On the morning of 28 February 2026, whilst a diplomat was still on a plane — Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, who had flown to Washington the previous day to brief the Trump administration on the progress of nuclear talks — missiles were already being programmed with co-ordinates. Hours before the bombs fell on Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, and Qom, al-Busaidi had gone on American television to say, with the particular caution of a man who understands what words cost, that peace was “within reach.” Iran had agreed to zero stockpiling of enriched uranium. Full IAEA verification. The hardest concessions were already on the table.
By the time he landed back in Muscat, the Supreme Leader of Iran was dead and the Middle East was, once again, on fire.
I want to begin there — not with the geopolitics, not with the nuclear calculus, not with the familiar theatre of press conferences and condemnations — but with that image: a mediator, mid-flight, carrying the architecture of a possible peace, whilst the machinery of war had already begun its irreversible sequence. That simultaneity is not incidental. It is the signature of the age. And it demands something beyond the usual commentary, beyond the cycle of outrage and forgetting what passes for public discourse in the Western world. What it demands is a reckoning with the civilisational infrastructure that makes this not only possible but, in a deeply structural sense, probable.
This is not a polemic against America, though America is indispensable to the story. It is not a defence of Iran’s clerical regime, which has murdered its own people with a methodical brutality — some estimates place the death toll from the 2025-2026 protests at several thousand, with the Iranian government itself acknowledging over three thousand dead. It is not a lament for international law, though law matters, and its erosion should alarm anyone with a serious interest in a habitable future. What I am attempting here is something more difficult: an excavation of the system that generates these outcomes as reliably as a body generates heat, and a provocation toward the only question that matters — whether we yet possess the collective imagination to dismantle it before it finishes dismantling us.
The Architecture of Inevitability
Wars are not accidents. Earthquakes are accidents — or rather, they are the release of pressures that accumulate beyond human intervention. Wars are choices, which is both more forgiving and more damning. They are choices made within systems that have been carefully, if not always consciously, constructed to make certain choices far more likely than others.
To understand why diplomacy failed in the hours before Operation Epic Fury, one has to look at what was being asked to succeed. Nuclear talks between Washington and Tehran had proceeded through multiple rounds of mediation in Oman and Geneva. Iran had moved — substantively, verifiably. The Omani foreign minister was not performing optimism; the famously restrained Omanis do not perform optimism. Something real had been built. And then, in a decision that bypassed congressional authorisation, that violated the spirit if not the letter of every diplomatic commitment made over the preceding two months, and that a Norwegian foreign minister characterised within hours as inconsistent with international law, the United States chose fire.
Why does this keep happening? Not why did it happen this time — the proximate causes are visible enough: a president temperamentally hostile to patience, an Israeli government that had been actively lobbying against the negotiations, a sixty-day deadline that had expired, and an intelligence apparatus presenting options defined by the institutions producing them. These are the surface features. Beneath them lies something far more durable and far more dangerous.
The United States will spend over one trillion dollars on its military this year. Between 2020 and 2024, private defence contractors received approximately 2.4 trillion dollars in Pentagon contracts — more than half the Pentagon’s entire discretionary budget across that period. Five companies — Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman — absorbed $791 billion of that alone. The S&P Aerospace and Defence Index rose nearly ninety percent since the Ukraine conflict began. Palantir, the data intelligence firm with deep tentacles in the Trump administration, grew its market valuation from thirteen billion dollars in 2022 to over four hundred billion by 2025. This isn’t background noise. This is the metabolism of a civilisation that has woven war into its economic bloodstream so thoroughly that peace, structurally speaking, represents a threat to shareholder value.
When Eisenhower warned in 1961 of the military-industrial complex, he was diagnosing something he had personally inhabited. What he couldn’t possibly have anticipated was the scale the monster would achieve, nor the sophistication of its reproduction. The defence lobby employed 950 lobbyists in Washington in 2024 — 220 more than four years earlier. Between 2018 and 2023, the top five contractors spent nearly 300 million dollars lobbying Congress. More than 600 former Pentagon officials moved into private defence industry roles in that period alone. These are not conspiracies. They are features of a system operating precisely as designed. The question is who designed it, and whose interests the design serves.
The answer is emphatically not those of ordinary Americans, who pay for it all and gain from it least — nor those of the Iranian students who poured out of classrooms into smoke and terror on the morning of 28 February, nor the Qatari families displaced when Iranian retaliatory missiles struck al-Udeid and surrounding civilian areas. War, as the decorated American general Smedley Butler observed with a frankness that cost him his reputation in 1935, is a racket. Nine decades later, the racket has incorporated itself, gone public, and listed on the S&P 500.
