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I have been watching Al Jazeera English for years now. Amidst the thousands of news channels that have popped up in recent years, I preferred it over others for a simple reason: wider network coverage on issues that pertain to the Global South – unlike Western news channels, which have largely become propaganda arms of Western empires.

However, I must admit I’ve seen a shift in Al Jazeera English’s news coverage over the last two to three weeks. Unlike its handling of the Gaza-Israel conflict, or for that matter the Lebanon-Israel one, its coverage of the Iran war has been dismal at best and propagandist at worst.

The images and videos it has been airing in this war are meant to showcase the power of Israel and the United States – how effectively they can destroy Iranian targets. Compare that to what they did during the Gaza war: a constant feed showing the suffering of Gazans (and I still commend them for doing such a good job when, for most networks, Gaza was just a footnote). But here, there’s almost no suffering shown of Iranian civilians. We aren’t shown the horrors of war on the ground in Iran – instead, it’s a continuous barrage of Israeli and American war footage highlighting how efficiently these killing machines work.

Back in June 2025, or even prior to that, Al Jazeera wasn’t allowed to broadcast from Israeli territory or the West Bank – their cameras were fixed on Israeli cities, showing Iranian missiles raining down. But in this war – even though their correspondents are present, at least in the West Bank – we see almost nothing. All at the excuse that the Israeli war censor prohibits showing these images, as if they didn’t do exactly that earlier.

Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt on that one. But lately, Al Jazeera airs a lot of programs from midnight to early mornings in West and South Asia, where much of the news coverage and discussions come straight out of the Washington studio. In all these programs, the tone is biased, painting a sympathetic picture of the US as if it’s bravely fighting evil. For example, in today’s show titled ‘This is America,’ broadcast from Washington DC, the program opened like this: “Hello, this is America, a friend to many Gulf nations…” – asserting just how vital the US is to the Gulf. This is happening at a particular moment when conversations in the Global South are shifting, and many people in the Gulf are openly questioning the presence of American forces in their countries. These nations are mostly run by families loyal to the US, so they’re fearful that their populations might revolt against them – especially as their governments tilt toward Israel, a country not looked upon positively in the Muslim world. In this period, Al Jazeera seems to be doing that job: reminding Gulf populations how important America is to them.

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And in another program where the host began by noting that Gulf states have invested billions in the US and asking where the relationship between the Gulf and US goes from here, she introduced her two guests: a former CIA official and a US ambassador to Bahrain. Their conversation was solely meant to degrade Iran and show the world how evil it is. What struck me most was how the CIA official went at length to argue that Gulf Arab nations have no real alternative but to stay dependent on the United States. He trashed the options the host threw at him – China and Russia – and argued at length how the US is indispensable to the Gulf, and how Gulf states should not even think about breaking this relationship.

Lately, I’ve been talking to a lot of my friends who express disbelief at Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Iran war. In fact, a friend suggested a few days ago that Indian media has better coverage of the Iran war than Al Jazeera. But it’s not just the coverage itself that interests me. I think – and I believe – that Gulf nations, in conjunction with the US, are using Al Jazeera as a propaganda arm, knowing full well that a huge audience in this region still trusts and watches the channel. I will update this article as and when I find more examples from their coverage.

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Language has always fascinated me; it reveals a lot about the person who is using it – what sort of words one chooses, what tone one uses, and in what context. Even for a person like me, a nobody, it matters. I think a lot about what word to use. If I use this word, how would I sound, or more accurately how will I be translated, perceived by others. It is within this context that I want to return to some of the language that has been used in the last few days by people who matter. Wartime language can sometimes be careless, emotions run high and words slip out, but leaders who run the show should be careful with that.

I analyze this language within the premise that the United States set out to start this war – not Israel (what else can you expect from Benjamin Netanyahu). After all he has been for decades now using some of the most abhorrent language against Arabs, Muslims and Iranians, at least in his Hebrew speeches.

Let us go back for a moment to December 2025, when Iranians were protesting on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere, and Donald J. Trump – the Supreme Leader of the United States – wrote on social media that “Help is on its way.” The suggestion was quite clear: the people of Iran needed help, and the United States was ready to provide it. It was presented almost as a moral cause, a noble undertaking – getting rid of the evil people in Iran who had, in Trump’s words, “for decades committed horrible crimes against the Iranian people.” What a noble thing to do, one might have thought – the United States stepping in to rescue ordinary Iranians from their rulers. And of course there is always that familiar story quietly in the background — the White Man’s burden, though in this case perhaps the orange man’s burden – the responsibility to step in and save poor Iranians from themselves.

Fast forward two months.

The United States, in collaboration with Israel, attacked Iran indiscriminately using Tomahawk missiles and aerial bombs that do not differentiate between military and civilian targets, killing hundreds of people – women, children, paramedics and ordinary civilians. The very people that the Supreme Leader of the United States had two months earlier promised to help.

Why am I talking about this? The idea is simply to give a brief background before returning to the question I set out in the beginning – language.

Among many other things that Trump has said in the last few days, I want to take you to March 10, 2026. While speaking to Republican lawmakers in Florida he described the Israeli-US military strikes against Iran as a “short-term excursion” and even a “little excursion.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines excursion as “a short journey made for pleasure, especially one that has been organized for a group of people,” or “a short period of trying a new or different activity.”

Two words here stand out – pleasure and activity – and they are the operative words in this definition.

Pleasure suggests enjoyment, satisfaction, something one derives happiness from. Activity suggests an undertaking, a task, something one simply does. When the bombing of a country begins to appear in the language of pleasure and activity, something important has already happened in the imagination. War begins to sound less like violence and more like an undertaking, a temporary outing, almost a recreational act. And the people who are killed in that undertaking slowly disappear from the imagination.

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If killing hundreds of Iranians can be described as an excursion – an activity that produces pleasure – then one might begin to question the claim that Trump was somehow pushed into this war by Benjamin Netanyahu, something earlier American presidents had largely avoided. It would seem far more likely that he walked into it willingly. After all he believes in the same biblical imagination that many of his allies do – his ambassador to Israel, his colleague and friend Lindsey Graham, and Senator Ted Cruz – the idea that protecting Israel is not merely geopolitics but something close to a religious duty.

More importantly, there is another language that appears in Benjamin Netanyahu’s speeches – the biblical reference to Amalek. In the Hebrew Bible Amalek is not merely an enemy tribe. The command associated with Amalek is to remember what they did and ultimately to blot them out completely. In other words, Amalek represents the enemy whose destruction is imagined as total. When this reference appears in contemporary political speech, it carries that memory with it. The enemy in this language is not someone to be negotiated with, or even simply defeated in battle. The enemy is someone who must disappear. If Muslims and Arabs are placed within that imagination – as Netanyahu’s rhetoric has suggested – then violence against them begins to appear not merely as war but as something closer to a sacred obligation. And if they can be killed like cattle, then perhaps war itself begins to look exciting – an adrenaline rush, a spectacle, something that produces pleasure of its own. War pornography.

Trump is not alone in this language. His Secretary of War – a man who seems to take great pride in calling himself that – has used language that is equally revealing. In his press conferences he has referred to Iranians as “rats.” This is an old technique of war. Before people are killed, they are first turned into something else – animals, creatures that need extermination. Rats are not people. They are pests. Such language dehumanizes people before the bombs begin to fall.

More recently Trump said this in a social media post:

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them.”

Pause for a moment and look at this language.

What does it mean to call someone a deranged scumbag?

The word deranged suggests madness – someone irrational, beyond reason, someone with whom dialogue is pointless. But scumbag does something else. It does not simply insult. It degrades. A scumbag is something filthy, something beneath dignity, something that provokes disgust rather than empathy.

Put the two together and the transformation is complete. The enemy is no longer human. He is mad and filthy at the same time. Once that transformation happens, killing him no longer appears morally troubling. It begins to look justified, even necessary.

And then there is the claim attached to this language – that these people have been killing innocent people around the world for 47 years.

