EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

China, Taiwan, and the U.S.: Decisions Today That Will Shape the World of Tomorrow

May 4, 2026
University of California, Irvine
Humanities Gateway (HG) 1030

Sponsored by the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute and the UCI Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies

Event Description

The Chinese Communist Party has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since it took power in China in 1949, and China’s government has been rapidly developing its military capabilities to lay siege to or invade the island. At the same time, China, Taiwan, and the United States have developed economic relationships that would be threatened by any Chinese attempt to assert sovereignty over Taiwan. The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently revised its threat assessment to indicate that China would not invade Taiwan in 2027, as previously assumed, but there is still disagreement about China’s plans due to its continuing aggressive actions in the Taiwan Strait. The panelists for this event will discuss the following two questions: What is the nature of the regime in China and the threat to Taiwan? What should the United States do to face this threat?

Speakers

Russell A. Berman, President, Telos-Paul Piccone Institute; Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Former Member, Policy Planning Staff and Commission on Unalienable Rights, U.S. State Department

Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China and The Great U.S.-China Tech War

John Graham, Professor Emeritus of the UCI Merage School of Business, Founding Director of the UCI Long US-China Institute, and co-author with Michael Lam of China Now: Doing Business in the World’s Most Dynamic Marketplace.

Eric Hendriks, Director, Telos-Paul Piccone Institute China Initiative; Visiting Fellow, Danube Institute

David Pan, Professor of European Studies, UC Irvine; Editor, Telos; Former Member, Commission on Unalienable Rights, U.S. State Department

Miles Yu, Professor of Military History and Modern China, U.S. Naval Academy; Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute; Former Principal China Policy Advisor, Policy Planning Staff, U.S. State Department

Schedule and Registration

Panel Discussions

Time: 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm (doors open at 2:30 pm)

Location: UC Irvine, Humanities Gateway (HG) 1030. Parking is available in the Mesa Parking Structure ($16).

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Reception and Dinner with the Panelists

Time: 6:30 pm

Location: Hotel Zessa, 201 E. MacArthur Blvd., Santa Ana, CA 92707

Registration rates:

• Early-bird registration by April 18: $175

• Regular registration by April 25: $200

• Benefactor: $500

• Table (8): $1,400

• Co-host: $5,000

The amount of the registration above $100 per plate includes a tax-deductible donation to the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute. The deadline for registration is April 25.

Click here to register!

Photo: Debjyoti Bardhan via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0

“Jewish life belongs to Germany.” Few phrases are invoked more often in discussions of German-Jewish relations. It sounds like a promise, a reassurance, sometimes almost like a declaration of faith. Yet the more often it is said, the more pressing the question becomes of what it actually means. The very frequency with which this formula is invoked points to an unresolved tension. Its constant repetition appears to compensate for a deeper, largely unspoken unease. The assumption that this unease originates with Jews themselves and merely reflects the insecurity of Jewish life in Germany, however, falls short. In reality, it reveals a deeper discomfort within German society about its own past, of which Jews are inevitably perceived as a living reminder.

In political discourse, the focus often seems to be less on real Jews than on a particular “idea of Jews.” In this sense, Jews serve above all as the yardstick by which Germany measures its own claim to be a decent and democratic country despite its “difficult history.” At times, Germany’s commitment to “protecting Jewish life” appears as little more than a matter of duty, performed diligently, yet quietly experienced as a burden. This discrepancy becomes visible not only in political rituals but also in everyday life. For years, Jewish activists have pointed out that Jews in Germany are largely perceived in three roles: as mascots of intercultural dialogue, as objects of hostility in debates surrounding Israel, or as victims of the Holocaust. As a result, German-Jewish relations are marked by a persistent unease and deep-seated reservations.

Paradoxically, this insecurity often goes hand in hand with a striking degree of confidence, for example, when politicians quick to express indignation debate the legitimacy of Israeli retaliatory strikes or public intellectuals pronounce with great certainty on whether Auschwitz should be regarded as historically unique. The root of this imbalance lies less in a lack of information than in a resistance to experiences that do not fit the preconceived picture. Representative surveys repeatedly show how strong the desire for moral exoneration in Germany is and how limited the knowledge of one’s own family history often remains. Around 18 percent of Germans claim that their ancestors helped Jews during the Nazi era, for example by hiding them.

Historical research, however, paints a very different picture. Even generous estimates suggest that the share of those who actually assisted Jews in hiding amounted to only about 0.2 percent of the population. Yet this limited historical awareness is met not with humility but with a passive-aggressive sense of expectation. Against this backdrop, it is striking how confidently and loudly German society places demands on what is often described as “schützenswertes jüdisches Leben” (“Jewish life worthy of protection”). The sheer number of requests directed at Jewish communities, organizations, and their representatives speaks volumes: “Jewish life” should not be too Zionist, it should remain suitable for moral admonition and remembrance, and it should stay compatible with interreligious dialogue.

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For many Jews in Germany, however, Israel is not a distant political issue but an essential element of collective security and identity. This is particularly true for Jews with Eastern European family backgrounds, who make up the large majority of the community. Their families were shaped by experiences of Soviet antisemitism or earlier waves of persecution in Eastern Europe. For them, anti-Israel rhetoric rarely appears as a purely abstract political disagreement. It often resonates with experiences of exclusion and older patterns of antisemitism, and therefore carries a particular historical weight that many outside these communities underestimate.

The Expectation of Moral Superiority

This arrangement works as long as the “Jew worthy of protection” fits the expected mold and there is agreement on what his legitimate needs are. It starts to unravel, however, as soon as Jews articulate their everyday fears and concerns about security, about radicalized Muslims or postcolonial agitators on university campuses. Suddenly Jews are seen as unreliable, politically instrumentalized, or as having taken a political wrong turn. In this constellation, Jews are not perceived as subjects with their own lived experiences, but as extras in a scripted moral drama. Jews may speak as long as they reaffirm what is already believed to be right. Once they deviate from that script, they lose their role.

Interestingly, voices that fit prevailing expectations often receive disproportionate attention in German public discourse. In several prominent cases, these have been left-leaning American or Israeli Jews whose hostility toward Israel resonates strongly with German audiences. While publishing in major newspapers and appearing on talk shows, they often lament the supposed suppression of dissenting voices. In practice, however, such outside commentators are readily welcomed in the German debate, as their interventions make it easier to portray more conservative and security-oriented positions within local Jewish communities as unjustified attempts to “exploit German guilt.”

