The Age of Unreason: Iran, Empire and the Violence of the West

The decision to obliterate Iranian nuclear sites in the early hours of 22 June was choreographed like a sequel to 2003: dazzling airpower, grainy satellite images, draped in stars and stripes. But if Iraq was regime change disguised as liberation, Iran 2025 is regime change disguised as deterrence. The difference is only in degrees of delusion. JD Vance looked like a man trying to hold in a scream. Marco Rubio nodded like a puppet. Hegseth, as always, looked like he didn’t belong. Trump, meanwhile, smiled and declared the attack a great success.

The war (because that is what it is) is being fought as spectacle. And like all late-imperial spectacles, it leaks chaos and contradiction. The US says it doesn’t want regime change, but demands “unconditional surrender”. Israel says the strikes are strategic, but its prime minister invokes Biblical annihilation. And in Britain, our Labour government refuses to condemn the war, but does threaten to criminalise protest against it.

As Katie Stallard wrote in The New Statesman, Trump’s Operation Midnight Hammer unfolded with all the theatricality of a Tom Clancy thriller, complete with decoy bombers and pre-dawn shock-and-awe. But the strategy is as threadbare as the script: a spectacle governed not by doctrine but by dopamine. JD Vance’s pained expression during Trump’s address spoke volumes—this was not an act of statecraft, but a social media war launched for likes and legacy.

Netanyahu, of course, knows better. As Joshua Leifer explains, his realism is not diplomatic but theological, rooted in the ideas of his father Benzion and the revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky. History, for Netanyahu, is a blood curse. It teaches not peace, but pre-emption. Israel must be militarily supreme or it will cease to exist. The idea that Iran’s nuclear programme might be peaceful is not simply dismissed—it is inconceivable within this worldview. That Israel possesses nuclear weapons itself is treated as both irrelevant and essential.

This is not new. As Lawrence Freedman notes in his account of the strikes, Netanyahu has spent decades lobbying against any deal with Iran, from the 2015 JCPOA to the recent, now-aborted negotiations mediated via Oman. What has changed is the capacity: Hezbollah degraded, Hamas decimated, Assad finally gone. Netanyahu calculated that Trump would not stop him, and he was right.

No murky interpretations here. Just the open, unapologetic abandonment of international law. From Israel’s targeted strikes on Iranian government infrastructure to the coordinated US attacks on nuclear sites deep inside the country, the principle of sovereignty has been treated like an inconvenience. No UN mandate, no legitimate claim of self-defence. Just brute force dressed up as deterrence. The attack on Fordo alone, a civilian nuclear facility under IAEA monitoring, makes a mockery of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Russia called it a violation. China condemned it. Legal scholars (those not on Washington’s payroll) are already using the phrase crime of aggression. But in the halls of power, the language is different: resolve, retaliation, red lines. The rules-based order, we’re told, still stands. Just don’t look too closely at who’s doing the breaking.

Against this duet of empire and vengeance, Britain plays the role of silent partner and moral coward. David Lammy, pressed repeatedly by the BBC, refused to say whether the US strikes were legal. He refused to say whether they were wise. He refused, even, to state whether he agreed with Trump’s invocation of regime change. Instead, he offered the usual mush: calls for diplomacy, warnings about enrichment, the familiar script about upholding international law while refusing to say if it had been broken.

And at the very same moment, the Home Secretary signalled the government’s intention to proscribe Palestine Action. As Sally Rooney wrote in The Guardian, the group’s offence was to spray-paint RAF aircraft in protest at UK arms complicity in Gaza. No one was harmed, but the government intends to treat this act of civil disobedience as terrorism. To support Palestine Action, even in writing, may soon become a criminal offence.

Let’s state it plainly: the UK is arming Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza. It is aiding and abetting illegal strikes on Iran. And now it proposes to outlaw domestic protest against that complicity. The designation of terrorism is being inverted: a tool of the powerful against the powerless.

None of this exonerates Khamenei. As Abbas Milani documents, the Supreme Leader turned the nuclear programme into a symbol of mystical nationalism, tied to apocalyptic Shiism and geopolitical bluff. But like all symbols, it obscures its own fragility. The Iranian economy is collapsing, popular discontent is surging, and the regime has lost its monopoly on power. Women are leading resistance. Workers are striking. Khamenei himself may not survive the year.

And yet the attack may achieve the one thing it claimed to prevent: a nuclear-armed Iran. As Simon Tisdall put it in The Guardian, bombing will not destroy knowledge, or erase the will to survive. The lesson other states will draw is clear: if you don’t have nukes, you’re fair game.

This is the terminal paradox of Western nuclear diplomacy. It demands non-proliferation while preaching deterrence. It enforces peace through the threat of annihilation. It moralises its own violence while criminalising resistance to it. And when that resistance takes the form of civil protest, it declares it terror.

If killing 23 civilians at an aid site is not terrorism, how can spray-painting a plane be?

Sally Rooney

What unites Trump, Netanyahu and Starmer is not ideology but impunity. Each sees power as the right to act without consequence. Each wraps violence in legality. And each, in their own way, seeks to delegitimise dissent. But if there is hope, it lies not in Downing Street or the White House, but in Brize Norton hangars and the streets of Tehran. The protesters, not the presidents, hold the only viable vision of peace.

In that sense, the war is not simply between nations. It is between those who want to remake the world, and those content to burn it.