Last week, after the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, parroted his boss’s threat to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age,” Tehran’s diplomats responded on social media. “At a time when you were still in caves searching for fire, we were inscribing human rights on the Cyrus Cylinder,” Iran’s Embassy in South Africa posted on X. “We endured the storm of Alexander and the Mongol invasions and remained; because Iran is not just a country, it is a civilization.” Days passed and bombs kept falling, while oil tankers idled on either side of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had effectively closed in retaliation for the war launched by Israel and the United States. Then President Donald Trump—likely frustrated by the cascading economic consequences of Iran’s blockade, the regime’s refusal to capitulate, the growing unease among his MAGA base, or the apparent leaks from mutinous advisers inside the White House—put forward an apocalyptic ultimatum. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he posted on social media, early on Tuesday. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
This was astonishing language, even for Trump, whose aggressive rhetoric has become background noise. Some Democrats cited the post as evidence of the President’s deteriorating mental fitness and his inability to remain in office. Iran’s envoy to the United Nations said that Trump was broadcasting “his intent to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.” António Costa, the president of the European Council, said that targeting civilian infrastructure, particularly energy facilities, is “illegal and unacceptable,” and added, “This applies to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and it applies everywhere.” Pope Leo XIV told reporters, “There are certainly issues of international law here, but even more, it is a moral question concerning the good of the people as a whole, in its entirety.”
But the United States and Israel have shown little regard for international law, or other such obligations. The Trump Administration believes it can secure perceived U.S. interests however it sees fit; earlier this year, Trump told the Times that he was constrained only by his “own morality.” If that statement didn’t offer much clarity, Trump’s close adviser, Stephen Miller, delivered his own explanation of the Administration’s guiding principles. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world . . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller told CNN, in January. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
This embrace of atavistic thinking in Washington—call it Stone Age mentality—may play well with Trump’s nationalist base at home, but it has done little to advance his aims in the Middle East. By Tuesday night, his bluster had given way to what sounded like relief at finding an off-ramp. After a group of regional intermediaries, led by Pakistan, brokered a temporary truce, Trump announced on social media that he would “suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks,” contingent upon the regime allowing the strait to reopen. Trump claimed that the United States had “already met and exceeded all Military objectives” and was close to clinching “Longterm PEACE with Iran.” The Pakistani Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said that U.S. and Iranian delegations were invited to Islamabad for potential talks later this week. As of Wednesday morning, Iran’s civilization still stood.