This imbalance becomes most apparent where outrage is selective, as sympathy for victims of antisemitism at times depends less on the person attacked than on the identity of the perpetrator. When Jews are attacked by a white neo-Nazi, the outrage is immediate and widespread. The image fits, the lines are clear, and it is easy to take a moral stance. The moral calculus changes, however, when antisemitism surfaces within progressive ranks or among those perceived primarily as victims of racism. This is where the relativization begins: everything is placed “in context,” followed by the familiar admonitions not to generalize, not to instrumentalize, and not to “play into the hands of racists.” Concern then shifts away from the Jews who have been attacked toward the political hygiene of one’s own worldview.

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German essayist Eike Geisel once captured this expectation with biting irony. Germans, he argued, have come to view Auschwitz as a kind of “reformatory” for Jews.1 The victims themselves are expected, in retrospect, to demonstrate that something morally meaningful could still be salvaged from the senseless machinery of extermination. Not despite Auschwitz, but precisely because of it, Jews are expected to behave in a particular way. They are expected to be better people and to have internalized a “never again” that is increasingly understood today as an obligation to exercise restraint even in the face of antisemitic terror, much of it perpetrated by radicalized Muslims. Confronting such antisemitism too forcefully, however, would challenge the multicultural self-image of contemporary Germany as an open and tolerant society.

In this context, it is not difficult to imagine the “bad Jew”: the one who refuses the role assigned to him. He is not conciliatory, nor willing to reinterpret the violence directed against him and his community as the expression of deeper social forces. Instead, he insists on self-defense, on Jewish solidarity, and on the right to express anger and demand justice for the wrongs inflicted upon him. Above all, he disrupts the comforting belief that something morally redeeming emerged from the catastrophe. The “bad Jew” refuses the pedagogical expectation. And that is precisely the provocation. Once Jews can no longer serve as a moral lesson, the entire arrangement begins to falter.

The urge for exoneration and the relentless search for “Jewish guilt” are not marginal phenomena but a central mechanism for deflecting guilt in postwar Germany. The supposed crimes of others provide a convenient escape from confronting the crimes of one’s own ancestors. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that slogans such as “Free Palestine from German guilt” found particular resonance and that antisemitic mobilization began even before Israel could respond to the October 7 massacre to protect its population from further attacks that had already been announced.

The expectation of moral superiority turns into aggression when it is disappointed. Jews who refuse to chasten themselves or to join the demanded criticism of Israel will be disciplined accordingly. One interlocutor succinctly described this impossible situation: “I wish more people in this country would treat us like ordinary people, and not as symbols or projection screens for their own conflicts.”

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Will There Still Be Jews in Europe in Twenty Years?

After October 7, it became clear how deeply these reaction patterns are entrenched in German society and how fragile the supposed German-Jewish normalcy truly is. Many Jews had expected that the brutality of the massacre and its openly genocidal intent would preclude any relativization; that the sheer scale of the violence would persuade even those who had long resisted all arguments. Instead, hatred of Jews exploded, with deadly consequences around the world.

Images of mutilated bodies and of those abducted to Gaza did not primarily evoke sympathy but intensified existing hostilities. Antisemitism persisted not despite the suffering but, disturbingly, because of it. In conversations, the same image was drawn again and again: sharks that smell blood and begin to circle their prey. This image captures the unsettling realization that Jews, once they show vulnerability, will not be protected. They become targets. When suffering becomes visible, it does not restrain hostility but instead fuels it.

Many also described a climate in which their grief was not recognized as such but immediately relativized or weighed against the number of victims in Gaza. Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that many Jews are considering leaving Germany altogether. The future of Jewish life in Western Europe is no longer an abstract question. In neighboring France, around 50,000 Jews have emigrated over the past decade, many of them moving to Israel, according to figures from the Jewish Agency. Germany is harder to quantify statistically, but anecdotal evidence suggests a comparable trend. Many younger Jews are considering leaving, often for Israel or the United States. The motivations may vary—security concerns, political frustration, or simply the search for a more stable future—but the underlying question remains whether Jewish life can continue to flourish in societies where hostility toward Israel and Jews is increasingly normalized.

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Several European governments have recently moved toward recognizing a Palestinian state, a step often driven less by diplomatic strategy than by domestic political calculations. For many politicians, the issue is increasingly shaped by electoral arithmetic, with a combination of antisemitic sentiment among segments of the political left and among parts of Muslim communities becoming an influential factor in public debate. Governments worry not only about votes but also about unrest in the streets. In such a climate, affirming gestures toward the “Palestinian cause” can appear politically advantageous, even when they run counter to the security of local Jewish communities. In Germany, such a policy still seems unlikely. Among older generations there remains a sense of historical responsibility or, if not that, at least a reluctance to damage Germany’s carefully cultivated postwar image. Yet demographic change and the sharp rise in antisemitic incidents may well shake this fragile equilibrium.

At the same time, Germany is increasingly shaped by political and intellectual currents that transcend national borders. Paradoxically, the country’s deep integration into transnational institutions and its embrace of an increasingly “internationalized” political culture have also created channels through which forms of antisemitism already visible in international forums such as the United Nations can gain influence. This is no longer the old, traditional hatred of Jews, but rather its postmodern and politically respectable variant. Increasingly, younger Germans who study abroad and move within international academic, corporate, and policy networks adopt these frameworks as well.

In Germany, uncertainty is growing, and an increasing number of Jewish parents are wondering whether they can still raise their children in Germany and send them to regular schools. In some of these schools, out of consideration for the sensitivities of Muslim students, the Holocaust is addressed only cautiously or avoided altogether. Many Jews are increasingly retreating into Jewish circles, not out of a desire for isolation, but out of necessity. The reemergence of separate professional associations for Jewish journalists, academics, and lawyers is itself a sign of how much public space has narrowed for Jews.

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Jews are often described as the canary in the coal mine, though many are unaware of what the metaphor actually implies. When Jews begin leaving a society because of rising antisemitism, it signals more than the dangers of “brain drain”—the loss of figures like Freud, Einstein, Zweig, or other “lost talents” often invoked in German popular culture in connection with flight and exile. Rather, it points to a central insight that is still insufficiently acknowledged: antisemitism poses a threat to freedom, democracy, and the Western way of life as a whole.