The Long Memory the West Chooses to Forget
There’s a habit of mind, almost liturgical in its regularity, whereby each new Western military intervention is presented as novel and unprecedented; a regrettable but unavoidable response to a particular threat that has left no other option. The habit depends on a very selective amnesia. The Middle East in particular has been subjected to a century of this amnesia’s consequences, and it is worth pausing to feel the accumulated weight of that history before rushing toward the next analysis of tactical sequencing.
The borders of the modern Middle East were drawn by British and French officials at the end of the First World War with the same imperial confidence that had carved up Africa decades before — lines that divided tribes, severed communities, and created states whose internal incoherence would provide perpetual justification for external intervention. In 1953, American and British intelligence agencies engineered the overthrow of Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, whose offence was the nationalisation of Iranian oil. The Shah they restored ruled with a brutality that incubated the same revolutionary fervour that brought Khomeini to power in 1979 — the same Islamic Republic that America has now spent forty-seven years attempting to dismantle by various means, arriving finally at open warfare. The snake swallows its tail.
Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Yemen. Syria. Each intervention carried its own vocabulary of liberation; each left behind a sediment of fractured institutions, traumatised populations, and unresolvable grievances that would nourish the next generation of armed resistance. Brown University’s Costs of War Project has documented what the arithmetic of this project actually looks like: more than 940,000 people killed by direct post-9/11 war violence across Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. When indirect deaths from the destruction of health systems, water infrastructure, and economic foundations are included, the figure rises toward 4.5 million. Over 38 million people displaced. The human geography of entire regions permanently redrawn by choices made in rooms where none of the displaced were present.
These are not statistics. They are the residue of a doctrine — never fully articulated, never democratically debated — that the organised violence of powerful states is a legitimate instrument of preference rather than a last resort when all others have failed. That doctrine has never been subjected to the scrutiny it warrants, in part because the populations that bear its costs are the least positioned to demand that scrutiny, and in part because the populations that generate it have been habituated to a particular story about what their power is for.
The Doctrine Behind the Doctrine
There’s a question that the war’s architects prefer not to answer directly: in whose strategic interest, precisely, did the bombs fall?
Not America’s — at least not in any sense that a clear-eyed audit could defend. The United States has gained a widening theatre of conflict, exposed military installations across the region to retaliatory targeting, convulsed global energy markets, and shredded what remained of its credibility as a negotiating partner. The diplomatic capital expended in the Oman process — months of painstaking mediation, Iranian concessions that would have locked down the nuclear programme under full IAEA verification — was incinerated in the same hours as the targets. These are not the outcomes of a power acting in its own interest. They are the outcomes of a power that has allowed someone else’s strategic doctrine to be laundered through its military apparatus.
To name that doctrine precisely requires distinguishing between things that Western commentary habitually conflates. Israel is not a monolith. Israeli society contains multitudes — pacifists and militarists, secular liberals and religious nationalists, voices that have consistently opposed the settlement enterprise and voices that have driven it. The Israeli public that, before October 2023, showed majority support for a two-state settlement in multiple polling series is not the same entity as the governing coalition assembled by Benjamin Netanyahu in late 2022 — a coalition whose survival has depended on the most expansionist factions of Israeli political life holding the balance of power. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich control twenty of the coalition’s sixty-seven seats. Their price for keeping Netanyahu in government has been the systematic advancement of an ideology that is, by its own explicit account, not primarily about security. It’s about territory.
Bezalel Smotrich declared 2025 “the year of sovereignty in the West Bank” and instructed the Defence Ministry to prepare the infrastructure for annexation. Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party advocates annexation of the entire West Bank without granting Palestinians citizenship — a formula that the UN Special Rapporteur, in a February 2026 report, characterised as a “criminal policy pursuing ethnic cleansing.” These are not fringe positions whispered in private; they are ministerial positions, formally held, publicly stated, and backed by the institutional authority of government portfolios. Smotrich, as Finance Minister with a concurrent role in the Defence Ministry, has direct supervisory authority over the Civil Administration that governs Palestinian life in the West Bank. In 2025, his office approved forty-nine new settlements, oversaw the largest single-year declaration of State land since 1998, and initiated a land registration process in Area C as part of what he has openly described as the groundwork for permanent Israeli sovereignty.
