Fragile truce

With bated breath, as in waiting in nervous suspense and anxiety, dramatically describes our common lot for the next two weeks.

Holding our nerves won’t be easy, particularly if the 11th hour, two-week conditional fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran somehow breaks down, threatening the resumption of more devastation.

But for now, our fingers are crossed.

So, with cautious optimism, we hope the frantic global powers, especially the middle powers, are able to defuse a conflict of worldwide impact where a mere five days ago Donald Trump brought the US terrifyingly close to crossing a line that cannot be uncrossed — the annihilation of “a whole civilization.”

Trump did push the world to the brink of disaster when he callously warned “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

None of us can take lightly Trump’s hyperbolic threats of apocalyptic annihilation, even as a negotiating tool.

There’s just no other way to describe what Trump did but as a war crime and genocide.

Concerned world leaders and experts immediately said that Trump’s threat to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure amounted to a war crime, pointing out that merely threatening genocide is a crime under the UN genocide treaty.

As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres summed it up: “There is no military objective that justifies the wholesale destruction of a society’s infrastructure or the deliberate infliction of suffering on civilian populations.”

In a word, Trump was about to engineer a societal collapse. He wasn’t waging war in the conventional sense.

Trump, however, said he was “not at all” concerned about war crimes nor was he worried his plans for attacking civilian targets would cause his removal from office.

Trump’s “mad king” bluster, nonetheless, was made under the shadow of something far darker and sinister.

Some were anxiously speculating that Trump’s terroristic talk of annihilation meant the White House was seriously entertaining the use of nuclear weapons; although some doubted this was the case.

Nonetheless, any hint of dropping nukes sends cold chills down our spines.

Not only because setting off nukes in the Gulf would send our country into an unprecedented crisis but also because it would directly put millions of Filipinos in harm’s way.

On this, our country likely won’t suffer from a nuclear fallout. Last week, a British newspaper graphically showed a map of a hypothetical nuclear fallout impact which showed severe radiation will mostly affect Iran, her immediate neighbors, parts of the Middle East, Europe, Pakistan, India and China. Radiation, nonetheless, will certainly affect hundreds of thousands of OFWs in the Middle East and Europe.

At any rate, Trump humiliatingly backed off from the apocalyptic brink. His decision to back off for now — insultingly dubbed by many as his latest “TACO” or “Trump Always Chickens Out” — bought the world two weeks of pause from where it precariously was early last week.

Still, the fragile ceasefire isn’t a long-term solution to the Gulf crisis, even if the bombings have stopped, the combatants are claiming victory, oil prices are falling and the Philippine peso’s decline has been arrested.

This is not yet peace. Difficult hurdles remain like whether or not the demands of both sides will be met or what happens if blindsided Israel undermines the talks or its attacks continue on Gulf countries.

But at least for now, let’s hope the ceasefire holds even as we demand this administration decisively stabilize oil supplies, bring fuel prices down, ease job losses and rein in inflation.