Precisely for this reason the broader society should be far more concerned, not out of well-meaning sympathy, but out of sober self-interest. For where Jews are attacked, the very order that places law above power and allows dissent will sooner or later begin to break down. If hatred of the liberal West, with Jews often cast as its agents, continues to grow without resistance, the embattled Jews of Europe will settle elsewhere. Jewish history offers many such examples. In the long run, this has usually harmed the societies that rid themselves of Jews or watched it happen in silence.

Ultimately, every Jew is evidence that somewhere in their family line someone once made a conscious decision to remain Jewish despite violence, exclusion, and persecution, despite the tempting option of assimilation. Sometimes this meant abandoning a place of residence after centuries in order to pursue a Jewish future elsewhere. The Jewish path was rarely the easier one, yet it was chosen again and again. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described Judaism not in its narrow religious sense as a system of beliefs, but as a shared story unfolding across time. This civilization has survived, while the vases and jewelry of the Romans and the mummies of ancient Egypt can now only be admired in museums.

This article is an extended version of a piece originally published in the German journal Zeitzeichen. The author gratefully acknowledges Eric Fraunholz for his assistance with translating this essay.

Topics: Israel Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues

Alexandra Farkas Bandl is pursuing her doctorate in Leipzig, with a focus on East-Central Europe, Jewish history, and the political cultures of state socialism in Hungary. She also leads a Jewish and Zionist organization for young adults.

On March 14, 2026, Pope Leo XIV addressed the judges and officials of the Vatican City State Tribunal for the inauguration of its judicial year. The occasion was routine. Popes have been giving these addresses for decades, and they follow a predictable arc. Pontiff after Pontiff expresses gratitude for the quiet work of the judiciary, a few theological reflections on the nature of justice, and an exhortation to fidelity. Leo XIV followed a proven formula, and his remarks were remarkable primarily for their adherence to convention.

“Authentic justice,” the pope told his judges, “cannot be understood solely in the technical terms of positive law. In the light of the mission that guides the action of the Church, it also appears as the exercise of an ordered form of charity, capable of safeguarding and promoting communion.” He then spent the balance of his remarks unpacking this claim with support from the works of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, grounding the administration of justice in the Thomistic virtue tradition and the Augustinian theology of rightly ordered love.

This is not new ground but draws from the most settled propositions in Catholic jurisprudence. That his remarks received attention tells us something about the current state of the institution he leads. For thirteen years, under the pontificate of Francis, the Angelic Doctor served a largely decorative function in papal discourse. He was invoked occasionally, but almost never deployed structurally. Francis’s preferred register was pastoral, situational, and oriented toward discernment and accompaniment rather than toward the stable and objective character of justice upon which Aquinas insists. Leo XIV’s address is not a revolution, but a recovery. And the fact that this recovery of first principles feels revolutionary invites reflection, not only for the Church but for any institution that claims to operate from pre-liberal philosophical foundations while having quietly abandoned them in practice.

The philosophical architecture of Leo’s remarks deserves attention, because it is doing more work than the occasion required. Leo XIV does not merely assert that justice transcends positive law; he provides the Thomistic scaffolding for the claim. He quotes Aquinas’s definition of justice from the Summa Theologiae: “constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum unicuique tribuendi,” the constant and perpetual will to render to each person what is due. He notes Aquinas’s insistence that “iustitia ad bonum commune ordinatur,” that justice is ordered to the common good. And he invokes the theological formula “caritas perfecta, perfecta iustitia est”: in the fullness of charity, justice finds its most authentic fulfillment.

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The structure of the argument is precise. Justice is not a set of rules but a virtue, a stable disposition of the will oriented toward truth and the good of others. Because it is a virtue, it cannot be reduced to the technical application of norms, but requires the exercise of practical wisdom by a person whose character has been formed for the task. And because justice finds its perfection in charity, the legal order is not self-grounding. It depends on a prior moral order, an account of what is due to persons and why, that positive law presupposes but cannot generate.

This is the classical natural law critique of legal positivism, and it has secular analogues that readers of Telos will recognize. The insufficiency of proceduralism is a theme that runs from Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberal legalism through the Frankfurt School’s analysis of instrumental reason, both central to the intellectual project that Telos has sustained for more than half a century. Schmitt argued that liberal constitutionalism imagines a self-executing legal order in which the question “who decides?” can be permanently deferred, because the rules themselves decide. The Frankfurt School argued that instrumental rationality, left to its own devices, hollows out the substantive commitments that give institutions their purpose. Leo XIV is making a cognate claim from within the Catholic tradition. Positive law, however necessary, cannot sustain a just legal order without reference to the substantive moral vision that animates it.

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It is worth noting what the pope is not saying. He is not dismissing positive law. He explicitly affirms “the observance of procedural safeguards, the impartiality of the judge, the effectiveness of the right of defence [sic] and the reasonable duration of proceedings” as conditions through which the judicial function “acquires particular authority and contributes to institutional stability.” The argument is not positivism versus natural law. It is that positivism is necessary but insufficient: the skeleton without which the body cannot stand, but not the life that animates it.

The Schmittian resonance, however, introduces the Schmittian problem. If positive law must be supplemented by the judgment of a person exercising the virtue of justice, everything depends on the formation and orientation of that person. The question “who decides?” does not disappear simply because one has identified the inadequacy of the claim that rules decide for themselves. It returns with greater force because the person who claims to transcend positive law in the name of a higher justice now wields a more potent authority than the mere technician of legal procedure ever did.

The Thomistic framework has an answer, but the answer presupposes conditions that do not obtain outside its native habitat. Aquinas wrote within a civilization that shared, at least nominally, a metaphysical anthropology: an account of what human beings are, their purpose, and what they are due. Within that shared horizon, “the constant and perpetual will to render to each what is due” has determinate content. Outside it, the formula becomes an invitation to fill in the blanks according to one’s own commitments, and to do so with the elevated confidence that comes from believing oneself to be serving justice rather than merely applying rules. The contemporary American legal landscape is littered with examples of such confidence run amok. Judges who override statutory text in the name of evolving standards of justice, prosecutors who decline to bring charges because enforcement would offend their understanding of equity, juries that reach verdicts animated by moral convictions, class animus, or political grievance untethered from facts or evidence: all of these actors could describe their conduct in the language of the tribunal remarks. Every one of them believes, or could plausibly believe, that he is exercising an ordered form of charity rather than merely applying positive law. The question is not whether they are sincere. Sincerity, absent a shared account of the order to which charity should conform, is no check at all on the exercise of power.

