Summary: Trump’s nuclear threat exemplifies the new stage of fascist imperialism we are under at present — Editors

In his unhinged rant at the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 22 — a forum where presidents and prime ministers normally appear each fall to make speeches about peace and harmony among nations – Donald Trump exceeded even himself.  Amid expected rants denying climate change and crowing over his seizure of Venezuela and its oil – “to the victor belongs the spoils” – and obfuscations over his Iran war, he exclaimed:

Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?

This amounts to nothing less than the threat of nuclear annihilation of a country of over 90 million children, women, and men. And unlike a similar one in April, this bloodthirsty threat was issued not in a late-night social media post, but in a formal, prepared speech in front of dozens of world leaders in a setting normally dominated by diplomatic niceties. Stunned, the large audience of diplomats and national leaders sat “stone-faced” (Farnaz Faishi et al., “Trump Tells UN Iran Faces a Risk of Obliteration,” New York Times, Sept. 23, 2026).

What is going on here? To be sure, the US is in the middle of a self-inflicted quagmire in Iran, having encountered stiff and unexpected resistance to its effort – along with Israel – to topple the Islamic Republic. The US still faces Iranian drone attacks on its bases and its allies throughout the region, the cutoff of global shipping – including petroleum, natural gas, and fertilizers – through the Persian’s Gulf’s choke point, the Strait of Hormuz, and in recent weeks, the partial cutoff of the Strait of Bab al-Mandab at the mouth of the Red Sea, the alternative route for Saudi oil.

Partly as a result of this fiasco, which has seen gasoline and diesel prices skyrocket in the US, in effect an unvoted war tax on the working class, Trump has grown increasingly unpopular at home. One poll showed his approval score having fallen to the low of 29% at a time when midterm elections are already underway in several states.

How then to explain Trump’s genocidal words?

First, many observers have suggested that Trump’s chilling threat to “annihilate” Iran was a rhetorical device masking US failure in this war, aimed at avoiding any appearance of weakness in the eyes of his conservative political base. In other words, that it was merely overblown political speechifying aimed at the November elections.

Second, it has been suggested that Trump may actually be using these threats to hurry along diplomacy, to force the Islamic Republic to consider US demands and make a compromise that would end the war. In short, this bellicose, even eliminationist rhetoric was really aimed at peace.

Neither of these arguments, though grounded in history and reasoned analysis, rise to the occasion, to the terrible and dangerous moment we are facing after September 22.

First, while Trump’s words may have been intended more as rhetoric than a concrete threat, such things have ways of getting out of hand. Doesn’t his speech signal to military commanders – from the Pentagon to the battle front — that the gloves are coming off, that they may have much more leeway than before to be aggressive?  Couldn’t that spin out of control?

Second, doesn’t it give the go ahead to other nuclear powers, like Putin’s Russia, to threaten their opponents like Ukraine with nuclear annihilation? Or to give new license to other powers to threaten their weaker neighbors in other ways.

Third, Trump’s threats have already motivated the Iranian regime to launch new attacks on shipping in the Persian Gulf, the opposite response that was to be expected, according to these arguments.

Fourth, and most importantly, Trump’s threat of nuclear annihilation, issued first in April and repeated now in the formal setting of the United Nations, marks a new, highly dangerous escalation of the danger of nuclear war that has been around since the 1940s.

Does anyone seriously doubt that Trump is dehumanized, cruel, and capricious enough to launch a nuclear war on a whim? The fact that his power and influence are receding as resistance grows inside the US and abroad in no way lessens his “monarchical” power to launch a nuclear strike on a few minutes notice, a power that has been legally granted to US presidents since the beginning of the Cold War for “national security” reasons. Nor does his weakening political position lessen the chance he will strike out at his enemies as even as he goes down, although it could motivate some at the lower ranks to slow or even resist such an order.

Don’t we also need to recognize that by 2025-26, US imperialism has entered a new stage, a fascist one, in which brute force and open threats of annihilation of whole peoples have become the norm? This is seen in Venezuela, Cuba, and even “European” Greenland. Don’t we need to see that as the US is declining as an economic and to some extent even as a military power, at least in terms of the new type of drone warfare, it still has the capacity – and apparently the will in the person of Trump – to bring down whole parts of our human community in a vengeful lashing out?

None of this diminishes the fact that Iran’s theocratic dictatorship remains as oppressive as ever, as the population continues to be disaffected. This was seen in the fact that just one day before Trump’s speech, the publication of imprisoned feminist Narges Mohammadi’s memoirs, smuggled out from the notorious Evin prison, was announced in Paris. Referring to the period of Israel’s 12-day war on Iran in 2025, when it bombed the prison in order to “save” the dissidents, Mohammadi writes, “At that moment, I felt that, in this country, we are at the intersection of injustice, discrimination, war, authoritarianism…. All of those are trampling on our people’s human rights” (Amir-Hussein Radjy, “‘No room to breathe’: Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi describes Iranians facing war, sanctions,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 2026).

But today, our eyes are focusing mainly on Trump and his murderous threat, expressed openly to the world, a threat that exemplifies the fascist, imperialist agenda he is attempting to implement in the US and the world. He and his regime must be resisted at every possible level, to stay the hand of oppression and death and to make room for life and humanity, in Iran and the world.