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Foreign It's Wednesday, April 8, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler and this is the Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. We have certainly had a very interesting 48 hours in world affairs and a lot of it began on Easter Sunday when you had the President of the United States post posting on social media. And of course, some of the major and quite understandable controversy has been over the profanity used by President in that message. Let's just say very unpresidential in the historic sense and in the moral sense, but nonetheless, the President was sending a very clear message to the people of Iran in particular, he was sending a message to the military Islamic leadership of Iran. And he was sending a clear message that he was going to bring about mass devastation in that land if they did not open the Strait of Hormuz and basically cooperate with American and Israeli officials. And we're looking at a situation that is unfolding minute by minute. But at least as of late last night, the situation seemed to be holding in which Iran had taken the initiative to offer a 10 point peace plan. President Trump actually responded at least somewhat positively, saying that at least it was the basis on which conversations could be held. The United States announced that a ceasefire had been arranged. And this was a 14 day, two week ceasefire. But it of course is going to be a supervised ceasefire and it was contingent, the President said, upon Iran opening the Strait of Hormuz. Now, Iran seemed within hours to affirm that it had also agreed to the deal.
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Now, Israel's role in this is still
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not quite clear, but at least in terms of the relationship between the United States and Iran, this is the first constructive, positive moment we've really had since the beginning of this war. And of course, we're nowhere near any kind of peace. We're not even really anywhere near a lasting ceasefire. But this is a signal, the signal success when you have the President make the announcement that there's going to be a 14 day cessation of hostilities and remember that this is over against what the President had been threatening and that is mass devastation in Iran, including what
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he called the end of a civilization. Okay, I don't know. All the President meant there. That is certainly overheated language. That's language that invokes all kinds of questions and in the Christian worldview tradition about the affairs of nations and even the conduct of war.
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It's a violation of just war theory,
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which says you have to protect civilians, you have to discriminate. That's actually the rule the principle of discrimination. You have to discriminate between combatants and civilians. And that means also even in terms of infrastructure, you can target what is being used by the military or is essential to supporting the enemy military, but you're not to attack civilian facilities necessary for the care and feeding of civilization, of families and just of civilians in the community. But of course, I don't know all the President was thinking about there, but let me just point out, there's a very interesting dimension to this I don't hear anyone in the press talking about, and that is the fact that when you talk about Iran, you are talking about an Islamic regime. You're talking about the Revolutionary Guard, you're talking about the, the Islamic Revolution in 1979. But you know, you're talking about a lot more than that. And we've mentioned this on the briefing before, when you say Iran, you're invoking a history, an imperial history, a civilizational history going back into ancient history, and even what the Iranians would see as the glory days of their empire when it was a Persian empire. And of course, the Persian Empire factors in scripture. It shows up right in scripture. And so this is an amazing thing. I don't know if the President meant to invoke all of that, but it does seem that at least some in Iran were hearing that. So I want to be clear. I believe it was very unprecedential for the President to use the language that he used. I also think that it invokes huge problems in terms of Christian worldview when you talk about just setting out to destroy a civilization, not so much because of the supposed goods of a civilization, but because of the, the civilians that are embedded within that civilization. Also, in a historical perspective, we don't actually justify just erasing a civilization from the face of the earth, even in terms of historical importance. Okay, so there's another side to this, and this is where we find ourselves on this Wednesday morning. Here's the other side of it. We don't know exactly what the communication was like in terms of how it was received in Iran. But at least one argument, for at least the theme and the substance of what the President was doing, is that the Iranians seem to have received the message when they've been unresponsive to everything else, including aerial bombardments and everything else, including all kinds of threats. This was the threat to which they responded. And that's not just a matter of some kind of negotiation strategy or assumption. That's actually history as it has unfolded over the course of the last, say, 48 hours. So it's a very interesting thing.