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Leo XIV can address the Vatican tribunal in these terms because Vatican City is, uniquely among the world’s polities, a jurisdiction in which the metaphysical premises of the Thomistic argument are formally, if not actually, shared by all participants. The supreme legislator, executive, and judge is one person who claims to be the Vicar of Christ. Canon law is the first source of norms. The judges serve at the pleasure of the pope and exercise their power in his name. Whatever difficulties attend the practical administration of justice in this peculiar micro-state, the theoretical problem of shared premises does not arise. The rest of us are not so situated.

The most rigorous theological challenge to what Leo XIV is doing comes not from within the Catholic tradition but from the Reformation. Luther’s two-kingdoms theology represents the foundational Protestant attempt to answer the question the tribunal remarks raise: what is the relationship between divine justice and the positive law of temporal institutions?

Luther’s answer is that God governs through two distinct kingdoms, each with its own proper logic. The spiritual kingdom operates through the Gospel of grace, forgiveness, and the free gift of justification. The temporal kingdom operates through law, reason, and coercive order. Both are legitimate expressions of divine governance. Neither can substitute for the other. The temporal kingdom does not need to become the spiritual kingdom in order to fulfill its function. The judge who administers temporal law faithfully, with impartiality and procedural rigor, is already doing God’s work in the earthly kingdom. He does not need to imagine himself as administering divine charity for his work to have moral weight.

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The force of this becomes clear when set against Leo XIV’s central claim. When the pope tells his judges that justice is “an ordered form of charity,” Luther would urge the sharpest caution. The moment a temporal judge begins to think of himself as administering charity rather than law, the restraints that proceduralism provides (imperfect, insufficient, but real) begin to dissolve. The judge who believes he is serving a justice that transcends positive law has given himself permission to override the law’s constraints, and he has done so with a confidence that no merely human actor is entitled to possess.

This is not a defense of positivism. Luther is neither Austin nor Kelsen. He does not believe that law is merely the command of the sovereign backed by force. He believes that temporal law participates in God’s governance of a fallen world. But he insists that the mode of that participation is proper to the temporal kingdom, which operates through reason, precedent, procedure, and the restraint of coercive power by institutional structure, not through the direct application of theological charity to legal disputes.

The contemporary relevance of Luther’s insight is stark. Every instance in which a legal actor invokes a justice higher than the positive law he is charged with administering, whether from the left or the right, is an instance of the category confusion Luther warned against. The progressive prosecutor who declines to enforce laws he considers unjust, and a conservatively ideological judge who reads his policy preferences into constitutional text are engaged in the same structural move. Both baptize temporal coercion with transcendent authority it does not possess. Luther’s two-kingdoms theology does not resolve the tension between positive law and transcendent justice. But it names, with a precision the Thomistic framework sometimes lacks, the specific danger of resolving it too quickly.

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Had we only Thomism and Luther, we could merely diagnose our present ills. Positivism is insufficient, the Thomistic alternative is unavailable outside its native habitat, and the Lutheran correction warns against cheap substitutes. The question of formation, of where rightly ordered judges and legislators actually come from, would remain unanswered.

It is here that the Wesleyan tradition offers something constructive. John Wesley shared Luther’s Protestant sobriety about the fallenness of human institutions, but he refused the quietist implication that the brokenness of the temporal order is simply to be endured. His distinctive theological contribution was the insistence that sanctification is real, progressive, and practically achievable. He does not offer perfection in the Pelagian sense, but genuine transformation of the person through disciplined engagement with what he called “the means of grace.” Prayer, Scripture, sacrament, Christian conference (by which Wesley meant structured mutual accountability among believers), and acts of mercy were not optional devotional exercises but the mechanism through which persons were formed for the exercise of rightly ordered judgment.

The genius of the Wesleyan project was institutional. That emphasis on disciplined, morally formative community also points backward to earlier Protestant traditions, including aspects of Calvinist covenant theology, which likewise understood communal structures as central to the formation of Christian judgment. The class meetings and bands that defined early Methodism were intentional communities of formation, featuring small groups in which persons submitted to mutual examination, confessed their failings, and held one another accountable to standards that the broader culture did not enforce. Wesley’s famous dictum, “think and let think,” preserved genuine pluralism on matters not essential to the faith while insisting that the persons who exercise judgment must themselves be genuinely formed, not merely instructed or credentialed. This is a critical distinction. Credentialing tells you what a person knows. Formation shapes who a person is.

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Translated out of confessional language, the Wesleyan insight is that virtue is cultivable at the human scale even when it is not achievable at the civilizational scale. One need not restore Christendom (the integralist hope) or redesign the constitutional order (the technocratic hope) in order to produce persons capable of judgment that transcends mere proceduralism. What is needed are communities of practice with thick moral commitments and real structures of accountability, communities honest enough to acknowledge that technical competence is not a substitute for character. The liberal order cannot produce the kind of people it needs through proceduralism alone. But it also cannot and should not attempt to reimpose a civilizational metaphysics. What it can do is attend seriously to the conditions under which formational communities flourish, and stop pretending that three years of law school and a bar examination produce wisdom.

Leo XIV’s address to the Vatican tribunal is a small, quiet text delivered to a tiny audience in a very small state. Its philosophical claims are not original. Its theological sources are not novel. Its practical implications, within the 121 acres to which it is formally addressed, are modest. And yet the question it raises is among the most urgent of the present political moment. The pope evidently doubts that any legal order can sustain itself on positive law alone.

The pope told his judges that their work requires “not only legal competence, but also wisdom, balance, and a constant search for truth.” That sentence is either a platitude or a radical challenge, depending on whether anyone takes seriously the question of where wisdom, balance, and a disposition toward truth actually come from. They do not come from law school. They do not come from procedural rules. They do not come from professional codes of conduct, however carefully drafted. They come from formation in communities with substantive moral commitments, communities capable of shaping not only what a person knows but who a person is. The Thomistic tradition names this problem with unmatched philosophical precision. The Lutheran tradition identifies, with equal precision, the danger of premature solutions. The Wesleyan tradition suggests that the work of formation is possible, if modest in scope and honest about its limits. Whether any of these resources can be brought to bear on the institutions that most urgently need them is a question that Leo XIV’s remarks pose but do not answer. Perhaps it is enough, for now, that a pope has posed it again. The answer will have to come from the rest of us, in communities smaller and more particular than Rome, doing the slow and unspectacular work of forming persons for the exercise of judgment in a world that feels increasingly unformed and uninterested in reformation.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Tim Rosenberger is a pastor and attorney and cofounder of Excelsior Action.

