In a prime-time television address Wednesday, US President Donald Trump declared that the goal of the United States in the Iran war is the destruction of Iranian society. “We are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly. We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We are going to bring them back to the Stone Ages,” Trump said.

Trump threatened that unless the Iranian government accepts his demands, “we are going to hit each and every one of their electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously. We have not hit their oil, even though that’s the easiest target of all, because it would not give them even a small chance of survival or rebuilding. But we could hit it and it would be gone, and there’s not a thing they could do about it.”

In other words, if Iran does not totally capitulate and become effectively a colonial protectorate of the United States, Trump declared his intent to wipe out everything that sustains modern life for 90 million people and not give them “even a small chance of survival.”

There has never been an address like this given by an American president. Whatever the crimes carried out by former administrations, they were framed as the defense of democracy, self-determination and liberation. Now the American president’s message to the population of an entire country is: accept our demands, or die.

These are statements of, literally, genocidal intent. To “bomb” a country “back to the Stone Ages” means to destroy its civilization—a civilization that in Iran’s case spans thousands of years. The president of the United States is declaring, on national television, his intention to annihilate an entire country—to level its cities, its power grid, its water supply, its hospitals and its industry, everything that sustains 90 million people.

In his speech, Trump declared that the “objectives” of the war were “dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders.” Yet this aim has plainly not been achieved—Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. The conclusion is that in order to achieve America’s “objectives,” Iran must be totally destroyed. The “Gaza model” is being applied to Iran.

Trump gloated over his murder of Iran’s leaders. “Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death. They’re all dead.” Accept our terms, or suffer the same fate as the leaders we already murdered. Trump calls this “negotiation.” It is the language of the mafia, issued from the White House.

The phrase “bomb them back to the Stone Ages” is associated with Curtis LeMay, the far-right Air Force general who directed the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II—killing over 100,000 people in a single night—and oversaw the bombing of North Korea during the Korean War, when US air power leveled every city in the country. During the Vietnam War, a faction of the US military and political establishment advocated the removal of all restraints on the bombing of Vietnam—a course that risked nuclear war with the Soviet Union or China. 

In his 1965 autobiography Mission With LeMay, he laid out what he wanted done to North Vietnam: “My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.” Behind such language was the threat to use nuclear weapons, which American imperialism at the time opted not to do.

This is the mood that now prevails in the White House. War Secretary Pete Hegseth set the tone on March 2 when he announced there would be “no stupid rules of engagement.” Three weeks later, at a Pentagon prayer service, he asked God for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

A criminal underworld is in power. The war against Iran is the product of decades of escalating violence—from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, through the destruction of Libya and Syria, through the genocide in Gaza—each crime more brazen, each carried out with greater impunity. 

Under Trump, however, a qualitatively new stage has been reached, with the abandonment of any even pretense of legal restraint, the proclamation that there are, as they say, no “red lines”—including the use of nuclear weapons—in the pursuit of imperialist domination.

Trump’s pledge to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages” was the third time he used this exact language in two days. But his earlier calls were barely mentioned as news items, let alone made the subject of condemnation on the editorial pages. The same newspapers that peddle lurid claims about the Iranian government killing tens of thousands of protesters earlier this year, that gasp in horror at the actions of the Russian government, do not find a call to annihilate a country’s civilization worth mentioning. 

In the media commentary that followed Trump’s prime-time address, discussion was dominated by whether he had “made his case,” not that the president of the United States had issued a criminal declaration of intent to carry out mass murder.

Not a single Democratic leader has responded to Trump’s “Stone Age” statements. Five weeks into the bombing, not one committee in either chamber has held a public hearing.

Trump’s genocidal threats are not simply the ravings of one man. He speaks for a capitalist oligarchy—for a ruling class that can no longer defend its interests through democratic forms and legal methods, and that answers deepening crisis with violence abroad and dictatorship at home. 

The same day as his address on Iran, Trump told attendees at an Easter lunch at the White House that he had ordered the Office of Management and Budget to cut all federal daycare funding. “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare,” he said, adding: “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.” Trump added, “We have to take care of one thing, military protection.”

The war against the people of Iran and the war against the working class at home are two sides of the same policy. A government that prepares mass murder abroad prepares social counterrevolution at home: the shredding of what remains of democratic rights and social reforms, the intensification of austerity and the drive to establish a fascistic dictatorship. The crisis now confronting humanity is posed as socialism or barbarism.