Re-published from the Harvard-Kennedy School with Permission from the Author
September 25, 2026, By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
1. September 22, 2026, a Second Date
On September 22, 2026, the President of the United States stood at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly — the very institution built largely at American initiative after 1945 to make sentences like the one he was about to utter unsayable by political leaders — and told the assembled leaders that he had “a big decision to make.” Would there be “a deal” that let Iran “rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before”? Or would he “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and “drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations”?
In April, I wrote about a social media post issued at 3 a.m. in the heat of a self-imposed deadline: “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” I argued then that the statement was a performative utterance in philosopher J.L. Austin’s sense — a speech act that terrorizes rather than describes — and that its clearest legal analogue was the kind of genocidal announcement the post-war order was built to answer but structurally cannot reach when the speaker is the President of the United States.
Five months later, the same president has said a version of the same thing again. But he has said it differently, and the differences matter as much as the repetition.
2. From Outburst to Doctrine
The April statement had all qualities of an eruption: issued at dawn, on a personal social media account, timed to a private deadline the President had somehow set for himself. One could, if indeed one wanted to be charitable, read it as heat-of-the-moment bluster — reckless, terrifying, but perhaps not fully deliberated policy. On balance, one should of course not have gone for this charitable reading. But at least it would have been available.
That reading is simply no longer available. The September statement was delivered from a prepared text, at a podium, before ambassadors and heads of state, as part of an address marking the 250th anniversary of the American founding. It was not blurted. It was written, reviewed, and delivered as considered American policy, framed as a “decision” the AmericanPresident is still weighing. He did not say Iran might be annihilated. He said annihilation is one of two options on his desk, the other being assisted national flourishing, and that he alone will choose between them. He was talking about that as if he was comparing two different proposals for national traffic development.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt’s point about the irreversibility of political speech, which I invoked in April, becomes even sharper in this speech. In April, one could imagine the statement as a single, terrible data point — awful, but perhaps anomalous. By September, it has become a pattern. And patterns are how intent is then actually captured in law: not through single sentences parsed in isolation, but through what a person says when given the chance to say it again, to say it calmly, to say it on the record, and to say it before the whole world.
German publicist Julius Streicher was convicted at Nuremberg in 1945 not for one broadcast but for a body of statements sustained over years. And he was convicted even though his deeds did not actually involve killing anyone. Trump has now supplied, entirely unprompted, a second data point just where the first one would have been most easily explained away. We did not need more proof of it, really, but he has shown the whole world exactly who he is.
3. “No Hope of Future Generations”: The Language Sharpens
There is a phrase in the September speech that deserves to be read with the same seriousness Ingrid Burke Friedman brought to the April statement’s closing benediction. Trump did not just threaten to “annihilate” Iran. He threatened to leave the country with “no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations.”
Legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, in coining the word genocide, was clear that the crime is not reducible to mass killing in a single moment. It includes deliberate destruction of the capacity of a group to continue as that group — its ability to have a future at all. The language in the Genocide Convention about intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” was drafted distinctly with this broader temporal horizon in mind: not just what happens to the living, but what happens to the possibility of there being more of them. “No hope of future generations” is, whether or not Trump’s speechwriters knew it, close to a textbook articulation of this broader genocidal horizon — a threat not just to end an ancient civilization’s present but to foreclose its entire future.
In April I wrote that Trump had done something Lemkin simply could not have imagined: announced genocidal intent aloud, in public, rather than leaving tribunals to painstakingly infer it. In September, he did something Lemkin could imagine even less: he refined the announcement, adding the very language of trans-generational destruction that international law uses to distinguish genocide from ordinary atrocity.
4. Exemptionalism, Delivered from Inside the House
In April I drew on Michael Ignatieff’s concept of American “exemptionalism” — the pattern of the US building international institutions while exempting itself from their reach — to explain why this statement, however clear, would likely never be adjudicated. That argument was structural: the US never became a member of the Rome Statute, the Security Council cannot act against its own permanent members (such as the US), and so on. It described a country standing outside the very system it had helped build.