Issue 214 of Telos has just been published. This constitutes the second issue emanating from our 2025 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference in New York, “China Keywords,” co-edited by Eric Hendriks, the Director of the TPPI China Initiative.

This principally consists of articles on central Chinese political concepts and also continues the debate in the previous issue about the nature of the Chinese state. Read the editors’ introduction here.

Alexander Sollfrank is Commander of Germany’s Joint Operational Command and former Commander of NATO’s Joint Support and Enabling Command. He has previously emphasized the importance for the Bundeswehr and NATO to prepare for a Russian assault. In a recent interview in the German newspaper Die Welt, he underscored how, despite considerable losses in the Ukraine War, Russia is simultaneously rebuilding in a way that could facilitate its opening an additional front on Europe’s eastern flank and a potential targeting of Germany. The assault might well begin—indeed, perhaps it has already begun—in hybrid dimensions including disinformation, sabotage of critical infrastructure, and cyberattacks, as preparation for a full-scale conventional invasion.

Rather than treating the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran as distinct conflicts, one can deduce from Sollfrank’s warning that they are preliminary theaters within a single great power competition that can spill over into the European heartland and challenge NATO to live up to its responsibilities. There is no inevitability in this potential escalation, but neither should one overlook how the distinct wars—here Ukraine, there Gaza—may not only foreshadow an expansion into Europe, but are already merging into a single war, with increasing interaction between the several zones: Russia aiding Iran with upgraded drones and intelligence to counter the United States, while Ukraine enters into defense pacts with Gulf states as a response to Iran’s drone warfare against Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain, and even Qatar. In the interview that follows, Sollfrank discusses how the fighting in Europe might begin.

General Sollfrank, Russia is currently suffering massive losses—in both personnel and materiel—in its war against Ukraine. Does Russia still pose a genuine threat to Western Europe?

Alexander Sollfrank: Our analyses proceed from the premise, first, that we here in the West—in Germany, in Europe—remain clearly in Russia’s crosshairs. That we are potentially vulnerable to attack. That Russia is currently doing everything in its power to replenish its stockpiles, to strengthen its troops, and to grow its military to a size of 1.5 million soldiers. The question is: When will Russia attack? When will the situation arise in which Russia launches an attack on Europe—including Germany? Of course, a smaller, regional-scale attack is possible at any time. NATO speaks of a “Fight Tonight”—a scenario for which we must be prepared. And that, too, is firmly within our focus. At present, our planning is based on the assumption that Russia will be ready to launch a large-scale attack against us by 2029. However, we are also making preparations for the possibility that an attack—albeit on a smaller scale—could occur sooner. And that is precisely what we are preparing and gearing up for.

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The nature of warfare is no longer evolving in annual increments, but rather in terms of months and weeks. What does this imply for potential attack scenarios? Should we anticipate, above all, a massive drone war?

Sollfrank: I think that when we discuss scenarios regarding how Russia might potentially threaten us in a conflict, we can generally assume that such a move would naturally be preceded by corresponding hybrid attacks—that is, anything falling outside the scope of a conventional assault. We are already witnessing elements of this today: sabotage, disinformation, and, for instance, massive cyberattacks. Should an actual attack materialize, a conventional military strike would, of course, constitute an integral part of that offensive. Moreover, such an attack would be waged across all domains—on land, in the air, and at sea. Such a scenario would also be accompanied by nuclear threats as well as by long-range strikes deep into enemy territory, specifically targeting areas toward France and Germany, in order to hit key strategic nodes within those regions. In short, we must be prepared to face precisely the kind of warfare we are currently witnessing in the conflict involving Iran.

Do you have sleepless nights given the fact that time may be running out? We see the rearmament efforts—in Germany as well as among our NATO partners—but are we really moving fast enough?

Sollfrank: Well, as the Commander of the Joint Operations Command, I serve as the operational commander of the German Armed Forces—the Bundeswehr—and in that capacity, things can never move fast enough for me. We cannot afford for weapons and ammunition to arrive too late. We cannot afford lengthy debates before a decision is finally reached. So, from that perspective, I must admit that I am constantly restless.

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On the other hand, I remain confident: I see a great sense of unity here in Germany—and indeed across all 32 NATO nations—regarding our resolve to counter any potential attack. Take “Eastern Sentry,” for example: this is an air-based deterrence operation in which Bundeswehr Eurofighters fly daily patrols along the eastern flank, ready to repel attacks should the need arise. We have ground forces stationed in Lithuania. Other nations have forces deployed in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania, and so on. Along the entire eastern flank, we have forces in place—specifically to be ready to “fight tonight.”

Even without the United States?

Sollfrank: Well, the United States is, of course, absolutely central to NATO—particularly in ensuring that the alliance, as a nuclear power, maintains the necessary credibility in its deterrence posture. However, my daily interactions with American generals and soldiers leave absolutely no room for doubt that the Americans are fully committed and standing right alongside us.

Has it truly sunk in among the German public that this threat posed by Russia is not some distant, abstract issue, but rather a matter of immediate and pressing relevance?

Sollfrank: I certainly sense that this awareness—this consciousness—exists: that the days of being free from threat are over, and that there is someone here who could potentially attack us with weapons to enforce his interests. And not merely as an abstract construct, but possibly very soon—and then in a very, very concrete way.

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You are preparing for a day that everyone hopes will never come. Should that day arrive nonetheless, can NATO—can Germany—win such a war against Russia?

Sollfrank: I am firmly convinced that we can. Of course, there are still shortfalls here—deficiencies that we identify and address on a daily basis. We are working hard to resolve them. However, if I were not convinced right now that such an operation—such a war—could be successfully prosecuted, then deterrence itself would be a complete failure. And I am convinced: Our plans are sound, our forces are prepared, and we have an excellent fighting force. We will counter any act of aggression with everything we have. We work hard every single day on our preparations. If we were to waver, if we were to falter, or if we failed to use this time—for instance, to stockpile the necessary armaments, ammunition, and so forth—then things would indeed become difficult. But let me reiterate: 32 nations are currently putting their shoulders to the wheel. And things are moving in absolutely the right direction.

I would like to return to the subject of the deficits. When you look at Ukraine, you no longer see an infantry war, but rather a drone war. Russia is currently striving to produce up to 1,000 drones a day. Does NATO—does Germany—even have the capacity to hold its own in such a drone war?

