TEHRAN – Iran on Thursday lashed out at U.S. President Donald Trump’s dismissal of the human cost of war, warning that the assertion “it doesn’t matter” because everyone dies “anyway” reflects a “modern nihilism” that risks turning death into a justification for indifference to human suffering.
In a post on his X account, Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei was responding to comments by U.S. media personality and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson about a conversation he said he had with Trump in the Oval Office days before the war began.
Carlson said he warned Trump that the war was not about Iran’s nuclear program and that Israel was pushing the United States toward war. 
“I said this to Trump to his face in the Oval Office, days before the war began. And he looked at me and said: ‘Yes, you’re right. But in the end, we all die anyway. So it doesn’t matter.’ That’s exactly what he said,” Carlson stressed.
Baghaei said the remark “echoes Albert Camus’s Caligula at the exact moment existential ‘absurdity’ curdles into tyranny — where the ‘inevitability of death’ is used to strip the living of their value.”
“The terrifying difference today is leverage. Caligula had only the primitive tools of Rome; modern nihilism commands vast stockpiles of mass destruction,” he stressed.
“The greatest geopolitical danger is not a leader confronting mortality. It is a system that uses the inevitability of death to justify indifference to human suffering. ‘We all die’ is a fact; ‘so it doesn’t matter’ is the leap where existential dread becomes a political weapon,” Baghaei wrote.
He also warned against attempts to appease such an approach. “Those who think they can appease Caligula forget that the absurd recognizes no rule or contract. Appeasement buys no safety — it merely negotiates the order of the victims,” he said.
In an interview with Time magazine published Thursday, Trump was directly confronted over his repeated threats to “annihilate” Iran and the contradiction with his self-description as a “president of peace.” 
Asked how a president of peace could call for the annihilation of an entire people, Trump said: “Because by annihilating Iran, we’ve created peace in the world. With Iran, I don’t think you could ever have peace.”
Trump’s remarks come despite Iran never having been found to be building a nuclear weapon. The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly confirmed the peaceful purposes of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and U.S. intelligence assessments have repeatedly found no evidence Iran had decided to build a nuclear weapon.
Acting Defense Minister Brigadier General Majid Ebn-e-Reza dismissed Trump’s new claim that Iran’s military has been obliterated, warning that his “imaginary war dramas” cannot conceal the reality that U.S. forces are exhausted.
“Do not hide the confusion in the White House behind imaginary war dramas,” Ebn-e-Reza wrote on X Thursday. “Public pressure, the exhaustion of U.S. forces, and the rising costs of war have thrown your calculations into disarray.”
Trump claimed in the Time interview that “their navy is gone. Their air force is gone. Everything’s gone,” adding that “159 ships are at the bottom of the sea.” 
Iranian judicial authorities said the overwhelming majority of vessels destroyed were civilian fishing boats, not military targets. 
“Claims of the destruction of the defense industry change nothing,” Ebn-e-Reza responded. “You will see Iranian capability and initiative on the battlefield and will feel its political impact.”