As we have maintained on this blog, our primary focus is on Africa. Of course, we recognize that we do not live in isolation; we are connected to the rest of the world. That's why we occasionally dabble in global geopolitics. Most especially when the issues concern the world’s three great powers - China, the USA, and Russia whose conduct or misconduct impacts our lives.
We have also maintained that the internal affairs of those countries, or of any other, are not our concern, except when they have a direct bearing on our lives in Africa or of humanity, of which we are a part.
As a student at a campus of one of the American universities in Europe in the 1980s, I subscribed to Time magazine. The school library provided Newsweek, Foreign Policy, and other journals recommended to guide our impressionable minds as we tried to make sense of the world.
Even then, in those early times, the name Donald J. Trump was constantly on the covers for the wrong reasons. He skirted jail terms on numerous occasions.
How a man like DJT ended up as POTUS is for Americans to explain to themselves. They are the only people who can explain why they elected a six-times bankrupted, licentious, narcissistic, pedophile, convicted felon, with the integrity of a rampant hyena, as their president despite the admirable efforts of those who wrote The Federal Papers.
What we didn’t know was that the mighty, virtue-signaling America that we all knew would collapse in real time, humbled not by peers like Russia or China, but by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The humiliation of the Almighty American by Iran must have done terrible things to the psyche of the loathsome American Chief Executive, so that he couldn’t resist the temptation to extend his juvenile boasts to the greatest assembly on earth - the United Nations General Assembly.
But there we have him on September 22, 2026, in his worst boorish form, investing in himself godlike powers like killing 91 million human beings, just so casually.
A foolish word spoken by an ordinary man may be vulgar, embarrassing, or briefly ridiculous. But the same word, spoken by the president of the most heavily armed country on earth, becomes a threat to civilization.
We didn’t know that we would come to that stage where a world leader would be so morally bereft that he would utter such words as annihilation against a people, and before a gathering of the United Nations.
But the world listened when the president of the United States, Donald Trump, stood before the United Nations General Assembly and announced that he was contemplating whether to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Let that sink in: Annihilate. Trump did not talk about negotiating with, containing, deterring, or imposing stricter sanctions. Not even defeat militarily, but total annihilation.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has 91 million people, and the pedophile, narcissistic, convicted felon the good people of America elected as their president spoke about killing them all. That is the meaning of annihilation.
And he did so at the gathering of the entire world!
The United Nations was created in the ashes of the Second World War because humanity had learned what happens when powerful men turn private fantasies and national mythologies into wars that cost millions of lives.
The UN Charter calls for saving future generations from war, respecting nations large and small, and settling disputes through international law.
Then along came Donald Trump to the podium and effectively asked the world: Would you like Iran annihilated before or after lunch?
Trump’s self-absorbing MAGA defenders may say that he was speaking rhetorically.
That defense, of course, raises an uncomfortable question: since when did the threatened destruction of a sovereign state (with 91 million people) become acceptable presidential rhetoric?
More importantly, since when did the vocabulary of extermination become a legitimate instrument of diplomacy?
Whichever spin is put on it, a threat to erase a country, its people, and its future generations is not statesmanship. It is a nasty tantrum emitted by a petulant, morally bankrupt leader of a country that pretends to lead the world.
The Indian guru, Gautama Buddha, told us: “Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care, for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.”
Trumpet probably never heard of Buddha.
Even Hillary Clinton informed us: “Words matter when you run for president. And they really matter when you are president.”
Words matter greatly. Trump’s speechwriters certainly know that “Annihilate” is not a synonym for pressure or deterrence. It removes villages, children, hospitals, libraries, graves, and the inconvenient possibility that the people on the other side are human beings with histories rather than props in an American campaign advertisement.
To speak of driving a nation “into hell” with “no chance of survival” or “hope of future generations” is to brush against the darkest vocabulary in the human catalog.
To do so at the august assembly of humanity is unconscionable.
One does not need a law degree to recognize that such language sits uncomfortably beside the principles the post-war legal order was designed to protect.
Trump’s threat was not presented as solemn national-security doctrine. He delivered it with the breezy theatricality of a man choosing between menu options in his favorite McDonald’s hamburger joint.
Iran might rebuild and become “a far greater country,” or it might be annihilated.
Trump suggested the decision would depend partly on how Iranian negotiators read his political prospects. Thus the fate of roughly ninety million people became an item in one man’s weak emotional weather system.
Mark Twain observed that it was easier to fool people than to convince them they had been fooled. Trump has discovered a bolder method: skip the fooling altogether, announce the apocalypse as a scheduling matter, and rely on the room to applaud.
The alternative would require admitting that the chamber built to prevent mass killing has become the stage for a man auditioning for the role of an Old Testament deity.
Yahweh, at least, gave Nineveh forty days and a prophet. Trump gave Tehran a rhetorical coin toss and a plug for his poll numbers.
