The global arrogance displayed by the President of the US Donald Trump was not just unbecoming of a great country like the USA, it displayed hubris on an astounding scale.
Amid an ongoing war of words between Washington and Tehran, Trump threatened that if actual fighting breaks out between the two countries, Iran will be destroyed.
To tweet such a threat of implied nuclear annihilation at a significant Islamic country can only increase instability in an already rocking global environment where “first use” has never been eschewed by the US which is in the process of withdrawing from the limited treaty obligations of the INF with Russia and which earlier unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal.
Though he may not know it, nuclear fall-out knows no boundaries and his closest friends in the Persian Gulf would be as equally affected as would Iran’s neighbors elsewhere, making this threat one capable of unleashing uncontrollable world war.
It is an open invitation for Iran to get its retaliation in first, on the oilfields of its closest neighbors and in the Straits of Hormuz through which most of the world’s oil flows, acts which would make the US president’s threat a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It constitutes a clear and present danger to the safety of Trump’s closest international partner, Israel, surely well within the range of current Iranian military technology.
“Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in response to Trump’s threats. “Economic terrorism and genocidal taunts will not ‘end Iran’,” he added.
And it underestimates too the zealotry of the Iranian leadership and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards for whom death whilst fighting the “Great Satan” would be a ticket to Paradise no less.
It must also constitute a considerable escalation of the risks of a “false-flag” attack on the US or her friends, either perpetrated by the US themselves – like the Gulf of Tonkin which turned Vietnam into a conflagration consuming millions of lives – or by other state actors seeking to provoke the United States in to war with Iran, or indeed by non-state actors with same goal in mind. Or even by hardline factions within the Iranian state themselves.
Never forget that Hitler, using the fake news media of the day, actually claimed Poland had invaded Germany.
It is long past time for President Trump to wind his neck in and disable his Twitter account before it becomes a weapon of mass destruction.