By Madi Jobarteh
In the annals of imperial overreach, there are moments so brazen they strip away the thin veneer of diplomacy to reveal the raw machinery of domination beneath. Such a moment arrived on March 23, 2026, when Donald J Trump, the self-imposed arbiter of global disorder, announced a “unilateral ceasefire” with Iran. The message, posted to social media with the usual bluster of all-caps, proclaimed that after “productive conversations,” he had instructed the “Department of War” to postpone military strikes against Iranian infrastructure, for five days.
Let us sit with the sheer grotesquerie of this statement. Mr Trump speaks of a “complete and total resolution of our hostilities” as though the United States and Iran are two sparring partners engaged in a mutual disagreement. But this is not a bar fight. This is the world’s most powerful military empire announcing that it has graciously decided to delay the bombing of another nation’s power plants, energy facilities, and, by extension, its hospitals, schools, and homes. The implication is clear: the bombs are already loaded. The target is already drawn. The only question is when the American dictator will give the final order to rain destruction on a country of nearly 90 million people.
Who, we must ask, bestowed this authority upon Donald Trump, or any American leader, to decide which governments may exist, which infrastructures may stand, and which children may live?
What right does the United States have to determine that it can drop bombs on the people of any nation, to slaughter women and the elderly, to obliterate schools and prayer houses, to assassinate leaders, and to reduce entire economies to rubble? The answer, of course, is none. There is no moral authority, no divine mandate, and no coherent principle of international law that grants Washington the license to decide who lives and who dies on this earth. Yet for centuries, the Western powers – the United States and its European allies – have acted as though such authority is their birthright.
We have watched this movie before. It is the same script that brought us the devastation of Vietnam, the nuclear horrors visited upon Japan, the chemical weapons deployed without provocation, the relentless bombing campaigns across the Middle East, and the toppling or assassinations of leaders deemed inconvenient. It is the same script that has seen European and American forces unleash unbridled violence on anyone who looks different, worships differently, or dares to chart a sovereign path outside the boundaries of Western approval.
And now, once again, we are expected to applaud a “ceasefire” as an act of magnanimity. But a ceasefire implies a mutual conflict. What we are witnessing is the unilateral suspension of a planned massacre. The United States is not a neutral peacemaker; it is the party holding the gun to the head of an entire nation, bragging that it has decided to wait a few days before pulling the trigger.
Where is the outcry from the enablers? The European nations, so quick to lecture the Global South on the “rules-based international order,” have gone silent, except for Spain. Where is the condemnation from London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, the Hague? British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have sat on their hands, unwilling to challenge their senior partner in NATO. Indeed, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has said nothing of consequence. These are the same leaders who profess to uphold the Geneva Conventions, who claim to stand for human rights, and who stockpile hundreds of nuclear weapons while demanding that others forsake theirs.
But let us speak plainly about the hypocrisy. Is the United States regime just by its own standards? Does it not violate the human rights of its own citizens? Is the British regime just? Does France not suppress dissent and violate the rights of its own minorities? These nations have spent centuries ravaging the Global South, and when the dust settled, they had the audacity to craft an international legal system in their own image, only to become its most flagrant violators. They demand accountability from everyone else while refusing to be held accountable themselves. They preach the rule of law while reserving the right to bomb at will.
Imagine, for a moment, the inversion. Should the Gambia, or Iran, or China, or Cuba, or North Korea, or Qatar, therefore have the right to invade the United States, the United Kingdom, or France? If the standard is that any nation powerful enough to do so may impose its will on another, then why should Western capitals not face the same sword they have wielded so freely? Of course, they would scream of aggression, of violations of sovereignty, of crimes against humanity. But what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, except that when the West does it, it is called “promoting stability” or “protecting human rights” or “enforcing a ceasefire.”
Let us be clear about what is at stake. The language of Trump’s announcement, the threat of strikes against “power plants and energy infrastructure” is a euphemism for collective punishment. When you bomb a nation’s energy grid, you are not merely targeting a government. You are shutting off the electricity that powers hospitals where premature babies lie in incubators. You are cutting the water pumps. You are plunging surgical theaters into darkness. You are rendering sewage systems inoperable, unleashing disease. You are bombing children. Make no mistake: the children who will die in such strikes will not be “collateral damage.” They will be the intended consequence of a strategy designed to break a nation by breaking its people’s ability to live.
How would Trump feel if his own children and grandchildren were bombed into smithereens? How would Macron react if a foreign power announced it had “postponed” the destruction of French hospitals? How would Starmer respond if Iranian jets were circling London, awaiting the order to bomb the city’s power grid? The silence of these leaders in the face of such threats is not merely cowardice but also complicity and hypocrisy.
One hundred and seventy children, each with a name, a dream, a family. What crime did those children commit? Who will pay for their lives? Who will answer to their mothers? These are not abstract questions. Under international humanitarian law, the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Under the Geneva Conventions, the threat of such strikes as a tool of coercion is a violation. And yet, the men who issue these threats walk free, attend summits, and are celebrated as statesmen.
This cannot stand. The centuries-long act of arrogance and criminality by the United States and its European allies must be confronted. The world is not the property of America and Europe. Neither God nor any human being appointed them to lead, to judge, or to destroy.
It is time to call things by their proper names. Donald Trump, by using the threat of lethal military force to achieve political objectives, is engaging in terrorism. Terrorism is defined as the use of violence or the threat of violence against civilians to achieve political aims. That is precisely what is happening here. The threat of bombing Iran’s infrastructure, the threat of killing its civilians, is not an act of defense; it is an act of terror. Trump must be declared a terrorist. He must be indicted. He must be arrested. He must spend the rest of his life in a prison cell, not as an act of vengeance, but as a statement that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law.
The world is watching. The silence of the European capitals is damning and typical. But the people of the Global South, the people of conscience everywhere, must refuse to accept this as normal. We must name the crime, condemn the criminal, and demand accountability. For if we do not, then we are all complicit in the next bombing, and the children who die will die with our silence ringing in their ears.
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Martin Luther King Jnr.
