Someone asked me recently which state was more dangerous — North Korea or Israel — and to set out the comparison plainly, side by side, so the answer would be obvious.
There’s a catch: the question arrives already built. It assumes that danger is a single quantity, that states can be ranked the way athletes are ranked at the finish line, and that the task of judgement is simply to recite the result. None of that is true. But the assumption is now so deeply seated in how we talk about the world that the demand to compare feels like clear thinking rather than what it actually is – a refusal to think about two situations that have almost nothing in common.
Weigh up what the two halves of this comparison comprise.
North Korea’s danger is a danger in the conditional tense. It possesses, by the most recent independent estimates, somewhere between fifty and sixty assembled nuclear warheads and enough fissile material for perhaps thirty or forty more — a stockpile Kim Jong Un has vowed to expand exponentially and which he inspected with evident pride at a new production plant only this month. It has unveiled a missile, the Hwasong-20, that analysts assess could carry a warhead fifteen thousand kilometres, far enough to reach any American city. The missile has not been flight-tested. The warheads have never been used. The entire apparatus is a statement about what could happen — a machine built to make a future catastrophe credible enough that it never arrives. Its menace lives in the subjunctive.
The harm in Gaza is indicative. By 9 June 2026, the Gaza Health Ministry counted 72,988 Palestinians killed since October 2023, with more than 173,000 injured — and a population-representative survey published in The Lancet Global Health found that official tally to be not an inflation but a floor, roughly a third below the true number of violent deaths for the period it examined. A ceasefire nominally in force since October 2025 has not stopped the killing; May 2026 was the deadliest month this year. South Africa’s genocide case against Israel sits before the International Court of Justice, now in its second round of written pleadings, with no merits ruling yet delivered, the Court having earlier found a plausible risk of acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention. This is not a claim about what might occur. It is a contested, documented, ongoing present.
Now notice what the comparison does to these two things when it forces them into the same column.
It converts them into a common currency – danger – and a currency, by design, erases the differences between the things it prices. A future risk and a present harm; a deterrent never fired and a campaign measured in tens of thousands of named dead; a weapon in the subjunctive and a war in the indicative. To ask which is more dangerous is to ask which weighs more, a score or a canvas. The question can be answered only by first discarding everything that makes each situation what it is. And the discarding is not a side effect. It’s the point. The league table exists precisely so that judgement can be outsourced to a ranking so that the virtually impossible work of holding two incommensurable realities in mind at once can be replaced by the easy satisfaction of a verdict.
This is industrial economism reaching into our moral vocabulary and doing there what it does everywhere else: reducing qualities to quantities so they can be compared, ranked, and managed. The logic that once priced a forest as timber and an hour of human life as labour has learnt a new trick — it prices catastrophe as danger and sends us out to weigh one against another like goods on a shelf. And like every such reduction, it purchases the appearance of rigour at the cost of the only thing that mattered — the texture of the particular case.
But a ranking is never produced for nothing. It is produced for someone, and it has impact. So the next question is not which state the league table places higher. It’s who the table serves.
A ranking does two things at once. It elevates one item and, by the same stroke, it lowers another – and the lowering is usually the point. Set North Korea and Israel on the same scale, and whichever way the needle swings, something has been acquired. Rank North Korea higher, and Gaza recedes into the comparative middle distance, a lesser entry on a list, its dead converted into the losing side of a metric. Rank Israel higher, and the manoeuvre is read at once as a move in a different game — as the taking of a side, the smuggling in of a verdict, the kind of sentence a person learns to fear writing. Either way the scale has done something no honest account of either situation would do. It has made one reality the instrument for adjusting our view of the other.
This is why the demand to compare so often comes dressed up as fairness. Side by side, plainly, so the answer is obvious – the very language of even-handedness. But there’s nothing even-handed about a frame that can only be entered by agreeing to weigh the unweighable. The appearance of balance is the mechanism. It invites you to believe that the alternative to ranking is bias, that to refuse the scale is to refuse to judge at all. The opposite is true. The scale is that which prevents judgement. It substitutes a position on a list for the harder act of seeing each situation as it is.
There’s a further assumption folded into the question, quieter than the first yet more consequential. When someone asks which state is more dangerous, the US table sent out to shop is tacit. It presumes a particular stance – a shared bench from which the comparison is made, a single international community looking out at the dangerous world and sorting it into rankings. The question presumes a we. And it is precisely this that’s come apart.
Watch what happened at The Hague this spring. South Africa’s genocide case moved into its next phase, and states began to file declarations of intervention – formal entries into the proceedings, each one a country stepping forward to say it has a stake in how the Genocide Convention is read. On a single day in March, four states filed at once: Namibia, the United States, Hungary, and Fiji. They didn’t file together. Namibia — a nation whose own people were the subject of the twentieth century’s first genocide under German colonial rule — intervened on one understanding of what the Convention demands. The United States, Israel’s principal supplier and shield, intervened on quite another. The Netherlands and Iceland had filed days earlier, and Belgium and Paraguay before them. These states are not arrayed behind a common position. They are entering the same courtroom from opposite doors to argue past one another about the meaning of the one legal instrument the post-war world built to label its worst crime.
This is the picture the league table can’t show you. The table needs a single observer doing the ranking — one table, one bench, one scale. What the intervention list reveals is that there’s no such bench. The international order the question assumes as its vantage point is itself the thing fracturing in front of us, breaking up along exactly the lines the question pretends to stand above. To ask which is more dangerous from inside that fracture is to speak as though the Westphalian “we” were still intact, still capable of a collective verdict – when the evidence sitting in The Hague is that it can no longer even agree on what its own founding words mean.
So the question answers a different question from the one posed. It can’t tell us which state is more dangerous, because the two dangers don’t share a scale. But it can tell us something about the people the question moves between — that they still reach for a common standard, a shared bench (a ‘we’) at the very moment that we are filing against ourselves in the world’s highest court. The hunger to rank is the hunger for a vantage point we have lost. The league table is a séance. It calls up the ghost of an international community and asks it to make a pronouncement that’s impossible.
I have no ranking to offer. I have, instead, a refusal — and underneath that refusal, a sadness. Both of these situations are real. The warheads in their silos and the subjunctive future they hold open are real. The dead in Gaza, counted and uncounted, and the court still arguing over the word for what killed them, are real. Neither becomes more bearable by being declared worse than the other. Our obligation is not to rank our fears but to refuse the machinery that turns suffering into a quantity and judgement into a purchase — and to learn, again, how to hold two true and terrible things in the mind at once without collapsing either into a number.
That’s much harder than ranking. But I can’t see a more candid space from which to see.