Sollfrank: Yes, well, we are monitoring this very closely. Incidentally, Russia has just fired 1,000 drones at Ukraine within a 24-hour period. Nor does Russia show any signs of ceasing its attacks. Moscow is not backing down, despite suffering massive losses. And, naturally, we are not yet prepared for a conflict on this scale. That must be stated quite clearly. However, we are well on our way—on a very, very good path—to developing this capability. And we already have truly excellent capabilities to demonstrate. But once again: time is critical, and we must not let up now.

This interview originally appeared in German in Die Welt and is presented here by permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Russell A. Berman is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and former editor of Telos. He is now President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

In November 2024, the First World Conference of Classics was held in Beijing, and Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory letter, marking the formal endorsement of classics at the state level. The rise of classics in China—which remains highly controversial—is part of a century-long intellectual effort to reassess Chinese civilization in response to the crises of Western modernity. In ongoing debates over antiquity and modernity, China and the West, Chinese scholars have turned to canonical traditions in both civilizations to seek intellectual resources for addressing shared challenges. This civilizational self-awareness ensures that classics in China will not simply replicate Western models but will also involve sustained engagement with China’s own classical heritage.

Luo Feng is a Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, East China Normal University. Her academic focus is primarily on Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, and the study of classical Chinese and Western poetics. She is the author of Dionysus and the World Polis: An Interpretation of Euripides’ “The Bacchae.”

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中国的古典学建设与文明自觉

罗 峰

在全球人文学科整体式微的背景下，一向被认为是西方传统学科的古典学在中国逆势兴起，堪称中外学界的一大奇迹。古典学在中国的兴起也引发了广泛关注，其中不乏争议。中国学人为何对据称是西方传统王牌学科的古典学感兴趣？它在中国的发展为何会引起如此大的关注？中国的古典学建设又将走向何方？

一、古典学的何种“传统”

2015年1月，由刘小枫教授创立的“‘经典与解释’丛书十五年350种纪念研讨会”在北京召开。“从古典重新开始”一时成为中国学界热议的话题。经国内媒体推波助澜，这门原本极为边缘的冷门学科随后在学界引发关于“何为古典学”的争议，引起广泛关注。

有目共睹的是，“经典与解释”丛书（迄今出版近800种）设计之初便中西学并重，为中国古典学术奠定了深广的基础，极大推进了中国古典学的建设，成为当代中国最具影响力的学术品牌之一。丛书下设“西方传统”“中国传统”“经典与解释辑刊”三大系列，其下又各设若干子系列（例如，“西方传统”下设“荷马注疏集”“古希腊肃剧注疏”“阿里斯托芬集”“柏拉图注疏集”“法拉比集”“莎士比亚绎读”“洛克集”“尼采集”“施特劳斯集”等四十余个子系列）。“西方传统”的译介不限于狭义上的“古典”，而是同时纳入中世纪的阿尔法拉比、阿威罗伊，现代哲人霍布斯、卢梭、洛克等，形成对西方古今大传统的深厚理解，侧重于经典的细致注疏，全面涵盖了政治哲学、古典诗学、伦理学、宗教哲学等学科，旨在引领汉语学界对西方思想大传统朝有解释深度的细读方向推进；“中国传统”立足于推动中国学人在现代学术语境中重拾自己的古典传统；“经典与解释辑刊”则以专题形式推广国内外学界的最新成果。

李长春教授总结了刘小枫教授在中国推行的古典学的四大特征：首先是涵括古今中西的包容性，通过充分敞开其中的张力，以西学激活中国经典，以古典关切现代人的生存处境。其次，中西古典学均诞生于现代性的学术语境，因此具有以古鉴今的反思性。第三是批判性，要在中西古今的张力中总体审视人类文明形态，需要借助古典学的批判意识。对什么是好、善、高贵和伟大等根本问题的共同关切，对于可能出现的新的文明样态的形塑，表明古典学也天然具有建设性。

时过境迁，古典学如今已迎来最好的发展机遇。不过，十年前那场因古典学在中国的兴起所引发的争论恰恰让我们看到，国内部分古典学者从一开始就没能认清西方古典学内部的张力。其实，早在2012年刊发的《古典学的何种“传统”》中，刘小枫教授不仅已然扼要梳理了西方古典学的起源和发展，还回溯源头精当地指出了内含于这一学科的张力。即便在西方，古典学也并非传统学科，而是伴随现代大学兴起的产物。18世纪末，亚当·斯密倡导面向商业社会的实用国民教育，人文教育衰落。通常认为，西方古典学科的成立，以弗雷德里希·A·沃尔夫（Friedrich A. Wolf）于1795年出版的《荷马绪论》为标志。但这位被誉为“古典学之父”的沃尔夫挑起“荷马问题”本身就表明，古典学从一开始就将古希腊罗马经典视为“古籍”研究对象，而非活的教养源泉。西方古典学科产生之初所内含的张力鲜明地体现在学科分支上。古典学甫一成立，便形成三位一体结构：古典语文学（文本研究）、古代史、考古学。三种学问路径的品质大相径庭，由此也导致了学科旨趣的核心分歧。有别于以实证原则研究为路径的古代史和考古学，古典语文学以关注经典文本承载的智慧。19世纪末，维拉莫维茨与尼采的著名论战所呈现出的实证史学与从现代文明危机视角解读古典的路径分歧，就凸显了西方古典学学科内部学问路向的本质差异与主导权争夺。不同于把一切文本当史料的实证路径，尼采的古典学抱负强调面向少数人进行古典教育的道德动机。这种分歧进一步延伸至现代教材：比尔德与汉德森的《古典学》代表了英美“后现代”倾向，将古典学核心等同于“旅游”（人类学化的实地考察/物质遗存研究）。这种学问路径把泡萨尼阿斯的《希腊指南》奉为圭臬，文本研究服务于田野。与之相对，克拉特夫的《古典语文学常谈》则体现了德国传统对西方文明精神传统的关切，将古典学（尤其语文学）与政治、道德及文明危机思考相联系，强调其教养功能。

由此可见，西方古典学的“传统”面相远非单一。由于古典学在西方的诞生有着鲜明的现代性，自这门学科诞生之日起，把古典作品作为客观实证研究的对象（以考古、人类学化为主导），还是视之为平衡乃至回应现代性困境的智慧和思想资源，一开始就构成了这门学科的内部紧张。后者正是尼采所代表的西方古典学人的品质和学问取向。尽管在那场争论中，维拉莫维茨占据上风，尼采所代表的关注古典智慧与现代精神关联的路径，却为我们指明了中国古典学的未来。

