Trigger-happy states and the death of diplomacy

Let’s strip the paint off the façade. Israel is not a democracy under siege. It is an apartheid regime built on the premise of eternal expansion, maintained through brute force, and glorified by Western sycophants too cowardly—or too compromised—to confront its reality.

By JUNAID S. AHMAD

Diplomacy isn’t dying a quiet death in a backroom. It’s being dragged into the street, executed in broad daylight, and buried under the rubble of Israeli airstrikes—with Washington standing over the grave, shovel in one hand, arms shipment in the other. The latest target in this grim theatre of annihilation is Iran: a sovereign nation of nearly 90 million, demonised for decades, and now punished not for aggression, but for restraint.

For more than a year, Tehran demonstrated superhuman patience in the face of Israeli provocations. Assassinations on its soil, sabotage of its infrastructure, and the routine bombing of its allies across the region—all met with silence or symbolic gestures. Not because Iran lacked the means to respond, but because it made a deliberate choice to keep a brittle regional equilibrium intact while engaging in serious nuclear negotiations with the United States.

But that restraint, predictably, was interpreted as weakness. Israel—forever mistaking its own impunity for divine right—decided to push further. This time, its bombs landed inside Iran proper, and in doing so, it triggered the very response it claimed to fear: a direct and devastating Iranian missile barrage on Israeli territory. The taboo had been broken, and it wasn’t Iran that broke it—it was Tel Aviv.

What followed was a revelation. Israel is not untouchable. And the Islamic Republic is not the caricature sketched in Western propaganda. It is capable, calculating, and—when provoked past a breaking point—entirely willing to retaliate.

Israel’s national religion: Violence with impunity

Let’s strip the paint off the façade. Israel is not a democracy under siege. It is an apartheid regime built on the premise of eternal expansion, maintained through brute force, and glorified by Western sycophants too cowardly—or too compromised—to confront its reality. Its national security doctrine is a cynical blend of settler-colonial paranoia and military adventurism: provoke, strike, blame the victim, and then sob before the UN while U.S. lawmakers compete to outdo each other in expressions of eternal loyalty.

Its latest war on Gaza, now entering a grotesque second year, has already surpassed the language of humanitarian crisis. It is industrial-scale slaughter. And while Palestinian corpses pile up in their thousands, Israel’s war machine has expanded its theatre of chaos—bombing Syria, threatening Lebanon, and now courting open war with Iran.

Netanyahu, presiding over all this with the deranged certainty of a man who sees divine mandate in his blood-soaked ambitions, has at last achieved his most dangerous goal: dragging the United States into a direct confrontation with Tehran. After decades of lobbying, manipulation, and false-flag flirtations, the Zionist state now has its imperial partner marching in lockstep toward yet another Middle Eastern disaster.

The American Empire: Midwife to mayhem

The United States, for its part, continues to play the fool it knows it is not. It has not been duped. It has been complicit. This is the empire that talks about peace while pouring billions into military aid, that pretends neutrality while actively picking sides, and that speaks the language of diplomacy with a mouth full of bullets.

Donald Trump, a man whose foreign policy could be summarised as “bomb first, brag later,” is now posturing like a mafia don on a power trip. He’s publicly mused about assassinating Iran’s leadership—as casually as if he were discussing a golf score. The delusion runs deep: that the world will simply nod along while the U.S. and Israel dismantle entire nations in the name of “stability.”

This isn’t just hypocrisy—it’s a war crime masquerading as strategy.

Washington, instead of learning from the charred remains of Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, is once again fastening itself to Israel’s death cult of supremacy and siege. And while American politicians shed crocodile tears over democracy and diplomacy, they are greasing the wheels of another catastrophic intervention—one with no exit strategy, no legal justification, and no moral compass.

Iran shatters the illusion of Israeli invincibility

But this time, the victim didn’t just scream. It struck back.

Iran’s response was direct, disciplined, and devastating. No proxies, no deniability—just raw state-to-state force. And Israel, that snarling attack dog of the West, flinched. Despite its vaunted Iron Dome and high-tech bravado, Tehran’s missiles landed with surgical precision. Strategic military sites were hit. Panic set in. The curtain was pulled back, and the myth of Israeli invincibility collapsed like a cardboard fortress in a storm.

The censors in Tel Aviv worked overtime to suppress footage, but the damage—both physical and psychological—was done. For the first time in decades, Israel felt the consequences of its own belligerence, not just through the suffering of others, but on its own territory.

This wasn’t some ragtag militia firing improvised rockets. This was a sovereign state with a formidable arsenal, coordinated command, and regional reach. And if Netanyahu was hoping for a swift, one-sided affair, what he’s gotten instead is a painful reminder: Iran is not Gaza, and this war will not be clean.

Regime change: The lie behind the lies

Strip away the propaganda and the core goal becomes obvious: this has never been about nuclear weapons. It’s about eliminating the last sovereign pillar in the region not dancing to the Empire’s tune. Israel wants regional monopoly. The U.S. wants a pliant Iran. Together, they’re trying to snuff out a country that refuses to kneel.

The shifting demands placed on Iran’s nuclear program—first limit enrichment, then abandon enrichment altogether, then dismantle its defences just in case—reveal the real game. The West doesn’t want compliance. It wants capitulation.

Meanwhile, Israel—possessor of an illegal nuclear arsenal and proud non-signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty—lectures the world about non-proliferation with the moral authority of an arsonist leading a fire safety seminar.

Only two outcomes: Reckoning or ruin

So how does this end?

Path one is a fantasy: that Trump, or whoever else is playing puppet-in-chief, grows a spine and tells Netanyahu to stand down. But U.S. foreign policy is not led—it is lobbied, bullied, and bought. This is a country where suggesting conditional aid to Israel is treated as treason.

Path two is brutal—but far more plausible. Israel gets a military slap so severe it’s forced to question whether its current doctrine of endless war is sustainable. That reckoning could come through a united front of regional states or by Hezbollah, whose arsenal and battlefield experience dwarf anything the Israeli Defense Forces have faced since their last humiliation in Lebanon.

Only a direct, undeniable defeat—not in headlines but in body bags and broken bases—might finally puncture Israel’s delusions of military omnipotence.

The region is being pushed to the edge—by its ‘allies’

Let us be unflinchingly clear: the region is being dragged toward war not by Iranian ambitions, but by Israeli fanaticism and American imperial muscle. Iran did not initiate this escalation—it was forced into it. It is not the wild-eyed fanatic—it’s the one actor calculating cost and consequence with unnerving sobriety.

Meanwhile, Israel lurches from one massacre to another, high on its own mythology, and the U.S. claps like an audience watching its favourite dog perform new tricks. This is not diplomacy. It’s a death pact.

And when the fire spreads, don’t let anyone pretend they didn’t see the smoke.

The last adult in a room of arsonists

The greatest irony, of course, is that the most mature, restrained, and strategically sane actor in this geopolitical catastrophe is the one most vilified in Western media. Iran, with all its flaws, has acted like an adult in a region full of vandals. It sought dialogue, absorbed provocations, and drew red lines with precision, not impulse.

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And when the grown-up finally decides to hit back, history won’t care who whined the loudest. It will remember who started the fire—and who burned trying to control it.

Professor Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Decolonisation (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE –https://www.theshapeproject.com/)

Trigger-happy states and the death of diplomacy

Let’s strip the paint off the façade. Israel is not a democracy under siege. It is an apartheid regime built on the premise of eternal expansion, maintained through brute force, and glorified by Western sycophants too cowardly—or too compromised—to confront its reality.

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