In Western democracies, arguments about the Islamic Republic of Iran increasingly reflect domestic culture wars more than the realities of the Iranian regime.
Let’s cut through the noise. The Islamic Republic isn’t misunderstood—it’s exactly what it says it is: a revolutionary regime that funds terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas while crushing its own citizens. The real distortion happens in the West, where ideological tribes twist every foreign crisis into a domestic culture war. One side reflexively blames America and Israel. The other retreats into isolationism. Both miss the point. When authoritarian regimes test the world order, pretending it’s merely a narrative dispute is dangerous. Democracies must debate policy—but they should at least start from reality instead of ideological theater. Truth comes before slogans.
Hi Richard. I wrote the piece. I’m not sure whether what you wrote seeks to reaffirm what I wrote in the piece or take it to task. Both are fine as far as I’m concerned. You appear to write in an oppositional tone (unless I’m reading into something that’s not there), yet essentially, you reemphasise the points that the article puts forward. I wonder whether your issue (if you have one) is that I am in some way ‘pretending that it is a narrative dispute’. If this is the case, I think you may be misconstruing what I’m saying: I’m not proposing a narrative-based paradigm for approaching foreign policy, but rather observing how common it is for people to (dangerously, I agree) view foreign policy through a narrative lens. All the best.
Joel — thanks for replying, and let me start by saying I genuinely thought your piece was excellent. I didn’t mean my comment as a critique of your argument. If anything, I was reinforcing it, just… in my usual louder register.
Where I’m coming from is this: when you look at the 46-year record of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the reasonable range of reactions really runs from alarm to outright moral outrage. This is a regime that literally has schoolchildren chant “Death to America, Death to Israel” as part of a daily ritual. It funds and directs groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and those groups have killed civilians across the globe. If someone in the West has a friend or family member who was killed or maimed in a terrorist attack over the past several decades, there’s a very good chance Iran sits somewhere in that causal chain.
For me, this isn’t abstract. On September 11, 2001, I was eight blocks from the Twin Towers in New York City. I watched the smoke and chaos firsthand. I lost friends, and a part of the soul of my hometown was irrevocably torn out. So when people debate whether regimes like this are serious about their intentions, I have a hard time engaging that question as if it’s theoretical. These organizations tell you exactly what they intend to do — and then they try to do it.
Where my frustration comes in (and why I probably sounded combative) is with the Western reaction you described so well. Large parts of what we’d broadly call Western civilization — the post-WWII, Cold War liberal order — have drifted into a strange place where reality gets replaced by narrative management. The bodies are real. The victims are real. The ideology driving the violence is real. But somehow the discussion turns into a domestic culture-war proxy: Trump bad, Netanyahu bad, therefore the rest must be contextualized or blurred.
That’s the “hyper-reality” problem you’re pointing to, and I think you’re exactly right about it. The narrative debate becomes the focus, while the underlying reality fades from view.
What unsettles me historically is that I can’t think of many periods since the Enlightenment where public discourse has become this detached from empirical reality. Facts are visible — sometimes literally in rubble and body counts — yet they get reframed or dissolved because they conflict with ideological priors.
So if my tone came across as oppositional, that’s on me. I’m not arguing with your thesis. I’m reacting emotionally to the phenomenon you’re describing.
You wrote the analysis. I just supplied the outrage.
Thank you so much for your response, Richard! I promise that I was not upset even if you disagreed with me! I just wanted to get to the root of where you were coming from. I really identify with what you wrote and understand the outrage that can result. As someone heading in and out of the shelter here in Israel and trying to keep children calm during these trying times, I appreciate how frustrating it can be to see people detached from a situation - with such strong opinions about issues so impactful on your own life - with so little contextual understanding of the issues - or a willful refusal to step outside of a framing dictated by domestic politic considerations or fanciful ideological paradigms. All the best.
Brilliant article all the way around! Lots of mental after-action will be required as I re-read it later. That said, despite the gut wrenching loss of Americans, this will be the first time a war (in my 70 year lifetime), has cause that is righteous. Sending soldiers to war with no intention of winning (ie: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam) is ignoble in the highest. THIS President will not let that happen.
