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THE WAR IN IRAN is the inaugural act of a new world order. We know this because it began without the usual prelude to war. In October 2023, there was a rush to manufacture consent for Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza. The United States’ president at the time, Joe Biden, said he had seen pictures of beheaded Israeli babies—comments later walked back by the White House. The soon-to-be-elected British prime minister went on radio to reassure conscience-stricken Britons that Israel could legally cut off water, food and electricity to Gaza. When Israel bombed Gaza’s hospitals, newly minted open-source intelligence experts emerged to read rocket fumes and declare, predictably, that Hamas did it. No such effort was made to justify the bombing of Iran.
The rules-based international order once required the West to justify its use of force in terms of human rights, democracy and international law. It was a liberal project that rested its authority on a claim to moral universalism, on the equal worth of people and their equal claim to human rights. Liberalism has been the dominant political tradition of the West for the best part of two hundred years. As the animating ideology of the free world, it was inseparable from the West’s sense of itself as a civilisation apart. In the effort to square the imperatives of power with their moral commitments, liberals cultivated a distinctive historical sensibility, which deferred ethical judgment with the faith that the violence of the present could be redeemed by the progress it made possible. This sensibility is what the historian Priya Satia calls the management of conscience.
The West’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza—and the ability of Palestinians to document their own destruction and broadcast it to the world—made a mockery of that project. With the US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the bombing of Iran, Donald Trump has taken a hammer to that order’s decaying edifice. For good or for ill, threats of power have replaced the rhetoric of universalism. The death of this liberal common sense demands an autopsy.
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