尼采的古典学路径表明，西方现代性的困境同样构成促发西方古典学人省思的一股力量。在这点上，中国古典学人的初心与之相仿：晚清以来中国学术乃至文明同样遭遇了西方现代性带来的困境，如何在这次中西文明的大碰撞中看清中国与西方，乃至传统与现代的关系，同样促发了中国学人百余年来的精神追索。

二、中国的古典学建设与文明自觉

晚清以来，中国以惨痛的代价迎来了现代性时刻。遭遇西方严重冲击给彼时的中国学人造成一个严重的误识，中国在军事和经济上的落后，被等同甚至归因于文化、制度乃至文明的落后，甚至出现了全盘否定中国传统的倾向。由新文化运动引发的中西古今之争，影响至今。2009年时值新文化运动九十年，《开放时代》主办了题为《古典西学在中国》的论坛（后以笔谈形式刊发）。此次论坛不仅深入探讨了中国的古典学建设及文化崛起，诸多议题（文化自信、自主知识体系的探索及文明互鉴等）甚至富于前瞻性。

甘阳教授指出，较之经济上有目共睹的成绩，中国在文化上的崛起刚起步。原因在于近代以来中国对西方的认知长期停留在“现代西方”（文艺复兴后的技术文明），并以之比照“传统中国”，导致中西比较严重不对称。长期以来，中国学人不仅全盘否定中国文明，也未看清西方古典传统（古希腊-罗马）与现代西方的断裂性。这种认知偏差使中国学术陷入“以现代西学为体”的困境，亟需通过研究西方古典文明重建文化主体性。但研究西方古典学绝非亦步亦趋追随西方，而是借此重新定位中国和西方的关系。因此，建设中国的古典学不是西方古典学的一部分，而是“中国学术界的一部分”。他还提醒，中国的古典研究虽旨在服务中国文明复兴，简单学习西方的时代也已过去，但我们绝不能将西方意识形态化，而是要严肃对待西学，对西学的了解深度将决定我们对中国的了解深度。

刘小枫教授在题为《为什么应该建设中国的古典学》的发言中系统检审了中国高等教育的结构性缺陷：由于传统“国学”被现代西方学科体系（文史哲分立）切割，中国传统学问已失去整体关照。西方古典学（古希腊罗马研究）在高校更几近空白。现代大学日益凸显的实用导向使得大学过度偏重理工、经管等实用学科，导致文教沦为技术附庸，以品性涵养为核心的古典教化传统在我国教育中的缺位，令文明血脉濒临中断，文明传承陷入危机。刘小枫教授主张以“古典学”替代“五四”以来的“国学”，打破中西对立框架，转向“古今之争”的文明对话。他旗帜鲜明地反对与西方主流大学的古典学专业接轨，认为应该整合中国古典、古希腊-罗马、犹太-基督教、印度文明研究，消弭文史哲分割，以经典文本教学为核心，建设中西合璧的古典学，设立独立一级学科“古典文明系”，以此完成晚清以来中国学界未竟的教育大业：“立足本土培养‘兼通中西之学，于古今沿革，中外得失，皆了然于胸中’（皮锡瑞语）的新时代栋梁之才。”

此次论坛也为中西比较与文明对话的路径建立了范式。与会学者对西方文明的根基进行了批判性反思。研究西方古典旨在认清其文明根底的矛盾（如两希张力），为中国提供镜鉴，目标是以“文明对话”取代“文明冲突”，在“古今中西”的叩问中认清自己的位置。

二十一世纪初以来，古典学在中国方兴未艾。李长春教授指出，以2010年中国古典学学会创立为标志，中国学人在教学和科研中长期摸索推进古典学学科建设的努力，可谓中国的“古典学运动”。这场由中国学人自发开展的古典学运动“深刻地反映了中国学人想要重新认识中国自己的文明传统的强烈冲动”（《专访甘阳：古典学与中国学术共同体》）。

三、如何建设中国的古典学

新世纪以来，古典学在中国的兴起，不仅是中国学界对古典学学科建设的独立摸索，也表明了中国学人探问中西文明根柢的学术自觉。随着2024年11月首届世界古典学大会召开，中国的古典学建设获得国家层面的支持。如今，古典学早已不是先前的冷门学科（入选“2024年中国学术十大热点”）。围绕中国古典学的学科化设计及面临的挑战，也在学界引发诸多讨论。

2024年6月，在第十一届全国古典学年会召开期间举办的“应该如何建设中国的古典学”的圆桌讨论上，贺方婴教授回顾了21世纪以来中国古典学学科建设的历程。若以《经典与解释》辑刊发布为标志，中国古典学学科的起点可以追溯至2003。首辑刊发中学文章9篇，西学文章4篇，彰显了中国古典学人在中西比较视野下做中国的古典学研究的初心。2010年起，由刘小枫教授主编的《古典学研究》历经国际期刊、国内辑刊，到如今的季刊，为中国古典学学科建设搭建了高水平的学术交流平台。柯小刚教授甚至认为，古典学在中国的发展堪称“古典学的中国时刻”。

长期以来，中国古典学在缺乏国家制度支持、自主探索的情况下“碰运气”（《与刘小枫谈古典教育》）。2010年，刘小枫教授在中国人民大学首创古典学实验班，以中西古典学为核心辟出跨学科模式的试验田。他还编修了将语言、作品与文脉传统贯穿其中的古典语文教材《凯若斯：古希腊文读本》和《雅努斯：古典拉丁语文读本》。

对于中国古典学的学科设计，刘小枫教授强调要立足中国自身的古典传统，关注西方古典学的同时还应包纳古印度和阿拉伯文明。在对西方古典学的认识上，他主张除了公认的古希腊罗马经典，还应纳入欧洲的古典传统，因为西方的古今断裂实际发生于十七十八世纪的古今之争。诚如丁耘教授所言，由于中国的古典学天然是“一门自觉检讨现代性的学科”，这必然意味着新时期的古典学建设要有“大古典学”视野。刘小枫教授还指出设立古典学本科建制的紧迫性：近百年来，中国文化面临的基本问题依然是化解西方文明的挑战，“‘破解古今中西之争’是新时期的历史使命”。中国学术的底气，必须基于深入把握西方传世经典重新认识中国传世经典。若无从本科开始培育习读中西传世经典的学科建制保障，中国学界很难“真正获得对西方文明独立自主的解释权”。（《古典学不是象牙塔里的学问》）。

