How Donald Trump’s war on Iran taps into the American appetite for destruction
Donald Trump still has the capacity to shock. The American president’s unauthorized war against Iran finds him in a vicious destructive mode, recently threatening to push Iran “into the Stone Ages” and to end Iranian civilization if Iran did not agree to “unconditional surrender.”
Even as the passing weeks have left Iran still standing, Trump’s words and deeds have already inflicted severe damage on the global economy and regional peace in the Middle East.
Trump’s turn toward a wartime posture is striking, but not entirely unexpected. His second-term conduct shows a growing tendency to push an earlier taste for disruption toward outright destruction — at home and abroad.
He now routinely acts in the belief that those who dare to resist his plans deserve the severest forms of punishment that imperial presidential power can deliver.
But Trump’s conduct is grounded in centuries of American experience. The United States has an enduring tendency toward retribution and destruction.
Trump’s scorched-Earth proclivity was obvious before the war with Iran. Warning shots came on Jan. 6, 2021, with the assault on both the Capitol and constitutional provisions for presidential succession. Similarly bold efforts began in 2025.
Globally, Trump has been sweeping away leaders, regimes and multilateral systems, using both military and political weaponry: the special operations extraction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, for example, as well as the launch of illegal attacks on purportedly drug-running fishing boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific (now tallying more than 50 obliterating strikes and 163 deaths).
International ravaging has been a hallmark of Trump 2.0: dismantling highly integrated global trading networks; fueling a surge in military recruits in allied countries like Canada and Denmark/Greenland; denouncing NATO.
There’s been destruction on the home front too: Elon Musk’s DOGE chain-sawed through congressionally authorized agencies and funding, for example, including the Environmental Protection Agency and 5,800 research projects at the National Institutes of Health. The anti-woke Trump administration has eviscerated diversity, equity and inclusion programs in government, the private sector and academia.
Trump has also literally bulldozed the White House East Wing.
Centuries of American history foreshadow Trump’s strategy of destruction. The precedents are complex for two reasons.
First, American personal and national interests have often mixed admirable aims with a more basic drive for wealth and power — combining genuine pursuits of democracy and civil liberties and ambitions for social welfare and community with less noble impulses.
Second, the scope and settings in which Trump-like behaviour appears have changed dramatically over more than three centuries — from a chain of Atlantic colonies to a continental nation and, ultimately, a global economic, military and cultural power. Yet across these shifting arenas, similar patterns of destructive and tragic outbursts have repeatedly surfaced.
Among countless examples, the most profound involved the treatment of Indigenous populations. White colonial appetites for land and resources always paired negotiation and repression, with superior weaponry leading to episodes of genocidal annihilation when forced migrations and “reservations” were deemed insufficient.
