The Theology of the Bomb

For more of Dante King’s writing, courses, and educational work, visit www.danteking.com. You can also follow Dante on Instagram @dantedkingofficial and TikTok @dantekingauthorofficial. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work.

Trump’s threat to destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant whenever a ship is attacked in the Strait of Hormuz is not an aberration. It is the latest expression of a political culture formed through conquest, racial slavery, forced removal, scorched earth, and the belief that civilian suffering is an acceptable instrument of white power.

Donald Trump has announced a doctrine of arithmetic destruction.

For every ship attacked in the Strait of Hormuz, he says, the United States will destroy one Iranian bridge or power plant, including infrastructure in or near Tehran. The threat is breathtaking not because it introduces something unprecedented into American warfare, but because it states with unusual bluntness what American power has repeatedly practiced: punish the larger population, destroy the material conditions of ordinary life, and call the result strength.

A bridge is not merely steel and concrete.

It carries workers to their jobs.

Children to school.

Patients to hospitals.

Food into cities.

Medicine into communities.

A power plant is not merely an emblem on a military planning map.

It keeps ventilators operating.

It pumps water.

It preserves food.

It regulates heat and cold.

It sustains dialysis, surgery, sanitation, communication, transportation, and nearly every system required for human survival.

International humanitarian law does not permit a government to designate infrastructure for destruction merely because its leaders want to intimidate an adversary. Civilian objects are presumptively protected. A bridge or power plant may become a lawful military objective only under specific conditions, and any attack remains governed by distinction, proportionality, and the obligation to minimize civilian harm. The International Committee of the Red Cross has expressly warned that an electricity network cannot be swept wholesale into the category of military targets simply to weaken an economy, break a population’s will, or force political concessions.

Therefore, Trump’s declaration is not a serious military doctrine.

It is retaliatory spectacle.

It does not evaluate the military purpose of a particular object, the expected civilian consequences, or the proportionality of a particular strike. It preselects categories of infrastructure for destruction and assigns civilian suffering a numerical value: one ship attack equals one bridge or one power plant.

This is violence transformed into bookkeeping.

It is vengeance disguised as strategy.

And it belongs to a much older American tradition.

Long before the United States threatened the electrical grid of Tehran, European colonists and American armies learned to make war by attacking the conditions necessary for other people to remain alive.

During seventeenth-century colonial warfare in Virginia, English forces carried out search-and-destroy operations against Native communities, burning settlements and cornfields while colonists continued expanding onto Indigenous lands.

During the Revolutionary era, American soldiers and militias repeatedly attacked Indigenous villages throughout present-day New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio. The National Park Service records that more than one hundred villages were burned and destroyed between 1774 and 1794, with civilians among the dead.

In 1779, George Washington ordered the Clinton-Sullivan campaign against the Haudenosaunee nations. Its goal was not limited to confronting armed warriors. The campaign was designed to destroy principal villages and food supplies, making continued resistance—and continued life—materially impossible.

During the War of 1812 and its aftermath, American forces again carried war into Native homelands, burning villages and fields and leaving civilians homeless and hungry.

In 1863, Kit Carson led a military campaign against the Navajo that destroyed crops, orchards, livestock, and homes. Thousands of Navajo men, women, and children were then forced to walk approximately three hundred miles to a disease-ridden detention site at Bosque Redondo.

In California, state-sanctioned forces entered Yosemite Valley, burned villages and food supplies, and drove Indigenous families from their homes so settlers could occupy the land.

Across these episodes, the operating logic was remarkably consistent:

Do not merely confront the resisting population.

Destroy its food.

Destroy its homes.

Destroy its movement.

Destroy its ecology.

Destroy its ability to reproduce community.

Then describe its surrender as proof of the conqueror’s superiority.

This is the historical architecture underneath Trump’s threat.

He is not inventing a new strategy.

He is repeating an old civilizational reflex: when domination is challenged, widen the field of punishment until the entire society becomes the target.

The American system of racial slavery must also be understood as organized warfare.

It was war against the body.

