Hypocrisy Hypocrisy Hypocrisy!

The Hypocrisy of Trump’s Threat to Destroy Iran’s Cultural Sites

Only months ago, Trump bragged about increasing the State Department’s investment in cultural preservation.

DAN SPINELLI

Three days before an American drone assassinated one of Iran’s top generals, the White House bragged in a press release about spending $25 million overseas “to protect religious freedom, religious sites and relics.” Over the weekend, President Donald Trump thoroughly undermined that boast by threatening, via his favorite platform, to eradicate 52 Iranian sites, including some “important to Iran & Iranian culture.”

Striking a cultural site that has no military value is, of course, a war crime, a fact that Secretary of Defense Mark Esper sheepishly acknowledged Monday. For State Department officials who are familiar with its preservation work, the threat was baffling. “I cannot even generate a response,” one department official told me. “The level of hypocrisy in this [tweet] is quite high.”

On Monday, Trump doubled down on his original threat, saying of Iran, “They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people. And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural sites? It doesn’t work that way.” By Tuesday, he had reversed himself slightly, saying, “If that’s what the law is, I like to obey the law,” and in a televised statement from the White House on Wednesday, he appeared to back away from any further attacks.

As a moment of macho brinksmanship on Twitter, Trump’s tweet was of a piece with other strange threats he’s hurled at foreign leaders, from telling North Korea’s Kim Jong Un that he had a “much bigger” nuclear button to sending an all-caps warning (“BE CAUTIOUS!”) to President Hassan Rouhani of Iran. Destroying cultural property invites far different concerns, in addition to the obvious ones.

Targeting cultural sites would contravene a treaty signed by the United States and more than 100 other countries at the Hague in 1954 and constitute a war crime. It would also unravel—or at least strongly rebut—one of his State Department’s signature efforts under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. With Trump’s blessing, Pompeo has increasingly prioritized religious freedom and protections for religious minorities as key planks of American foreign policy. At the United Nations in October, Trump unveiled a $25 million plan to protect “religious sites and relics” around the world, which the White House later listed among Trump’s accomplishments.

It’s not clear yet how this money will be applied, but if even some of it goes toward preserving historically vital religious sites, it would represent a dramatic increase in the State Department’s cultural preservation efforts. Currently, the department receives $6.25 million in funding each year from Congress as part of a program it administers to sponsor research projects to protect at-risk religious and cultural sites, usually in countries recovering from war or natural disasters. Last year, for one such project, a University of Pennsylvania research team received $2 million for a 40-month project in Mosul to preserve churches, mosques, and other heritage sites in the aftermath of the bloody battle to retake the Iraqi city from Islamic State control.