The Guardian view on Trump’s apocalyptic threats: a sign not of strength, but of moral and strategic weakness | Editorial

Article 52 of the first additional protocol to the Geneva conventions prohibits attacks on civilian targets. It is on those grounds that the international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for Russian military officers and officials responsible for attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. Such assaults, and the missiles rained on Ukrainian cities and towns in order to terrify and demoralise, constitute war crimes. Exactly the same would apply to the United States, should Donald Trump’s threats to bomb Iran back to the “stone age” this week be carried out.

Such basic tenets of international law bear repeating at a time when Mr Trump and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, appear to speak as if from within a bloodthirsty fever dream. Glorying repulsively in his capacity to order death and destruction from the Pentagon, Mr Hegseth, an Evangelical Christian, has presented Operation Epic Fury as a 21st-century crusade “to break the teeth of the ungodly”. On social media at the weekend, Mr Trump topped that by unleashing a stream of expletive-ridden abuse, ranting that unless Iran reopens the strait of Hormuz to shipping, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day … Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell”.

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence this summer, this is language which shames the office that Mr Trump holds and the administration he leads. It further diminishes the global reputation and moral credibility of the US, which he has already done so much to undermine. In a saner political time, members of his cabinet would be following the Democratic senator Chris Murphy’s advice and exploring constitutional options to remove him. But given the craven complicity of the team that Mr Trump has surrounded himself with, the prospects of that are remote.

The rest of the world has no option but to wait and hope that a devastating escalation of the US and Israel’s illegal war does not take place, leading to unknowable and spiralling consequences. Iran has threatened to respond by expanding the reach of its own attacks within and beyond the neighbouring region. Despite Mr Trump’s vainglorious claims to have annihilated its military capacity to resist, that is not an empty threat – as the closure of the strait of Hormuz itself illustrates.

Nato allies have rightly refused to endorse Mr Trump’s folly by joining the war, recognising both the absence of a coherent strategic plan and any legal justification. They must now hope that the US president’s apocalyptic rhetoric disguises an actual search for a swift off-ramp, as global economic pressure mounts. Mr Trump followed up his dire warnings by claiming that there was a “good chance” of a ceasefire agreement with Iran before the latest Tuesday deadline expires. Yet hours later, Israel bombed a key petrochemical plant in Iran’s biggest natural gas field.

It appears Mr Trump is making it up as he goes along. At a White House press conference on Monday, he and Mr Hegseth preened themselves at length over the dramatic rescue of the missing crew member of a US fighter shot down in southern Iran. In the coming hours, thousands of lives – and the immediate future of the global economy – will depend on the erratic will of a US president guided only by his own self-aggrandising instincts and the sycophantic echo chamber of his advisers.