For him, threatening annihilation was another real-estate transaction - The Art of the Deal.
This is the strange historical achievement of the modern American presidency: turning nuclear terror into a personality trait.
An office created to prevent the next world war becomes a stage on which one man advertises his ability to start several. Every event becomes proof of his genius. Every concession becomes victory. Every retreat becomes strategic brilliance. Every corpse becomes a statistic, and every statistic a campaign souvenir.
Mental illness is a medical matter, and no responsible observer can determine its clinical condition from television footage. We cannot diagnose Trump by watching him from a podium.
But we can examine his political conduct. What we see as we watch Trump is a grandiose architecture of power: perpetual boasting, compulsive exaggeration, heroic self-placement, and an astonishing inability to recognize the boundary between personal triumph and public catastrophe.
Immanuel Kant supplied the principle that most directly exposes Trump’s wreckage: human beings must never be treated merely as means to an end.
Trump inverted the Kantian imperative into a business plan. In his transactional mind, nations become means to his image; wars become means to his invented legend, and suffering becomes a means to his next juvenile boast.
Iran becomes a problem to be bombed, an audience to be frightened, or a regime to be forced to kneel so that the president may admire his reflection in the rubble.
The Iranian people do not enter his moral universe as persons. They appear as leverage, like any other, in his deals - licit and illicit.
We see the same logic visible in Venezuela. Trump has celebrated American control over Venezuelan oil as though a nation’s resources become virtuous the instant they pass beneath an American flag.
His administration has described a deal involving control over more than 65 billion barrels of proven Venezuelan reserves as the greatest oil deal in history, while presenting the seizure as recompense for oil Venezuela dared to nationalize decades before Trump was elected.
Trump did far worse than the old imperial powers who, at least, armed themselves with the Bible and composed hymns about civilization before stealing the natives’ silverware.
Per this Trumpian logic: When the powerful seize, it is strategy; when the weak resist, it is aggression, terrorism, and a threat to national security.
No, Trump did not invent it; imperial logic has always been remarkably fluent in this double standard.
Kant would have recognized the moral collapse in the new configuration. In Trump’s warped arithmetic, Venezuelans and Iranians are just line items: assets to be liquidated, threats to be muted, extras in his sitcom production.
Trump’s performance at the UNGA gathering was not confidence; it is insecurity armed with state power - the insecurity of a performer who needs the world to applaud while he holds a match over the curtains.
Each ruler of empires eventually discovered that geography has a memory and that the dead do not remain obedient to the living's speeches.
Iran is not a cardboard villain awaiting an American executive order. It is an ancient civilization, a populous state with a formidable national consciousness, a sophisticated political structure, regional relationships, and a history that did not begin when Washington discovered Tehran on a map.
Only the most obtuse would ever consider geopolitics a real-estate transaction. Iran is not and will never be a hotel Trump can bankrupt and sell.
And what of the United Nations itself?
On paper, it is magnificent. In practice, it is hard to parody because it has become a parody of itself.
An organization founded to save humanity from war provides microphones to leaders who threaten war, while powerful states treat international law as an optional subscription service.
The absurdity goes even further. While the General Assembly resembles the Annual Meeting of People Who Have Weapons, Lawyers, Vetoes, and Very Strong Opinions About Peace, the Security Council is a club in which five permanent members may veto the conscience of the other 188.
The last UNGA meeting proves that the current international system preserves universal morality only in ceremony. Mounting supposedly hallowed podiums were governments accused of grave crimes who haughtily lecture the world about civilization. ICC-indicted Netanyahu brandished the pager he used to mass-kill, with no consequences.
Yet institutional hypocrisy does not make Trump’s threat less monstrous. It makes institutional reform more urgent. The alternative to an imperfect forum is not divine rule by the loudest president.
It is the jungle, now equipped with hypersonic missiles.
That warning should be heard especially clearly in Africa. Africans must pay close attention - not because Iran is flawless, nor because the government in Tehran deserves admiration, but because the principle at stake is larger than any one regime.
If a superpower can decide that another nation’s sovereignty, resources, population, and future are merely obstacles to its appetite, what prevents the same logic from being directed at an African country tomorrow?
Think Africans. Think.
Only foolish Africans should applaud Trump’s reinvented gunboat diplomacy and naked capitalism because today’s target is Iran. Imperial power rarely stops at the first target.
It studies the applause, measures the silence, and learns which peoples can be threatened without consequence and which resources can be renamed “recompense.”
A people that cheers when another nation is humiliated may one day discover that they have been applauding the rehearsal for their own humiliation and destruction.
Power without restraint is not statesmanship. It is merely capacity, and civilization exists to ensure that capacity does not become permission.
The world does not need presidents who measure their greatness by how loudly they can threaten annihilation of a whole nation before a world gathering.
It needs institutions strong enough to restrain them and citizens wise enough not to mistake imperial domination for world peace.
©️ Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)
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