War against kinship.

War against memory.

War against language.

War against mobility.

War against reproduction.

War against the possibility of Black sovereignty.

The enslaved person’s labor, sexuality, children, movement, punishment, marriage, and death were regulated for the benefit of people legally classified as white. Slavery was not a regrettable departure from American order. It was one of the principal ways American order was produced.

The United States maintained a domestic slave trade even after Congress prohibited international importation in 1808. Human beings continued to be bought, transported, separated, and sold within the country through a commercial system documented in shipping manifests, court records, and government archives.

Even the constitutional abolition of slavery preserved an exception for involuntary servitude imposed as punishment for crime—a provision through which coerced labor could be reorganized rather than fully extinguished.

In Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness, I describe white power not simply as prejudice but as the accumulated control of legal, educational, economic, political, medical, and cultural institutions. The social order is organized to accumulate authority, protect those who possess it, and omit punishment when white institutions inflict harm. I define white malignant narcissism through traits including exploitation, an extreme need for dominance, aggression, revenge upon criticism, and the absence of remorse.

A nation socialized through conquest and enslavement learns a particular lesson:

Power does not require consent.

Power proves itself by imposing consequences.

The subordinate population’s suffering is not treated as a moral limit. It becomes the language through which domination communicates its seriousness.

Trump’s threat against Iranian infrastructure emerges from this inheritance.

Dr. Frances Cress Welsing defined white supremacy as a global behavioral power system functioning simultaneously through economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex, and war.

Trump’s Iran policy moves through nearly every one of those domains.

Economics: The Strait of Hormuz carries a substantial portion of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas. Iran’s leverage over the strait demonstrates that military superiority does not automatically produce economic control. Trump’s answer is to threaten the infrastructure upon which Iranian civilians depend.

Entertainment: Warfare is narrated as spectacle—explosions, threats, scorekeeping, triumphal language, and declarations of dominance suitable for television and social media.

Law: International restraints are treated as obstacles to presidential performance rather than obligations binding the use of force.

Politics: Civilian destruction is presented domestically as evidence of decisiveness.

Religion: American violence is continually sanctified through the civic theology of exceptionalism—the belief that the United States acts for order even while producing devastation.

War: Destruction becomes compensatory. When the appearance of American omnipotence is challenged, the answer is not reflection or diplomacy, but an enlarged performance of force.

Welsing’s framework helps us understand why an empire may react to humiliation with disproportionate violence. The violence does not merely seek a military objective. It attempts to restore a threatened self-concept.

The empire must be seen as dominant.

It must be obeyed.

It must not be made to look limited.

It must not be forced to acknowledge dependency, vulnerability, error, or defeat.

When Iran demonstrates that it can disrupt shipping through one of the world’s most economically important waterways, the myth of unilateral American control is wounded. Trump responds as the malignant narcissist responds: not by reassessing the failed strategy, but by fantasizing about retaliatory destruction.

The bridge and the power plant become objects upon which the injured imperial ego may discharge its rage.

Dr. Bobby E. Wright’s framing of the psychopathic racial personality is indispensable here.

Wright argued that the defining pathology was not confusion about morality but the near absence of ethical conflict when white power confronted Black existence. His analysis described a collective personality capable of appearing civilized and competent while demonstrating callous disregard for the rights and humanity of those placed outside its moral community.

In Wright’s analysis, psychopathy becomes socially consequential because institutions are organized around it. Those who are harmed are expected to keep appealing to the conscience of a system whose behavior suggests that conscience is not the controlling variable.

This distinction matters when evaluating threats against civilian infrastructure.

A government capable of anticipating the predictable consequences of destroying electricity—hospital failures, water disruption, food spoilage, sanitation collapse, preventable disease—and then presenting those consequences as leverage is not merely making a technical military calculation.

It is revealing the boundaries of its empathy.

Humanitarian organizations have warned that attacking power infrastructure can cascade through water systems, healthcare, food distribution, employment, and the basic conditions of civilian life. The ICRC has described war against essential infrastructure as war against civilians.

