When I was growing up in Garden City in Cairo many years ago, my parents’ house was near the American Cultural Centre that was attached to the American Embassy.
My favourite pastime back then was going to the centre to read and borrow books. I was a teenager when the late John F Kennedy was elected the youngest ever American president and the first Roman Catholic since the establishment of the republic.
The days of “Camelot” at the White House during his short-lived presidency fired the imagination of this Egyptian teenager, and I remember his expression, dear to the American people, of the “Shining City on the Hill”. It was a way of bestowing a certain historical greatness on the American nation on the world stage.
Back then, and before the involvement of the United States in Vietnam and later its role in the June War in 1967, we did not have problems with this expression. We liked it not because we really believed in it, but because the United States then stood for something we had always cherished, namely freedom and democracy.
Then came the assassination of Kennedy, and a few years later the assassinations of his brother, former attorney-general Robert Kennedy, and of the civil-rights leader Martin Luther King. There was also the My Lai massacre in 1968 in Vietnam when US troops killed up to 500 Vietnamese civilians. As a result, the idea of the “Shining City on the Hill” began to fade from our imaginations, and the United States became just another superpower, or imperialist power, that was no different from any other great power, past or present.
The expression became confined to Hollywood moviemaking and some remarks later made by former president Ronald Reagan.
Fast forward to the Gaza war in late 2023, and the war that the 47th President of the United States Donald Trump, unleashed on Iran on 28 February with his Israeli allies, a war that is still raging. For Egyptians and probably for most Arab and Muslim people, the fact that America has now gone to war against a Muslim country and is threatening to “bomb it back to the Stone Age” is something that will not be forgotten for decades to come.
Any reference to the “Shining City on the Hill” will likely be seen as a provocation. To add insult to injury, the US war against Iran is being carried out in alliance with the Israel of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. How can we square such an expression with the fact that this imagined “Shining City of the Hill” has turned a blind eye to the killing of more than 70,000 Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza?
The following tweet by the American president on his Truth Social platform on 5 April has made matters worse.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F****n’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
Hours later on 6 April, Trump wrote on Truth Social that his administration was “in serious discussions” with what he described as a “New and More Reasonable Regime” in Iran. He said that “Great Progress has been made,” warning that if a deal is not reached, and “if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately Open for Business,” the United States will “blow up” and “obliterate completely” Iran’s electricity generating plants, its oil wells, and Kharg Island, in addition to “possibly all [its] desalination plants”.
Maybe the American president is not aware that such threats, if carried out, would constitute war crimes.
The American-Israeli war on Iran has caused tremendous damage to the image of the United States around the world, and no credible American official, whether Republican or Democrat, can claim that the United States has the “moral high ground” when it comes to its foreign policy.
Some of them have asserted this from time to time when defending their positions regarding international questions, including the ill-fated invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively. But the war against Iran has dealt the international image and credibility of the United States a near knockout blow.
The UK newspaper the Guardian published an article on 5 April by a former US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy during the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, in which he argued that “Trump’s venal persona and his war on Iran will do untold damage to America’s ability to make a positive difference in the world.”
“We were never quite the shining city on the hill we thought we were. But, post-Trump, the United States will become little America. Smaller, meaner, less shiny.”
Once the war on Iran is over, its victim will not only be Iran. Another victim will be the United States. The Iranians will rebuild their country, but I am not sure the credibility of the United States as a beacon of liberty and a responsible great power can be restored anytime soon.
The self-inflicted damage to this credibility has been so great that the expression “Shining City on the Hill” has been relegated to the history books.
For a teenager who regularly browsed books on the Founding Fathers, the American Republic, and the Declaration of Independence in the American Cultural Centre and American Library in Garden City in the 1960s, the United States lost its innocence a long time ago.
And Trump’s White House today is undeniable proof of that.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 April, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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