The ideology animating this project has a genealogy. Ben-Gvir is an avowed admirer of Meir Kahane, whose Kach movement was designated a terrorist organisation and banned from the Israeli Knesset. Smotrich’s Religious Zionism draws on a tradition of messianic nationalism that envisions the entire biblical Land of Israel — including the West Bank and Gaza — as the inalienable inheritance of the Jewish people, not as a matter of security calculation but as theological imperative. This is not Judaism; it is a political programme dressed in theological garb, and most Jewish communities outside Israel regard it with alarm. In June 2025, the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the United Kingdom sanctioned Ben-Gvir and Smotrich for “incitement of extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights.” Slovenia subsequently declared them personae non gratae. The international consensus on what these ministers represent is not ambiguous.
What this coalition needed from the Iran strikes was not, at its deepest level, the removal of a nuclear threat — that threat was being managed through the Oman process, which Iran’s side was actively advancing. What it needed was the elimination of the most significant regional counterweight to Israeli dominance, the decapitation of the one state that had sustained meaningful resistance to the expansion of Israeli power, and the demonstration that Washington would absorb the costs of that project. Lebanon fractured. Syria was hollowed out. Gaza was reduced to rubble. Each stage followed a logic of systematic regional degradation — not deterrence, but transformation of the neighbourhood by the removal of actors capable of contest. Iran, with its conventional and proxy military capacity, was the last node in that network capable of imposing strategic costs on Israel. Its neutralisation was the culmination of a decade-long project, not a response to an acute threat.
Netanyahu visited the White House seven times in the period between Trump’s return to office and the February strikes. He received full briefings on the Oman talks from lead US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. He publicly demanded conditions — dismantling all nuclear infrastructure, not merely verified stockpile limits — designed to be unacceptable to Tehran. Al Jazeera’s Washington correspondent characterised his visits as attempts to “poison the well before this diplomatic process gains traction.” The Israeli Air Force conducted drills simulating Iranian missile attacks on Israeli airbases in the days following the second round of Oman talks. The sequence is not suggestive of a government hoping for successful diplomacy.
All of this documents a strategy — one pursued openly, using every available lever of influence over an American administration whose innermost circle, from Witkoff to Kushner, has documented personal and financial ties to Israeli real estate and political interests. The revolving door between American foreign policy and Israeli strategic priorities is not clandestine. It operates in daylight, through campaign finance flows, think-tank funding structures, and the kind of personal relationships built across decades and activated at critical moments. What they produce is an American foreign policy that, in its Middle Eastern expression, has become structurally incapable of sustaining a position that conflicts with the preferences of the Israeli right — not because American officials are corrupt, but because the system has been built in ways that make such positions politically impossible to hold.
This is not antisemitism. The careful distinction matters and must be held. Ethnonationalist expansionism is a political ideology, and like all political ideologies it can be opposed on its merits without reference to the ethnicity of those who hold it. The critique of Smotrich’s annexation agenda is not a critique of Jews; it is a critique of a specific political programme that the British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and Norwegian governments have all formally condemned. The critique of Netanyahu’s lobbying against the Oman talks is not a critique of Israel; it is a critique of specific actions by a specific government, documented in real time by journalists, diplomats, and the governments involved. The refusal to make these distinctions — the deliberate conflation of any criticism of Israeli government policy with hostility to Jewish people — is itself a political operation, designed to place this particular state’s actions beyond the scrutiny that every other state in the world is subject to.
The mediator was on a plane. A peace architecture had been built. And in the capitals of governments that had spent months working toward that architecture — in Muscat, in Geneva, in the foreign ministries of every country that had staked diplomatic credibility on the process — there is now a very clear understanding of what happened and why. That understanding will reshape how the world’s majority calculates the value of American diplomatic commitments for years to come. It is the most durable consequence of the strikes, more lasting than any crater, and the one least likely to appear in the victory communiqués.
The View from Elsewhere
Here is what is almost entirely absent from Western commentary on the Iran strikes: the perspective of the majority of the world’s population, who have observed this sequence of events not as a debate about nuclear non-proliferation or regional security architecture but as further evidence of a pattern they have experienced across generations and continents.
From Nairobi to Jakarta, from Karachi to São Paulo, the reaction to Operation Epic Fury will be processed through a very different historical filter than the one applied in Washington, London, or Brussels. For large parts of what is still called, with decreasing accuracy, the “developing world,” American military power is not experienced as a force for order, even less a force for good. It’s experienced as the enforcement mechanism of a particular global dispensation — one that has maintained commodity prices, debt obligations, and trade arrangements favourable to Northern economies at the expense of Southern ones, and that reliably intervenes when the former are threatened, and reliably withholds intervention when only the latter suffer.