Perhaps that claim also deserves a pause.

Over the past several decades the United States has fought wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere that together have taken millions of lives. Even the post-9/11 wars alone have caused close to a million deaths, including hundreds of thousands of civilians. These numbers do not even include those who died later because hospitals collapsed, infrastructure was destroyed, or entire societies were displaced.

Whether one takes pride in this war, or pleasure, or simply looks away, one thing seems clear: the United States never really cared about the Iranian people. It was a beautiful fiction sold to Iranians and to the rest of the world. But language reveals more than its speakers sometimes intend.

When Netanyahu invokes Amalek, it does not refer only to Muslims or Arabs. In its biblical sense Amalek can mean anyone who stands outside the chosen community. Today it may be one group. Tomorrow it may be another. In other words, Trump, Hegseth and the other cheerleaders of the Israeli regime today may one day discover that they too belong to the category of Amalek. History has shown many times that the language used to destroy others eventually circles back.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
—W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming" (1919)

Yeats wrote those lines in early 1919, right after World War I had left Europe in ruins and the Irish War of Independence was breaking out. The old order was collapsing and chaos felt inevitable.

The same feeling grips the Gulf today. At a time when the Middle East is facing a litmus test of sorts – which direction it wants to go – Bahrain presented and introduced a draft resolution on behalf of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, along with Jordan, in the UN Security Council. The truth is, let me state it as clearly as I can: the GCC countries find themselves at a crossroads where they cannot decide what direction to take.

From where I sit, it appears they have two main choices – and I’m not sure whether they even want to make that call or not:

a) They can go beyond diplomatic condemnations and join the war alongside Israel and the United States – and while I’m writing this, I can’t fathom the idea of them fighting alongside Israel. Not that it’s impossible, but it’s difficult and they know it.

b) They can continue to remain enraged, issue condemnations and do nothing more than that.

They do have a third choice, though: put pressure on the United States to stop attacking Iran and perhaps that is what Iran’s game is.

I want to try to answer these three questions one by one in this essay.

Let us take the first proposition: that the GCC joins the war and starts bombing Iran alongside its allies, Israel and the US, who have been bombing Iran since February 28, 2026. I want to look at this question from two different perspectives –one from the Iranian side and the other from the streets of the Middle East.

From an Iranian perspective, it makes little or no difference to Iran if these countries join the war. After all, what are they going to bring to the table that the United States and Israel are lacking? They can bomb, but what difference does it make? The US and Israel are doing that already – what difference do a few thousand more bombs make when the place is already being bombed a thousand times a day? Iran seems to have calculated this risk and come to the conclusion that they are ready for all contingencies.

But let us flip that idea: if they do join the war, what does it mean for the Arab streets? There is growing anger in the Arab streets that their governments have not done anything for the Palestinian people – in fact, many think their governments are colluding with Israel, and that anger is simmering in the streets. The governments in these countries are mostly monarchies – dictatorships – and the anger on the streets can directly affect them. Some analysts believe it would end their rule in these countries – it would be regime change, but not the one the United States had expected.

And honestly, joining actively looks pretty unlikely anyway. The Abraham Accords normalization was always more about economic deals, trade, tech, and some shared security – not turning into a full-blown military alliance bombing Iran together. It was never sold as “let’s team up to fight Tehran head-on” and if the GCC suddenly starts dropping bombs alongside Israel, the public backlash would be massive – way beyond what they’ve already got simmering. These governments know that crossing that line could blow up in their faces fast.

Now let us look at the second option: these countries will keep issuing condemnations and nothing more than that. By all means, this looks like the possible direction they would want to continue. They are aware that they cannot anger their population any more than they already have, but that begs a difficult question: can they withstand daily attacks from Iran and the humiliation it brings? The Gulf dream is based on the idea of peace and security – an idea that most of these countries have successfully sold to the rest of the world for years now. Iran is puncturing that bubble, and the United States, which has de facto been the guarantor of that security, has betrayed the GCC in their hour of need.

This is exactly where the Bahrain resolution comes in – it’s classic symbolic posturing. They push a strong condemnation through the UN, and get it passed with big co-sponsorship, but there’s zero real enforcement to these resolutions. True, It lets them look tough on paper, preserve that shiny “peace and security” brand for investors and the world, while quietly still relying on US protection.

Perhaps these countries – or at least conversations in these countries – have shifted in the way they look at the United States. They have understood that Israel means a lot more to the United States, and these countries are just convenient investments that can be discarded anytime like a bad business. Make no mistake: these countries have themselves understood that in this war, but they have put their foot where it shouldn’t have been and now find themselves in a difficult position.

The third option these countries have is to tell the United States that it is time for them to leave the Middle East for good. But do they have the courage to irritate a madman in the White House – who thus far has shown no signs of stability when it comes to war and peace? Look at how Trump has flip-flopped on this Iran mess already – he promises quick wins one day, then threatens “twenty times harder” strikes the next. He has made it clear that he has no clear endgame. What is more surprising is that not only Trump, but the White House also has no idea how this war is going to end. In a recent question to press secretary Karoline Leavitt asking for the reason Trump joined the war, she seemed to suggest that the president had a feeling that Iran was going to attack the US. Wars are not fought on feelings – if this is the lunacy we are dealing with, then god help us.

Finally, GCC countries have been trying to diversify anyway – in the recent past they have shown interest in doing trade with China, they have also shown their interest in BRICS – basically, they do not want to be stuck with Washington only. But let’s be real: US bases are all over the Gulf and the security pacts run deep, therefore a full break would be a risky move. Yes, pressuring the US to exit sounds good on paper, but pulling it off without getting burned is a different story.

Iran is aware that this game will go on and they can ignore these resolutions as long as the war is ongoing – after all, Israel has ignored numerous such resolutions in the past three years. Iran, on the other hand, will try to use plausible deniability on some of the attacks that it carries out in the GCC countries, such as the ones we saw in Oman yesterday – a drone strike that hit Salalah port oil facilities and set fuel tanks ablaze.

A few days ago Donald Trump brazenly demanded veto power over Iran’s new Supreme Leader while talking to the press. He then went on to say, and has since been saying, that his war of choice is ahead of schedule. He also claimed that Iran has been asking for talks. Which Iranian officials have vehemently denied, in fact they have said they are not interested in negotiations with United States. This kind of hyperbole is nothing strange for Trump. If he has shown anything during his tenure as president, it is his ability to lie – the liar-in-chief of the United States.

Now the Iranians have elected Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the assassinated Supreme Leader and in doing so they have told Trump to go fuck himself in the clearest terms. Trump called him unacceptable. They picked the one man he hated most to show the world that Iran is sovereign and no one dictates terms to it. Mojtaba does not have the traditional qualifications of becoming a Supreme Leader, yet they made him. They ignored both his qualifications and his father’s instructions against it, only to tell US that no one tells them what to do.

But in selecting Mojtaba they essentially told Trump that they don’t care what he says or thinks. Trump has said a lot since then, but one thing is certain that he is desperately looking for an off-ramp. And if reports are to be believed, The Washington Post has reported that Israel is also looking for an off-ramp, but Iran is essentially saying that you don’t get to decide that. From an Iranian perspective, Israel and the US started the war and Iran will decide when to end it. Iran has a plan and they are going according to that, they will keep targeting GCC countries as long as those countries house US bases.

In Mojtaba Khamenei, the US now faces a leader harder and more IRGC-embedded than his father. And interestingly enough, the Iranian people and the armed forces have overwhelmingly pledged their allegiance to the man whom Trump said would be unacceptable. That is not to say that everyone in Iran believes he will be good for the country. Iran is not a homogeneous country – no country is. Not all Americans approve of Trump, or for that matter not all Israelis approve of the war criminal Netanyahu. But one thing is clear: Iran has proved that its system has continuity. At the same time, calculations in Tehran may change as well – this all depends on whether Iran will survive the current onslaught. The only real barrier between Iran and the nuclear bomb was Ayatollah Khamenei himself, whose long-standing fatwa declared nuclear weapons haram and forbidden under Islamic law. Since the US assassinated him right at the beginning of this war, Mojtaba might very well revisit that fatwa – or set it aside entirely – in the name of regime survival and deterrence.

