1. Introduction

There are moments in political life when the language of power ceases to disguise itself, when the elaborate architecture of legal justification, diplomatic restraint, and moral posturing collapses into a blunt admission of what has always been at stake, and when those who exercise violence no longer feel compelled to narrate it as necessity, but instead begin to speak of it as entitlement. What we are witnessing is not a departure from the norms of US foreign policy, but the removal of the linguistic and moral mask through which those norms have long been obscured.

 

When Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored on 4 March 2026, and responded to the killing of over 165 Iranian schoolgirls in Minab by declaring that they were ‘better off dead than in a burqa’, concluding that ‘This is…a barbaric society’, he did not misspeak, nor did he exaggerate; he articulated, with unusual clarity, a hierarchy of human value in which the death of the Other is not only permissible, but preferable (Hawkins, 2026). When, days later, Pete Hegseth, the US War Secretary, publicly declared that US forces would deny ‘quarter’ to the Iranian military during the so-called ‘Operation Epic Fury’, before adding that there would be ‘no mercy for our enemies’, only to be retrospectively shielded by the Office of General Counsel through the claim that he ‘did not know what “no quarter” means’, the issue was not ignorance, but the normalisation of exterminatory language at the highest level of military command (Office of General Counsel, 2026). And when Donald Trump speaks of bombing Iran’s Khark Island with the remark that ‘We may hit it a few more times just for fun’, in the same register as recounting an evening meal, what is revealed is not impulsiveness, but the casualisation of violence as an instrument of policy (RTÉ News, 2026).

 

Taken together, along with numerous other warmongering statements, these are not isolated utterances, nor merely the excesses of the current US administration, but rather convergent expressions of an American political culture in which aggression, violence, and terrorism are no longer concealed behind the vocabulary of necessity or regret, but are instead affirmed, normalised, and, at times, even trivialised.

 

The significance of this moment lies not in the shock such statements are intended to produce, but in the clarity they impose, for they collapse the distance between what the America always done and what it is now willing to say about what it does.

 

 

2. The Normalisation Of Exterminatory Language

What binds these statements is not their offensiveness, but their coherence, for they do not emerge in isolation, nor do they represent a rupture in an otherwise restrained political discourse, but rather constitute a consistent vocabulary through which aggression and violence is articulated, justified, and ultimately normalised across different registers of US power, from the media sphere to the military command structure and the executive office itself.

 

Schlapp’s assertion that Iranian schoolgirls are ‘better off dead’ is not an incidental provocation, but a civilian articulation of a logic that renders certain lives devoid of value when measured against a constructed civilisational hierarchy, a hierarchy that has long underpinned the language of intervention, sanctions, and war, even when it has been expressed in more sanitised terms. In this sense, his statement does not stand outside policy, but mirrors it, translating into explicit form what is ordinarily embedded within the implicit assumptions of foreign policy discourse. Yet, despite an illiteracy so elementary that he cannot distinguish between the Arabian burqa and the Iranian headscarf, which is in fact a compulsory hijab forced upon Iranian women by a totalitarian theocratic regime that the West and Israel imposed upon the Iranian nation following an engineered Islamic Revolution in 1979 (Suren-Pahlav, 2010; 2018), but to describe Iran as ‘a barbaric society’ is not offensive at all, for it is precisely what one expects from an American. It demonstrates the illiteracy from which many Americans suffer, a nation of hillbillies, cowboys, and rednecks, where over half of adults read below a sixth-grade level and millions struggle with basic comprehension – an illiteracy that renders Iran, with seven thousand years of civilisation and recognised as a torchbearer of human civilisation, ‘barbaric’, while elevating the United States to an entirely unexamined position of civilisational authority. Perhaps he requires a history lesson to remind him of where he comes from: the United States was a former British penal colony to which convicts, including murderers, thieves, and prostitutes, were expelled, becoming the forefathers of the American nation (American Historical Review, 1896).

 

Hegseth’s declaration that US forces would deny ‘quarter’, followed by the insistence on ‘no mercy’, operates within a different register, yet reproduces the same logic with greater institutional weight, for here the language of annihilation is not merely rhetorical, but situated within the framework of military conduct, where its implications are not symbolic but operational. The subsequent intervention by the Office of General Counsel, which sought to neutralise the statement not by confronting its moral content but by reframing it as a misunderstanding of terminology, does not mitigate the severity of the declaration, but instead reveals the mechanisms through which such language is absorbed, managed, and rendered administratively acceptable within the structures of the state (Office of General Counsel, 2026).

