HOW DARE YOU!
I am done using careful language to describe what the United States has become.
Yesterday, the President of the United States threatened to erase a civilization.
He posted it himself, on Tuesday morning, for the world to read: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Then he described the plan. Every bridge in Iran demolished. Every power plant destroyed. In four hours. He said it to reporters in the White House briefing room. He said it tlike he was describing a construction project.
Think about what that morning was like for the people in Iran.
Ninety million people woke up and read that the most powerful military on earth had a plan to end their civilization by midnight. Parents looked at their children. People called their families. Iranians formed human chains around power plants, not because it would stop anything, but because it was the only act of resistance left to them. Iran’s president wrote that he was prepared to die alongside millions of his people.
That is collective trauma. Ninety million people spending a day not knowing if they would survive the night because one man in Washington was in a foul mood about a shipping lane and no one on earth had the power to stop him.
Iran is one of the oldest continuous civilizations in human history. Its poetry, science, mathematics, and architecture predate the United States by more than two and a half millennia. None of it belongs to the Islamic Republic. It belongs to the Iranian people. It belongs to humanity. And Donald Trump threatened to end all of it before bedtime, and then went to his press briefing.
The audacity of that is so total it barely fits into language.
The trauma did not stop at Iran’s borders.
Every Iranian-Canadian, every member of the Iranian diaspora scattered across this country and across the world, they spent the day unable to reach the people they love, watching a countdown clock, knowing that the difference between their family living and dying rested entirely on one man’s mood.
The global energy shock from this war of Trump’s choosing is already tearing through hundreds of millions of lives. Fuel prices spiking. Supply chains breaking. Families absorbing costs they did not choose for a war they did not vote for, started by a man who answers to no one. Farmers. Truckers. Working people in every country on earth, paying the price of imperial hubris they had no hand in creating and no way to stop.
This is what empire is. The casual, sneering assumption that one country’s decisions made by one man, unchecked by any legislature, unbound by any law, are simply the weather that the rest of the world lives in. You don’t get a vote. You don’t get a warning. You wake up one morning and read that your civilization might die tonight, and you understand with terrible clarity that your life, your family, your future, none of it is yours to protect.
Legal experts agreed: targeting civilian infrastructure without any distinction between civilian and military targets is a war crime under international and U.S. law. Trump described it out loud, to reporters, in detail, and when asked if it constituted war crimes, he rejected the premise and called Iran’s leaders “animals.”
That is how you build the moral architecture for genocide. You declare the target subhuman, then your base falls in line.
Here is what American institutions did yesterday
They issued statements.
More than three dozen Democrats called for Trump’s removal. Senator Markey called him “a clear and present danger, not just to the American people but to the world.” U.S. Senator Ed Markey Senator Murkowski, Republican, said the threat was “an affront to the ideals our nation has sought to uphold and promote around the world for nearly 250 years.”
GOP leaders in the House and Senate said nothing.
One Republican congressman went on CNN and helpfully clarified that Trump only meant to destroy Iran’s civilian bridges and power plants. As though that were a reassuring distinction. As though “we’re only going to destroy everything that keeps 90 million people alive” is the moderate position.
Last month, Congress voted against limiting Trump’s war powers. Not to end the war. Just to limit the authority of one man to threaten the extermination of 90 million people. They voted no.
The attacks have already killed more than 2,000 people and struck schools, hospitals, and residential buildings. Republicans went along with all of it and called it leadership.
The protests have not stopped this. The marches, the signs, the Hands Off rallies, the hundred-plus Democratic press releases fired off in a single day while Congress sat on vacation, none of it stopped anything. The bombs paused because Pakistan mediated and Iran blinked. American democracy had nothing to do with it.
America used to be the hero
The world looked to America as a beacon of hope: a democracy of the people for the people backed by incredible economic and military might. USAid, Air America, civil rights, technology, medical advances, music, films. The “shining city on the hill.”
America has always had a gap between its stated values and its actual conduct. It has done terrible things and called them freedom. But there was a framework. A constitutional order. International alliances built on the idea that even the most powerful country on earth operated under some minimum of law and accountability. The hero myth was always partly fiction. But it was functional fiction. There was a floor.