The September speech makes the very same point more directly and in a more damaging way. Trump did not merely benefit from exemptionalism this time; he campaigned for it, from inside the institution itself. He called the International Criminal Court “an out-of-control institution,” accused it of running “show trials,” and urged every ICC member state to “officially resign from this rogue institution immediately.” Many in the human rights community are currently expecting that the ICC as a whole will be sanctioned soon — with all the exclusion from the US-focused transnational financial system that this would entail (“financial death,” as someone called it in my presence recently). Trump announced budget cuts to the UN — 15% reduction and elimination of more than 4,000 positions — and criticized the UN’s human rights machinery for spending time on issues other than his favorite projects.
This is exemptionalism no longer content to stand outside the order and decline its jurisdiction. It is exemptionalism that has walked into the General Assembly hall and asked the rest of the system to dismantle itself — to follow the United States out of the very structures built to prevent statements like the one he made twenty minutes later in the same speech. Thomas Franck’s “compliance pull,” the idea that legitimate institutions generate their own gravitational force independent of enforcement, depends on the perception that the institution is worth being pulled toward. A sitting president spending part of a UN address asking other countries to leave the ICC is not merely declining to be bound. He is actively working to lower the compliance pull for everyone else, in real time, from the rostrum where the pull is supposed to be strongest.
5. The Grammar of Blessing and Annihilation, Formalized as Policy
In April, I submitted that Trump’s closing line — “God Bless the Great People of Iran” — was no accidental contradiction of his genocidal threat but part of a recognizable historical grammar: perpetrators of civilizational destruction have almost never described themselves as destroyers, but as reluctant agents of a painful necessity, even benefactors.
The September speech takes that very grammar and turns it into a structure of choice.Trump did not just juxtapose blessing with threat, as he did in April. He built a decision treefrom it: on one branch, Iran becomes, in his words, “one of the greatest” countries “in the Middle East, or even the world”; on the other, it is driven “into hell with no chance of survival.” The benevolent alternative is no afterthought appended to the threat — it is now formally structured as the necessary complement to the threat, the carrot that makes the stick legible as statesmanship rather than aggression. This is the grammar of atrocity made procedural: destruction and liberation are no longer just adjacent rhetorical moves but two clearly labeled options on the same policy menu, with the very same man holding the pen.
As in April, Trump again invoked Iran’s record of atrocity against its people — noting that the regime “slaughtered over 72,000 of its citizens this year” and killed “10,000 for protesting” — as part of the justification for the choice he says he alone will make. As I wrote in April: none of this is false (this is a truly ugly regime) — and none of it is an answer to a threat of annihilation with no hope of future generations. A government’s crimes against its own people do not bestow upon a foreign head of state a moral or legal license to threaten that people’s collective extinction. If anything, invoking the suffering of Iranian civilians under their government, in the same speech that threatens to compound it, deepens rather than resolves the problem Judith Butler names: whose lives are grievable, and to whom. (See her 2009 book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?).
6. Whose Lives Count, Six Months Later
This is the place where the two moments diverge most sharply, and where the diagnosis I offered in April has, unfortunately, been tested and largely confirmed. Trump’s April statement generated headlines, condemnation from human rights organizations, and — as I noted then — considerable legal commentary about whether it satisfied the technical threshold of genocidal intent. It was treated, briefly, as a profoundly shocking event. And that is what it was.
The September statement was delivered to applause breaks. People present in the room tell me that the applause came mostly from the US delegation sitting in the wings. Still, the transcript records people in that hall interrupting the speech with “thank you very much” and sustained approval at multiple points, including in the section surrounding the Iran discussion. Whatever the diplomatic conventions governing General Assembly applause, the basic fact remains: the second time a sitting American president told the assembled governments from around the planet that he might annihilate a nation of ninety million and leave it with “no hope of future generations,” the room did not gasp. It clapped for other parts of the same speech and moved on. Most likely pretty much no one in that room actually believes that he would go through with something like what he is proposing, notwithstanding his prior actions. But none of that makes his statement any less damaging or dangerous. It is a horror and a tragedy, and it is immensely troubling that it happened, and happened to someone’s applause.