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The president mentioned wiping out a civilization. And I think Americans hear that as some kind of just bombastic threat. And I think many people around the world, Europeans heard it that way, Canadians heard it that way, Australians probably heard it that way. The interesting thing is to know how the Iranians heard that, because it just might be that the end of a civilization was a message that spoke to them particularly. Once again, I am not saying that the Christian worldview would ever justify setting out just to end a civilization, meaning to wipe out the people who were there. But when it comes to basically bringing about a civilizational crisis in Iran, it appears that, at least to some extent, this is the first positive movement we've had. The Iranians, at least it seems, responding to this, because nothing else basically has changed over the course of the last 48 hours. It appears, at the very least, to have gotten their attention. And it's very interesting that the president responded not just by saying, we've received 10 points in a plan from Iran, but by saying, I think this is at least a framework for how we can start a conversation. There's an article that appeared in the Spectator late last night in which one of the observers writing there at the Spectator from London basically said, you know, there are all kinds of things we don't know right now, but one of them is whether or not in a matter of months, all of this is going to be seen as an absolute disaster or as an unexpected and unmitigated success. You know, the fact is probably neither of those. But we can hope and we can pray for and we can work for, and we can advocate for a just conclusion to this. And I think President Trump at this point has demonstrated exactly by how you now see the response of so many in Europe and elsewhere that they are simply not up to this kind of challenge, period. And I think it's one of the reasons why President Trump really doesn't care so much what they think. I think most of us care what they think, but we care less what they think than would have been the case before. We're talking about a battle between the United States and Israel. On the one hand, in Iran, which has been one of the most deadly enemies of human flourishing now for a matter of almost half a century, and you look at that and you recognize, okay, if this isn't a situation in which you really have good and evil pretty clearly understood, then I'm not sure you want to understand. One final note on this, it does appear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that he will go along with President Trump's leadership in this effort, but that's when it comes to Iran, not at this point when it comes to Israel's fight against terrorist forces in Lebanon. So this is an unfolding story, and by the time we talk again, it will have unfolded further, we pray, in a good way and righteous direction. Okay, before we leave this issue entirely, let's just reflect upon the fact that there's been an awful lot of conversation in the media and in the international conversation about just how out of line the United States is, how out of line Israel is. And I think a lot of that is detached from reality. But when you look at some of the arguments being made, I think we begin to see the problem more clearly. So I want to turn to a piece published in the Wall Street Journal on the last day of March. It is by the president of Brazil, President Luis Inacio Lula da Silv. He's a man of the left. And remember, when you're talking about Brazil, you're talking about one of the four countries that is at least at times identified as in an alliance, as an alternative to the United States in Europe. B R I C Bric. That's Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Very interesting alignment. And again, this is coming from someone who writes with the headline, the world needs a stronger UN that is United Nations. So, very, very interesting article. This is really in response to President Trump's action, the US Military action in particular in Iran. And you can include Israel in this, but it's the United States that is his concern. This is what he writes, quote, every violation of international law invites another violation. From Afghanistan to Iran and across Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, and Venezuela, the line between what is permitted and what is prohibited has been steadily blurred by the complicit inaction of the United Nations Security Council. The next sentence, quote, wielding the veto as both a shield and a weapon, its permanent members act without grounding in the UN Charter. They play with the fate of millions, leaving a trail of death and destruction. He then says, until recently, and I'm quoting here, there was at least an attempt to give interventions of an era of legitimacy through UN endorsement. Today, he says, it's clearly not happening. Now, that's a direct indictment of the United States taking this action in Iran and not going to the United nations for some kind of authorization. Okay, let's just remind ourselves first of all of the pragmatics of the situation, and that is that the United Nations Security Council was required by the major powers. And the United States was at the top of that list. When you go back to the period after the Second World War when the United nations was formed, there is no way that the United States of America, there's no way that the Soviet Union, there is no way that England and France and Germany and other nations of that size and magnitude were going to put the fate of their nations in the hands of some kind of assembly of all the supposedly recognized nations of the earth. That just wasn't ever going to happen. And so one of the ways that that mayhem was avoided was by creating a Security Council within the United nations power structure. And all the big decisions actually are made by the Security Council. And there are several members of the Security Council that have a permanent veto. And that includes the United States, it includes Russia. And you can just go down the list. And now you have the reality that had the United States gone to the United nations and said, we need some kind of authorization for this military action against Iran, first of all, it would have been announcing the action. There would have been absolutely no surprise. And furthermore, the United Nations Security Council would never have given that authorization because Russia and China, Russia alone just would have vetoed it. Russia has been a primary ally to Iran, and so there's just no way that was going to happen. But what you have in this statement by the Brazilian President is a plea for a