrogant rhetoric is to redefine power across multiple domains—standing on the axis of a civilization that, centuries before many of these threat-makers were even born, regarded culture, knowledge, and justice as the foundations of power. Trump’s delusional excesses, sooner or later, will provoke the conscience of free people around the world and spark waves of widespread opposition and protest—something already visible in the streets of Spain today and likely to spread to other regions of the world in the near future.
NOURNEWS