 

Trump’s remarks, in which the prospect of further bombardment is framed as something to be done ‘just for fun’, complete this pattern by collapsing the distinction between strategic calculation and casual expression, thereby situating violence not only as permissible or necessary, but as an act that can be trivialised without consequence. What is at stake here is not merely the personal disposition of a president, but the extent to which such casualisation can occur without institutional rupture, public accountability, or international censure (RTÉ News, 2026).

 

Viewed without illusion, these statements do not signal a breakdown in political language, but its consolidation into a form that no longer requires concealment, for what is being expressed across these different sites is a shared assumption: that violence, aggression and blunt terrorism directed outward, particularly towards those constructed as militarily inferior or politically expendable, does not require justification beyond its own assertion. This is not just politics or opinion, it is a blunt expression of what America is, its culture, its instincts, its identity, laid bare before the international community, particularly across the ‘Non-Aligned World’, or what is derogatorily labelled the ‘Global South’, without apology or disguise. Trump's administration is not America gone wrong. It is America unmasked.

 

 

3. From Rhetoric To Doctrine: The Administration Of Violence

To persist in treating these statements as rhetorical excess, as though they were slips of the tongue or moments of indiscipline, is not merely analytically weak, it is politically evasive, for it allows a structure of violence to be misrecognised as a series of individual aberrations, thereby preserving the very fiction that these utterances themselves have already begun to dismantle. What is being articulated is not the breakdown of political language, but its clarification, not the eruption of irrationality, but the removal of constraint from a discourse that no longer feels compelled to disguise its premises.

 

The response of the Office of General Counsel to Hegseth’s explicit invocation of ‘no quarter’ lays bare this mechanism with particular precision, for what is at stake is not whether the term was used correctly, but the fact that its meaning, namely the denial of surrender and the legitimisation of annihilation, could be publicly invoked by a senior military figure without immediate institutional rupture. The subsequent claim that he ‘did not know what “no quarter” means’ does not function as a correction, but as a bureaucratic containment strategy, one that displaces the problem from the level of intent to the level of terminology, thereby converting a declaration that directly contravenes the established laws of war into a manageable issue of linguistic imprecision (Office of General Counsel, 2026).

 

This is not ignorance. It is not confusion. It is a culture of illegality in which the Global North, complicit in every American act of aggression, including the present illegal war against Iran, does not merely remain silent but actively polices that silence, because international law functions here as an instrument of convenience, invoked or discarded at will, written by the West to serve the West. The most damning illustration lies in this illegal war on Iran by the United States and Israel under the false pretence of human rights and ‘liberation’ (Suren-Pahlav, 2026; 2016), which has already resulted in the killing of over 1,300 civilians and the destruction of more than 43,000 residential buildings along with critical civilian infrastructure, yet, apart from Pedro Sánchez of Spain and Giorgia Meloni of Italy, no other European leader possessed even a shred of integrity or humanity sufficient to object, or to hold the United States and Israel to account under international law; on the contrary, they have opened their airports to facilitate American bombardment of Iran and deployed their air forces to shield Israel, and, more telling still, the moment the consequences register at the petrol pumps, they rush to condemn the Islamic regime, hastily resurrecting the language of international law precisely when it serves their interests [1].

 

And when Jarrod Agen, a White House official and executive director of the National Energy Dominance Council, made this logic explicit when he stated, without qualification or rhetorical cover, that ‘the goals of Operation Epic Fury is to take all of the Iranian oil for the US’, a statement that does not merely abandon the language of humanitarian justification, but renders it redundant by replacing it with a direct declaration of extraction as policy (Aitken, 2026). What previous US administrations laboured to obscure through the vocabulary of liberation, security, or responsibility is here articulated in its most reduced and unambiguous form, namely that war is not an instrument reluctantly deployed in defence of values, but a mechanism through which resources are seized and power is enforced.

 

The contrast is not incidental. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, under Bush and Blair, was framed through the fabrication of weapons of mass destruction and the promise of democratic transformation, while the destruction of Libya in 2011 under Obama was narrated as humanitarian intervention, both resulting in devastation on a massive scale; what distinguishes the present moment is not the objective, but the abandonment of the narrative discipline that once concealed it, exposing not a new logic, but the underlying logic those narratives were designed to mask.

