Those who denounce the religious illusions of their adversaries now appear to be guided by radical convictions themselves. The war in Iran exposes the violent core of the West.
Mohamed Lamine KABA
State fanaticism or theology of war
The offensive against Iran cannot be understood without analyzing the ideological shift sweeping through American and Israeli decision-making centers. As Ismail Allison writes, apocalyptic religious beliefs have been transposed into public action with devastating effects. For him, “A group of religious fanatics with access to nuclear weapons is using a powerful army to wage a holy war.” This chilling statement refers not to Tehran but to Washington. It speaks volumes about the ongoing reversal. Far from the caricatures perpetuated for decades, it is now Western decision-making centers that are giving substance to a militarized theology.
In the same vein, the testimonies relayed by the Military The Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) reports a systemic phenomenon in which officers present war to their subordinates as a divine plan, even referring to it as a sacred mission entrusted to the executive branch. According to these officers, as reported by the MRFF, President Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran in order to bring about Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” This fusion of religion and the military is not marginal but structural. It is not peripheral rhetoric. It is a mental infrastructure.
In this context, Trump administration Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth refers to his adversaries as “crazy regimes” and accuses them of being “determined by prophetic Islamic illusions” in an obsessive rhetoric, while his own symbolic universe is marked by the term “infidel” inscribed on his body. Along with Mike Huckabee, they appear as the vectors of a Christian Zionism that no longer merely supports Israel but projects an apocalyptic vision onto the entire Middle East. This is the embodiment of a form of political messianism where the enemy is constructed as absolute otherness. Conversely, within Netanyahu’s Israeli government, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich project an eschatological vision that inscribes violence within a sacred temporality, oriented towards regional domination. This is a parallel logic where violence becomes an instrument of historical achievement, and where Iran thus becomes less a strategic target than a milestone in a mythologized narrative oriented towards total hegemony. They see themselves as agents of this messianic temporality.
This ideological convergence produces an unprecedented configuration where war ceases to be a rational calculation of foreign policy and becomes a belief, a quasi-liturgical undertaking; that is to say, a militarized act of faith from which those who denounce the religious illusions of their adversaries appear themselves guided by radical convictions. Within this framework, strategic rationality gives way to a logic of absolute confrontation, where destruction becomes an end in itself. Consequently, the enemy is no longer an adversary but a figure to be eradicated. Politics then shifts into a form of sacralization of destruction, with destruction perceived as a necessary step toward an ideological horizon. This phenomenon marks a profound rupture in the way Western power conceives of itself and is exercised.
Right dissolved in organized illegality
From a legal standpoint, the attack against Iran falls squarely within the framework of international law. As Jérôme de Hemptinne points out, it meets neither the strict criteria of self-defense nor the requirements of the United Nations Charter. The absence of actual or imminent Iranian aggression renders the legal argument particularly weak. The widely contested notion of a preemptive strike/self-defense is being invoked here to justify the unjustifiable. What is at stake here is a unilateral redefinition of the norms.
The formula “illegal but justified,” put forward by Maxime Prévot and adopted by several Western leaders, solves nothing. On the contrary, it reveals a deep unease. It means that illegality is accepted as soon as it emanates from dominant powers and that the norm is no longer binding but merely available for rhetorical purposes. Law then ceases to be a framework and becomes a tool for ex post facto legitimation, where some arrogate to themselves the right to violate the rules they claim to defend, by imposing them on others.
Furthermore, bypassing the Security Council illustrates the paralysis of a system designed precisely to limit this type of abuse. While the American intervention, conducted without congressional authorization, reinforces this dynamic of deregulation, their European allies take refuge in calculated ambiguity – going so far as to describe certain responses as “indiscriminate and disproportionate” in a selective stance – oscillating between partial condemnation and diplomatic caution, demonstrating a structural inability to oppose this logic of power. The collective security system is de facto bypassed because it still constitutes a minimal obstacle.
This double standard has a major consequence. It establishes a permanent state of exception, a space where force prevails over law. In this space, legitimacy becomes a discursive construct indexed to power relations, sometimes justified in the name of a supposed “humanitarian intervention.” The international order is transformed into a field of arbitrary rule where force trumps law, enshrining a form of strategic anomie with potentially irreversible consequences.
War industry or chaos economy
Beyond the ideological and legal dimensions, the material reality of the war in Iran reveals another truth. It is also a profoundly asymmetrical political economy. Military operations cost nearly $59.39 million per day. This sum could fund healthcare for millions of Americans or feed impoverished populations. As the budget briefing notes, every dollar spent on destruction is taken away from social survival. In other words, every dollar spent on this war is a dollar taken from citizens in need. This teleological observation reveals a political economy of war where costs are socialized and benefits are concentrated.
Meanwhile, the death toll continues to rise. More than a thousand Iranians have been killed, including hundreds of children, mostly gunned down in cold blood at a girls’ school in Minab. American soldiers are also dying in a war that the majority of the population disapproves of. This disconnect between decision and consent reveals a deep democratic fracture that directly contradicts the humanitarian rhetoric used to legitimize the intervention.
War thus appears as a destructive enterprise whose beneficiaries remain invisible, but whose victims are perfectly identifiable. It produces its own justifications, its own enemies, and its own cycles. The terrorism that the West claims to combat paradoxically fits into this dynamic. It is both a consequence and a pretext, an outgrowth of a system that externalizes the violence it generates.
More broadly, this dynamic is part of a historical continuum in which Western powers have played a central role in the production of contemporary conflicts and in the dissemination of the forms of violence they claim to combat. From the fabrication of threats to the proliferation of armed groups, intervention strategies have contributed to structuring an unstable international environment. Terrorism, often presented as an exogenous threat or an external anomaly, also appears as an indirect byproduct of these intervention strategies.
This observation necessitates a broader interpretation. Contemporary conflicts are not anomalies but manifestations of a structure. A structure in which the West, far from being a factor of stability, acts as a central producer of disorder. Iran is merely another episode in this continuum. That is to say, the most accomplished expression of a system founded on the projection of power, the manipulation of norms, and the exploitation of crises.
It therefore goes without saying that what is happening in Iran is not just another war, but the exposure of a system based on organized violence, centered around this trilogy of power projection, manipulation of norms, and instrumentalization of crises, all in the service of a declining hegemony.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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