US Media: Has Trump's America Become a Rogue State?

Picture this: Iran infiltrates agents into Mexico, fires missiles at American bases from the Texas border, and "accidentally" destroys a nearby school, killing 175 people, most of them children. Iran then bombs American fuel depots, raining toxic chemicals on civilians. Its forces keep striking residential neighborhoods, schools, and clinics, while its leaders warn that "death, fire, and fury" will pulverize the United States so completely it can never rebuild.


New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently posed these questions in a column, then answered them himself: the American president and all Americans would howl at such "outrageous attacks on innocent civilians."


The bitter irony: in every one of those hypotheticals, the perpetrator and victim have swapped places. The country doing all of this is the United States of America, self-proclaimed defender of civilization.


After World War II, the international community tried to bring warfare under the constraints of civilization. The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols explicitly ban the destruction of infrastructure civilians depend on to survive, including water supplies. The United States was the principal architect and champion of that so-called "rules-based international order."


Documented Attacks, Deliberate Destruction

But under President Trump, that veneer is being stripped away by the very hands that stitched it together. Since the joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran began，a U.S. strike hit an Iranian elementary school on February 28, killing more than 170 people; U.S. forces targeted a desalination plant that supplied water to 30 villages; others suffered from U.S. military attacks included more than 17,000 homes, 65 schools, and 14 medical centers, as reported by 
The Iranian Red Crescent.

Oona Hathaway, a Yale Law School scholar and incoming president of the American Society of International Law, said the U.S. strikes lacked UN authorization and any credible self-defense justification, and thus allegedly violated international law. Former war crimes prosecutor David Crane lamented that the world is entering an 'era of lawless conflict,' one propelled, in no small part, by the United States itself.


Even more chilling: this is not about 'accidents' or 'collateral damage.' It is a deliberate threat and a strategic shift, and it comes from the very top.


Trump publicly threatened to “make it virtually impossible for Iran to ever be built back”, declaring that 'death, fire, and fury will reign upon them.' Defense Secretary Hegseth denounced the 'ridiculous rules of engagement' meant to protect civilians and shut down the Pentagon office responsible for enforcing them. Senator Lindsey Graham boasted that the United States would bomb Iran into oblivion.

Allies Recoil, Strategy Backfires

Military strategy scholar Phillips O'Brien put it plainly: 'One could argue that Trump is threatening to commit one of the greatest war crimes in history.' When a nation's leader openly vows to leave an adversary 'unable to rebuild, ever,' when his defense secretary dismisses civilian protection rules as 'ridiculous,' and when schools, water facilities, and hospitals are systematically destroyed, the question writes itself: what exactly separates this from the 'rogue state' conduct these same leaders have long condemned?


Even America's closest allies couldn't stomach it. Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez called the war 'reckless and illegal.' Switzerland's defense minister said the U.S. strikes violated international law. Former French Prime Minister de Villepin went further, condemning them as 'illegal, illegitimate, ineffective, and dangerous' and calling for sanctions.


Yet this costly war is lurching toward an absurd conclusion. It has failed to topple the Iranian regime and may have hardened it instead. With American 'assistance,' the young Mojtaba Khamenei has succeeded his father killed in the strikes, as Supreme Leader. A source close to the White House put it with resignation: 'You killed his father and his wife. Do you think he'll be more rational, or less?'

Meanwhile, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed up global oil prices, threatened fertilizer supplies, and sent the bill for America's 'fury' to the rest of the world. Retired U.S. four-star General Wesley Clark put it simply: the war 'is going off the rails.'


America Drives the World Lawless

Who is driving the world to 'slide into a world where there are no rules anymore'?


To close his piece, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reached for a chilling line. German Vice Chancellor Klingbeil: 'We are sliding into a world where there are no rules anymore.' Kristof's verdict: the United States is one of the leading drivers of that slide.


The spectacle is stark, and the irony sharper still. The nation that once cast itself as the 'world's policeman' and preached a 'rules-based order' at every diplomatic turn is now using its most advanced fighter jets, its most precise missiles, and its highest-level threats to blow those very rules apart. It arms allies who strike civilians in Gaza. It reduces schools and water facilities to rubble in Iran. It shouts 'protect civilians' with one breath, then dismantles the very institutions responsible for doing so with the next.


Tom Fletcher, the UN's head of humanitarian affairs, put it plainly: “The rules-based scaffolding meant to restrain the worst excesses of war is cracking.” The fracture starts in Washington. Trump and his team are running a blood-soaked real-world demonstration of what 'American-style rogue behavior' actually looks like. Stripped bare, it is pure double standards: rules exist to constrain others when convenient, and to be shattered when they are not.