And that continuity matters, because despite the rhetoric coming out of Washington and Tel Aviv, regime change in Tehran is unlikely. Removing the Islamic Republic would almost certainly require a large-scale ground invasion. It is difficult to imagine the United States undertaking such an operation given the enormous military, political, and domestic costs involved. The more important question therefore is not regime change in Iran, but the broader regional consequences of the war – particularly for Israel and the Gulf Arab states.

Iran’s response has been asymmetric and regionally focused. Rather than limiting the conflict to Israeli territory, Tehran has expanded the battlefield across the region. Missile and drone strikes have targeted U.S. military assets and infrastructure connected to Washington’s presence in the Gulf. Some attacks reportedly hit areas linked to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, while others affected oil facilities in Saudi Arabia and infrastructure in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and Oman.

The economic implications are immediate. Gulf states rely heavily on stable energy exports, trade routes, tourism, and imported goods. When ports, airports, or oil infrastructure are disrupted, the effects are felt quickly. This creates pressure on governments whose legitimacy rests largely on their ability to deliver stability and prosperity.

From Tehran’s perspective, the strategy appears deliberate. Iran has tried to shift the costs of the conflict outward, particularly onto U.S. allies in the region. Rather than confronting the United States directly, Iran relies on drones, missiles, and allied militias to stretch the conflict and impose costs over time.

Several proxy actors have been activated as part of this approach. Hezbollah has opened a front from Lebanon against Israel. Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq have targeted U.S. bases. The Houthis have threatened shipping routes connected to the Red Sea. Taken together, this resembles a strategy of attrition. The aim appears to be to stretch the war, exhaust defensive systems like Patriot and THAAD interceptors, and increase political and economic pressure on states aligned with Washington.

For Israel, this means the conflict is unlikely to remain limited to Gaza or even to Israel’s borders. The opening of additional fronts and the involvement of Iranian allies risks turning the war into a prolonged regional confrontation. Even if Israel retains military superiority, sustaining multiple fronts over time carries heavy economic and security costs.

As far as for the Gulf monarchies, the situation may be even more complicated. On one hand, their security systems remain deeply tied to cooperation with the United States. On the other hand, hosting American bases now exposes them to direct retaliation from Iran. Facilities in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have already been targeted or placed under threat.

This raises an uncomfortable question for Gulf governments – whether American bases still guarantee security, or whether they have become magnets for retaliation.

The Gulf states now face a truly difficult situation – they are literally caught between the devil and the deep sea. They have two main options, and neither looks good for them. They could attack Iran and fully join the US-Israel war, but most of these states are family dictatorships. They know their people would turn against them in outrage, potentially causing their regimes to fall like a pack of cards. Or they could ask the US to vacate the Middle East and remove its bases, but that too is a difficult and risky option that would upend decades of security arrangements. At this stage, the only thing they can really do is issue condemnation statements against Iran while hoping the storm passes. But by the time this war ends – and if Iran survives, which I believe it will – this would mark the end of American hegemony in the Middle East. In a way, the loser in this war won’t be Israel, it won’t be Iran, but it will be the United States.

There is also a domestic dimension. In countries such as Bahrain, protests have appeared in Shia-majority areas following strikes near the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters and the killing of Khamenei. Security forces have responded with arrests and force, while Gulf Cooperation Council troops reportedly entered Bahrain to assist authorities. The situation echoes earlier moments in the region when external conflicts triggered internal political tensions.

If the war continues, similar pressures could emerge elsewhere. Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, where much of its oil infrastructure is located, has a significant Shia population. Iraq already hosts powerful Iranian-aligned militias. Lebanon is vulnerable because Hezbollah has entered the conflict. Even states such as Jordan could face domestic pressure because of economic strain and public anger over regional developments.

If Gulf states begin to conclude that hosting American forces brings as much risk as protection, they may start quietly reassessing their security arrangements. Some could seek adjustments to basing agreements or diversify partnerships with other powers, including European states or even China.

In the end, the Islamic Republic may well survive this war even if it emerges weakened. The assumption in Washington and Tel Aviv that pressure and escalation will produce regime change in Tehran may prove misplaced. Iran’s system has shown before that it can absorb shocks and continue functioning.

The more immediate consequences of this war may therefore appear not inside Iran, but across the region. Israel could find itself trapped in a prolonged multi-front conflict, while Gulf monarchies may discover that their close alignment with Washington carries far greater costs than they anticipated. American bases that were once seen as shields are now becoming targets, and governments that once relied on stability may soon find themselves managing unrest and economic disruption. Maximum pressure has become maximum embarrassment.

We are in the middle of a war, I must add, a war of choice, which the United States willingly took upon itself, not because Iran posed any direct threat to the American mainland but because Israel had President Trump rather firmly under its thumb. As Marco Rubio suggested the other day, it was Israel that took the lead and the United States followed. One might wonder why a global hegemon is taking cues from a state whose own moral footing in the modern world is almost zero. Not that the United States has any moral clarity either.

It is within this context that I want to examine the language we have heard in recent days.

In this piece I will look specifically at the words of Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, or as he himself seems to prefer, the Secretary of War – and that is precisely what he sounded like at the podium on March 4, 2026, when he was briefing the press. One wouldn’t, even mistakenly, take him as a statesman addressing a grave moment in international affairs, but something closer to a triumphant bully revelling in violence. His language was crude, vulgar, vile, and disturbingly orgasmic. He spoke about death and destruction not with gravity but with visible relish, romanticizing, rather eroticising, the horrors of war as though he were intoxicated by them – almost as if it gave him a thrill.

Let me look at some of the statements he made in that briefing in order to prove my point. Take for example how he chose to open:

“America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy… They are toast and they know it. Or at least soon enough they will know it. And we have only just begun to hunt, dismantle, demoralize, destroy, and defeat their capabilities.”

This language has no place in the truest sense of diplomatic language; it is rhetoric deeply rooted in the hatred of a people, in this case Iranians, but Muslims in general. How should one look at the words ‘decisively,’ ‘devastatingly,’ and ‘without mercy’? They sound like the words of an arrogant man who is drunk with a sense of orgasmic victory, the destruction of people whom he calls enemies, and finally he dismisses the concept of mercy, a concept that is supposed to temper power, outright. The message that he wanted to send is not merely that the United States is succeeding. The message is that it is succeeding brutally, and that brutality is something to boast about.

Now let me turn to the line that sets the tone for everything that follows:

“They are toast and they know it.”

‘Toast’ is not military terminology. He chose that word deliberately; he did not say that they are defeated, degraded, or strategically neutralized. ‘Toast’ as a word belongs to schoolyard taunts or locker-room bravado. It trivializes annihilation. An entire country’s military and leadership are reduced to something casually incinerated.

What follows is a breathless litany of destruction:

He said and I quote: “We have only just begun to hunt, dismantle, demoralize, destroy, and defeat their capabilities.”

Look at those words, grammatically they belong to the category of verbs, and in his briefing these verbs pile on top of each other: hunt, dismantle, demoralize, destroy. This is in no way careful language of strategy; it reads like someone savoring the process of breaking an enemy piece by piece.

He then went on to a fantasy of absolute, voyeuristic control from the sky – as if a predator looking for his prey. And I don’t use the word predator in any lighter vein. Hegseth describes the air campaign in obsessive detail:

“It means we will fly, all day, all night, day and night, finding, fixing, and finishing the missiles... Finding and fixing their leaders and their military leaders flying over Tehran, flying over Iran, flying over their capital, flying over the IRGC, Iranian leaders, looking up and seeing only US and Israeli air power every minute of every day until we decide it’s over. And Iran will be able to do nothing about it. ...picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long.”

