The president’s latest warning barely registered, written off as typical behavior. But the threats have real-world consequences
As the US and Iran fought around the strait of Hormuz last week, Donald Trump issued one of his typical threats. In an interview with a Fox News correspondent, Trump said Iran would be “totally wiped out as a country” if it retaliated for the latest wave of US air strikes.
That threat by the US president to wipe out another country generated few headlines, even during a relatively slow news week by Trump administration standards.
Trump has delivered this kind of warning so frequently over the past six months of his war against Iran that it hardly registers anymore. But it’s important not to normalize Trump’s threats, which are usually accompanied by promises to devastate Iran’s infrastructure – vowing to destroy bridges and power plants. Those kinds of attacks would constitute war crimes under international law.
The president’s repeated vows to obliterate Iran are usually written off by other western leaders and the news media as typical of Trump’s bravado and unpredictability, but they have real-world consequences. By treating Trump’s rhetoric as normal, US and western societies are becoming more desensitized to the idea of large-scale violence – including the targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure – as a legitimate kind of warfare. And of course, Israel’s war on Gaza has inured many in the western world to wholesale atrocities, including intense aerial bombardment that leads to massive civilian casualties and displacement.... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/10/trump-iran-violence