That floor is gone.
What the world watched yesterday was not a democracy wrestling with a hard decision.
An unauthorized war waged by executive fiat. Threats of mass civilian destruction broadcast on social media like fight-night promotion. A legislature on vacation. A Republican party that has decided its political survival is worth more than 90 million Iranian lives.
America is not the hero of this story. America is the country that threatened to erase a civilization over a shipping lane and faced no internal consequence for it. The ceasefire was not an act of American restraint or moral reckoning. It was the product of Pakistani diplomacy and Iranian endurance. America stumbled backward from the edge of a war crime because the rest of the world grabbed it by the collar.
The world knows this now beyond any shadow of a doubt
I am Canadian.
I am a Canadian watching a neighbouring country that has abandoned the rule of law, that is waging an unauthorized war, that just threatened genocide as a negotiating tactic and whose legislature responded by staying on vacation.
I am a Canadian watching a Republican party that knows exactly what it is enabling and has chosen to enable it anyway, because the alternative is a primary challenge. I am watching a legislative body with the constitutional authority to end this, sitting on its hands in beach chairs while a nation of 90 million people stood in human chains around power plants and waited to find out if they’d make it to Wednesday.
And I feel anger. Not at the Iranian people. Not just at Trump.
My fury is at everyone who knows and has chosen to do nothing sufficient. Every Republican senator calculating that silence is survivable. Every American who watched January 6th and decided democracy would self-correct. Every allied government that keeps picking up the phone and managing a rogue state rather than naming it one. Every institution that was supposed to be the floor and who caved.
The marches are not working. The statements are not working. The accountability mechanisms Americans were promised would hold are not holding.
The ceasefire is two weeks. Talks begin in Islamabad. Maybe they hold. Maybe they don’t.
The shock will not disappear with a ceasefire announcement. The trauma is real. The hubris that created it is still in power. The conditions that allowed one man to threaten a civilization on a whim: no authorization, no accountability, no consequence. Those conditions are intact and will be intact the morning after the Islamabad talks, whatever they produce.
A civilization got a reprieve. But the belief that America operates under law, that power answers to something, that the world’s most powerful country is at least trying to be what it has always claimed to be, all of that has been destroyed.
The world is now saying it out loud.
How dare you!
The war in Iran began in late February 2026 with coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It has been ongoing for 38 days. The Hormuz closure has triggered a global energy shock. Congress has not authorized the war. The two-week ceasefire announced April 7 is contingent on Hormuz passage remaining open, with talks in Islamabad beginning April 10.
~ Maritimer
I have to say I was terribly disappointed in other Western leaders as well. There was not one US ambassador called to account for what there government was doing or expelled. They could have threatened to stop trade with the US til they backed off. If they all stood together like Carney suggested and like happened with Greenland perhaps this farce would have been over sooner.
You have managed to capture all the outrage, angst, and fear that has been occupying my thoughts for the past month, but especially over the Easter weekend. I have been stunned to observe how many people have been able to carry on with minute details of their daily lives, seemingly oblivious to the war clouds building and raining destruction over the whole Middle East because Trump allowed himself to be played by Israel. I respectfully disagree with the comment made by Jodi Gay about calling to account the US ambassadors stationed in Western counties. Canada has a US ambassador, Mr. Hoekstra, who is useless in his position and he takes every opportunity to criticize and denigrate Canada. The ambassadors have little power over policy. I think the leaders of NATO countries took very firm stands against the US from the outset and refused to be drawn into the conflict. They maintained a unified group, and restated many times that NATO is a defensive force, designed to come to the aid of a member nation when it is under attack. France and the UK have been firm about limiting the use of their airspace and bases for refuelling, while Germany has said repeatedly that it is not their war. In fact, The EU has presented a unified front and have maintained their position of non-involvement. Trump has fully displayed his demented thought processes which are scattered, argumentative and show oppositional defiance like an out-of-control child. There is now two weeks of tentative calm and safety, thanks to Pakistan. Will it stand? What happens in two weeks?