This was, at least to me, the most pornographic imagery in his briefing. He went on this rant for some time trying to make the audience feel how powerful the United States is. The endless surveillance, the enemy forced to ‘look up’ in terror, are all the images of a predator looking from the skies at his victims, who are powerless and the predators omnipotent – “all day long.” He made the bombardment of Iranian cities and towns sound like an unending spectacle of control and violation. Hegseth should have also mentioned how the predator hovering above the skies of Minab was looking for his victims – 165 small girls in an elementary school – all because they believed the predator was negotiating with their country and there might be an ounce of morality left in him.

No, Pete, world leaders do not speak in the language of death and destruction all day long – but then one should know the difference when a bigot, a zealot, is given the podium to reassure the world; he would only turn it into a spectacle which gives him a rush, the rush that ecstasy gives to sexual predators. He then went on to celebrate the unfairness and cruelty as an American virtue. Here is what he said:

“Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight. And it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

One might ask whose rules Hegseth was talking about – the rules of a hegemon who has brought only death and destruction to people in the last seven or eight decades around the world. To name only a few from a long list: Vietnam War (1955–1975), Cambodian Civil War (1969–1975), Invasion of Grenada (1983), Bombing of Libya (1986), Invasion of Panama (1989), Gulf War (1990–1991), Kosovo War (1998–1999), War in Afghanistan (2001–2021), Iraq War (2003–2011), Libyan Intervention (2011), Syrian Civil War Intervention (2014–present), Yemeni Civil War Intervention (2015–present).

Look at the vulgar and depraved language he chose, “punching them while they’re down.” This is in no way a political leader’s language; it is a bully-boy’s language celebrating the kick of a fallen opponent. The emphatic “exactly how it should be” drips with sadistic satisfaction, as if mercy itself is weakness. What he was doing on that podium, while the press and the rest of the world were listening, was gloating over asymmetry, turning war-crime logic into patriotic swagger.

He then went on to mock the terror and corpses of the enemy (Iran). He said:

“Iran’s senior leaders are dead…The so-called governing council that might have selected a successor dead, missing, or cowering in bunkers, too terrified to even occupy the same room…That’s not great for morale…The Iranian Navy rests at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Combat ineffective, decimated, destroyed, defeated. Pick your adjective.”

The sarcasm – ‘so-called,’ ‘too terrified,’ ‘not great for morale,’ ‘pick your adjective’ – reeked of cruelty, mockery, and vileness – of a school bully who takes pride when he bullies the weak mates in his or her school. The use of adjectives felt compulsive, almost masturbatory in its repetition of destruction.

And finally he descended completely into the language of personal revenge.

“Looks like POTUS got him twice.” (on sinking the Solamani, evoking Soleimani) “Iran tried to kill President Trump and President Trump got the last laugh.”

How does one look at the phrase ‘the last laugh’? It belongs to playground feuds and revenge fantasies, not international conflicts. It reduces international conflict to the emotional logic of humiliation and payback. In this rhetoric war becomes not a tragic confrontation between nations but a story of settling scores. For those of us who believe war is one of humanity’s greatest tragedies – something we need to approach with sorrow even when it is unavoidable, Hegseth’s rhetoric feels obscene. Because beneath the sarcasm, beneath the bravado, beneath the lists of destruction, there is a disturbing impression that Pete Hegseth is not merely describing violence. He is enjoying it.

I recently read ’s Substack response to Mike Huckabee’s February 2026 interview with Tucker Carlson, and I agreed with much of his argument. He shows how religious language can enter foreign policy talk and make very extreme ideas sound normal and respectable. The interview spread quickly online and drew strong condemnation from Arab and Muslim nations. Still, the moment felt less about one ambassador and more about how familiar this rhetoric already feels in American politics. Statements that should shock us often pass with little reaction. The problem seems larger than one interview or one person and is tied to the wider environment where these ideas keep appearing and circulating.

Huckabee is not some lone fringe voice. Political figures such as Ted Cruz, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley have also used biblical language when talking about Israel. They often frame support in terms of divine promise or covenant, and these are people who have held or sought the highest offices in the United States. When leaders at this level use scripture to discuss borders, sovereignty, or military conflict, it cannot be treated as a minor rhetorical issue. It becomes part of mainstream political debate. This was clear when Huckabee responded to Tucker Carlson’s reference to Genesis 15:18 and the land ‘from the Nile to the Euphrates.’ When asked if Israel had a divine right to that territory, he said ‘it would be fine if they took it all,’ while adding that Israel is focused on defending its current land. Such caution does not remove the fact that expansive biblical claims are being normalized at an ambassadorial level, especially given the diplomatic backlash that followed the interview. It is easy to explain this only through voter incentives since white evangelical Christians remain a large and reliable voting bloc. Yet this explanation is incomplete. Many of these leaders have long public records shaped by evangelical Christianity, and their language often sounds like genuine conviction. Belief and political strategy seem to reinforce each other, and it would be naive to assume that faith plays no real role.

This does not mean most Americans support extreme territorial expansion or endless conflict. Public opinion has shifted in recent years and has become more divided. A February 2026 Gallup poll shows that for the first time in more than twenty five years more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis, and many people express doubts about unconditional support and feel tired of long wars after Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet politics does not always follow average opinion because highly motivated groups often have a louder voice than passive majorities. When an issue is treated as sacred it becomes harder to question without political risk. This helps explain why statements that sound shocking to some can pass with limited reaction in a political environment where religious language already feels familiar.

Conversations outside the region often present Israel as a single unified voice, which oversimplifies reality. Israeli society is far more complex than it is often shown. Far right politicians who openly support annexation or permanent control over Palestinian territories are real and influential, and their statements travel widely in international media. Yet polling inside Israel shows a mixed and often pessimistic picture. Support for a two state solution among Jewish Israelis is relatively low and many people doubt that lasting peace is likely, while full annexation mainly appeals to right wing voters rather than a clear majority. At the same time many citizens still support diplomatic agreements, regional cooperation, or security arrangements that stop short of full annexation. This internal debate matters because it reminds us that the loudest voices are not the only voices, even if they travel the furthest and receive the most attention.

The Huckabee interview also raised concerns about whether strong American support for Israel could pull the United States toward a wider conflict with Iran. Huckabee repeated the idea that Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies. This language echoes a long civilizational story in which Middle Eastern conflicts are framed as part of an ongoing religious struggle. When foreign policy is placed inside that story it begins to feel like a moral duty rather than a strategic choice. History shows how powerful this shift can be. Christian Europe once persecuted Jews through expulsions and violence, while many evangelicals in the United States today see Israel as central to biblical prophecy and a key ally in an end times narrative. When theology overlaps with national security, the line between faith and policy becomes harder to see and more difficult to question.

History makes this shift striking. Christian Europeans once persecuted Jews through expulsions and violence. Today many evangelicals in the United States and Christians in Europe see Israel as central to biblical prophecy and future expectation. This support places Israel inside a larger sacred story, and when that story overlaps with national security arguments the boundary between faith and policy becomes harder to see.

The problem becomes sharper when scripture is used to justify territorial claims. Saying that a land belongs forever to a specific people because of divine promise assumes we can clearly identify that people and interpret ancient texts for modern politics with certainty. The idea of a chosen people becomes complicated because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all trace their origins to Abraham and understand inheritance in different ways. If descent from Abraham becomes a basis for political legitimacy, then the question of who decides becomes unavoidable. Religious identity is shaped by faith, culture, and interpretation, not simple lineage. When politicians use these ideas to defend borders, personal belief moves into state power. The modern international system is meant to rest on law, citizenship, and equal rights rather than divine selection. If land is framed as a sacred entitlement, compromise becomes extremely difficult because a divine promise is seen as beyond negotiation.

All of this unfolds amid fears of a possible conflict between the United States and Iran, a direction Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long encouraged Washington to consider. American society still carries deep war fatigue after Iraq and Afghanistan, and many people worry about the cost and uncertainty of new wars. Yet reluctance can shift when security concerns are mixed with religious language, which can make confrontation feel inevitable or morally required. Huckabee’s claim that Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies shows how quickly this framing can move from belief into policy at a moment when escalation could carry serious consequences for both American interests and regional stability.