Joel Meyer offers excellent insights. I’d add as follows:
For me. There’s a valid distinction between attacking another country because of what they’re doing to you and attacking to correct what they do to their own citizens. Meyer hints at that when he discusses ambivalence about Iranian lives vis a vis their own government l.
The UN, admittedly useless, is a collection of sovereignties not factions therein. Sovereignties are not supposed to interfere with internal affairs of other sovereignties. That’s the norm we call peace.
Thus Israel has every justification to attack Iran and seek regime change to eliminate a direct external enemy threat to Israel, regardless of what the regime does to it’s citizens.The U.S. must make that same case, and I think it can and should.
Regime change is justified whenever the regime is the threat. As it is to Israel directly.
That said, “what happens next” is an internal issue. A selfish sovereign can justifiably say “the threat to me is gone. What happens next to Iran internally is not our concern unless it threatens us anew.”
Perhaps that’s shortsighted, but in a complex world, that may be the best we get. Stay strong and vigilant and let them choose a better path knowing they have to leave us alone or else.
How much better off would the world be if Great Britain and France took out the Wehrmacht in 1936 when they illegally remilitarized the Rhineland? They could have easily defeated the very weak German army. But they decided to do nothing, just like Presidents Obama and Biden did, and what the Democrat Party is saying now. It took tens of millions of people dead in World War II and STILL the Democrats and the Left aren't getting it. If Trump didn't start the process of destroying the Iranian regime now, we would be facing a much bigger problem down the road.
Both hate Christians, Jews, Western Civilization and want all three utterly destroyed.
I know who my enemies are and in this case, they both are. They want me dead and everything I hold dear. We are in a war with them and they want us gone.
Let’s cut through the noise. The Islamic Republic isn’t misunderstood—it’s exactly what it says it is: a revolutionary regime that funds terror groups like Hezbollah and Hamas while crushing its own citizens. The real distortion happens in the West, where ideological tribes twist every foreign crisis into a domestic culture war. One side reflexively blames America and Israel. The other retreats into isolationism. Both miss the point. When authoritarian regimes test the world order, pretending it’s merely a narrative dispute is dangerous. Democracies must debate policy—but they should at least start from reality instead of ideological theater. Truth comes before slogans.
Hi Richard. I wrote the piece. I’m not sure whether what you wrote seeks to reaffirm what I wrote in the piece or take it to task. Both are fine as far as I’m concerned. You appear to write in an oppositional tone (unless I’m reading into something that’s not there), yet essentially, you reemphasise the points that the article puts forward. I wonder whether your issue (if you have one) is that I am in some way ‘pretending that it is a narrative dispute’. If this is the case, I think you may be misconstruing what I’m saying: I’m not proposing a narrative-based paradigm for approaching foreign policy, but rather observing how common it is for people to (dangerously, I agree) view foreign policy through a narrative lens. All the best.
Joel — thanks for replying, and let me start by saying I genuinely thought your piece was excellent. I didn’t mean my comment as a critique of your argument. If anything, I was reinforcing it, just… in my usual louder register.
Where I’m coming from is this: when you look at the 46-year record of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the reasonable range of reactions really runs from alarm to outright moral outrage. This is a regime that literally has schoolchildren chant “Death to America, Death to Israel” as part of a daily ritual. It funds and directs groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and those groups have killed civilians across the globe. If someone in the West has a friend or family member who was killed or maimed in a terrorist attack over the past several decades, there’s a very good chance Iran sits somewhere in that causal chain.
For me, this isn’t abstract. On September 11, 2001, I was eight blocks from the Twin Towers in New York City. I watched the smoke and chaos firsthand. I lost friends, and a part of the soul of my hometown was irrevocably torn out. So when people debate whether regimes like this are serious about their intentions, I have a hard time engaging that question as if it’s theoretical. These organizations tell you exactly what they intend to do — and then they try to do it.
Where my frustration comes in (and why I probably sounded combative) is with the Western reaction you described so well. Large parts of what we’d broadly call Western civilization — the post-WWII, Cold War liberal order — have drifted into a strange place where reality gets replaced by narrative management. The bodies are real. The victims are real. The ideology driving the violence is real. But somehow the discussion turns into a domestic culture-war proxy: Trump bad, Netanyahu bad, therefore the rest must be contextualized or blurred.
