The Trump administration maintains that the government of Iran can never be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb. The reason? Because the leaders of that land are allegedly lunatics. The primary concern appears to be that dissident factions sponsored by Iran—including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis—could wreak untold devastation, were they to gain access to such weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
In reality, the only government which has ever explicitly and credibly threatened to deploy WMD against entire populations of mostly innocent people is that of the United States of America. Not only did the U.S. government use atomic bombs to raze the civilian-populated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1945, but President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure, as in this Easter Sunday (April 5, 2026) message:
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Also in early April 2026, during a press conference, Trump matter-of-factly observed:
“The entire country [Iran] could be taken out in one night—and that night might be tomorrow night.”
In another social media post, Trump explicitly threatened the complete genocide of the Iranian people:
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will… 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!”
On May 17, 2026, the official White House account shared this Trump Truth Social post on X:
“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE! President DJT”
This sort of inflammatory rhetoric could be ignored if not for the fact that the person issuing the threats possesses the capacity to follow through on them. Such menacing messages raise, yet again, a question which has lurked beneath the surface of all U.S. foreign policy for decades, but especially since September 11, 2001. What is terrorism?
To cause human beings continually to fear for their own safety or even lives is to terrorize them. Americans were terrorized by what happened on 9/11 because for months they worried that they might be the next victims of a surprise attack by Al Qaeda. The simplest, most neutral, definition of terrorism is the arbitrary threat of death against innocent persons. Political terrorism, then, would be the arbitrary threat of death against innocent persons in the service of political ends. Terrorism thus defined, whether political or not, is not an activity intrinsically connected to any particular person or groups. Whether or not someone is a terrorist depends only upon his or her actions.
The factional terrorism committed by groups such as Al Qaeda and Hamas is carried out by nonstate actors who join forces with angry dissidents to counter what they take to be state terrorists, those who use the resources of citizens to carry out mass homicide in the name of national defense, perfunctorily dismissing the “collateral damage” victims of their missions. Viewed in this way, the cycle of mass homicides witnessed throughout the twenty-first century, with the American and Israeli governments retaliating in kind to massacres perpetrated by smaller groups, including the crimes of September 11, 2001, and October 7, 2023, have tragically confirmed yet again that “Violence breeds violence.”
Political killers interpret their own homicidal activities as permissible but those of their adversaries as criminal. What the U.S. government characterizes as Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorist groups is regarded by Iran’s leaders as the support of liberation movements. The adage “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” arose out of the recognition that both informal, subnational groups and formal governments may undertake homicidal missions in what typically are either revenge attacks or what the perpetrators themselves perceive or portray to be acts of self-defense. Kill or be killed.
Throughout the Global War on Terror, a variety of “counterterrorism” tactics were developed by the U.S. government. However, the use of drone strikes outside areas of active hostilities, that is, where there were no allied troops on the ground, in fact constituted terrorism because the people living in those places, including FATA (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas) in Pakistan, were under continual threat of death by the ominous machines buzzing over their heads. Much psychological distress was reported among such populations, because the people on the ground already knew that drones sometimes emitted missiles which cratered homes in the vicinity, terminating the lives of persons believed by their neighbors to be innocent. Because no one was ever warned when this was about to happen, there was always a chance that someone on the ground who saw or heard the drones in the sky above might be the next victim, having been identified by a group of invisible and anonymous analysts as deserving of death.
A second clear example of state-perpetrated terrorism can be seen in the use of drones to sink boats off the coast of Venezuela and elsewhere in the Caribbean Sea or Pacific Ocean, which has been going on since September 2, 2025. The reason why such drone strikes constitute terrorism is because, as many critics in the region have lamented, no fisherman attempting to do his job, no matter how innocent, can now know that he is safe when he sees or hears a drone in the sky above his head. Acknowledging his awareness of the psychological effects of the serial bombings, Vice President J.D. Vance articulated in these terms how rational it has become for fishermen to fear their imminent death: “Hell, I wouldn’t go fishing right now in that area of the world.” A week earlier, on September 6, 2026, Brian Krassenstein challenged Vance with the following observation on X:
“Killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.”
Vance’s brash reply was, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
Even setting to one side the glaring terrorism involved in these cases, it is unclear that such “bold” acts of state-inflicted homicide can effectively diminish the transmission of drugs to the U.S. homeland for the simple reason that the drug business is market driven. Does bombing what appear to be randomly selected boats thought to be loaded with contraband seriously impede the provision of drugs to anyone in the United States? Most likely it strongly deters drug lords from transporting the source of their wealth themselves. Instead, they are far more likely to seek out the assistance of ever-more-desperate persons willing to risk their own lives because they have no other viable prospects anyway. So long as there are buyers, there will be sellers, who will devise the means necessary to deliver their goods to consumers willing to pay even elevated prices for the objects of their desire.
The gratuitousness of Operation Southern Spear becomes undeniable in the light of the most obvious, reality-based problem with the Trump administration’s extrajudicial execution of persons suspected of drug trafficking: the fentanyl killing people in the United States is not sourced from Venezuela. Nor should it be forgotten that drug trafficking is not a capital offense in any U.S. state, which means that the federal government’s commission of homicide in these circumstances amounts, in every case, to murder. As standards for those said to warrant “warheads on foreheads” continue to be lowered by the very people who profit from their deaths, the kill lists grow longer and multiply, which is the only reason why unarmed, non-threatening, civilian Venezuelan fishermen now fear for their lives. Doggedly to proclaim that all of the victims of the boat strikes are “narcoterrorists” does not make it legal for the military summarily to execute them, and some among the victims’ survivors have mounted lawsuits against the U.S. government in response.