Yet Trump’s language contains no Iranian nurses.

No babies in neonatal intensive care.

No elderly people dependent upon oxygen.

No families trapped without refrigeration, water, transportation, or medicine.

There are only targets.

This is how dehumanization works.

The civilian population disappears before the bomb arrives.

Frantz Fanon understood colonialism as a system that divides humanity into compartments.

One population is granted complexity, interiority, innocence, law, childhood, and grief.

The other is reduced to danger.

The colonizer’s violence is treated as order.

The colonized person’s resistance is treated as pathology.

The colonizer attacks, occupies, confines, disciplines, and dispossesses. When the colonized respond, their response is severed from the history that produced it. The resistance becomes the beginning of the story.

That pattern is visible in discussions of Iran.

Iranian attacks on commercial shipping and civilian infrastructure must be evaluated under international law and condemned when unlawful. The obligations of one side do not disappear because the other side violates them. Human Rights Watch emphasizes that one party’s unlawful conduct does not authorize reciprocal violations.

But the United States cannot begin the moral narrative wherever it finds itself most innocent.

It cannot erase decades of intervention, sanctions, covert action, military encirclement, regime-change politics, proxy conflict, and the current war, then present each Iranian response as an inexplicable eruption from an irrational people.

Fanon teaches us to ask what preceded the visible explosion.

What history has been removed from the frame?

Whose violence is called security?

Whose violence is called terrorism?

Whose dead are individualized?

Whose dead become estimates?

Dr. Amos N. Wilson insisted that domination is maintained not only through possession of institutions but through control over perception.

Power defines what counts as violence.

Power defines who began the conflict.

Power defines whose fear is rational.

Power defines whose suffering is regrettable and whose suffering is deserved.

Power names its own aggression defense.

It names resistance provocation.

It names civilian deprivation pressure.

It names coercion negotiation.

My work builds from Wilson’s understanding that schooling, religion, media, law, and culture condition populations to normalize white authority and interpret opposition to that authority as disorder. I describe whiteness as transactional rather than relational—a structure produced through terror and maintained through control, reward, punishment, and narrative.

Trump’s doctrine depends upon this control of language.

Bombing a power plant becomes “retribution.”

Destroying a bridge becomes “deterrence.”

Civilian suffering becomes “pressure.”

Escalation becomes “strength.”

Failure becomes another opportunity for violence.

Wilson’s question would not simply be whether Trump possesses military power.

It would be: Who possesses the power to define the meaning of what he does?

The same administration waging war around the stated danger of Iran’s nuclear program has approved a long-term civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that may leave open a route to domestic uranium enrichment.

The agreement reportedly lacks some of the strongest nonproliferation conditions sought by critics, including the “gold standard” prohibition on enrichment and the IAEA Additional Protocol’s enhanced inspection regime. Supporters emphasize strategic cooperation, commercial opportunities for American companies, and the risk that Saudi Arabia could otherwise partner with China or Russia. Critics warn that domestic enrichment is dual-use technology and may intensify regional proliferation risks.

This contradiction exposes the emptiness of universal moral claims.

Nuclear capability is not treated as inherently unacceptable.

It is treated differently according to who possesses it, who authorizes it, whose commercial interests are served, and whether the state in question remains aligned with American power.

Iranian nuclear capacity is narrated as civilizational danger.

Saudi nuclear enrichment becomes a negotiable commercial and strategic arrangement.

The rule is therefore not simply nonproliferation.

The deeper rule is obedience.

A compliant government may be entrusted with possibilities denied to a defiant one.

That is colonial logic.

The colonizer does not object to power itself.

The colonizer objects to power beyond its supervision.

In The Psychopathy of Whiteness, I frame the ongoing reproduction of state violence through denial, projection, moral inversion, and legalized indifference. The state refuses to interpret the suffering it produces as evidence against itself. It turns brutality into doctrine and calls repetition precedent.

I call this White Malignant Diabolical Psychopathic Institutional Repression.

It is malignant because domination spreads through systems.

It is diabolical because cruelty is transformed into righteousness.

