If any doubt existed before this writing, international law and diplomacy are dead and buried. Ironically, the culprit is the United States and its 51st state, Israel. Israel’s deeds are well-documented. In a disproportionate reaction to a 2023 terrorist incident, Jerusalem spent 2 years reducing the Gaza strip to rubble, with an estimated 70,000 Palestinian casualties. The U.S. then followed suit. Over the course of 6 months, it has abducted a Venezuelan leader, threatened the sovereignty of Greenland, attempted to fold Cuba into the United States by starving it of resources (it may succeed), and now assassinated the Iranian head of state in a move Russia’s Vladimir Putin, now an American “friend,” rightly called “a cynical murder.” Is there any end in sight? No. When big-power politics and military brawn come front and center (as well as a lust for oil), there is usually no turning back. It is this kind of militarism that precipitated the two most recent world wars. Let it be clear, however, that the U.S. has opened a Pandora’s box of the kind that cost it nearly 15 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The murder of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may mean little to Americans, but he was an important and symbolically weighty Shia leader. Domestic reprisals may not be imminent, but they will come. And they will be, in their way, justified. What is happening now, is what every American president since 1970 has sought to avoid, namely openly stoking the flames of anti-Americanism. The post-9/11 wars were at least, in part, justified by terrorist attacks on the United States. Here, there is no such justification, aside from one president’s impatience over slow going on the diplomatic front. In a nutshell, this cauldron of bombardments and bloodshed, provoked astonishingly by a man who created a self-styled Board of Peace, was not at all necessary. In the long run, woe to those who cast the first stones.