The African Union’s response to Western intervention in Libya was instructive in this regard. Regional leaders had proposed a negotiated transition that would have preserved institutional continuity while removing Gaddafi. The proposal was ignored.
What followed was a decade of militia warfare, mass displacement, and the reopening of slave markets — consequences whose weight fell entirely on Africans and on the sub-Saharan communities through which desperate migration flows moved. Western governments expressed concern and moved on. The willingness to bear consequences is, it turns out, calibrated to who suffers them.
China and Russia moved quickly to condemn the Iran strikes. This will be presented in much Western commentary as further evidence of a cynical axis of autocracies aligned against the liberal international order. That framing is not entirely wrong but it’s almost entirely insufficient. The more precise observation is that the bulk of the world’s nation-states — including many that are neither authoritarian nor allied with Moscow or Beijing — have been watching the “rules-based international order” accumulate exceptions and exemptions for its architects with growing scepticism. When the ICC moves against African leaders whilst Western ones face no equivalent accountability, when Security Council vetoes shield certain permanent members from consequences that would apply to any other state, when sovereignty is invoked to protect allied governments and violated to punish adversarial ones, the legitimacy of the system as a system rather than as a set of arrangements serving particular interests begins to dissolve.
Spain’s prime minister rejected the strikes as a unilateral military action contributing to “a more uncertain and hostile international order.” Norway’s foreign minister called them inconsistent with international law. These are not radical voices. They are the measured expressions of governments that still believe in the framework of multilateral constraint and are watching it dismantled in real time. Their concern points to something beyond a diplomatic response. The infrastructure of international law is not self-sustaining. It depends on the most powerful actors voluntarily subjecting themselves to its disciplines. When they cease to do so, what remains is not order but the performance of order — which is, in its way, more dangerous than honest disorder.
The Psychology of the First Resort
There’s a question that should be asked far more often than it is: why does war present itself as the first resort rather than the last? The answer, when it’s given at all, tends to be pitched in terms of political will — leaders lack the courage for diplomacy, public opinion is manipulated toward bellicosity, the hawks outmanoeuvre the doves at critical junctures. All of this is true. Again, none of it is sufficient.
The deeper answer is structural, and it operates across multiple registers simultaneously. Within government, the options presented to decision-makers are shaped by the institutions producing them. Diplomatic corps have been systematically defunded across the Western world for decades — the United States spent roughly 356 billion dollars on diplomacy, international development, and humanitarian aid across the five years from 2020 to 2024, a period in which the Pentagon directed more than twice that sum to private contractors alone. When the institutional capacity for negotiation atrophies, the institutional capacity for coercion expands to fill the space. The options on the table look like the institutions that prepared them.
There is also a cognitive dimension that deserves more attention than it receives. The military option offers what might be called a seductive false precision — the illusion of a definable, executable action with measurable outcomes. A missile strike has a launch time, a target co-ordinate, a blast radius, a battle damage assessment protocol. Diplomacy has none of these. It offers instead the chronic discomfort of ambiguity, the indignity of sitting across a table from adversaries, the political exposure of concessions that opponents will amplify, and the maddening possibility of failure after protracted effort. For leaders who have internalised the industrial paradigm’s obsession with measurable outputs and quarterly results, the missile is legible in a way the negotiated accord is not.
And then there’s the cultural sedimentation of what I have elsewhere called the dominant worldview of industrial economism — the civilisational operating system that conflates dominance with safety, growth with progress, and control with order. Within this worldview, strength is demonstrated through the capacity for violence, not through the wisdom to forgo it. Restraint reads as weakness. Patience reads as indecision. The mediator who boards a plane with the architecture of a possible peace plan is doing something that this worldview cannot properly value, because its value lies precisely in what it prevents — and prevention leaves no crater, generates no footage, produces no moment of televised resolution.
The result is that societies capable of extraordinary feats of technical sophistication consistently fail at what should be the comparatively modest challenge of sitting with their adversaries long enough to find the edges of common interest. This is not a natural condition. It’s a cultivated one. And it’s worth asking who benefits from its cultivation.
War as Domestic Policy
The costs of permanent militarism are not only paid in foreign cities. They accumulate at home, in ways that are rarely connected to their source.