Long before the attacks on boats in the Caribbean, it was well documented that U.S. drone strikes have killed many innocent people, as happened in Kabul on August 29, 2021, when Zemari Ahmadi and nine other persons were destroyed because “intelligence” had misidentified an aid worker driving a white Toyota Corolla as a terrorist preparing to bomb the airport during the U.S. military’s departure from Afghanistan. Palantir CEO Alex Karp has boasted that his company was integral to the withdrawal mission. More recently, the Trump administration depended on some of the same players in the highly lucrative remote-control killing logistics game (notably, Palantir and its “Maven Smart System”) in selecting for obliteration the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school, in Minjab, Iran, where 156 innocent people, including 120 children, perished on February 28, 2026, as a result of multiple missile strikes.
In recent decades, a long series of ghastly mass homicides have been committed by arguably addled citizens at schools in the homeland, but the U.S. government now holds the dubious distinction of having perpetrated the largest school massacre in history. Knowing that the U.S. government has obliterated even schools, whether intentionally or in error, no parents in Iran can now know that their children are safe. It is this knowledge, that entirely innocent people continue to be annihilated by U.S. missiles far from any battlefield, which renders the targeting of civilian structures in Iran no less an instance of terrorism than was the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001.
The only guaranteed outcomes of military intervention are the destruction of both people and their property, and the terrorism intrinsic to bombing. Because of the inevitable “collateral damage” produced, bombing campaigns also give rise to an increase in factional terrorism, which is why the Global War on Terror dragged on for as long as it did. Looking back, it seems fair to ask: Are the survivors of the two-decades-long debacle in Afghanistan better off under the new, more heavily armed Taliban (now known officially as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan) than they were before? Are the people of Libya better off now than they were under their former leader, Moammar Gaddafi, who Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others convinced President Barack Obama had to be removed? By any rational metric, no. But at least it can be said in those cases that some among the Afghan and the Libyan people survived. U.S. government officials until now have rested rhetorically on an assumption, albeit erroneous, about how much better the situation for survivors would be after the war.
Donald Trump, in contrast to George W. Bush, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, has broadcast his willingness to completely erase Iranian civilization, which sounds more insane than anything which the government of Iran has ever done. With access to the “nuclear football” codes, President Trump has the means to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran, under the pretext of eliminating its leadership. This despite the common knowledge that, as under any dictatorial regime, most of the people living in the potentially affected area bear no responsibility for what their leaders do. Either the citizens had no choice—the rulers were tyrannically imposed upon them—or they went through the motions of “selecting” their leadership but were effectively coerced into accepting the government foisted upon them, having witnessed the treatment (in some cases, execution) of dissenters who dared in the past to defy the regime.
In any case, to annihilate an entire population under even a demonstrably tyrannical government would not be to do them any favor whatsoever, and using nuclear weapons to do so would poison everyone else in the region as well. Nuclear weapons are inherently indiscriminate, which is why the Trump administration’s threats to use them have taken terrorism to an entirely new level, never before seen in history. The threat of the use of nuclear weapons in Iran is perilous to not only Iran’s leadership but also the entire population of Iran and all people in the region, given the wide-ranging and nefarious effects of radiation.
Far from being spurned as an international pariah for his volatile threats, Trump continues to be tolerated, and his behavior thereby normalized. Beyond threatening Iran with total annihilation, Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to annex other sovereign nations, including Cuba, Venezuela, Canada, and Greenland, all of which seem to be candidates in his mind for the 51st U.S. state. It is disconcerting that a not-insignificant number of Trump supporters continue to act as though his increasingly erratic and unhinged behavior is somehow acceptable. Regrettably, with rare exceptions, world leaders, too, have carried on as though this sort of behavior on the part of a U.S. president is business as usual. Perhaps this is merely a pragmatic measure being taken to avoid putting their country on Trump’s list of vendettas to act upon.
Everyone should of course be relieved that the government of China recently received the U.S. president for a meeting with Xi Jinping, the paramount leader of China, allaying among some worries that World War III was imminent. But any sober assessment must nonetheless conclude that President Trump, by repeatedly threatening the Iranian people with annihilation, has proven to be the world’s foremost state terrorist. That the U.S. government continues to label Iran the world’s top sponsor of terrorism is ironic, to say the least, because by credibly threatening millions of innocent people with the end not only of their lives, but also their legacy, and the very future of their civilization, the current U.S. commander in chief has become not the top sponsor but the top perpetrator of state terrorism, exceeding in this regard even the abysmal comportment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Defenders of Israel persist in insisting that Iran wishes to annihilate Israel, but the fact remains that Israel, with the aid of the U.S. government, has destroyed the lives of far more Palestinians and Iranians than the number of non-Iranians killed by the Iranian government. So whose lunatics are worse? Perhaps the time has arrived to withdraw support from all political lunatics, wherever they may reside. To fund a government which overtly threatens to erase other civilizations entirely cannot be supported by rational people of conscience, and knowingly to do so, even if under coercion (through threat of financial penalties or even incarceration) is to be complicit in their crimes. Without the financial means to commit mass murder and nuclear terrorism, the top executive of the U.S. government would be just another feckless lunatic yelling angrily into the void.
