The Brooklyn Rail

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After Trump rescinded his threat of utter annihilation, the consensus among military analysts was that Iran now has the upper hand.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.

Political commentator Ben Rhodes summed up the current situation in this way on X:

In the best-case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with [Iran] demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents—including hundreds of children—dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. US troops killed and wounded. US embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. US standing in the world obliterated. US munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.²

Political scientist Robert Pape goes as far as saying, “The War Is Turning Iran Into a Major World Power” (as his op-ed in the New York Times on April 6 was titled). He argues that Iran may now join China, Russia, and the United States as a fourth major power because of its control over “the most important energy choke point in the global economy, the Strait of Hormuz.” Iran doesn’t need to completely shut the Strait down; it only needs to hit an oil tanker every once in a while to make it too risky for the insurance carriers. As Pape said on social media the next day, “Power isn’t just about what you control. It’s about what you can put at risk. In a global economy, risk = power.” Iran may be able to do this with a small number of drones and a small number of mines. Pape compares the Strait of Hormuz now to the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Vietnam War, where America was able to stop ninety percent of the traffic on the trail, but could never shut off the last ten percent, and this is one of the reasons why the Viet Cong won the war. If Iran manages to do that, with asymmetric means, Pape paints a dark picture of a possible new world order:

Imagine Iran with control of about 20 percent of the world’s oil, Russia with about 11 percent and China able to soak up much of that supply. They would form a cartel to deny the West 30 percent of the world’s oil. You don’t need sophisticated analysis to recognize the catastrophic consequences: precipitously declining power for the United States and Europe, and a global shift toward China, Russia and Iran.³

And at this point, all that stands in the way of that dark future are JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, now headed to Islamabad to negotiate with Iran.