new kind of international law, a new kind of binding international super government. He goes on to say, quote, excessive power and instability go hand in hand. A world without rules is an insecure world where anyone can be the next victim. Violence can't replace dialogue, nor can force prevail over diplomacy. The prerogatives of the permanent members of the Security Council are already unjustifiable in an international order grounded in the sovereign equality of nations. Okay, let me just state that when you talk about the sovereign equality of nations, I'll just state the matter bluntly. The United States of America is never going to turn over its national defense, its national integrity, and its national fate to any just group of supposedly sovereign nations. This is not going to happen. And by the way, Americans would not allow it to happen. Many of America's allies in Europe will talk a far more internationalist game. And at least in terms of pan European affairs, they will play that game with some consistency. But the reality is that not one of them is going to put its own national fate in the hands of the United Nations General assembly either. By the way, nor is Russia, nor is China just not going to happen. But this does show that there is, in a certain class, a certain intellectual tradition, there is a desire for some kind of binding international law that would basically be able to tell Donald Trump and the United States, you can't do that. And here's the penalty box you're gonna be put in if you do it. That just doesn't exist. President Harry Truman, who was the president when the United nations was being formed, made certain that could never happen. The price of the United States entering the entire United nations, entire system, it was built upon the fact that that could not happen. The threat of anything like that happening was at least in part what kept the United States out of the League of Nations after World War I. The United States is simply not going to put its national security on the line. It's not going to put its national sovereignty and integrity on the line. And here's the thing. Many of the nations that would call upon the United States to do so, they call upon perhaps China and Russia and other nations also. The fact is they are calling for this simply because they want to stop the United States from taking this kind of action. And that's just something the United States will never agree to. By the way, you will have Democrats and Republicans talk a different talk on this. The Republicans are going to be far more consistent in saying it's an America first foreign policy. But you'll notice there isn't a single Democratic President of the United States, no matter how liberal, who's actually suggested the United States giving up its position, its permanent seat on the Security Council, and its veto power. And there's a reason why. You just need to understand. There's a reason why you've never heard that from an American president. And I think it's very hard to imagine that you ever will. One final thought on this. Remember, Christians don't deny there is something like a law of nations or international law, simply because, as Romans 1 tells us, the Apostle Paul makes very clear there is a moral law that is built even into nature. It all testifies of the law of God. The problem is, of course, there is no international court in any true sense, and there's no global government in any sense. And we should be thankful for that. It would not be a more just government at the global level, but infinitely less just. And of course, there are clear biblical warnings against that kind of ambition in the first place. Okay, now we need to turn to something else. The culture of death is showing up all over the globe with an ever more threatening intensity. So here's another headline and I'm going to share with you the headline from the Spectator in London. There's nothing merciful about Noelia Castillo's death. We're Talking about a 25 year old young woman in Barcelona, Spain, who demanded an end to her life through medically assisted death or assisted suicide. And even against the protest of her father and others, a mass movement trying to prevent this. This young woman, 25 years old, demanded assisted suicide from the government of Spain. And the government of Spain responded with the answer of death. It's a very, very Sad story. Again, 25 years old. This is a young woman who had been raped by a gang and she had gone into a very deep psychological, psychiatric depression. I think we can understand that she had attempted to commit suicide and basically ended up being a paraplegic. She said she was an intractable suffering, most of that suffering, apparently psychic, moral suffering, and she demanded an end to her life. She said she wanted to end the pain and she wanted to escape what the scripture calls this earthly coil. And she clearly wanted what she saw was liberation by death. And here's where we just have to step back for a moment and say, we've now reached the point where we have a government, a government of a nation like Spain, a nation that prides itself on its commitment to human rights. And here you have a European country deeply steeped in Christendom, in the tradition of Christian morality, of course, overwhelming influence in most of its history from the Roman Catholic Church, very much against anything like assisted suicide. And now you have this nation that is delivering it to a 25 year old young woman. Not because necessarily she's even suffering intractable physical pain, but psychic pain. She demands it. And of course, the law there in Spain is now so liberal, like laws in several other European nations and also in Canada, that death is the answer. She is now dead. The headline in the New York Times, Spanish Woman Dies after Winning Legal Battle for right to end her life. I want to point to that headline because that's the way the secular world sees it. A right, a successful attempt, a successful legal battle. She won the legal battle for the right to end her life. It's a very sad commentary. Just the words in that headline, even the way it's presented morally. The subhead in the article, by the way, tells you how the Times saw it. Noelia Castillo Ramos, 25, who was in chronic physical and psychological pain, so physical pain is mentioned there, had sought an assisted death since 2024, but her father sued to prevent it. Clearly he was not successful in that suit. The case went, by the way, all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, which upheld a Spanish court's ruling that this young woman had the right to demand government assisted death. And that's really what it is. It's government assisted death.
