Robert Reich’s recent Guardian essay, titled “Donald Trump poses a threat to civilization,” raises an alarm that deserves to be heard well beyond the borders of the United States. His argument is not narrowly partisan; it is civilizational. At its core lies a question confronting all societies today: whether power will continue to abandon moral restraint, or whether humanity can still arrest the slide toward “de-civilization.”
On this point, I find myself in deep agreement with Mr. Reich.
In our ethical and religious tradition, defending the oppressed against the oppressor is not a slogan but a duty. An old maxim, familiar to many Iranians, captures this plainly: Be a pillar of support for the downtrodden. Civilizations are not judged by the reach of their power, but by how that power is exercised.
There was a time when many Iranians believed the United States embodied this principle. Before the world wars—and long before the Cold War hardened global divisions—America was seen in Iran as a civic republic, guided more by law than by force. That trust was tangible. Following Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1905, the country entrusted its most sensitive institution, its treasury, to Americans. William Morgan Shuster and later Arthur Millspaugh were appointed to reform Iran’s public finances; a responsibility no sovereign state assigns lightly. Their presence reflected confidence in American integrity rather than fear of American might.
This image was reinforced by a more intimate memory. During the constitutional struggle, an American teacher in Tabriz, Howard Baskerville, joined Iranians resisting absolute monarchy. He was killed in 1909 while attempting to break the siege of the city. To this day, his death is remembered in parts of Iran during Ashura commemorations, an extraordinary place to honor a foreigner. Baskerville is remembered not as an outsider, but as someone who crossed a moral boundary to stand against tyranny. His tragic demise was commemorated for years in a folk song: “Three hundred red poppies and one cross among them—we shall never fear death.”
These memories matter because they remind us that hostility between nations is not inevitable. It is constructed, slowly, through deliberate choices, interventions and the erosion of restraint.
For nearly eight decades now, Iranians and many others across the globe have encountered a different America. From the 1953 coup in Iran to interventions across Latin America and Southeast Asia, U.S. power has appeared less as a guarantor of law than as an instrument of disruption. Iran is not unique in this experience. What distinguishes it is how deeply these events have shaped its national consciousness.
In recent decades, this perception has only hardened. Wars fought far from American soil, sanctions that hollow out civilian economies and selective applications of international law have steadily eroded the moral authority the United States once claimed. From the ruins of Vietnam to the ongoing devastation in Gaza, images of civilian suffering have come to symbolize power exercised without accountability.
The threat does not lie solely in one leader or one country. It lies in a convergence of forces: the concentration of wealth and political power, the weakening of democratic constraints, the unregulated advance of technology and the normalization of permanent war. Artificial intelligence, economic policy and national militaries are increasingly deployed as tools of domination rather than as instruments of human progress.
Iran’s resistance to external pressure, particularly sanctions, is often misunderstood in this context. It is not rooted in a desire for confrontation, but in historical experience. The twentieth century offers a stark lesson. After World War I, Germany was economically strangled and politically humiliated. John Maynard Keynes warned that such punishment would not secure peace but prepare catastrophe. His warnings went unhebaeded, and the world paid the price.
Sanctions imposed without moral and political responsibility follow a similar logic. They do not weaken abstractions called “regimes”; they fracture societies, radicalize politics and suffocate the social forces that make reform possible. The belief that suffering can be engineered abroad without consequence is among the enduring illusions of modern power.
Iranians know this from experience. We also know the cost of misplaced trust. In recent years, while diplomatic negotiations were underway, assassinations and covert attacks, widely attributed to actors backed by the United States, continued. Negotiation conducted alongside violence is not diplomacy; it is coercion. No society can be expected to regard this as good faith.
None of this should be mistaken for a rejection of peace. On the contrary, it is precisely because war is so destructive that we avoid paths that make it more likely. Blood does not cleanse blood. What we reject is not compromise, but a version of “compromise” that merely postpones larger wars while entrenching injustice.
Humanity stands at a threshold. The tools now at our disposal—economic, technological and military—are powerful enough either to accelerate collapse or to enable renewal. The difference lies in whether morality reenters political decision-making as a governing principle, and not simply a rhetorical ornament.
Civilization does not require uniformity of ideology or culture. It requires restraint, accountability and a shared commitment to human dignity. If that commitment collapses, no amount of power will save us. If it endures, even deeply divided societies may yet step back from the edge.
Dr. Ahmad Meidari is Iran’s Minister of Cooperatives, Labour, and Social Welfare.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