 

It is precisely this collapse of narrative discipline that unsettles Western allies, for once the objective is stated without disguise, the next war cannot be concealed behind the same exhausted vocabulary, and the complicity of those who participate materially while distancing themselves rhetorically becomes increasingly difficult to sustain without openly acknowledging the deception upon which it depends.

 

If one returns, at this point, to the formal definition of terrorism, namely ‘the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims’ (Oxford Dictionary of English, 2015), the reluctance to apply this term to the conduct under discussion becomes increasingly untenable, for what has been described thus far satisfies not one, but all of its constitutive elements: violence is not only deployed but justified, civilians are not only killed but rendered expendable, and the objectives pursued are explicitly political, strategic, and, as now openly admitted, extractive.

 

This is not incidental harm occurring at the margins of military action, but a form of state violence in which the distinction between military and civilian is progressively eroded, not in practice alone, but in the language through which that practice is justified.

What follows from this is not a matter of rhetorical provocation, but of categorical clarity, for if the same criteria are applied without exception, the distinction between what is conventionally labelled as ‘terrorism’ and what is here being enacted at the level of the state collapses entirely, revealing not a difference in kind, but a difference in scale, organisation, and impunity. Impunity is not a by-product of power; it is one of its operating conditions, without which neither repetition nor escalation would be sustainable. To refuse this designation in the present case is therefore not an act of analytical caution, but an admission that the term itself has been politically contained, reserved for those without power, and withheld from those who exercise it most extensively.

 

The consequence is unavoidable: what is ordinarily condemned as terrorism when enacted by non-state actors is normalised, institutionalised, and defended when carried out by the United States, not because it differs in substance, but because it operates under the protection of power.

 

Thus, what is being performed here is a familiar operation within the architecture of US power, in which the law is not abolished, but instrumentalised, not as a barrier to violence, but as a language through which violence is processed, justified, and, when necessary, sanitised after the fact. The point is not that such statements violate international law, but that the system within which they are made is fully capable of absorbing that violation without consequence, precisely because the legal framework itself is subordinated to the strategic imperatives it is ostensibly designed to regulate.

 

Within this configuration, the distinction between lawful and unlawful conduct becomes secondary to the question of manageability, for what matters is not whether a statement signals an intention to commit acts prohibited under the laws of armed conflict, but whether that statement can be rearticulated in a manner that preserves institutional continuity. The law, in this sense, does not restrain power; it accompanies it, providing the vocabulary through which its excesses can be reclassified, deferred, or rendered invisible.

 

It is here that the convergence with Schlapp’s justification of civilian death and Trump’s casual invocation of further bombardment becomes unmistakable, for all three operate within the same discursive field in which violence no longer requires moral justification, but merely procedural accommodation. The killing of children is not denied, but rationalised; the denial of surrender is not condemned, but linguistically managed; the prospect of further strikes is not weighed, but trivialised. Each instance reveals a different register of the same logic, one that does not simply permit violence, but normalises its articulation to such an extent that its expression ceases to generate institutional crisis.

 

To call this rhetoric is to participate in the concealment. What is being observed is doctrine, not in the formal sense of codified strategy, but in the more consequential sense of a governing rationality that organises how violence is thought, spoken, and enacted, and which, once exposed, makes clear that the distance between what is said and what is done is not a gap to be interrogated, but a continuity to be recognised.

 

 

4. Culture as continuity, not exception

What is being revealed in these statements is not a collapse of standards, nor a temporary descent into rhetorical barbarism, but the exposure of a political culture in which violence is not merely permitted, but foundational, a culture that has for decades required the constant production of moral language in order to obscure the material realities it generates, and which now, with increasing frequency, dispenses with that language altogether because it no longer needs to pretend.

 

To continue isolating figures such as Trump, Hegseth, or Schlapp as though they represent a deviation from an otherwise principled political tradition is to participate in a fiction that has become intellectually untenable, for it requires the wilful erasure of a historical record that is neither ambiguous nor contested in its broad outline, a record in which the United States has repeatedly projected force across the globe under shifting justifications, while producing outcomes that, stripped of their rhetorical covering, amount to destruction on a vast scale. Vietnam was not an accident, Iraq was not a miscalculation, Afghanistan was not a misunderstanding, and Libya was not a humanitarian intervention gone wrong; each was an expression of a consistent logic in which the assertion of power takes precedence over the lives it displaces or extinguishes (Chomsky, 2003; Blum, 2014).

