"A Whole Civilisation Will Die Tonight"

"A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." The genocidal words of Donald Trump, the President of the United States. For days Trump has promised a buffet of war crimes, with targets including bridges, power stations, energy infrastructure, and desalination plants. It goes without saying that residential areas and "soft" institutions, like schools, hospitals, universities, are likely to be in the firing line as the Pentagon designates them semi-military in nature. Just as the Israelis did for the entirety of Gaza.

Trump has promised escalation before, and not delivered. His civilisation-ending rhetoric fits the usual pattern of making extreme, and in this case blood-curdling statements, to monstrously browbeat opponents into submission. Unfortunately, what makes a cataclysm possible is the US government's refusal to understand Iranian strategy. Because Tehran is not responding how Trump and the State Department expects them to, this makes the carrying through of the threats more likely. Even if the US unleashes hell, Iran's position is unlikely to change. It will continue to exert control over the Strait of Hormuz, and it will continue to humiliate the Americans and Israel by striking back. Even more dangerously, the relative restraint Iran has shown toward Gulf state oil refineries and desalination facilities could be gone. Iran alone isn't facing catastrophe.

This brings to head a crisis of US constitutionalism as well. The US and Israeli war on Iran is an illegal war, a conflict that fits the UN definition of war of aggression and an understanding endorsed by the US itself. Attacking civilians occurred at the outset, with the murder of 168 people, including approximately 110 school girls at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in the first wave of American bombings. The administration has done nothing to hide these crimes, and explains its actions as big power bullying. They openly, cynically tell the truth of themselves. But with a declaration of genocidal intent, the consequences of the war should rebound sharply on domestic politics. The 25th amendment allows for the provision of the removal of a president "unable" to discharge their duties, and indeed the Democrat leadership have called on the cabinet to oust Trump. The Republicans, however, are now the face of open, illusion-free, and unaccountable oligarchical power. And there is little chance those cabinet members, who are on the hook for war crimes too, would accede to the pleas for political proprietary. JD Vance, who would take over from Trump, is spending this crisis campaigning for Hungary's Viktor Orban ahead of this Sunday's election. The only Republican to have joined with the Democrats is Marjorie Taylor Greene.

As with the Greenland crisis in January, what the West and significant sections of the US itself are seeing for the first time is how the state operates as a (declining) global hegemon. How it threatens, how it bares its teeth, how it rains death with no regard to the rules of war on its opponents. Iran's every refusal invites a response that tears away not just the liberal democratic veils US power has hitherto dressed itself in, but shows up the emptiness of American constitutionalism itself. If Trump can't be checked, cannot be removed over his stated intent to murder an entire country, how then can he ever be removed? In that question lies the fundamental, and possibly terminal crisis of US legitimacy abroad. And at home.

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