This is the “hollowing from within” I warned about in April, now observed rather than merely feared. Franck’s compliance pull depends on repetition reinforcing the force of a norm. What we are watching instead is repetition eroding it — each iteration of the threat costing less in reputational terms than the last, each recurrence teaching the system, and the public, that this is just how the American president talks about Iran now. Six months ago this sentence was infamy. In September it was Tuesday’s news cycle, one item among many boasts about tariffs, Superintelligence, and Venezuelan oil deals, delivered in the same breath as a new round of jokes about the First Lady’s seating location might be delivered.
Judith Butler’s question — whose deaths and whose potential deaths register as losses that summon a moral response — has an uncomfortable answer emerging from this pattern: repetition itself degrades the registration. The first threat of civilizational death is a crisis. The second, delivered more formally and more explicitly, is treated as rhetorical continuity. If a third comes in six more months — imagine that — there is no reason internal to this pattern to expect it will generate more alarm than the second did. That is not a prediction (and how could it be?); it is an extrapolation from what has already happened between April and September.
7. What Has Changed on the Ground
This no longer is a hypothetical situation discussed in the future tense, as it largely was in April. By September, according to Trump’s own account to the General Assembly, “Operation Midnight Hammer” had already struck Iran’s nuclear program, “Operation Epic Fury” had sunk “all 159 ships” of Iran’s navy, destroyed its air force and air defenses, and left its “economy… gone,” with inflation “over 300 percent.” Whatever one makes of the accuracy of these claims, they describe, in the President’s celebratory words, the large-scale destruction of a nation’s military and economic infrastructure already underway before the annihilation threat was even issued a second time.
This matters for our analysis. In April, the threat of civilizational death was terrifying partly because it was speculative — a vow about what might happen. In September, the same vow is made by a man who has already, by his own account, delivered enormous, if partial, destruction on the target population, and who now describes total annihilation not as a hypothetical horror but as the harsher of two live administrative options still on his desk.
The gap between threat and capacity to execute it — a gap that in April one might have hoped was wide — has by his very own telling narrowed considerably.
8. Conclusion: The Promise, Tested a Second Time
In April I asked if the post-war promise of universal human dignity was a real moral commitment or a phrase that dissolves at the borders of great-power politics. I wrote that the answer was not yet fully written, and that silence in the face of a loud threat of civilizational destruction is complicity.
Six months and one more explicit threat later, we have more of an answer than I would have wanted. The norm was tested once, in April, and produced outrage without accountability. It has now been tested again, in a more formal setting, with more deliberate and more genocidally specific language, in the same building that the architects of that very norm raised distinctly for this purpose — and it produced not outrage but a round of applause between agenda items.
This is what the hollowing of a norm looks like in real time: not dramatic collapse, but gradual absorption into unremarkable texture of a single speech, sandwiched between presidential boasts about stock market records and jokes about AI’s new name. Amnesty International and other human rights bodies that named the April statement for what it was havean obligation to name this one too, regardless of how much less shocking it has been allowed to seem. The alternative — treating a second, more formally delivered threat of civilizational annihilation as background noise because we have heard something like it before — is the very mechanism by which “never again” becomes a phrase whose meaning erodes one repetition at a time.
The question I posed in April remains the right one, but we can no longer ask it in the future tense. We must now ask it about a pattern already observed: whether the promise still binds when it has been broken twice, the second time more clearly than the first, and the second time to visibly less alarm than the one before it. That is the world we live in now. We need the kinder, more morally upright sides of the United States to prevail, and we need for that to happen soon.