 

What Trump represents is not rupture, but disclosure. What Hegseth articulates is not extremism, but candour. What Schlapp expresses is not ignorance, but the distilled form of a hierarchy that has always structured the relationship between the United States and those it designates as targets of intervention. The insistence that these figures are uniquely dangerous serves a convenient purpose, for it allows the system that produces them to remain intact, repositioning the problem as one of personality rather than structure, of tone rather than content, of deviation rather than continuity.

 

There is no doubt that Trump is a deranged narcissist, a criminal accused of sexual relations with underage girls, rape, paedophilia, prostitution, corruption, and a catalogue of other criminal acts; yet Americans and their European proxies continue to advance the idea that he is an aberration, thereby sustaining the fiction that those who preceded him embodied some higher standard of graciousness, dignity, or integrity. This fiction collapses immediately when placed against the historical record of the presidency itself. Bill Clinton, still recoded within liberal memory as a statesman, leaves office marked not only by impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice, but by credible allegations of sexual misconduct and exploitation (Office of the Independent Counsel, 1998). George W. Bush presides over the invasion of Iraq under demonstrably false pretences, a war that results in the deaths of one million Iraqis and the destruction of an entire state structure (Guardian, 2016). Barack Obama, elevated to the status of moral corrective, institutionalises drone warfare across multiple theatres, normalising extrajudicial killing, including of civilians, under the bureaucratic language of counterterrorism (Scahill, 2013). Even those figures positioned as embodiments of stability, such as Ronald Reagan, remain entangled in the Iran–Contra affair, a covert operation that directly violated both domestic and international law (Walsh, 1993). These are not aberrations within otherwise clean administrations; they are expressions of a continuity in which criminality, whether juridical or moral, is absorbed into the functioning of power itself.

 

The fact remains that, apart from a marginal few, the rest of the United States presidents, in one form or another, are not fundamentally different from Trump; what differs is not the substance of their conduct, but the discipline with which it is narrated. The pattern of external violence is neither disputed nor obscure. From Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, from the destruction of Libya to ongoing operations in Syria, and now the assault on Iran, the United States has repeatedly projected force beyond its borders, leaving behind societies fractured, populations displaced, and infrastructures destroyed, all under shifting justifications that dissolve upon inspection (Blum, 2013; Chomsky, 2004; Vine, 2020; Congressional Research Service, 2022).

 

Measured against this record, even the most extreme historical comparisons cease to function as moral boundary markers. While Nazi Germany caused the deaths of 11–17 million people and is conventionally presented as one of the most brutal regimes in world history, the United States, ostensibly ‘advanced’ as a symbol of justice, democracy and freedom, has, since its inception as an independent state, instigated over 569 conflicts worldwide, comprising military interventions (469), major wars (20) and CIA covert operations (80), and has, directly and indirectly, caused the deaths of over 50,000,000 civilians (Congressional Research Service, 2022; Johnson, 2004; Prados, 2006; Bacevich, 2016; Leitenberg, 2006).

 

These are not discrete episodes that can be isolated and explained away; they form a continuous trajectory in which war is not the exception to policy but one of its primary instruments.

 

This phenomenon is neither accidental nor designed, but arises from a political nature that can be traced back to the founding cultural identity of the United States. That identity is not abstract; it is historical, material, and violent in its formation. The United States emerges through the dispossession and near-erasure of Indigenous populations, a process that cannot be described as anything other than genocide, followed by the institutionalisation of slavery as an economic and social foundation, and the subsequent reproduction of racial hierarchy in different legal and political forms (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2015). The language of freedom, so central to American self-representation, is therefore structurally entangled with domination, for it has historically functioned alongside, rather than in opposition to, systems of exclusion and violence. Even its most celebrated principles reveal this contradiction. The constitutional right to bear arms is presented as a safeguard of liberty, yet it presupposes a social order in which the capacity for violence is normalised at the level of the citizen, raising the question of what conception of civilisation requires the perpetual readiness to kill in order to sustain itself. Likewise, the national ritual of Thanksgiving, framed as a moment of gratitude and origin, rests upon a narrative that obscures the subsequent extermination and dispossession of the very Indigenous populations whose ‘hospitality’ it commemorates, transforming a history of violence into a myth of mutuality.

