One Tuesday morning, the President of the United States posted on Truth Social, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Soon after, my thoughts flashed back to one of the world’s most celebrated Persian poets, Omar Khayyam and his most famous poetic lines from the Rubaiyat:
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
Only a beautiful civilization could have uttered these beautiful words.
But then I read Trump’s words again, slowly. Not “the regime will fall.” Not “the military will be destroyed.” Not even “the infrastructure will be degraded.” A whole civilization. Never to be brought back again.
The civilization in question is Persian, one of the oldest and most consequential in human history. The people who gave the world algebra, poetry, architecture, and philosophy going back more than 2,500 years.
Trump spelled out a specific plan. Every bridge in Iran would be “decimated,” every power plant “out of business, burning, exploding, and never to” be rebuilt. This is not a metaphor, not a negotiating ploy, not the exasperated hyperbole of a frustrated commander-in-chief. This was a detailed, public statement to destroy the civilian infrastructure upon which tens of millions of people depend to survive, including their heat, their water treatment, their hospitals, and their food supply chains. And their children!
When pressed on whether targeting every bridge and power plant would constitute war crimes, Trump rejected the premise, arguing that Iran’s leaders were “animals” who needed to be stopped. The dehumanization — “animals,” “crazy bastards,” a civilization unworthy of continuity — is not incidental to the threat. History has a word for the deliberate destruction of a civilization based on the premise that its people are less than human. What’s that word?
Recalling the horrific word, Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said, “Make no mistake: the president’s threats are deeply reprehensible to us as Jews and as Americans, and must be condemned by all leaders – regardless of their stance on the war with Iran….We know what it means when leaders call for communities and populations to be wiped out.”
The U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “there is no military objective that justifies the wholesale destruction of a society’s infrastructure or the deliberate infliction of suffering on civilian populations.” Legal experts affirm it too, for example, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, warned that targeting civilians on a mass scale “would be a clear violation of the law of armed conflict as laid out in the Geneva Conventions, as well as the Pentagon’s Law of War Manual.”
A group of Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it loud and clear, “Intentionally destroying the power, water, or basic infrastructure upon which tens of millions of civilians depend to punish the very civilians who suffer at the hands of the Iranian regime would constitute a war crime, a betrayal of the values this nation was founded on, and a moral failure.”
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, once perhaps Trump’s most devoted congressional ally, condemned the post “evil and madness” and called for the invocation of the 25th Amendment.
The question that haunts most of us today is not who we have been— a beacon and champion of liberty across the globe—but who we are becoming and where the Pied Piper of Make America Great Again is taking us.
With unambiguous moral clarity, Pope Leo XIV called it the “delusion of omnipotence.” The first American-born Pope in history looked at what his own country’s president had written and called it “truly unacceptable,” adding that attacks on civilian infrastructure are “a sign of the hatred, the division, the destruction the human being is capable of.” He urged Americans and people of good will everywhere to contact their political leaders and demand they choose peace.
Pope Leo XIV is not naive about geopolitics or indifferent to Iranian aggression and the tyranny of the mullahs against the Iranian people. He called it unacceptable because some lines, once crossed even in language, alter the moral architecture of the world. When the leader of the most powerful nation on earth tells more than 93 million people that their civilization will die tonight, he is not just threatening Iran. He is telling every person on the planet what America will decide whose human life is worth.
Pope Leo XIV’s warning regarding the “delusion of omnipotence” has shifted from a prophetic whisper to a screaming reality. American and Iranian diplomats descended upon Islamabad, fueled by the toxic certainty of their own supremacy, convinced that total victory was an inevitability. Instead, they departed empty-handed, bounded only by a fragile ceasefire and a suffocating blockade. The illusion of control has shattered, leaving behind a chilling clarity: there are no masters in this conflict, only victims. They now face the terrifying realization that the next spark won’t just ignite a city — it will consume the globe.