That’s the “hyper-reality” problem you’re pointing to, and I think you’re exactly right about it. The narrative debate becomes the focus, while the underlying reality fades from view.
What unsettles me historically is that I can’t think of many periods since the Enlightenment where public discourse has become this detached from empirical reality. Facts are visible — sometimes literally in rubble and body counts — yet they get reframed or dissolved because they conflict with ideological priors.
So if my tone came across as oppositional, that’s on me. I’m not arguing with your thesis. I’m reacting emotionally to the phenomenon you’re describing.
You wrote the analysis. I just supplied the outrage.
Thank you so much for your response, Richard! I promise that I was not upset even if you disagreed with me! I just wanted to get to the root of where you were coming from. I really identify with what you wrote and understand the outrage that can result. As someone heading in and out of the shelter here in Israel and trying to keep children calm during these trying times, I appreciate how frustrating it can be to see people detached from a situation - with such strong opinions about issues so impactful on your own life - with so little contextual understanding of the issues - or a willful refusal to step outside of a framing dictated by domestic politic considerations or fanciful ideological paradigms. All the best.
very well stated, Richard!
Clear eyed lucid analysis. People have lost sight of right and wrong.
These are essential points:
Algorithm-driven platforms reward emotionally charged, identity-affirming content, accelerating its spread while setting aside nuance.
Foreign policy becomes an extension of identity politics.
The 1938 Munich Agreement…[shows] avoiding confrontation is not automatically pacifism; sometimes it defers conflict until conditions are worse.
When foreign policy becomes subordinate to domestic culture wars, analysis again gives way to signaling.
Thank you Avraham
Thank you, Joel. I hope your points are able to penetrate into the mainstream conversation.
Brilliant article all the way around! Lots of mental after-action will be required as I re-read it later. That said, despite the gut wrenching loss of Americans, this will be the first time a war (in my 70 year lifetime), has cause that is righteous. Sending soldiers to war with no intention of winning (ie: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam) is ignoble in the highest. THIS President will not let that happen.
Thank you Pam
Joel Meyer offers excellent insights. I’d add as follows:
For me. There’s a valid distinction between attacking another country because of what they’re doing to you and attacking to correct what they do to their own citizens. Meyer hints at that when he discusses ambivalence about Iranian lives vis a vis their own government l.
The UN, admittedly useless, is a collection of sovereignties not factions therein. Sovereignties are not supposed to interfere with internal affairs of other sovereignties. That’s the norm we call peace.
Thus Israel has every justification to attack Iran and seek regime change to eliminate a direct external enemy threat to Israel, regardless of what the regime does to it’s citizens.The U.S. must make that same case, and I think it can and should.
Regime change is justified whenever the regime is the threat. As it is to Israel directly.
That said, “what happens next” is an internal issue. A selfish sovereign can justifiably say “the threat to me is gone. What happens next to Iran internally is not our concern unless it threatens us anew.”
Perhaps that’s shortsighted, but in a complex world, that may be the best we get. Stay strong and vigilant and let them choose a better path knowing they have to leave us alone or else.
Thank you, ‘Onappeal’. Your analysis is spot on.
How much better off would the world be if Great Britain and France took out the Wehrmacht in 1936 when they illegally remilitarized the Rhineland? They could have easily defeated the very weak German army. But they decided to do nothing, just like Presidents Obama and Biden did, and what the Democrat Party is saying now. It took tens of millions of people dead in World War II and STILL the Democrats and the Left aren't getting it. If Trump didn't start the process of destroying the Iranian regime now, we would be facing a much bigger problem down the road.
I just wrote a piece touching on the parallels of that period to today - I think you may get something from it: https://itssimplycomplicated.substack.com/p/can-history-excuse-any-action?r=4safrv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Red Green Alliance.
Both hate Christians, Jews, Western Civilization and want all three utterly destroyed.
I know who my enemies are and in this case, they both are. They want me dead and everything I hold dear. We are in a war with them and they want us gone.
Thank you for your responses. I wanted to share my latest article, delving deeper into the question of scepticism in the West regarding the moral and legal justification for war with Iran: https://itssimplycomplicated.substack.com/p/can-history-excuse-any-action?r=4safrv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web