Trump’s warning to Iran: ‘A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again’

President Donald Trump posted a dire warning on Truth Social Tuesday morning that Iran—one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, a country of 90 million people—may be destroyed within hours.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump wrote. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

The post landed a little less than 12 hours before Trump’s 8 p.m. ET deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and came after the U.S. conducted more than 50 strikes on military targets on Kharg Island early Tuesday, according to two U.S. officials cited by the Wall Street Journal. Kharg is Iran’s main oil export hub, responsible for shuttling through 20% of the world’s oil. 

Trump then pivoted in the same post to suggest that Iran’s regime has already collapsed. “Now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?” he wrote, before landing on: “47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

Trump’s threatened targets—Iran’s power plants and bridges—would almost certainly constitute war crimes under international humanitarian law, which prohibits attacks on civilian infrastructure that isn’t directly serving a military purpose. The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols explicitly bar strikes on objects “indispensable to the survival of the civilian population,” a category legal scholars say clearly includes electrical grids that power hospitals, water treatment, and food storage for 90 million people. But beyond the humanitarian costs, blacking out the entire nation would be economically catastrophic for the region and could trigger a global recession. 

Leaders and markets respond

Vice President JD Vance, speaking in Budapest alongside Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, insisted the strikes did not represent a change in strategy and said “fundamentally the military objectives of the United States have been completed” in Iran. The ball, he said, is now in Tehran’s court.

Even some of Trump’s closest allies expressed alarm at the apocalyptic rhetoric. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), a firm Trump supporter, told podcaster John Solomon he was “hoping and praying” Trump was “just using this as bluster.” Johnson added, “We are not at war with the Iranian people. We are trying to liberate them.”

Qatar called for restraint on the President’s part.

“Escalations left unchecked will get us in a situation where it can’t be controlled – and we are very close to that point,” Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed Al-Ansari said during a press conference. “There are no winners in the continuation of this war.”

Inside Iran, officials called for human chains of young people to gather around power plants and bridges to physically protect them from U.S. airstrikes. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, warned Gulf states that its “considerable restraint” was ending and that it would no longer hesitate to target American-linked oil and gas infrastructure in ways that could disrupt the industry for years.

Financial markets reacted immediately to the post. U.S. crude jumped another 3.2% to $116 a barrel, the VIX spiked more than 6%, and the S&P 500 opened negative.

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