I had finished writing my scheduled essay and was about to publish it when I heard that Israel and the United States launched what they call a ‘pre-emptive strike on Iran.’ My essay was on a rejoinder to ’ piece “It would be fine if Israel took it all” – I shall post that soon.

So let me go straight to what I want to say about the ongoing war between US-Israel and Iran.

Before I go any further let me state this in the very beginning that time and again the United States has told the world that it doesn’t care about negotiations and that negotiations and diplomacy mean nothing to them.

Having Said that let me talk for some time about how we should see Trump as a leader. Perhaps he has taken the most important gamble in his presidency. In his address, which he published on Truth Social, he – like Netanyahu – stated that the objective of the war was regime change. And that is exactly what both of them aimed for in the opening salvo: a decapitation strike designed to take out the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Pezeshkian, and many other key figures in the leadership and armed forces.

What we know so far is that the Supreme Leader’s compound was hit – explosions were heard near his offices – but Khamenei himself appears to have been moved to a secure location beforehand, and there’s no confirmed word yet that he or the president were killed. To that extent, it is fair to say Trump appears to have suffered a major early setback in the very first instance – unless the US can reverse that calculation through sustained operations. The US and Israel are talking about days, perhaps weeks, of “major combat operations,” with Trump openly calling on Iranians to “take over your government” once the bombing stops, as if this were some liberation script from a bad Hollywood movie.

But let me go back to the negotiations for a minute. This is the second time in less than eight months that the United States has proved itself an unreliable negotiation partner. Just yesterday we were told, by Omani negotiators that, talks were reportedly “close to success” on limiting Iran’s nuclear program – yet Israel, with US backing, intervened to pre-empt diplomacy itself. The buildup was massive and the warnings were loud, but the moment a deal seemed possible, Israel struck Tehran as it had done in the June of 2025. It’s the same script that we saw before: promise talks, then strike when the other side believes them. How can anyone – any state, any movement – trust American word now? This isn’t leadership; it’s gangster diplomacy dressed up as pre-emption.

And let’s be clear that the stated goals are regime change, plain and simple. Trump said it outright - “the hour of your freedom is at hand,” urging Iranians to rise up while US and Israeli jets pound military sites, nuclear facilities, and leadership targets. Netanyahu echoes it, calling the operation a removal of an “existential threat” from the “terrorist regime.” But when you target the supreme leader’s offices and call for the people to overthrow their government mid-bombing, you’re not defending yourself - you’re attempting to engineer collapse from the air. This has all the ingredients to spill across borders – a regional fire that engulfs everyone.

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Iran had been for long saying that if it is attacked it will hit all the American bases in the region and it would be an all-out regional war. Why wouldn’t Iran do that, if one were to put oneself in Iran’s shoes? When you are facing an existential threat, the only logical conclusion for the Iranian regime will be to pull the entire region into it. So that is what we saw: attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan. Perhaps Oman is the only country in the GCC that hasn’t been attacked yet. We now know that the US 5th Fleet headquarters housed in Bahrain were struck – smoke rising, videos circulating of explosions near the base. Some reports suggest that Al Udeid in Qatar was also hit – though not yet confirmed – and we don’t have much information on what exactly was targeted in the other countries, but the missiles flew, interceptions happened, and the message landed.

Let us now turn back to US and Israel. There are reports that some missiles were fired at the USS Abraham Lincoln – now that is not something a scared country will do, and it is a major escalation. Again, there are reports of multiple impacts in Israel, but the Israeli military censor has made very clear to its citizens that no footage is to be shown to the world – no videos, no photos, nothing that might reveal the real damage or give comfort to the enemy. Classic control of the narrative: keep the home front calm while the bombs fall elsewhere.

Now why am I mentioning all this? Only to make an assumption that what Iran has done so far appears calibrated as a strong warning shot and messaging to the GCC countries, to the US, to Israel. No powerful and modern weapons were used in full force, no all-out barrage of their most advanced hypersonic missiles or swarms that could overwhelm defences completely. But it made it abundantly clear to them that if the need arises, it will not hold back anything. This was the warning shot: we can reach you, we can hurt your allies’ shiny cities and bases, we can turn your “secure” havens into war zones. Next time, it won’t be calibrated.

Now let me come back to Israel and US. Since the opening salvo did not give them the desired results – the supreme leader and president apparently survived, leadership intact enough to order retaliation – this strongly suggests this could become a protracted war. And if Iran turns it into a war of attrition for US and Israel, there is every chance that both Trump and Netanyahu will chicken out. Trump loves the tough talk, the big announcements on Truth Social, calling for Iranians to rise up like it’s 1989 all over again. But when the body bags start coming home, when oil prices spike through the roof because the Gulf is on fire, when his own voters start asking why American kids are dying for regime change in a country that never attacked the US homeland – will he have the stomach for months?

Iran knows this game. They’ve played it before – absorb the hits, bleed the aggressor slowly, let domestic pressure build in Washington and Tel Aviv. The US can bomb from afar, Israel can claim precision, but sustaining “major combat operations” (Trump’s words) against a country that refuses to fold quickly? That’s where gambles turn into quagmires. Diplomacy was discarded for this and now the bill is coming due, and it’s regional.

And let’s not forget what this war could mean for Trump personally, especially with the 2026 midterms looming just months away. Trump came back to power promising no endless wars, America First, focusing on the border and the economy – not shipping more American blood and treasure to the Middle East for regime change fantasies. But here we are again -with another Middle-East war. Polls have repeatedly shown that US voters are fed up with foreign entanglements and some MAGA voices are grumbling about why we’re fighting Israel’s battles again. Trump might think he’s playing the strongman card, rallying the base with decisive action, but history says otherwise: presidents who get bogged down overseas right before midterms usually pay a heavy price at the ballot box. This gamble isn’t just about Iran surviving the first strike - it’s about whether Trump survives politically when voters finally get their say.

This isn’t just about nukes or threats anymore, in fact, I would argue it never was, it’s about dragging everyone into the abyss because two leaders bet they could decapitate a regime from the sky and walk away heroes. History rarely rewards such arrogance.

I’ll finish that Owen Jones rejoinder soon. For now, this war demands we say it plainly: this isn’t pre-emption it’s predation and it’s already backfiring.

While I’m aware that this post is a little late but I believe it is necessary for me to write on. When I first listened to Mark Carney speak at Davos, a place where the world’s richest decide about the rest of us, I did not know what exactly I felt. I was not excited, but I was not dismissive either. The next morning, I asked my students to listen to the speech and we ended up talking about it, even though it wasn’t part of the lesson. I remember telling them I was unsure how to read it. At moments the speech sounded bold and honest. But at other moments I kept asking myself: what is actually new here? How should we read this moment?

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This is the question I want to raise.

If the so-called rules-based international order was always fragile, always selective, always unequal, then what exactly are we supposed to do with this “new” realization? Is it a real turning point, or simply a late acknowledgement of something the Global South has been saying for a very long time?

I want to think through this question step by step.

First, was this order ever truly neutral?

For many people in the Global South, the idea of a fair and universal system has always felt distant. We grew up hearing about free markets, multilateral cooperation, and human rights. Yet our experience with these institutions has always felt distant. Markets have largely been shaped to favor the West. Western interventions in the Global South have often been selective – driven by their own interests. And economic reforms have repeatedly been imposed on countries that fall outside what Carney would consider part of the core. So, when Carney described the old order as a “pleasant fiction,” I could not help thinking that for many societies it was never pleasant in the first place. It was simply reality.

Second, why does this realization come now?

