Visiting mixed villages in former Yugoslavia before it careened toward its violent breakup in 1992, I spoke to neighbors who dismissed the idea of a coming war as simply unimaginable. But as each tuned in to the increasingly nationalistic TV stations of their respective Serbian or Croatian capitals, they were bombarded by commentary posing as news that recalled historical wrongs and alleged plots for coming atrocities. Steeped in these bilious alternative realties, the neighbors stopped talking. Soon, they were killing one another, each convinced they were acting in self-defense.

I was reminded of this while listening to President Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly, when he said he was deciding whether to make a deal with Iran or to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again.”

It’s tempting to say, “Well, that’s just Trump.” This is a man who made a career in real estate and showbiz by blowing smoke. I don’t believe he has the slightest intention of killing 90 million-plus Iranians. But for the record, threatening countries or peoples with extermination is not normal, not since the genocidal conflict that was World War II, and especially not for nations with the nuclear arsenals to do it.

Beyond one somewhat cryptic “We will bury you!” from Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, Soviet and prior U.S. leaders never publicly threatened to annihilate anyone, even if that extremity underpinned the entire policy of Mutual Assured Destruction that governed their Cold War standoff.

The more worrying part about such threats today is that Trump is not alone in making them. Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, may have had a strong point when he told the UN on Wednesday that his country was a victim of U.S. aggression, but until 2015 the Islamic Republic was singled out for containment by the entire UN Security Council, precisely because it routinely called for the annihilation of another state (Israel) while simultaneously running a covert nuclear program.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin talks about annihilation a little differently. He has hinted that he’s ready to deliver a nuclear strike against any country that pushes back against his invasion of Ukraine. To underscore the point, he has changed his nation’s security doctrine to lower the threat-threshold required. And he has worked assiduously to persuade his own people of the falsehood that they are not invading a neighbor, but rather acting in self-defense against an aggressive Europe that’s returning to its fascist past.

A 2025 study of 261 conflicts from 1508 to 1941 by academics from the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany found that leaders planning wars of aggression falsely claimed the need for self-defense 64% of the time. They did so because, by and large, populations — like those Yugoslav neighbors — won’t choose the sacrifice and slaughter that comes with war unless they’ve no choice. The same rule applies when it comes to breaking the nuclear taboo.

On this, Putin has left the heavy lifting to others. The shock jocks who run the main news talk shows on Russia’s state-controlled TV channels make frequent threats to annihilate London or sink the UK as a whole, sometimes with images of nuclear mushroom clouds as a backdrop. Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president who now heads Putin’s National Security Council, has threatened both Lithuania and Ukraine with annihilation.

Sergei Karaganov, who advised Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin as well as Putin on nuclear policy, has said repeatedly since the start of the Ukraine war that Russia should use a nuclear strike to end it. In June he spelled out how that should work: Moscow would first hit European targets with conventional missiles to restore the continent’s “fear of hell.” Then, should there be any response, Russia would escalate to nuclear strikes on Romania, Poland and Germany. And were Germany to even think of getting its own nuclear arsenal to deter such an attack, the country that gave us Goethe and Beethoven, as well as the fascist Third Reich, should be “evaporated.”

Underlying all this is the belief that in the event that Russia should wipe out a target in Europe, the threat of a U.S. nuclear counterstrike no longer exists. So whereas Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan jointly stated in 1985 that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought, Russian officials now believe they just need to avoid targeting the U.S. “A nuclear war is winnable,” Karaganov said.

As with Trump, it’s easy to dismiss Karaganov, a known hawk. And there remains a strong suspicion that Putin’s goal is less to risk the fallout from becoming the first leader in history to use nuclear weapons for a war of aggression than to let the threat do the work for him. All he needs is for enough Europeans to believe they face the prospect of a nuclear Armageddon, and he can win without having to push the button.

As was the case in the former Yugoslavia, language can normalize the unthinkable, and that makes such reckless talk of annihilation too great a risk to take in the nuclear age. “We see how state propaganda is preparing people to think that nuclear war isn't a bad thing,” the Russian journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov said of Putin’s war, as early as 2023. “On TV channels here, nuclear war and nuclear weapons are promoted as if they’re advertising pet food.”

This is a period of extreme change and dislocation. Old certainties are vanishing almost by the day, made all the more unpredictable and disorienting by the speed of technological change allowing for the advent of drones on the battlefield or the rise of agentic AI. Some taboos, like assassinating other world leaders, are already being broken openly. Now we are normalizing the treatment of genocide and nuclear weapons as common instruments of war.

I’m not sure this is a genie that can be put back in its bottle, but all world leaders need to condemn talk of annihilation whenever and from whomever they hear it. That’s a huge ask, because these are demagogues in charge of great powers and there are few available tools to rein them in. It is a combination that has never ended well when left unchecked.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.

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