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Now, the story of this young woman is unbelievably tragic.
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Our hearts go out to her. Certainly the problem is, have we become a world in which you have nations like Spain, and is the United States
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headed in this direction? Canada is clearly headed in this direction.
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It's right across our northern border. Are we living in a world in which governments reframe, redefine human rights in
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such a way that an individual has an absolute right to demand death simply if that person decides life is no longer worth living for one reason or another?
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And when you look at this young
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woman's life, unquestionably tragic, there are people, by the way, who would make this demand without that, because the law has now been pressed to this point in Spain, where it's a very fluid definition of what kind of suffering justifies a 25 year old demanding death. Now, when you look at this, the logic then gets pressed further and there is no country right now that demonstrates this more tragically than Canada, again right across America's northern border, where the logic is now being pressed even by the highest court in that land in such a way as to say, you're gonna have to be very careful about denying this to anyone. How can you draw an arbitrary age? How can you draw an arbitrary definition? How is it not that an individual just has a sovereign right to define what is unbearable suffering and the circumstances
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in which assisted death could be demanded? We're looking at a situation in which, by the way, one of the things Christians need to note is that there are people who will say, arguments against assisted suicide fall into the fallacy of the slippery slope. Okay, so let me just tell you to be on guard about that kind of argument. Is there such a thing as a slippery slope argument? Yes, there is. Sometimes it is a false argument to say, if A happens, B will happen. If B happens, C will happen. If C happens, D will happen. Sometimes that's a false claim. But you know what? It's true. It's not false. If A leads to B, B leads to C and C leads to D. In other words, you can just draw a line. And when it comes to assisted suicide, the line is literally deadly. Just in terms of what it is, it's death. And people say, well, if someone under that condition has a right to demand physician assisted or government supported medically assisted dying, Then what about someone right in the next ward, the next room, the next house, who has the same right, she has the same right to define what's unbearable to them. And how do you draw a line? How do you say it's only available to persons who have, say, a terminal diagnosis with only like six months left in life? How can you discriminate on that basis? What about someone who has seven months? Why can you draw the line there? How about age? If someone who is 25 can demand this, then how about someone who's 15? Or for that matter, someone who's 5? If we are going to buy into this mentality of absolute individual autonomy and apart from any kind of moral accountability, apart from any kind of objective grounding of the image of God and human dignity and human worth and the sanctity of human life, and we do have to understand this is a slippery slope. It's not a warning, a false warning about a potential slippery slope. It's a slippery slope. You can already see the slope is already fully apparent. Go to Belgium, go to Switzerland, and now look at Spain, go to Canada, go to other nations and go to some American states where at least this slide has begun, if not proceeded so far downhill. So we need to watch this very carefully. I am touched by the fact that so many listeners to the briefing and others are already alert to the case of Noelia Castillo Ramos and already know the tragedy and already know and are driven by the moral judgment, the Christian worldview judgment that this is just horribly, horribly wrong. But if it's wrong, that means assisted suicide is wrong, period, categorically, objectively. And that means that assisted death, when it comes to medically assisted death, is just wrong. It is wrong to use medicine or medical technology to intervene to end a life. Medicine is supposed to be about extending life, enhancing life. And sometimes medicine is about accepting the reality of death, but not bringing it about ever. Hippocratic Oath, historic language. First do no harm. The physician heals, the physician dare not kill. Another interesting argument. I don't