This is the part that drew me in the most. For years, leaders and scholars from Asia, Africa and Latin America spoke about the risks of dependence on powerful countries and institutions. Often these warnings were dismissed as ideological or exaggerated. Now, as geopolitical tensions rise and even Western allies face pressure and uncertainty, the language has suddenly changed. It creates an uncomfortable feeling: the crisis appears real only when it reaches the Global North.

Third, who belongs in this new idea of “middle powers”?

Carney speaks about coalitions of like-minded countries. At first this sounds inclusive. But it also raises doubts. Which countries are imagined in this group? Are countries from the Global South partners in shaping the agenda, or are they expected to support a project designed elsewhere? This question matters because inclusion is not just about invitation. It is about authorship.

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Fourth, what kind of realism are we really talking about?

If the world is entering a period of self-reliance and strategic competition, then the conversation cannot stop at security and trade. Issues such as climate, finance, debt, and representation in global institutions are central for many developing countries. Without addressing these material realities, any new framework risks sounding familiar.

Finally, what kind of future is actually being imagined?

For many countries in the Global South, the goal is not to repair the previous order. It is to move toward a more multipolar world, where rules are negotiated more equally and development paths are less constrained by geopolitical alignment.

So, my uncertainty about how to read this moment remains. The speech felt important. It felt like a step, but a step is not a destination. And the real question is whether this moment will lead to genuine change or simply a new language for old structures

I listened to Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. As Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, his words carry not only rhetorical force but institutional consequence. I must admit that at first I did not know how to react, so I read and reread the transcript of his speech. One must admire the confidence and imagination with which he spoke at the conference – the choice of words was fascinating. My first instinct was a sense of dismay but also historical recognition. His speech was a carefully crafted narrative of civilizational nostalgia that seeks to rehabilitate five centuries of Western imperialism as a glorious chapter worth renewing. I must point out that it did not come as a surprise to me; for someone who was born in South Asia, it reminded me of the legacy of British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, the Partition of 1947, and the epistemic violence that continues, to this day, to shape Global South realities. Rubio’s words represent a textbook example of what Edward Said called “Orientalism1” and what Frantz Fanon described as the colonizer’s refusal to relinquish the “settler’s zone2.”

Rubio romanticized five centuries of Western civilizational triumph through empire building. He spoke of missionaries, pilgrims, soldiers, and explorers “pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires.” He framed the post-1945 “contraction” of those empires as a regrettable decline, accelerated by “godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings.” What he does not understand is that this language does not just glorify colonialism; it erases the violence that Western civilization inflicted on the Global South.

This Western civilization Rubio claims “produced the genius of Mozart and Beethoven, of Dante and Shakespeare, of Michelangelo and Da Vinci,” also produced – though he conveniently ignores it – the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, which carved up Africa like a cake; it also produced the Radcliffe Line, which triggered mass displacement, communal violence, and a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives. In places like Kashmir, those arbitrary lines still fuel unresolved conflict and displacement today. It extracted trillions of dollars of wealth from India alone between 1765 and 1938. It engineered famines that killed tens of millions of people in Bengal in 1770 and in 1943. It presided over brutal repression during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and waged a devastating colonial war in Algeria that left deep political and social scars. It dismantled indigenous industries and responded to peaceful demands for self-rule with massacres.

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The “anti-colonial uprisings” he pairs dismissively with “godless communist revolutions” were, in South Asia, led by figures like Gandhi and Bhagat Singh; in Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta; in Algeria by Ahmed Ben Bella; and in Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah, along with many other nationalists, socialists, and democrats who represented the subaltern’s refusal to remain objects of history. From India to Kenya, from Algeria to West Africa, these movements were not eruptions of disorder but organized struggles for political dignity and self-determination. By framing decolonization as the regrettable “terminal decline” of “great Western empires,” Rubio presents it as something to mourn rather than something to examine critically.

His invocation of “civilizational erasure” and the need to control borders, while rejecting “a world without borders,” is particularly revealing. The borders he now defends were drawn by colonial cartographers with little regard for ethnic, linguistic, or historical realities – see the Radcliffe Line that bisected Punjab and Bengal in 1947, causing one of the largest forced migrations in human history. Similar arbitrary borders scar much of Africa and the Middle East, legacies that
continue to shape political instability and migration. The very migrants he
fears today are often the descendants of those whose resources and labour built
the prosperity he now claims as exclusively “Western.”

He calls for a “new Western century” of reindustrialization and border control. This echoes the “civilizing mission” that justified empire. He diagnoses the present moment as one that must avoid the “malaise of hopelessness.” Yet the migrants he describes as threats to Western civilization often flee conditions rooted in colonial legacies and unequal global systems – systems the West helped shape.

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It is striking that American political life often draws moral authority from stories of exile and repression. Narratives of families fleeing authoritarian regimes become powerful symbols of freedom, resilience, and renewal. They are invoked as proof of the moral superiority of liberal democracy over dictatorship. Yet this moral vocabulary rarely extends to those displaced by colonial borders, extractive economies, or wars shaped by Western intervention – as in Rubio’s own case.

His fascination with restoring the ‘great Western civilization’ does not require the restoration of Western primacy but a multipolar humility. It requires acknowledging that Western civilization was never self-generated. It drew on Arab mathematicians, Indian numerals, African gold, and Asian spices and knowledge systems. It requires recognizing that the “forces of civilizational erasure” today include not only migration but also the erasure of non-Western histories reflected in his own narrative.

I do not write this in anger but in the spirit of the very Enlightenment traditions Rubio claims – reasoned critique. If the transatlantic alliance is to mean anything beyond a refurbished empire, it must make space for the voices of those who were on the receiving end of that history. Let me end by saying that decolonization was not decline; for many in the Global South, it remains unfinished justice.

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A few days ago, when Booker Prize–winning author and activist Arundhati Roy withdrew from the Berlin Film Festival, it made headlines in major publications around the world. Roy called out members of the jury of the Berlin Film Festival and wrote:

“This morning, like millions of people across the world, I heard the unconscionable statements made by members of the jury of the Berlin film festival when they were asked to comment about the genocide in Gaza. To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.

Let me say this clearly: what has happened in Gaza, what continues to happen, is a genocide of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel. It is supported and funded by the governments of the United States and Germany, as well as several other countries in Europe, which makes them complicit in the crime. If the greatest filmmakers and artists of our time cannot stand up and say so, they should know that history will judge them. I am shocked and disgusted.”

Roy’s unapologetic condemnation quickly sparked reactions across media and social platforms. Her statement travelled quickly, and so did the reactions to it. Some defended Roy, while others came out in support of the jury. I must say, criticising Roy is not unusual – she faces many attacks from right-wing members in India for her principled stand on several issues. Roy’s statement ignited debate that soon shifted from cinema to geopolitics. Questions about what can be said on stage and what can be silenced began to be discussed on social media and in mainstream media alike. Along with this, the question of whether art can be neutral also surfaced.

I am not interested in the immediate controversy. What interests me is what this controversy reveals about us as individuals and about the institutions we otherwise cherish. The Berlin episode becomes important when we place it alongside other recent developments. It helps us see how outrage is selectively applied, and how institutions and individuals react to certain cases with decisiveness and to other cases with reluctance. What troubles me is not disagreement – disagreement is normal. What is not normal is the ease with which we use and justify uneven moral language. How quickly people rally behind favored causes, while exercising careful restraint toward others. My point is that this restraint is neither accidental nor innocent. It teaches us something about power.

Let us go back to the Russia–Ukraine war. When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, much of the world and Western cultural institutions responded with conviction – that it was a war of aggression against a sovereign nation. Many Western countries soon began boycotting Russian sportspeople, musicians and others. Sports federations and film festivals joined in and started excluding Russian participants from their institutions. I am not questioning the reaction of these institutions. Russia did attack a sovereign nation, and that is against settled international norms – at least on paper. My concern is not the boycotts and sanctions themselves – cultural or political. My concern is why the same principle is not invoked across conflicts where a big power, especially a Western ally, does something similar to its neighbours. If cultural institutions can take a moral stand in one case, it means they are capable of doing so. The question then is not about possibility, but about willingness.