 

To isolate Trump within this continuum is therefore to misrecognise the nature of the system. He is not the rupture; he is the exposure. What distinguishes him is not that he embodies something new, but that he articulates, without the customary restraint, a political culture in which violence, both external and internal, has long been embedded, normalised, and justified. The insistence on his exceptionalism serves only to protect that culture from the scrutiny it demands, allowing a structure of power forged in conquest, sustained through intervention, and reproduced through successive administrations to present itself as momentarily corrupted rather than historically continuous.

 

This is why the language matters, not because it is unusually offensive, but because it is unusually honest. When the killing of children is justified as preferable to their continued existence within a cultural form deemed inferior, what is being stated explicitly is what has long been implied in policy. When the denial of ‘quarter’ is invoked, what is being expressed is not a misunderstanding of military terminology, but a willingness to suspend even the minimal constraints that international law claims to impose. When the bombardment of a sovereign territory is described as something that may be repeated ‘just for fun’, what is revealed is not recklessness, but the degree to which violence has been internalised as an unremarkable instrument of statecraft.

 

This is not a question of American hypocrisy, as though the problem lay in the failure to live up to declared values, but of American consistency, for the values in question have always functioned as instruments of legitimation rather than constraints on action. Democracy, human rights, and international order have operated less as principles to be upheld than as languages through which intervention is rendered acceptable, selectively invoked when useful, quietly discarded when inconvenient, and now, in this moment of exposure, increasingly abandoned in favour of a more direct assertion of power that no longer seeks validation beyond its own capacity to act.

 

To speak, therefore, of a ‘fall’ from American ideals is to misrecognise the nature of those ideals, for it assumes that they possessed a substantive reality independent of the practices they accompanied, when in fact their primary function has been to provide the moral infrastructure through which those practices could be sustained. The removal of the mask does not mark the degeneration of a system; it marks the point at which its underlying logic becomes impossible to deny, even for those who have long benefited from believing in its illusions.

 

 

5. The collapse of legitimacy and the exposure of Western complicity

Once this continuity is recognised, the entire edifice through which the United States, and by extension its Western allies, have sought to legitimise their global conduct begins to unravel, not gradually, but decisively, for what collapses is not a single claim, but an entire architecture of self-representation that has depended upon the systematic separation of what is said from what is done.

 

The outrage now directed at Trump by political elites across NATO states is therefore neither principled nor transformative, but defensive, for what has been disrupted is not merely diplomatic etiquette, but the very mechanism through which Western power has historically sustained its moral alibi. Trump’s offence, in this regard, is not that he has introduced violence into policy, but that he has articulated it without restraint, stripping away the language of ‘rules-based order’, ‘collective security’, and ‘human rights’ that has long functioned to obscure the material realities of intervention, occupation, and destruction. The discomfort expressed by European leaders does not arise from a rejection of these practices, but from the loss of the rhetorical distance that once allowed them to participate in, endorse, or remain silent about them while maintaining the appearance of normative delusional superiority.

 

To condemn Trump while preserving the system that produced him is not opposition, but evasion. It is an attempt to restore the mask, not dismantle the structure beneath it.

 

The claim to a ‘rules-based international order’, so frequently invoked by NATO governments, is revealed under these conditions to be less a system of universal norms than a selective instrument, applied rigorously to adversaries and flexibly to allies, invoked loudly when useful and quietly disregarded when it obstructs strategic objectives. What is presented as order is, in practice, hierarchy; what is described as legality is, in operation, discretion; what is framed as collective security is, in substance, the consolidation of power within a bloc that reserves to itself the authority to define, interpret, and, when necessary, suspend the very rules it claims to uphold.

 

This is why the exposure effected by Trump is so destabilising, not because it alters the behaviour of the United States or its allies and proxies, but because it renders that behaviour more difficult to narrate within the established moral framework. When the language of justification collapses into the language of assertion, when bombing can be discussed ‘for fun’, when the denial of quarter can be publicly entertained, when the killing of children can be rationalised without hesitation, the distance between Western self-image and Western practice becomes impossible to sustain without a degree of bad faith that even its own proponents struggle to maintain.

 

The complicity of European states, therefore, is not incidental, nor can it be reduced to passive alignment with US policy, for these states are active participants in the reproduction of this order, whether through direct military involvement, logistical support, diplomatic cover, or the persistent reinforcement of the narratives through which such actions are legitimised. Their current discomfort does not absolve them; it implicates them, for it reveals that their objection lies not in the violence itself, but in the manner of its articulation.  Not to mention, their media, through a language engineered not simply to mislead but to reverse reality itself, systematically recodes an American–Israeli war on Iran as ‘Iran’s war’, alongside a repertoire of similarly duplicitous formulations, a calculated inversion that recasts the aggressor as the victim and the victim as the aggressor, erases agency, manufactures ambiguity, and thereby displaces responsibility at the very point where it ought to be named.

