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A biting analysis of Trump’s rhetoric on Iran and what it reveals about the deeper realities of American power, empire, and the collapse of liberal illusions.
By PROFESSOR JUNAID S. AHMAD
There are moments when power stops bothering with manners. The velvet glove slips, the diplomatic smile curdles, and empire begins to speak in its mother tongue: threat. We are living through such a moment. The old catechism of ‘stability,’ ‘security,’ and the ‘rules-based order’ is no longer even pretending to be plausible. What stands exposed is something far less elegant and far more familiar: coercion without embarrassment, destruction without disguise, and domination so self-assured it no longer feels compelled to lie gracefully.
Trump did not invent this order. He merely stripped it of its cosmetics. His threats against Iran have shocked the liberal conscience largely because he delivers imperial menace with the verbal subtlety of a nightclub bouncer. But this indignation is as selective as it is self-flattering. It confuses vulgarity with novelty. Trump’s obscenity is not that he is uniquely brutal; it is that he is too lazy, too narcissistic, and too intoxicated by his own performance to wrap brutality in the usual embalming language of humanitarian concern.
The point is not that civilian infrastructure is now being threatened. The point is that such threats are being voiced so nakedly. The modern history of American power is littered with the wreckage of societies whose electricity grids, water systems, hospitals, roads, and civilian institutions were treated as expendable components in some higher strategic arithmetic. Iraq, Vietnam, Korea — these were not moral accidents. They were demonstrations. The message was always the same: a population can be collectively broken, then lectured about peace.
This is why the liberal shock now feels less like moral awakening than historical illiteracy. Trump is not a rupture from the American tradition. He is its least edited transcript. The Korean peninsula was drenched in staggering violence. Vietnam was pounded with a ferocity that still deforms the landscape of memory. Entire regions have been subjected to drone warfare, sanctions, sabotage, and regime-change operations under presidents whose diction was smoother, whose syntax was more civilised, and whose crimes were therefore easier for respectable opinion to metabolise.
Trump’s real offence against elite decorum is not that he says something different, but that he says too much of the quiet part aloud. Previous administrations preferred a silkier grammar: humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, strategic necessity. Trump reduces all of this to its crude operational core: obey, or suffer. Align, or burn. He does not corrupt the imperial script; he performs an unfiltered reading of it.
Iran, in this sense, is not merely an adversary of Washington. It is an irritant to the mythology of effortless American control. For decades, it has functioned as a standing refutation of the fantasy that enough pressure, enough sanctions, enough covert subversion, enough military intimidation can bend every state into submission. The issue is not simply the Strait of Hormuz, vital though it is, but the larger insult represented by any country that refuses to internalise the terms of its own subordination.
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That is why American power oscillates so absurdly between swagger and complaint. First comes the boast that the chokepoint does not matter; then the panic when control is contested. First the pose of indifference; then the threat of devastation. This is not strategic coherence. It is imperial frustration discovering its own limits and reacting with the petulance of a hegemon unaccustomed to hearing the word no.
Yet to read this only as decline is too easy, and therefore too comforting. Power in decay can remain ferociously dangerous. A wounded empire is often more reckless than a confident one. What we are witnessing is not the disappearance of American dominance but its mutation into a cruder, more openly punitive form — less disciplined, less persuasive, and therefore more reliant on raw intimidation. Trump is not the grave-digger of empire. He is empire after the speechwriters have been fired.
For countries like Pakistan, the lesson is as external as it is internal. Sovereignty cannot survive as mere rhetoric while domestic elites reproduce the very structures of dependency they denounce abroad. A ruling order that socialises pain and privatises privilege cannot drape itself in the language of dignity. It is difficult to oppose imperial hierarchy overseas while preserving miniature versions of it at home.
So let liberals continue acting scandalised by Trump’s tone, as though the problem were a breach of etiquette. Let them mourn the decline of decorum while the architecture of coercion remains intact. The truth is harsher: Trump has not disgraced the Western order. He has clarified it. He has taken the mask off an empire that liberals preferred to admire in softer lighting.
And that is why he is so dangerous — not because he betrays the system, but because he reveals it. Empires can survive atrocity; what they cannot survive indefinitely is exposure. Once the language of civilisation can no longer conceal the habit of barbarism, fear begins to change sides. And when that happens, history stops asking power to justify itself and starts preparing its indictment.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
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