JD Vance says America wins whether or not Iran ceases to exist.

That is what the vice president of the United States said on Friday night. “If we make the final deal, then great. If we don’t make the final deal, their nuclear program is still destroyed. They’re still much weaker as a country, so my attitude is America wins either way.” The president posted, hours before fresh strikes were exchanged in the Strait of Hormuz, that the United States may soon be forced “to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started,” and that if that happens, “the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist.”

Around eighty-eight million people live in Iran. Most of them did not build a nuclear weapon. Most of them are not the Islamic Republic. Some of them are the children the next retaliatory strike will leave without parents. Some of them are the parents whose children will be the next dead. The vice president has just told you, on national television, that their continued existence is not a variable in the calculation. The president has just told you that their country’s existence is conditional on American satisfaction. “America wins either way” is the most revealing sentence this administration has produced, because it admits, in plain language, that the moral outcome is not what the calculation is about. This is not statecraft; it is the cruelty of the abattoir, adopted by those who have never had to sweep up the pieces.

Pope Francis, from Lampedusa to Fratelli Tutti, warned that we have fallen into a globalization of indifference, treating the suffering of others as a spectacle that does not concern us. To rejoice that a country is “much weaker” is to rejoice in the suffering of every family who will now eat less and live in the shadow of a superpower that delights in their diminishment. The prophets of Israel knew the temptation of imperial triumphalism and warned their own people against it: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, let not your heart be glad when they stumble, lest the LORD see it and be displeased.” To gloat over the weakening of a people is to adopt the posture of the wicked, who make the divine the author of their vengeance.

The Catholic bishops of the United States wrote the moral math of this kind of moment down in 1983, in The Challenge of Peace. A war can only be morally justified when the cause is just, when it is the last resort, when the authority declaring it is legitimate, when the intention is right, when the violence is proportionate, when there is reasonable hope of success, and when non-combatants are protected from direct attack. “The Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist” fails at least three of those criteria on its face. “America wins either way” is not a moral category at all. It is the language of a man at a card table, not a man at prayer.

We who live in the empire have a long, bloody habit of treating the ruin of other peoples as our vindication. We did it in the deserts of Iraq, and we did it in the mountains of Afghanistan, counting the bodies of the innocent as collateral in our own moments of triumph. I am a combat medic who served in Iraq from 2003 to 2007. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed that invasion on just-war grounds before the first bomb fell. The bishops were right. Whatever I say about Iran, I say with the knowledge that I was part of the last time we told ourselves we had no choice, and the climate of triumphalism we are watching on our screens is one our own parishes, our own pulpits, and our own neighborhoods helped to build.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish theologian who marched with Martin Luther King at Selma, taught that few are guilty, but all are responsible. I do not need to know which general drafted which strike plan. The decision is being made in my name, by officials I did not choose and cannot remove, and the moral weight of it lands on me. The moral weight lands on every American Christian who hears “America wins either way” and does not flinch. Heschel was a refugee from what happens when a country decides that the existence of another people is conditional on its own satisfaction. He knew what the calculation looks like when it finishes.

And the same administration that has now made the destruction of Iran a win condition has, this week, named Lance Schroyer to direct ICE, applying the same utilitarian arithmetic to children in border custody as it does to millions in the Strait of Hormuz. The children in the holding cells and the families in the Strait of Hormuz are entered in the same ledger, and the ledger is being kept by the same hand. The same arithmetic that writes off around eighty-eight million Iranians as a price worth paying is the arithmetic that writes off a six-year-old in a detention center as a price worth paying. The math is the same math.

You who sit in the seats of power and speak of erasing nations: you are playing with the flesh and blood of people who bear the image of God. The destruction of a nuclear program is not a trophy to be hoisted; it is the kindling of a fire that will burn in the lungs and the soil of the innocent for generations. A nation that builds its identity on the ashes of another has already forfeited its soul. The door of return remains open. The ceasefire can hold. The strikes can stop. The next ICE director can be told, on his first day, that the children in his custody are not inputs. The bishops, the pastors, the parents, the veterans, the people in the pews on both sides of this — you have work to do that the country cannot do without you. Let us refuse, together, the doctrine that any human being’s existence is a win condition.

I am a veteran of the last war we started on calculations like this. I am still here. The country is still here. So, for now, is Iran. Let us act like we know what that costs.