 

What is collapsing, then, is not merely American credibility, but Western credibility as such, for the distinction between the United States and its allies has always been one of degree and presentation, not of principle. The same structures of power, the same hierarchies of value, and the same readiness to deploy force under the cover of moral language traverse the Atlantic, binding together a political formation that has long relied on the belief that its violence is qualitatively different, more restrained, more justified, more necessary, than that of others.

 

That belief is no longer sustainable. What remains is a system exposed in its own terms, in which the invocation of democracy, justice, and international order functions less as a description of reality than as a residue of a discourse that can no longer fully contain the practices it was designed to legitimise. The anger directed at Trump is, in this sense, the anger of those who recognise that the mask has been removed not by external critique, but from within, and that once removed, it cannot be restored without acknowledging the very deception it was designed to conceal.

 

However, if the preceding analysis is taken seriously, the conclusion is difficult to avoid: the United States, functioning as the principal vehicle of institutionalised terrorism on a global scale, constitutes not an aberrant actor within the international system, but one of its most destabilising forces, sustained not by legitimacy but by the continuous projection of power. Yet its Achilles’ heel remains its financial architecture, the apparent stability of which is far less secure than it appears. The petrodollar system, long treated as the foundation of American hegemony, operates simultaneously as its condition of possibility and its point of vulnerability, for it binds global energy markets to US monetary dominance while generating the very geopolitical tensions that increasingly threaten to dislodge it. In this sense, it functions less as a guarantee of permanence than as an imperial liability, an Achilles’ heel embedded within the structure it sustains.

 

Historical precedent offers little comfort to such formations. The Neo-Assyrian Empire, widely regarded as one of the most formidable and brutal imperial systems of the ancient world, collapsed solely through external coalition, culminating in the alliance of the Iranian-Medes and the Semitic Babylonians, who, in 612 BCE, brought about the fall of Nineveh and the end of Assyrian power . What rendered this possible was not symmetry of power, but the coordination of forces that had previously existed in fragmentation. The lesson is not historical analogy for its own sake, but structural recurrence: empires that extend themselves through sustained violence generate the conditions of their own opposition, and once that opposition coheres, decline accelerates.

 

What follows is therefore not a matter of interpretation but of necessity. The Non-Aligned World must move beyond fragmentation and dependency and cohere into a unified political and strategic formation capable of confronting and dismantling the structures through which the United States sustains its global dominance, most notably the petrodollar system that underwrites its capacity for continuous war and intervention, as demonstrated in antiquity when the coordinated alliance of the Medes and the Babylonians brought an end to the Assyrian Empire. Without such unity, resistance remains symbolic, easily absorbed, and ultimately ineffective, allowing the cycle of aggression, extraction, and destabilisation to persist without meaningful constraint. The lesson of history is unambiguous: empires do not recede through appeal or negotiation, but through the consolidation of forces capable of opposing them. What is required, therefore, is not alignment with power, but coordination against it.

 

And if the Arab states of the Persian Gulf persist in the illusion that this process will terminate with Iran, they repeat a familiar historical error, for it did not end with Iraq, nor with Libya, nor with Syria, each of which has already been subjected to varying degrees of intervention, fragmentation, or destruction, and there is no structural reason to assume that the trajectory halts here. The logic of expansion does not recognise limits; it advances until it encounters resistance. Those who align themselves with it in the expectation of exemption do not escape its consequences, but merely defer them, positioning themselves not outside the cycle of intervention, but within its future horizon, alongside others such as Turkey and Pakistan, whose strategic significance renders them not immune, but increasingly exposed.

 

‘Either we become students of history, or we remain its victims.’