think it goes far enough, but it's interesting. It appeared in the Wall street journal by Lois McClatchy Miller, and her article is entitled Assisted Suicide is a Threat to Freedom. And what she's arguing is that this young woman really didn't have autonomy when she demanded death, but the Spanish government was just right there to kill her anyway, at least with medically assisted dying. I think there's a further point we as Christians need to understand, and that is that this starts out As a matter of choice, individual autonomy and expression. This young woman, the argument comes, had the right to demand this kind of death. All right, well, how quickly does that change itself? I'm gonna say, slide into no, There's a duty to die because you're using up precious medical resources. You're taking up a bed that someone else could hold. You're putting your family in the poorhouse by the fact that you're just adding to additional medical bills. Why don't you have the moral duty simply now to commit suicide? And that by demanding some kind of medically assisted suicide, medical assistance in dying is what they euphemistically want to call it. Just understand that's very, very close. It's already evident in an article like this. At this point, the situation in Spain appears to be just an absolutely idolatrous argument on behalf of personal autonomy. And that's where Lois McClatchy Miller is really good to point back to the fact that, given the circumstances, this is really not an exercise of this young woman's autonomy. It is an act of desperation. Okay, one final matter for Today. Headline also in the Wall Street Journal, a Harvard cap on A's has students smarting. All right, you got the pun. Here's the issue. Harvard has reached a situation in which a majority of students in some classes are getting an A. And that's destroying the curve in terms of the grading system. It's also just creating a problem in which the grades become unre. But here's the thing. The majority of these students at Harvard, and this article makes this very clear, they're demanding A's. After all, they're super, super smart. They had to be super, super smart to get into Harvard. So everybody at Harvard's above average. Okay, that's fascinating. Just think about this. It's kind of like one of these situations, like Lake Wobegon, if you remember this, from National Public Radio, where all the children are above average. Now, just think about it. That's mathematically impossible. But that is, of course, the judgment of every parent. The point is that you can't have a grade average at Harvard. And by the way, at Harvard, they should know how to do the math. You can't have a grade average that means anything at Harvard. If just about everybody is getting an A, then the average is an A, which means the A actually is no longer an A. The pushback from students has been huge. I just want you to hear, before we close, a couple of sentences from the article by Rochan Fernandez at the Wall Street Journal. Just listen to this quote. Already Harvard has pushed back the timeline for implementing a cap after students raise concerns. If approved, the cap would go into effect in the fall of 2027 so professors have time to redesign coursework. Harvard says it learned from others who tried similar grade cap policies. I'm continuing this section from the Wall Street Journal report. Quote, princeton implemented a cap on A's in 2004, but repealed the policy in 2014 after reporting it added a quote, large element of stress to students lives, end quote. So in other words, they tried it, but it added so much stress to students lives that they just went back and said, well I guess we don't care, just give everybody an A. Now just one final word on this. It's not fair just to pick on students at these Ivy League schools. This is particularly interesting because it's Harvard and these are students at Harvard who just demand because they got into Harvard that of course they have to have an A. That's just something that shows you how human pride works and how human comparison always works and how at the end of the day it all comes down to the fact that all of us in our own way, at some point are chasing the wrong thing. Absolutely convinced that we're right. And for the quality of this argument, I demand an A. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information go to my website@albertmohler.com you can follow me on X or Twitter by going to X.comX Albert Mohler for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to spts. Edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com I'm speaking to you from Williamstown, Kentucky, home of the Ark Encounter. And I'm speaking at a conference at the Ark for the next couple of days. It's not every day you get to say you're speaking from the Ark. I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.