President Donald Trump threatened to "blow up" Oman if it did not behave.

There are millions of civilians in the Sultanate of Oman who live under the shadow of a threat that has no precedent in the law of armed conflict. They are not combatants. They are not combatants’ families in a zone of active hostilities. They are a sovereign population, bound by treaties of friendship and strategic partnership with the United States, yet they are told by the leader of that nation that their existence is conditional upon political compliance. The Geneva Conventions, which I helped to draft, were built on a simple premise: that even in war, there are lines that must not be crossed. But here we face a different problem. The line has not been crossed by a bullet or a bomb. It has been crossed by a word. And because it was a word, the institutions I built have no mechanism to stop it.

At Solferino, I saw forty thousand men lying in the sun, dying because no one had organized the care for them. The horror was physical, visible, and immediate. Today, the horror is abstract, verbal, and preemptive. When a head of state threatens to “blow up” an ally, he is not merely engaging in rhetorical hyperbole. He is dismantling the psychological foundation of international law. The law relies on predictability. It relies on the assumption that states will act within certain bounds, even when they are angry, even when they are afraid, even when they are wrong. If a president can threaten total annihilation of a sovereign state during a cabinet meeting, then the conventions that protect the wounded, the prisoners, and the civilians become meaningless. Why sign a treaty limiting the treatment of prisoners if the signatory reserves the right to erase the prison, the prisoners, and the country itself on a whim?

I do not trust human goodness to prevent atrocity. I learned that at Solferino. I trust institutions. I trust the signed paper, the ratified convention, the trained volunteer, the red cross on the armband. These are the constraints that make war less terrible. But institutions require a baseline of rationality. They require the belief that the other side is playing by the same rules, or at least that the other side respects the rules enough to be held accountable for breaking them. When the threat is not just to break the rules but to obliterate the context in which the rules exist, the institution collapses. There is no Red Cross delegation that can negotiate access to a country that has been “blown up.” There is no Geneva Convention that applies to a void.

This is not a matter of sentiment. It is a matter of operational reality. The humanitarian cost of such rhetoric is not measured in immediate casualties, but in the erosion of the protective framework that prevents future casualties. When allies are treated as potential targets for total destruction, the distinction between war and peace dissolves. The precautionary principle, which requires parties to take all feasible precautions to avoid harm to civilians, becomes impossible to apply. How does one take precautions against a threat that is not yet an attack, but is framed as an inevitability? The anxiety that permeates the region is a form of suffering. It is a slow, corrosive violence that undermines the stability required for humanitarian work to function.

The specific violation here is not of a single article, but of the spirit of the entire body of international humanitarian law. Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions prohibits violence to life and person. But this threat is a precursor to violence. It is a declaration that the rules are optional. It signals that the United States, a signatory to these conventions, no longer views them as binding constraints on its behavior, but as tools to be discarded when inconvenient. This is a catastrophic failure of leadership. It is a failure to understand that the strength of a nation lies not in its capacity for destruction, but in its adherence to the rules that make destruction unnecessary.

I spent my life building systems to constrain the worst impulses of humanity. I believed that if we could just get the governments to sign the papers, if we could just train the volunteers, if we could just establish the emblems, we could save lives. I was right, but I was also naive. I did not foresee that the very leaders who signed the papers would one day threaten to ignore them entirely. The institution is only as strong as the political will to uphold it. When that will is replaced by impulsivity, by ego, by a desire for dominance rather than order, the institution is hollow.

What is needed now is not more rhetoric. It is not more threats. It is a return to the basics. The United States must reaffirm its commitment to the rules-based order. It must clarify that its alliances are based on mutual respect, not on the threat of annihilation. It must understand that the credibility of its humanitarian and diplomatic efforts depends on the consistency of its actions. If the United States threatens to blow up Oman, it undermines every humanitarian mission it supports in the region. It tells the world that the rules are a joke. And if the rules are a joke, then the suffering of the wounded, the displaced, and the civilians is a tragedy that no one will try to prevent.

The human cost of this moment is not yet counted in bodies. It is counted in the loss of trust. It is counted in the fear that the next crisis will not be managed by diplomacy, but by destruction. We must count this cost. We must name it. And we must demand that the institutions I built are not rendered obsolete by the whims of those who should be protecting them. The alternative is not peace. It is chaos. And in chaos, there are no rules. There is only suffering. And I have seen enough of that to know that it is never enough.