Take, for example, the Gaza war. When questions were raised about the participation and possible boycott of Israel, these very institutions took a different stand – that such events are non-political and should not be linked to or judged according to what governments do. Western commentators who have long preached democracy and the rule of law took a different stand when it came to the rulings of the International Criminal Court. When the court issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin, the West welcomed the decision and said that international law applies even to the powerful. However, when the same court issued arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders, the same West questioned the court’s jurisdiction. The United States, which hails itself as a champion of international law, even sanctioned the prosecutor Karim Khan and criticised the court.

For many of us who grew up believing that international law, though imperfect, still meant something, this reversal is not minor. If law applies only when it aligns with strategic interests, then it looks less like law and more like leverage. This pattern did not begin with Ukraine or Gaza. Long before these two conflicts, when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 without clear UN backing, the language of international law – especially in the Western hemisphere – became feeble in similar ways. When the war in Yemen created one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent times, the moral urgency in many Western capitals was noticeably softer. The difference was not in the scale of suffering alone, but in who was involved and who was allied with whom.

When I point out these patterns, my aim is not to equate these conflicts or reduce their historical significance. I am also not drawing parallels between the Russia–Ukraine war and the Israel–Gaza war. They emerge from different contexts. The regional histories, the scale of destruction and the actors involved are different. For me, the issue is not to draw parallels, but to observe how universal principles of law and democracy are selectively applied. I am not looking for perfect consistency in a world that is messy and unequal. But when institutions speak in the language of universality – human rights, sovereignty, rule of law – they invite us to measure them by those standards. The disappointment arises from that invitation.

This selective outrage is not just the hypocrisy of one or two countries. It is embedded in alliances, trade, security dependencies and, more importantly, in civilizational narratives. When states speak of international law and human rights, they operate within a strategic framework. Cultural institutions such as film festivals, sports bodies and universities are not outside these realities. These institutions depend on funding, diplomacy and public legitimacy, and their language is shaped by these forces. Perhaps this is how power works best – not by silencing everyone, but by creating different vocabularies for different situations. One vocabulary for adversaries and another for allies. Over time, we internalise these distinctions without even noticing.

The Berlin Film Festival and Roy’s withdrawal from it expose this tension between cultural institutions and their dependence on political power. When the jury suggests that art should not be politicised, it is, in Roy’s words, “shutting down a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time.” For me, the question is not whether art is political or not. The question is why political expression is tolerated in one case and not in others. Why is the West – and more recently, the right-wing phenomenon across many societies – selectively outraged? The question then is: what does this entail for us – as individuals and as societies? When the principles behind such outrage appear strategic, the outrage itself loses meaning. It makes people cynical. The assumption that follows is that every moral claim serves an interest. That erosion of trust is what should worry us.

This politics of selective outrage, for me, is therefore less about moral principles and the rule of law, and more about hierarchies. If we begin to see the underlying architecture of power, cultural events like the Berlin Film Festival do not create these hierarchies, but they make them visible. The danger is not just the hierarchy itself, but our growing acceptance of it. It slowly corrupts our principles. Once principles become flexible, no one stands securely within them. We see it when certain panels are cancelled and others celebrated, when certain words are condemned while others are amplified – silencing dissent under the guise of neutrality.

We live in a world where militarism, war and death are regular occurrences. What interests me in writing this piece is not writing about military adventurism per se (which most governments indulge in), nor war itself, but how we understand and comprehend the language used to describe death. Government institutions often describe death in security terms – counterinsurgency, national sovereignty, and above all, the claim that some entities pose a danger to governmentality itself. Much of this language of power is amplified by television and print journalism which reduce death to daily briefings, thereby inventing a terminology that strips emotion and grief from it. A cursory look at some of the places in the current moment will make my position clear. Take, for example, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, and Israel. The geography changes, but the language, the grammar, and the choreography of death do not. Mass media tells us about the accumulation of bodies, but it also teaches us a language that trains us to cope with it. News channels announce the numbers, sometimes show us the faces, and then politely set them aside so that the world can continue with its day-to-day chores. We are told this is what realism looks like.

But realism, it turns out, has a hierarchy.

The question we should be asking, in this cacophony, in the midst of condemnations by powerful world leaders, is this: are all deaths equal? It does not take much effort to see that the answer is a big NO.. Some deaths matter more than others. Some are ushered into the room with ceremony, named, photographed, and mourned. Their grief is made felt, visible; it is allowed to spill, to stain, and to interrupt prime time and our consciousness. Others, meanwhile, are counted, stacked into infographics and statistics. They are wrapped in a vocabulary that makes killing sound like a governmental inconvenience and mourning an unnecessary exercise. These deaths do not interrupt. They do not shock our consciousness.

Israel and Gaza make this obscenity impossible to miss.

Let us say this clearly, because clarity is the first thing power tries to steal. Israeli lives matter. Civilian lives matter, and rightly so; the world responded to those killings as it should have – with grief, mourning, and unequivocal condemnation. The horrors were televised through mainstream media and social media alike, repeated over and over, using the language of care, intimacy and sympathy. We were told in no uncertain terms that these lives were precious and irreplaceable. Which they were.

But then the horrors began to unfold in Gaza.

Not in ones and twos. Not discreetly. The deaths in Gaza were violent, televised 24x7 into our homes. Images of children buried under concrete, of men and women, old and young, of families erased in a single strike. And yet, as the numbers climbed, the language began to normalise. It did not invoke the preciousness and irreplaceability of these lives. The grief evaporated. I must add that Palestinian deaths were acknowledged, but only in the way one acknowledges, say, bad weather. We were told that these deaths were regrettable, unfortunate, yet nonetheless expected. It was, perhaps, for the first time in our living memory that the horrors of a genocide were televised directly into our homes – into our living rooms and kitchens – and the consciousness and moral character of citizens were tested. Much of humanity, including those who for centuries have told us, in no uncertain terms, that human rights matter and have championed them, began to watch these images while sipping coffee, having a nice meal, or even while going to sleep. People scrolled through these images and videos on their mobile phones day in and day out, yet we could not jolt our consciousness and call a spade a spade – that Palestinian lives matter.

We are told that these deaths are collateral damage. But what is collateral damage, and why do governments love this phrase? Precisely because it pretends to be neutral – a bloodless phrase for blood-soaked facts. It suggests accident, inevitability, a tragic side-effect of something nobler happening elsewhere. Collateral damage has no parents, no names, no grammar. It does not cry; it does not interrupt meetings. It is the word power uses when it wants to keep its hands clean while everything burns.

To understand this, let me turn to Gaza-Israel for a minute and see how this works. Israeli deaths are narrated as loss, as precious and grievable, whereas Palestinian deaths are narrated as fallout. Israeli lives are mourned. Palestinian lives are managed. Grammar does the killing quietly. Airstrikes happen. Operations are conducted. Civilians die. No one kills them. Death simply occurs, like a clerical error. And repetition does the rest. Once death becomes familiar, it becomes tolerable. Once it is tolerable, it becomes forgettable. The numbers grow larger, but the space they occupy in our imagination grows smaller. What we are witnessing is not just war, but the slow training of conscience. Judith Butler once wrote that not all lives are considered grievable, that some deaths register as losses while others fail to count as loss at all. Gaza is what that theory looks like when it leaves the page and enters the world. Palestinian lives are not denied outright. That would be crude. They are acknowledged just enough to be dismissed, counted just enough to be closed.

I want to widen this for a moment, because Gaza is not the only place where this hierarchy of death operates. Take Ukraine, for example. The deaths there matter to me. They should matter. But the way Western power has framed those deaths tells us something else as well. We are told, repeatedly and without hesitation, that Ukrainian lives matter. Their deaths are mourned, narrated, and personalised. Russia is vilified, rightly so, for its treatment of Ukrainians, and a clear moral language is mobilised to condemn that violence. One begins to wonder whether it is the death itself that is being valued here, or something else. Why does this moral compass falter when it comes to Israeli brutality in Gaza? Is it because such condemnation is inconvenient, or because it does not fit comfortably within the dominant Western narrative? Is it, perhaps, proximity, familiarity, or even colour that determines which deaths invite outrage and which are absorbed quietly?