 

​

 

 

6. Conclusion: the end of the alibi

Today marks the twentieth day of the US–Israeli assault on Iran, not on the regime but on Iran itself, conducted under a range of textbook false pretences, including the prevention of the Islamic regime’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, the dismantling of its ballistic missile capability, and, above all, the purported ‘liberation’ of the Iranian nation from tyrannical rule; the sol-called liberation that only some naïve Iranian diaspora fell for it and assisted Americans and Israelis to instigate this war, which as predicted in neither way bring any form of liberation (Suren-Pahlav, 2026b). At its core, the objective of the United States remains what it has long been: the pillaging and looting of national, natural and mineral resources across Western Asia, while Israel seeks the removal of any impediment to its delusive project of ‘Greater Israel’, encompassing Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Iran, a design in formation for over four decades, grounded in the Bernard Lewis Plan (Suren-Pahlav, 2018). Although this regime was itself a Western and Israeli construction, intended to facilitate such a moment, the entity thus produced has proven resistant to elimination, sustained by a dual miscalculation: the overestimation of their own capacities and a fundamental misreading of the adversary with whom they initiated conflict (Suren-Pahlav, 2026c; 2026d). Consequently, the prospect emerges that the regime will endure, and in enduring, intensify its radicalism (Suren-Pahlav, 2026e), thereby imposing a condition in which Israelis remain in sustained insecurity until its eventual dismantlement, an outcome that is not predetermined but contingent upon political choice, for unless Israel abandons the expansionist project of ‘Greater Israel’, a project sustained by what can only be described as a delusional and politically infantile fantasy of permanence, accepts a two-state settlement within the internationally recognised 1967 borders, and reconstitutes itself as a state operating within the norms of international law rather than above them, it will continue to reproduce the very conditions that make its long-term stability impossible, for no oppressive order, whether in Iran or in occupied Palestine, persists indefinitely (Suren-Pahlav, 2025).

 

In the interim, what this war reveals, stripped of its alibis, is not an aberration, but the governing logic of the system itself. And so, there is nothing left to misinterpret. What has been exposed is not a deviation, not an excess, not a momentary rupture in an otherwise coherent moral order, but the operating logic of a system that has long relied on violence while insisting on its own virtue, and which now, having lost the discipline or the need to sustain that fiction, speaks with a clarity that renders denial intellectually dishonest and politically complicit.

 

The killing of children is justified. The language of annihilation is publicly invoked. The prospect of further destruction is discussed as casually as an afterthought. These are not anomalies. They are declarations. And once declared, they cannot be folded back into the exhausted vocabulary of ‘mistakes’, ‘misstatements’, or ‘unfortunate rhetoric’ without exposing the bad faith of those who continue to use such terms.

 

The claim that the United States stands for democracy is untenable. The claim that it acts as a force for justice is indefensible. The claim that it upholds an international order collapses under the weight of its own record. These are not controversial statements; they are the only conclusions that remain once the protective language surrounding US power is stripped away and its practices are allowed to speak for themselves.

 

What Trump has done, alongside figures such as Hegseth and Schlapp, is not to corrupt this system, but to articulate it without restraint, to abandon the moral choreography that once allowed its violence to be narrated as reluctant, measured, or necessary. The outrage directed at him, particularly from within NATO and across Western political elites, is therefore not the outrage of principle, but the panic of exposure, for he has not violated the rules of the system, he has made them visible, and in doing so has collapsed the distance between what the West does and what it claims to be.

 

There is no refuge left in the language of values. There is no credibility left to salvage through repetition. There is no distinction left to maintain between excess and norm, between deviation and continuity. What remains is a structure of power that kills, justifies, and repeats, and which now, for the first time in decades, does so without even the minimal effort to persuade.

 

To continue to speak of legitimacy under these conditions is not analysis; it is complicity. And to recognise this structure without naming it for what it is does not constitute neutrality, but participation in the very language that allows it to persist.

 

The mask is not slipping. It is gone.

 

 

Footnotes:

1 – The most damning illustration is the genocide in Gaza: the very international court the West claims as the pinnacle of legal order, once it issues arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, is not simply ignored, but openly defied, as the same actors move from indifference to active participation in the genocide and ethnic cleansing that has been imposed upon occupied Palestine for over seventy years (UN News, 2024a; 2024b).

 

 

References:

• Aitken, P. (2026) White House official suggests Iran's oil can alleviate supply crisis. Available at: https://www.newsweek.com/white-house-official-suggests-irans-oil-alleviate-supply-crisis-11639544 (Accessed: 19 March 2026).

• American Historical Review (1896) ‘Volume information’, American Historical Review, 2(1), pp. 12–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Blum, W. (2013) America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy: The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else. London: Zed Books.

• Chomsky, N. (2004) Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. New York: Metropolitan Books.

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