It is psychopathic because visible human suffering fails to generate sufficient moral restraint.

It is institutional because the behavior is authorized, financed, professionalized, narrated, and repeated through government.

It is repression because the violence seeks not merely to defeat an armed opponent, but to subordinate a population’s political will.

Trump’s threatened equation—one attacked ship, one destroyed bridge or power plant—is a nearly perfect illustration.

There is no individualized determination.

No human consideration.

No evidence that the selected infrastructure is making an effective contribution to military action.

No proportionality analysis.

No distinction between a government and the millions of civilians dependent upon its systems.

Only retaliation.

Only dominance.

Only the ancient belief that suffering will teach the disobedient population to submit.

Strength without discipline is not strength.

Power without moral restraint is not leadership.

A military that must terrorize civilians to produce political compliance is not displaying confidence. It is admitting strategic failure.

Trump entered this conflict promising dominance. Instead, the war has produced American deaths and injuries, immense expenditures, regional escalation, threats to global shipping, and renewed questions about the limits of U.S. power. Reporting as of July 22 placed the American military death toll at eighteen and the number of wounded above five hundred, while estimated direct costs had risen into the tens of billions of dollars.

Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz has exposed a fundamental reality: military supremacy does not eliminate geographic, economic, and political interdependence.

The United States can destroy.

But destruction cannot guarantee control.

It can bomb a bridge.

It cannot bomb away geography.

It can attack a power station.

It cannot force the world to interpret recklessness as competence.

It can impose catastrophic suffering.

It cannot transform catastrophic suffering into a durable peace.

This is the crisis of white imperial masculinity: it recognizes only two positions—domination and humiliation. Because cooperation feels like weakness, every limit becomes an insult. Every negotiation becomes a contest of manhood. Every challenge demands a theatrical display of power.

The result is not security.

It is compulsion.

Indigenous nations were told that destruction was the price of resistance.

Enslaved Africans were told that torture was the price of racial order.

Black communities were told that terror was the price of white peace.

Colonized populations across the world were told that occupation was civilization.

Today, Iranian civilians are being told that their bridges, electricity, water, hospitals, and daily lives may become instruments in America’s effort to discipline their government.

The language changes.

The psychology remains.

American violence continually presents itself as reluctant, defensive, moral, and necessary—even when it attacks the conditions required for civilian survival.

That is the delusion.

And that delusion has become dangerous not only to those whom the United States attacks, but to the United States itself.

In my work, I argue that collective pathology advances cyclically: reform, relapse, and rationalization. Each generation announces that it has transcended the violence of the past while reproducing its underlying logic in new administrative and technological forms.

Trump’s doctrine is not postcolonial.

It is colonialism with drones.

It is the scorched field converted into the electrical grid.

It is the burned village translated into the urban power station.

It is collective punishment delivered through precision-guided weapons and announced through social media.

The question is not merely whether Donald Trump will order the destruction of an Iranian bridge or power plant.

The deeper question is:

What kind of society hears such a threat and recognizes leadership?

What kind of political culture interprets retaliation against infrastructure as strength rather than evidence of emotional and strategic failure?

What kind of civilization places millions of civilians inside a punishment equation and still calls itself the guardian of freedom?

What kind of people repeatedly confuse the capacity to destroy with the capacity to govern?

Trump is not the creator of this condition.

He is its unfiltered expression.

He is what American exceptionalism sounds like after the language of diplomacy, humanitarianism, and liberal restraint has been stripped away.

The doctrine underneath is brutally simple:

We possess the power.

You will experience the consequences.

Your civilians are not our moral concern.

Your infrastructure is leverage.

Your suffering is instruction.

That is not peacekeeping.

That is not security.

That is not civilization.

It is the theology of conquest, the psychology of collective punishment, and the pathology of whiteness—armed with the most destructive military apparatus on Earth.

And until America accepts the diagnosis, it will continue to call its disease strength.

To learn more about Dante King’s books, educational resources, online video courses, and upcoming events, please visit:
www.danteking.com

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