TEHRAN – Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei has criticized US President Donald Trump for 'indifference to the human cost of the US-Israeli war against Iran,' warning that treating death as inevitable does not diminish the value of human life or justify the suffering inflicted by military aggression.

In a post on his X account, Baqaei shared excerpts from remarks by American commentator Tucker Carlson, who recounted a conversation with Trump days before the start of the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran. The exchange, as described by Carlson, concerned the potential human consequences of an attack on the country.

Baqaei drew a comparison between the attitude reflected in Trump’s reported remark — “we all die anyway” — and the reasoning of the Roman emperor portrayed in Albert Camus’s play Caligula. He argued that invoking the inevitability of death to dismiss human suffering represents a dangerous shift from philosophical reflection to the justification of political violence.

“‘In the end we all die anyway, so it doesn't matter.’ This is no conventional political statement; it 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,” Baqaei wrote.

He said the reasoning attributed to Caligula treated the finite nature of human life as grounds for regarding the suffering of others as inconsequential, warning that such thinking becomes particularly dangerous when placed in the hands of modern political and military powers.

“The terrifying difference today is leverage. Caligula had only the primitive tools of Rome; modern nihilism commands vast stockpiles of mass destruction,” the Iranian spokesman added.

Baqaei argued that the central danger was not simply a political leader’s awareness of mortality, but the use of that reality to rationalize indifference to the human consequences of decisions involving war and mass destruction.

“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,” he wrote.

The Iranian diplomat also warned against assuming that concessions to a power acting without regard for human suffering would guarantee security.

“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,” Baqaei said.

His remarks framed the reported exchange as a broader warning about the moral and political consequences of dismissing civilian suffering in the pursuit of strategic objectives. By invoking Camus’s Caligula,

Baqaei linked the question of accountability in modern warfare to a literary exploration of unchecked power, nihilism, and the erosion of restraints on political authority.

The account of the conversation remains Carlson’s allegation. In an interview published by NPR on September 24, he said Trump made the remark during a private Oval Office meeting shortly before the war began.