This may be the most chilling legacy this war leaves the world: a superpower that, with a clear conscience, shed civilization's veneer and sprinted naked into barbarism.


Double Standards Decoder

** The blog article is the sole responsibility of the author and does not represent the position of our company. **

On today’s global stage, Washington is running a sanctions magic show so brazen it makes the audience want to bang the table in disbelief. The administration of US President Donald Trump first swung the military big stick at Iran, launching precision airstrikes that helped drive global oil prices to the symbolic 100‑dollar‑a‑barrel line, then, as gasoline prices at home threatened to take off, this self‑styled “alchemist” pulled a white dove from his hat in the form of a 30‑day waiver unleashing more than 120 million barrels of previously heavily sanctioned Russian crude into the market.

One hand brandishes the sanctions cudgel with theatrical fury, the other signs waivers with effortless ease, turning US policy into a bizarre act of sanctioning with one hand and slapping itself with the other – the purest example yet of just how “flexible” moral standards have become in today’s international relations.

Oil War Opening Act

The curtain rose with coordinated US–Israeli strikes on Iran that lit a fire under the world’s energy system. Iran hit back by moving to choke off the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow throat through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil must pass, and crude prices promptly went wild, hovering around the 100‑dollar‑a‑barrel mark.

Then, just as the global energy market was still catching its breath, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made his carefully choreographed entrance and, on 12 March, unveiled a “highly targeted, time‑limited” special license. The waiver invites countries worldwide, for the next 30 days, to snap up Russian crude and refined products stuck at sea under earlier sanctions, a “pardoned” batch estimated at roughly 124 to 130 million barrels – five to six full days of global oil supply suddenly put back on the table.

Washington tried to dress this move in a dazzling “technical” costume. Bessent insisted it was merely a temporary clean‑up of “stocks stranded at sea,” and argued that because most of Moscow’s oil revenue supposedly comes from taxes at the extraction stage, selling cargoes that were already loaded on tankers would not deliver any “significant fiscal gains” to the Kremlin.

But reality slapped that logic down almost instantly. Within barely two weeks of the latest US–Iran clash erupting, the Finland‑based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air calculated that Russia had already pocketed about 6 billion euros in extra fossil‑fuel revenue, and U.K. media expect Russia’s March oil‑related tax take to jump as prices stay elevated, prompting Bessent to concede awkwardly on a podcast that Moscow may be gaining in a “regrettable” way – one he could only hope would be “very short‑lived.”

The absurdity of this argument lies in its attempt to tear “extraction” and “sales” apart on paper, as if turning Russian oil into cash does nothing to refill Moscow’s coffers. Edward Fishman of the Council on Foreign Relations warned that this single move “instantly weakened much of the pressure” built up by earlier sanctions, and some analysts now fear the waiver could be rolled over again and again, quietly hollowing out the very credibility of the sanctions regime.

Domestic Blame Game Ignites

This sanctions costume‑change not only left foreign observers scratching their heads, it also triggered a furious blame game back in Washington. Senior Senate Democrats pounced, branding the move a bid to ease the economic blow from “a war of Trump’s own making” and jeering that the conflict has driven US gasoline prices to the highest level of his two presidential terms, while Reuters analysis stripped away the spin and laid bare the electoral math: the White House fears soaring pump prices before November’s midterms will hit voters’ wallets, and Republicans are desperate to hang on to control of Congress.

Seen as one long play, the Trump administration’s double‑standard script reads like this.

First, elastic rules: sanctions on Russia are proclaimed sacred, the cornerstone of a “rules‑based international order,” right up until those rules start torching America’s own fuel tanks, at which point they are instantly downgraded to “narrow, short‑term tools.”

Second, selective consequences: Washington can ignore the damage its military adventures inflict on the global energy market when the bombs are falling, but the moment high prices bite at home, it claims the right to rewrite the rules unilaterally, even if that means bankrolling its “opponent” to put out the fire.

Third, fluid morality: buying Russian oil is denounced as “funding aggression” when others do it, yet rebranded as a responsible act to “stabilise global markets” when the same action comes with a Made‑in‑America label, allowing an effortless glide between lofty moral high ground and hard‑nosed realpolitik.

In the end, this “bizarre drama” strips things down to a blunt reality: when weighed against absolute domestic political and economic interests, the grand dam of international sanctions is little more than a tool the United States bends at will to preserve its superpower status. What the world sees is a great power flailing in a storm largely of its own making, scrambling to rob Peter to pay Paul as it rushes from one self‑inflicted blaze to the next.

And the world is asking a simple question: when the next fire it lights starts raging, what new magic trick will Washington reach for to try to douse the flames?