On Sunday, many churches around the world prayed for peace. That same day, seven months into the war with Iran, President Trump told Fox News he was weighing “if and when do I blow the entire nation up.”
Two days later, he took the question to the UN General Assembly. Iran could make a deal and rebuild into “a far greater country than it ever was before.” Or, he asked, “Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly?” Then he went further: “Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
We have heard versions of this before. In April, he warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” then pulled back hours before his deadline. By one count, he had set and canceled at least eight deadlines for military action against Iran by mid-July, and the pattern has continued since.
Read generously, “the Islamic Republic” can mean the regime, and destroying a regime’s capacity to wage war is a legitimate aim. If that is all he meant, his threats may be permissible. But a regime does not have “generations.” A people does. Blowing up an entire nation and denying it any future would fall on 90 million human beings, most of whom never chose the men who rule them.
Some Christians see every American bomb as proof the war is unjust, while others wave off the president’s words as bluster or bargaining leverage. Neither holds up. I support using military force against military targets and terrorists who threaten innocent lives. Iran’s regime has spent decades arming groups that kill Americans, Israelis, and its own citizens, and our forces have every right to stop them.
But annihilating a nation clearly crosses a line.
The Church has drawn that line for a very long time. In Contra Faustum, Augustine wrote that the real evils in war are the love of violence, revengeful cruelty, and the lust of power. In other words, what corrupts a war is the intention behind it, the motives in the hearts of those who lead it and fight it. The Apostle Paul reminds us that the governing authority does not bear the sword in vain, that the ruler is God’s servant (Romans 13:4). The sword answers to God’s justice. It is legitimate, but it is not unlimited.
Two rules follow from that. Commanders must distinguish combatants from civilians, and the harm they cause must fit the military objective. But war is ugly and the line separating legitimate targets from civilian infrastructure is fuzzy. Some bridges carry tanks, and some power plants run weapons factories, and commanders may strike them one target at a time after weighing the cost to civilians. And protecting civilians is not optional. That is why these standards exist, and why they cannot be abandoned the moment they become inconvenient.
The rules govern not just what we do but what we threaten to do. Threats matter because intentions matter. A threat tells the world what a nation is willing to do. After September 11, Jean Bethke Elshtain defended the war on terror in Just War Against Terror on exactly this ground. Terrorists set out to kill civilians. We do not. That difference sits at the heart of our cause. When an American president threatens an entire nation, he hands Tehran’s propagandists the argument that no such difference exists.
The families of Minab, a city in southeastern Iran, already feel the weight of that question. On the first day of the war, Tomahawk missiles struck a primary school there, and around 120 children died, apparently because of mistaken targeting data that misidentified the school as an IRGC facility. Reuters reported that the Pentagon has conducted an internal investigation, but the results have never been made public. A full public accounting would show the world the difference between our nation and the regime we are fighting.
Scripture has a story for a moment like this. God sent Jonah to Nineveh, the capital of Israel’s most feared enemy. Jonah wanted the city destroyed. God spared it instead, and asked Jonah whether He should not care about a great city full of people who could not tell their right hand from their left (Jonah 4:11). Christians confess that Christ alone holds the keys of death and Hades (Revelation 1:18). No government gets to decide that a people has no future. God has a long record of giving hope to nations everyone else had written off.
So what should America do? The president already named the better path in the same speech. He described an Iran that could rebuild and become one of the world’s great nations. That vision should anchor our policy, and we can pursue it from strength. Keep striking the regime’s missiles, its nuclear program, and the terror networks it funds. Keep negotiating, as our envoys have tried to for months. Speak to the Iranian people as future partners, the way Reagan spoke past Soviet leaders to the millions living behind the Iron Curtain. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire, built the military to prove he meant it, and never stopped talking about a free future for the people under its rule.
The Church has a part to play, too. Jesus told us to pray for our enemies (Matthew 5:44). Iranian Christians already know what that costs, because many of them worship in secret under the same regime that threatens us. The Church does not exist to baptize every exercise of state power. It has a duty to hold that power accountable to a standard that transcends politics, party, and the news cycle. The prophet Micah writes that a day is coming when nations will no longer learn war (Micah 4:3). Until then, every decision our leaders make should move us closer to that day.