By Atilio A. Boron on April 8, 2026
foto: AFP
As I put the finishing touches on these lines, we can now say with certainty that the threats made by the most sinister and powerful head of state of our time, Donald Trump, have been postponed for a period of fifteen days. The world breathes a sigh of relief upon learning that the order to wipe out one of history’s most brilliant civilizations, the Persian one—which Trump claimed would be returned to “the Stone Age”—has been postponed for two weeks. We will see how that stands. It is difficult to find in history a head of state who has expressed such a categorical destructive intent against a country that, according to UNESCO, has 29 sites inscribed on the World Heritage List—the result of a three-millennia-old history captured in beautiful architectural works, Persian gardens, and numerous archaeological sites. But nothing surprises us about Trump, who has made crude insults, verbal aggression, and racist contempt for his opponents the hallmark of his politics.
Many political analysts compare him to Caligula, a sadistic and sex-obsessed Roman emperor, fond of orgies and, like Trump, consumed by delusions of grandeur. But the U.S. president goes a step further than Caligula, as will surely become clear once the Epstein files are fully declassified and made public. Trump is a cornered beast, capable of committing the worst crimes to avoid his political downfall and, following that, prison—just like his partner in the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu, another racist who will also go to prison for his crimes as soon as his term as Israel’s prime minister ends. For both of them, continuing the war is a condition of their precarious freedom. Free, as Hugo Chávez would say, “for now.”
Iran is among the Top 10 Countries on #WorldHeritageList. UNESCO has registered 26 Iranian cultural heritage monuments there from 1979 to 2021.
In the case of the American, the order to destroy all the infrastructure that sustains modern life in a country like Iran undoubtedly constitutes a war crime, a crime against humanity, a display of barbarism by a superpower that seeks to halt its irreversible decline by resorting to violence. The not-so-veiled threat to use the nuclear arsenal made by Trump—and explicitly stated by Netanyahu and several of his ministers—is yet another of his bluffs that I do not believe will materialize, as we will see below. Nor do I believe—and here I am making a strong bet—that he will go so far as to bomb Iran’s water desalination plants, power stations, oil and gas facilities, bridges, and roads. For several reasons: first, because Tehran still possesses significant retaliatory capabilities. Second, because Trump and his more-than-mediocre collaborators naively expected that, in the face of Washington’s escalating attacks and threats, the Iranian people would flood the streets in massive protests against the “regime” and bring about its downfall—which did not happen. After more than a month of brutal attacks, the regime remains unshaken, and just as in Venezuela, the much-anticipated regime change did not occur. On the contrary, U.S. aggression had the opposite effect, and the government of the Islamic Revolution managed to mobilize millions of people to gather near the potential targets of the attack promised for tonight, forcing the United States to postpone its attacks for fifteen days to avoid what would have been a bloodbath unprecedented since World War II. What has happened demonstrates that popular mobilization, when massive and organized, can overcome the language of weapons. It is said in the corridors of Washington—we will see if it is true—that in exchange for this refusal to bomb and by virtue of the mediation of the Pakistani government, Tehran committed to allowing passage through the Strait of Hormuz, though it remains to be seen how and under what conditions this will be carried out. The falsehoods of a serial liar like Trump are well known, so we will have to wait a while to know exactly what the conditions of this ceasefire were.
Israeli bombing of Kashan. foto: Anadolu Agency
There is, however, an unexpected element that complicates matters for Washington: the attack carried out by the Israeli Zionist regime against the historic city of Kashan, which partially damaged the Xinjiang–Iran high-speed rail corridor built and financed by the People’s Republic of China. This connection is nothing less than China’s land-based alternative for securing oil supplies while bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. While the Asian giant had maintained a cautious stance regarding the crisis in Iran until now, Netanyahu’s incredible blunder—or was it a calculated yet foolish provocation?—has turned China into a key player in the unfolding conflict in Iran. The attack on Kashan confirmed that, in reality, for the United States and its Israeli ally, the main enemy is not Iran but China. Faced with this realization, Beijing will adopt a much more active stance in the final resolution of the conflict, something that clearly undermines the plans hatched by Trump and his dim-witted advisors.
A few final words on Trump’s character. A violent and intolerant man. This is irrefutably proven by the fact that he installed a former Al Qaeda leader, Abu Mohamed Al Jolani—the serial be header whose head was worth ten million dollars to Washington—as president of Syria, and that in a swift act of political sleight of hand, he became a champion of “regime change” in Syria, now, as Ahmad Al Sharaa, is received with full honors in the Oval Office of the White House. There are no words to describe such infamy. Furthermore, Trump is a fugitive from justice in your country. He was convicted of 34 crimes and is charged with another 57. He is not in prison because he is the president, and U.S. law suspends the execution of the sentence for the temporary occupant of the White House. But as soon as his presidency ends, he’ll be seen in an orange jumpsuit, just like the other war criminal, Netanyahu, spending long years in prison. Times are changing, and no matter how much he bluffs, only death will save him from prison. Furthermore, as soon as the Epstein documents are made public, there will be new accusations against Trump, including pedophilia. He’d better start preparing. In fact, he is doing just that: his headlong rush consists of waging wars, wherever he can. In the process, he satisfies the voracity of the giant corporations of the military-industrial complex and the techno-feudal oligarchs of the major tech companies, who have sustained his political career and that of his cohorts in Congress.
A reference to the anti-Trump No Kings protests is left on a building at Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology that was damaged in an airstrike.
Photograph: Majid-Asgaripour/Reuters
One last word about the laughable “Trump Corollary.” One really doesn’t know if the U.S. president is in his right mind or under the influence of some substance that clouds his judgment. Do you think you can put a fence around Latin America and the Caribbean so that no extra-hemispheric actor establishes economic, political, cultural, and diplomatic relations with our countries? Too late! Today, China is the primary—or secondary—trade or financial partner of almost all our countries. Are you going to kick out China, or Russia? Are you going to prevent them from trading or investing in our countries? And what does Washington offer them? Nothing. It promises that U.S. companies will come to invest in various activities, for their exclusive benefit and without any spillover effects or infrastructure development—unlike China with its famous “Win-Win,” where both parties must benefit. With the United States, it’s “I win, you lose!” And furthermore, China doesn’t meddle in domestic affairs, unlike Washington, which not only plunders us but also wants us to adopt its values, its institutions, its culture, and its politics.
Taking all these factors into due consideration, I believe we can predict that the crisis in Iran will be resolved on terms that are extremely unfavorable to the United States, because now, at the negotiating table, there is not only the fickle U.S. president but also the Iranian representatives and, in an increasingly influential role, China—an unwelcome guest whom the stupidity of the fascist Netanyahu managed to bring into the conversation.
Source: Atilio Boron | Análisis internacionales, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English