Everything and nothing that Donald Trump says should be taken seriously. He has proved both that he does what he says he will do – and that he always backs down. Let us hope that when he is making threats of annihilation, he’s not fingering the nuclear button but just having a tantrum.
Any other world leader with access to Doomsday weapons would cause global horror. The US president has said he could “totally destroy” North Korea, “wipe out” Afghanistan, threaten that “a whole civilization will die tonight” in Iran and that the country would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it targets the US military in the region.
The US president’s threats against Iran, which are more directly apocalyptic than any made by Iran’s president or supreme leaders against either America or Israel, have been condemned by some of Trump’s critics.
But his repeated flirtation with the idea of using weapons of mass destruction has put him in a category that is arguably more sinister than that of our established bogeyman dictators.
Recently, Trump has used more inflammatory language than North Korea’s Kim Jong Un or Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Crucially, Trump rules over a nation that still has a democratic constitution. The greatest test so far of how much of America’s democracy has been stripped of its branches will be in the midterm elections in November.
Trump’s threats against North Korea go back to 2017, during his first term in office. His words have been personal, while Kim has avoided saying anything directly. Kim’s officials have said that Japan could be “sunk into the sea” and that North Korea could “destroy the US” in pre-emptive nuclear strikes.
Similarly, Putin has moved some nuclear-capable forces closer to Ukraine and used non-specific threats that he is “not bluffing” when he said that Russia could use “all the means at our disposal” to see off an escalation in military support to Ukraine.
Russia has about 5,500 nuclear weapons. The US has about 5,000. North Korea has only around 40 or 50 and is still developing its long-range missile capabilities.
But in using the kind of language that he likes to display in person and on social media, Trump is removing the US from the top of the list of mature nuclear powers, along with France and the UK, and enthusiastically settling into the company of rogue nations.
In Iran, I imagine the temptation to use the massive capabilities for destruction at his fingertips increases as it dawns on Trump that his US-Israeli attack on Tehran’s regime has achieved next to nothing while destabilising the world economy.
His latest threat to blow Iran “off the face of the earth” comes as he struggles to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran closed when Tehran was attacked. If any US vessels are fired upon, he has said he will use the US arsenal to devastating effect.
Iran, a nation that has exported terrorism, destabilised the Middle East, threatened Israel’s existence and murdered street protestors, is managing to appear the more grown-up party in this war.
“We know full well that the continuation of the status quo is intolerable for America; while we have not even begun yet,” said Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker in the Iranian parliament and chief negotiator with the US.
Technically speaking, Trump has less than a month left before he has to get congressional authorisation for his war against Iran.
His “secretary of war”, Pete Hegseth, says that the countdown, from 1 April, has been reset by the recent ceasefires that the US and Iran have only partly observed – the US continues to blockade Iran’s ports and Iran continues to attack the United Arab Emirates, which has also conducted operations against the regime.
On Tuesday, Hegseth insisted that the ceasefire was still in place.
Time, though, is on Iran’s side. US forces, including two Marine Expeditionary Units, as well as paratroopers and other attack units that could be tasked for ground invasion, cannot bob on the high seas indefinitely.
Global food supplies will be badly affected by a collapse in the supply of fertiliser, ingredients derived from fossil fuels that should have been shipped through the Straits of Hormuz. Microchip manufacturing needs helium, which also comes via the same route, along with 20 per cent of the world’s oil supplies.
All of these are the direct consequence of Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran alongside Israel, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been indicted for alleged crimes against humanity.
This allegiance and the wider strategic decision to go to war at all that was taken without consultation with other US allies means that Trump himself (not Iran, which is actually strangling the strait) is being, and will be, blamed for the consequences.
Enraged, the US president wishes this whole problem would go away. He seems increasingly tempted to blow it away.
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