Notoriously, on the eve of the deadline that President Trump had set for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, he posted on Truth Social, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
The implied threat has been universally condemned, but I also hear a strange melancholy sadness in the post that hasn’t been addressed.
The feeling could be part of a theatrics to terrify an opponent into a concession. But it could also be a genuine sadness, a plaint whose origin and nature remain a mystery. Let’s consider for a minute that the melancholy sadness could be real.
Melancholy is the feeling expressed after the loss of something very close to us: a beloved person, sometimes even a political ideal. To suffer from melancholy is to mourn the loss of a part of ourselves that is fundamental or essential. Sometimes, it’s a loss we are not aware of. Something unconscious triggers the melancholy sadness.
President Trump’s reference to the loss of a civilization was somewhat ambiguous. But it’s safe to say he wasn’t referring to Western civilization when he said that a civilization would die. After all, his administration has been outspoken in its defense of that civilization.
So, which is the other civilization?
Ali M. Ansari writes in his very short introduction to Iran that Sir John Chardin, long resident of Isfahan in the latter half of the 17th century, presented the decline of the East as a context for the rise of the West in his bestselling “Journey to Persia” (1686). Ansari attributes to Chardin the beginning of a long and influential narrative that places Persia, Iran, and by extension the so-called decadent East, at the beginning of the concept of the West, of Western civilization, and of Western progress.
If Ansari is right, if the idea of the West and of Western civilization and progress depend on the shadow ideas of the byzantine and barbaric East and its decline, then the West has been repeating a version of President Trump’s threat for a long time. And yet, the East has never disappeared. It has remained in the Western imagination as a necessary foil to the idea of Western progress.
But President Trump went further in his post than the decline of the East. He suggested the annihilation of the people of Iran. He ended his post with a lapidary phrase: “God Bless the Great People of Iran!” And he insisted that neither would be brought back to life. The absolute nature of the threat, the annihilation of a whole civilization, of the idea of Iran and of its people, explains the melancholy sadness of the post.
Whether such an apocalypse could actually happen is an open question. But what the post reveals without a doubt is that we can’t survive without the people of Iran or the idea of the East. Such a loss would have a traumatic effect on the whole of Western civilization.