Now look at Iran. The deaths during protests under the Iranian regime are rightly condemned and grieved. But the Iranians who died during the war, or under sanctions, or as part of long military confrontations, are reduced to statistics. They are not mourned in the same way. Their deaths do not shock us. Why do these Iranian deaths carry different values? What decides this difference? Who decides it? Does the West, implicitly or explicitly, teach us which deaths matter and which do not, which lives deserve grief and which are to be quietly absorbed?

The violence in Gaza is real violence. It is not only the bombs and the missiles that perpetuate this violence, but also the mass media and the way it uses language and then moves on. We have entered a time when real people, like gamers in a simulation, are ready to shoot, decide, and move on. When deaths are not grieved, they do not demand explanation. When they do not demand explanation, they do not demand justice. They become the acceptable price of someone else’s security.

What is most chilling is how normal this feels now. How calmly we accept that some lives will be mourned in detail, while others will be absorbed into statistics. How easily we learn to feel the correct amount of sorrow. This is not balance. It is discipline. A moral discipline imposed by power, enforced by language, and internalised by us. The question is no longer how many have died. The numbers are obscene enough. The real question is this: whose deaths are allowed to stop the world, and whose are meant to pass quietly, without consequence, like collateral damage.

This paper grows out of a set of related questions that I find difficult to avoid in the present political moment. How did the language of diplomacy move from the careful and procedural to what now often appears blunt, transactional, even vulgar? How did we move from treaties (nation-states talk to each other through treaties) to what are openly and shamelessly called “deals”? Why has lying become not only acceptable but often effective in this style of statecraft? And what happens when shared legal frameworks are replaced by a highly subjective idea of morality claimed by those in power? I do not claim to give final answers. What I try to do instead is to make these questions harder to ignore, because the shift they point to is not merely strategic. It is linguistic and political at the same time. I think through them using James Thurber’s The Owl Who Was God, recent political practice, and a perspective shaped by the Global South.

I want to begin with the fable, not as literature in the strict sense, but as a way of thinking through a problem. James Thurber’s The Owl Who Was God is useful here. In the story, an owl becomes important because he can see in the dark and answer a few questions correctly. The other animals take this limited ability as proof that he knows everything, and gradually they stop questioning him. When a fox raises a simple question – can he see in the light? – he is mocked and driven away. Later in the story daylight arrives and the owl cannot see. Yet the animals continue to follow him. The story ends in disaster. Thurber is not suggesting that the animals are foolish. What he portrays instead is a political condition in which authority survives not because it is tested, but because testing begins to feel unnecessary. Once doubt is treated as disturbance rather than responsibility, procedure loses value and following becomes easier. The story is less about blindness than about the comfort of following.

For much of the twentieth century, diplomacy tried to avoid such conditions, at least in appearance. It relied on procedure. States negotiated through formal channels, drafts circulated, language was revised repeatedly, and treaties were signed. These treaties were often unequal and shaped by power, yet they imposed a discipline on political speech. Leaders could not speak entirely as they wished; they had to operate within a recognisable diplomatic vocabulary that was measured, sometimes deliberately cautious. This did not make politics moral but it imposed restraint. Restraint was not always justice, but it mattered. What we are witnessing now is not simply a change in geopolitical strategy but a change in tone itself. Diplomacy increasingly sounds less diplomatic, and the shift is audible even before we begin to analyse it.

The treaty, once considered the central instrument of international politics, is now gradually being displaced by the language of the deal. This shift did not occur accidentally. It was pushed into political speech and normalised most visibly by Donald J. Trump, who has repeatedly described international relations in explicitly transactional terms. In Trump’s worldview, the world appears as a space of bargains where outcomes resemble contracts more than commitments. A deal is not a neutral word. It belongs first to the world of business, where bargaining, leverage, winners, and losers are expected. It does not promise durability and can be revised, abandoned, or denied. Outside business, the word also circulates comfortably in the vocabulary of gangsters – you accept, or something follows; there is no appeal and no shared rule. When such language enters diplomacy, it does more than simplify communication. It alters the moral atmosphere of politics itself. Consider how allies and adversaries alike are described as partners who must “pay,” “give,” or risk being “left.” Security begins to resemble a purchasable service, and protection appears conditional. There is a certain perversity in this language. Diplomacy once attempted to restrain power through formality; now power often seems almost proud of speaking without it.

This transformation is closely tied to the weakening of what was long described as the rules-based international order. For decades, Western states presented democracy, liberalism, and procedural rules as universal aspirations, even though these rules were applied selectively and frequently suspended when inconvenient. The Global South did not discover this contradiction late; it lived with it. Yet the pretence mattered because it compelled justification and forced power to explain itself in normative terms. What is striking today is not the exposure of hypocrisy but the fading need to hide it. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mark Carney described the rules-based order as a useful ‘fiction’ that benefited the West. The remark was unusually candid, but perhaps what unsettled many was not the statement itself so much as the ease with which it could now be voiced. The fiction had already weakened; the admission merely confirmed its decline.

Trump’s politics fits this moment with unusual clarity because he does not simply violate rules – he questions why they should constrain power at all. Diplomacy becomes less a process of settlement and more a demonstration of will, where agreements are valued for the spectacle of strength they produce rather than for their capacity to endure. Durability matters less than visibility. More troubling still is what replaces law when it is set aside. Law assumes continuity and answerability beyond the moment, whereas Trump frequently substitutes it with a deeply personal language of morality – what he feels is fair, what he believes is right. But whose morality is this, and by what measure can it be assessed? It is neither universal nor stable; it shifts with audience and interest. A morality that cannot be questioned does not restrain power. It shelters it.

The consequences are visible in the treatment of truth. Traditionally, in treaty-based diplomacy, lying carried risk because commitments were recorded and memory was extended beyond the present. However, in a deal-driven political environment, statements need only survive the news cycle. Precision itself becomes a political instrument. When Trump claims to have stopped a specific number of executions in Iran, the number produces the impression of measurable intervention and travels easily through media circulation, while verification becomes secondary. Meanwhile, large-scale deaths – in Gaza, in Ukraine – appear as aggregates, almost statistical. Numbers here do not clarify violence; they organise attention. Some deaths acquire immediacy, while others dissolve into magnitude.

From the Global South, this situation does not feel entirely new. Many societies have lived through political orders where speech overshadowed institutions and personal authority carried more weight than law. Formal structures often existed, but their presence did not always guarantee restraint. Decisions were frequently shaped elsewhere – sometimes behind closed doors, sometimes through informal networks of influence. Citizens learned, often early, that what was written and what was practiced did not always coincide. What feels different now is the location of this style. It is no longer confined to the margins of global politics, nor is it spoken of with embarrassment. It is visible at the centre and is increasingly described as pragmatic, even necessary. Language that once signaled excess – blunt threats, open transactionalism, the casual mixing of statecraft with personal authority – now circulates with surprising ease.

The owl in Thurber’s story is not evil. He is limited, and his limits are revealed too late. The problem lies less with the owl than with his followers, who continue to follow not because they are compelled but because ethics, morality, and hesitation have lost their value, and procedure no longer feels necessary. The movement continues because it has already begun to feel ordinary, and by the time daylight arrives, the habit of following is stronger than the instinct to stop. What is taking shape in diplomacy today follows a similar pattern. Treaties yield to deals, law yields to personal morality, and truth yields to repetition. Power now speaks more directly, sometimes even crudely, and seems less concerned with how it is perceived. Perhaps the real shift is this: politics no longer feels obligated to appear diplomatic. In such conditions, harm rarely arrives as spectacle. It gathers quietly within the language through which power speaks, and by the time it becomes clearly visible, it is already difficult to interrupt.

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