The United States has the largest military budget in human history, now exceeding the combined expenditure of the next nine countries. Its domestic infrastructure — roads, schools, water systems, health services — ranks poorly against peer nations across numerous comparative measures. This is not coincidence. It is allocation. Every dollar directed toward a defence contractor’s profit margin is a dollar not directed toward maternal mortality rates, which in America are among the highest in the wealthy world. Every congressional vote to expand military spending through supplemental budgets is a vote with consequences for the housing security of working families whose representatives voted for the bombs without consulting them.
The pattern extends beyond spending. The surveillance architecture erected in the name of the War on Terror didn’t remain confined to foreign targets. It turned inward, as it predictably does. The militarisation of American policing, accelerated by programmes that transferred surplus military equipment to local forces, transformed the relationship between state and citizen in communities that were already over-policed and under-resourced. The rhetoric of counterterrorism colonised domestic politics, making it easier to frame dissent as threat, protesters as agitators, and the question of accountability as an interference with security.
This is the dimension of perpetual war that its architects never advertise: it doesn’t only reshape the countries it strikes. It reshapes the country that does the striking. Democratic cultures become incrementally less democratic when they are organised around permanent emergency. Civil liberties contract. Executive power expands. The legislature — which in America has not formally declared war since 1942, even as presidents have waged it repeatedly — cedes authority it was designed to hold. Congress was not consulted before Operation Epic Fury was launched. The War Powers Act clock began ticking, as it has ticked before, without altering the fundamental reality of what had already been done and could not be undone.
The domestic corrosion of perpetual war is felt differently across the social spectrum, which is part of why it persists. Those who benefit from defence contracts are concentrated and organised. Those who pay through reduced public investment are dispersed and often unaware of the precise mechanism of their loss. The political economy of war systematically advantages its proponents and disadvantages its critics. This is a system doing what systems are designed to do.
The Complicity of the International Order
It would be comfortable to locate the pathology entirely within American exceptionalism and the particular pathologies of its current political class. It is more honest, and more useful, to recognise that the broader international order is itself structured in ways that reward coercion and punish restraint.
The United Nations Security Council, conceived as a mechanism for collective security, has functioned in practice as a veto system that immunises its five permanent members — and, by extension, their allies — from the rules it promulgates for others. This is not a flaw in the architecture; it is the architecture. The permanent members accepted the UN’s founding charter because it formalised their supremacy, not because it constrained them. When the system is used to authorise intervention in Libya but not to hold accountable those whose intervention left Libya in ruins; when it can call for ceasefires that are ignored and declare violations that carry no consequence for the powerful; it ceases to function as law and becomes instead a register of great-power preferences dressed in the grammar of principle.
The International Criminal Court has brought cases against leaders from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Libya, and other African states. American leaders who authorised the torture of detainees in CIA black sites, or the invasion of Iraq on the basis of intelligence that multiple internal reviews later characterised as manipulated, have faced no equivalent process. This asymmetry is not incidental. It is structurally embedded in the ICC’s founding statute, which created opt-out provisions that the United States has exercised. The consequence is not merely institutional hypocrisy — it is the systematic destruction of the legitimacy that international law requires in order to function as anything other than the penchants of the strong.
What this means in practice is that every nation-state observing the Iran strikes from the outside — particularly those in the Global South that have experienced the gap between international law’s promises and its practice — is rationally updating its assessment of what the rules-based order is actually for. The conclusion many are reaching, with considerable empirical support, is that the rules exist to organise relations among the powerful and to discipline the weak. Sovereignty is available on subscription: you have it if the right countries recognise it; you lose it the moment those countries decide your existence is inconvenient.
This is not simply a diplomatic problem. It’s an existential one for the international order itself. Legitimacy is not a resource that regenerates automatically. It is depleted by each act of selective enforcement, each demonstrated double standard, each moment when a mediator boards a plane to brief an administration that has already decided and is simply waiting for the plane to land before announcing the decision. At some point — and that point may be closer than comfortable — the delegitimisation of the existing order creates a vacuum, and vacuums are filled by whatever is nearest and most forceful.
What Cannot Be Rebuilt in the Dark
I have been asking, across many years of work on the futures of governance and civilisational design, whether our dominant institutions are constitutionally capable of the kinds of changes that the evidence, rather relentlessly, suggests are necessary. The question takes on particular urgency in the context of Iran.
