The world needs to wake up to a profound truth about this war in Iran: it reveals that this President puts the human future in grave danger.
If we look at the totality of how it came to pass that a war broke out in the Middle East, a stark conclusion emerges: the necessary and sufficient cause of this catastrophe is that the President of the United States has an urge to foment conflict with other nations, shows no ability to think through the implications of launching a war, and has usurped the world’s most powerful military force not to serve any “national interest,” but to gratify whatever impulses make attacking other nations appealing to him.
In other words, from the very beginning of this war it has been on gross display that all of this is happening because the person deciding America’s conduct in the world combines a set of characteristics that could scarcely be more dangerous in the leader of the world’s most powerful nation—a nation that has long been the keystone of progress in the international system and that possesses a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and the systems for delivering them to any spot on the globe.
We are now at war with Iran—bringing strife to the whole region and driving up the price of oil to levels that could have major destructive economic consequences—without the nation having had any participation in the decision or even any credible explanation. None of this would have happened were it not that the current President of the United States is a man who seems compelled to defy anything that would limit his powers, who shows signs of cognitive decline that amplify the worst aspects of his character, and who seems to get off on threatening or attacking others. (Menacing Canada and Denmark for no clear good reason, illegally bombing boats in the Caribbean, and now demanding “unconditional surrender” from a major nation he chose to attack with American air power.)
What all this demonstrates is a terrifying fact: the leader of the world’s mightiest superpower is willing to launch a war with no apparent good reason and no real plan simply because it gratifies him to do so.
That’s not just a tragedy for the world. It is a warning.
Never in the history of the world has so much power to destroy been in the hands of someone so dangerous to possess it.
Isn’t that clear? Is there any way of interpreting the totality of what we have seen from Trump since he launched the attack on Iran that does not demonstrate not only that he is “unfit for office,” but that he is unfit in a particular way that is already doing catastrophic damage to the human world? Is there anything in Trump’s decision-making that suggests he could be trusted not to do something reckless with his nukes?
We should not focus all our attention just on what is happening with THIS disastrous decision Trump has made. We should also be looking ahead and asking, “What might the man who made THAT decision decide to do in the future?”
“Might” does not mean “will.” But when the stakes are this high, even the mere possibility must be given its due weight.
It would be folly for human civilization to look at this picture and simply let things take their course rather than do whatever can be done to remove this threat.
Sound the alarm! Something must be done to take this world-threatening power away from a person who cannot in the least be trusted to make the right decisions, in the right way, for the right reasons.
But so far, we’re not even hearing about this unprecedented situation. All the focus is on the huge damage Trump’s present decision is inflicting. But we need to attend also to the danger that still greater disasters could be inflicted on the human world if Donald Trump remains in the presidency.
