U.S. President Donald Trump leaves following a press conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 6, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Retired Col. Cedric Leighton cautioned that President Donald Trump is running the risk of rallying the Iranian people against the United States with his latest threats to kill them all.
In a TruthSocial post on Tuesday morning, Trump announced, "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." Trump set a deadline for 8 p.m. EDT on Tuesday. Iran has called on young people in the country to make a human chain around the power plants that Trump wants to strike.
"Actually, [it] kind of plays into the hands of the Iranian regime because they see their struggle for existence, their revolutionary struggle for existence as being an existential struggle against the forces of the West and against the forces of non-Shia Islam. They are, of course, the representatives they see as being the representatives of Shia Islam. And they believe that their job is to not only maintain their regime, but to spread their revolution and to spread the ideas of Shia Islam," the colonel said.
When Trump puts his threats in the context of attacking not just military targets, but describing the death of entire civilization, he gets "into their sandbox, and ... makes this a conflict betweencivilizations. And that's areally dangerous area to be in."
He said he hopes that Trump doesn't make good on the threat because it will only rally people against the United States.
"So if you see large number of civilian casualties, that then creates a real problem for the U.S. We already have a public relations problem in the world," Leighton explained. "This is going to exacerbate that, and it's going to make it really difficult for us to pull ourselves back from this."
He cited a recent comment from Qatar's Foreign Minister, Majed Al Ansari, "We have been warning since 2023 that escalation, left unchecked, will get us into a situation where it cannot be controlled. And we are very close to that point. This is why we have been urging all parties to find a resolution out of this — to find a way of ending this war before it spirals out of control."
Leighton echoed the sentiment of all parties stepping back.
"Because if we don't, it not only exists the collapse of Iran potentially, which of course seems to be the goal of the administration's efforts, but it also risks the collapse of a lot of the Gulf economies in the Arab Gulf states. And that is something we don't want to have happen," he said.