Regime change, as a doctrine, has a record that should long since have ended its credibility. Iraq was promised liberation; it received fragmentation, sectarian civil war, and the conditions that produced the Islamic State. Libya was promised protection; it received a decade of militia fiefdom. Afghanistan consumed twenty years and the lives of people across multiple generations — the vast majority of them Afghan — only to return to the authority of the Taliban it had sought to dislodge. The pattern is not aberrant. It is instructive. States are not software; they cannot be rebooted. The social fabric, the networks of trust, the informal institutions that allow collective life to function — these are the work of generations, and they cannot survive the kind of deliberate demolition that “major combat operations” entail. What is built in their place, if anything, is built by those who survive and who carry the memory of how the destruction arrived.
The Iranian people are not a monolith. The protests of 2025-2026 were the largest since the 1979 revolution, driven by economic collapse, by the rial’s catastrophic devaluation, by the regime’s comprehensive failure to offer its citizens a dignified life. There was genuine appetite for change among millions of Iranians. What there is not — what the historical record of externally imposed change uniformly fails to produce — is a stable, representative successor emerging from the rubble of a military campaign. External bombs do not deliver internal legitimacy. They do not hand power to the liberal reformers waiting in the wings; they hand it to whoever has the guns, the networks, and the will to fill the void.
None of this argues for passivity in the face of genuine threats. The Iranian regime’s barely disguised nuclear ambitions, its systematic violence against protesters, its arming of regional proxies — these are serious and legitimate concerns. But the Omani mediator had, in the hours before the bombs fell, secured commitments that addressed the nuclear dimension more directly than any previous agreement. Zero stockpiling. Full IAEA verification. These weren’t trivial concessions. They represented, from the Iranian side, a significant departure from longstanding positions, made under enormous domestic political pressure in a country already convulsed by protest and economic collapse.
The bombs fell anyway. Which means the bombs were not about the nuclear programme. They were about something else — a combination of regime-change ideology, alliance management, domestic political dynamics, and the institutional momentum of a military apparatus that had been repositioning assets and rehearsing this option for months. The diplomacy was, in the assessment of some of the most sober foreign policy analysts watching events unfold, a ruse before the bombs fell. Iran’s negotiators may be forgiven for drawing that conclusion. So may every other government watching from a position of lesser power, and updating their own calculations about whether negotiated agreements with Washington are worth the political cost of making them.
Toward Something Else
I am not, in the end, a pessimist. Pessimism is a form of passivity, and passivity is not a luxury available to those who care about the direction of the world. But I am a realist about the depth of what would have to change for the patterns documented here to change with it.
The institutional changes are imaginable, even if politically difficult. Binding legislative constraints on executive war-making — the restoration of Congress’s constitutional role in authorising force — would not prevent all wars, but would slow the slide from threat to strike that has characterised American foreign policy for decades. Genuine investment in diplomatic capacity, building the institutional infrastructure for sustained and complex engagement with adversarial states, would give future presidents something other than military options when patience runs thin. Transparent arms export controls, enforceable conflict of interest rules preventing the revolving door between the Pentagon and defence contractors, campaign finance reform that breaks the direct line between defence industry dollars and congressional votes — none of these are utopian. They are the ordinary equipment of accountable governance that has simply been dismantled over time.
The cultural changes are harder and more important. The worldview that equates power with coercion, that reads patience as weakness and dialogue as naivety, is not a universal feature of human political organisation. It is a specific historical formation, rooted in particular assumptions about competition, dominance, and the nature of security, that has been so thoroughly naturalised that its alternatives have become almost literally unthinkable in the mainstream of Western political culture. Making them thinkable again — in schools, in media, in the conversations that shape what options appear on tables — is the long and difficult work that underlies all the institutional reforms and makes them possible.
What happened in Iran on 28 February 2026 will be recorded as a military event. It was also, and more profoundly, an intellectual failure — a failure of the imagination that allows complex human beings with contradictory interests and genuine fears to find, through sustained and difficult engagement, arrangements they can both live within. That imagination is not an idealist luxury. It is the most practically urgent capacity that a species armed with civilisation-ending weapons needs to develop, quickly, before the machinery of the first resort finishes its work.
A mediator was on a plane. Peace was within reach. The bombs fell anyway.
The question that outlasts the smoke is whether we can build a world in which that sequence becomes, finally, impossible — not because violence is unavailable, but because the systems we inhabit no longer make it the path of least resistance. That is the work. It is longer, less dramatic, and more important than any war.