不过，就在形势一片大好之际，国内就古典学的学科范围及古典学学科建设的时机是否成熟上有了一些争议。实际上，刘小枫教授早已指明中国古典学建设的核心：“古典学的主体是经典研究，文献整理、文物品鉴、考古发掘都是辅助学科。”（《古典学不是象牙塔里的学问》）。2025年3月，四川大学成立国内首个古典学系，率先开启了中国古典学学科化建制的实践和探索。

扼要回溯中国古典学的来龙去脉不难看出，中国古典学在全球文科衰退潮流中逆势兴起，并非偶然，而是百年来中国学人在遭遇西方现代性危机中重新认识自我的一次自发探索。在古今中西之争的百年思想激荡中，中国古典学人选择回到中西传世经典，寻找化解人类共同面对的现代性危机的思想资源。这种鲜明的文明自觉注定中国的古典学不会是西方古典学的翻版，而是天然包含着对中华文明源头及传世经典的精深研究。

中国的古典学建设始终要直面吴飞教授指出的三大张力（中西、古今、义理与考据）。在接下来的学科建设道路探索上也将充满困难和争议。但争议本身并非坏事，而是学术活力与自觉的体现，关键在于如何将之转化为利于学科发展的动力。

对于古典学在中国的兴起，西方古典学者总体持开放欢迎的态度。不过，近期有学者注意到，美国“后古典主义研究集团”（The Postclassicisms Collective）核心人物詹姆斯·波尔特（James Porter）认为，中国学者在西方学者早已转向批判、反思乃至抛弃“古典”之时才开始研究西方古典，反映了“当下中国西化的潮流”以及中国学者欲在古典学上“与西方学者一争高下的学术心态”。（张瀚墨，《新世纪国学与古典学关系的反思》）这种偏见与傲慢本身提醒我们：西方古典学在日益考古学化、人类学化乃至反古典的转向中背离古典精神而不断衰落，不啻为一记警钟。这同样警示我们，中西古典学者若不能超越意气之争，摈弃门户之见，回归古典的德性教养旨归，注定无法以平和的心态正确看待古典学在中国的兴起。

【本文为上海市曙光人才计划项目“欧里庇得斯悲剧翻译、笺注与研究”（编号：24SG27）及国家社科基金重大项目“地中海文明与古希腊哲学起源研究”（23&ZD239）的阶段性成果】

作者简介：罗峰，华东师范大学外国语学院教授。她的研究领域集中在希腊悲剧、莎士比亚戏剧，以及中西古典诗学，著有《酒神与世界城邦：<酒神的伴侣>义疏》。

German novelist Peter Schneider, who passed away on March 3, was one of the most prominent literary voices of the “1968 generation” of the Vietnam-era protest movement. More quickly than many of his contemporaries, he grew critical of the dogmatic tendencies that emerged within that movement, as parts of the anti-authoritarian left developed their own forms of authoritarianism. By 1970, the New Left was decomposing in divergent directions. Some adherents turned to terrorism—the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, like the Weathermen in the United States. Others reverted to variants of orthodox Marxism, the “Old Left,” and found themselves defending the Soviet Union through formal or informal ties to Communist parties. Still others—among them Schneider—confronted the shortcomings of dogmatic leftism and, over subsequent decades, articulated a politics of freedom and dignity, often worked out through literary form.

He entered the literary scene with his 1973 novel Lenz, exploring the disappointments of the protest generation. His Mauerspringer (1982; English translation: The Wall Jumper, 1983) presents the surreal fantasy of a figure moving back and forth across the Berlin Wall. Alongside his fiction, Schneider was a prolific essayist on cultural and political questions, including contributing to Telos. In lieu of offering a full retrospective of his literary career, it is instructive to return to one example, his 1999 Telos essay “Intervention in Kosovo.” That text can serve as a litmus test for Schneider’s mature political thinking. It condenses the trajectory from the anti-authoritarian critique of the 1968 generation, through the turn to subjective experience, to a defense of intervention grounded in human dignity rather than ideology. It also speaks with renewed urgency today, as questions of intervention—Kosovo then, Ukraine and Iran now—remain unresolved.

Schneider’s intellectual development can be understood as a movement through three phases: from the critique of the dogmatic left, through the emergence of “new subjectivity,” to a position that combines moral affect with a willingness to endorse force under certain conditions. In the Germany of the early 1970s, the turn to “new subjectivity” marked a rejection of authoritarian politics, accompanied by skepticism toward any rigid theorization and an affirmation of individual experience. Emotion was granted priority over abstraction; Schneider was a central figure in this development. It is therefore not surprising that, three decades later, in the Kosovo essay, he begins not with doctrine but with affect:

The war in Kosovo is heartbreaking for everyone whose feelings are not limited by their convictions. Watching the daily television images of refugees and the NATO bombings, only dogmatists could be satisfied by their arguments for or against the war. Opponents and advocates of the intervention alike should concede their mixed emotions, and there is no reason to deny similar scruples to the political leadership of the Western alliance.

This opening establishes a fundamental premise: before questions of morality, legality, or strategic aims, one must acknowledge suffering and respond to it. War is hell, and the suffering of victims demands recognition. Schneider’s insistence on the primacy of affect reflects a consistent ethical stance: suffering is never to be endorsed or dismissed, regardless of political alignment. In this regard, his position stands in sharp contrast to contemporary responses to violence that have, at times, such as after the October 7 attacks, included both open celebration of violence against civilian victims or cold denial of the reality of the atrocities.

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From his initial moment of solidarity with victims, Schneider proceeds in his Kosovo essay to the central conceptual claim: respecting sovereignty is not a blank check for violence. Against anti-interventionist arguments that point to ulterior motives—strategic, economic, or geopolitical—he focuses on the normative core of the issue:

So far, no one has come up with a minimally convincing argument for the claim that the NATO intervention concerns natural resources, strategic positions, territorial expansion, etc. On the contrary, this war is about the establishment of an elementary principle: legitimate sovereignty and the domestic concerns of a state do not include the systematic expulsion, rape, and murder of a segment of the population.

Here Schneider articulates what would later be codified in the language of a “responsibility to protect”: sovereignty is conditional upon the protection of a population. States may claim autonomy, but they do not therefore have the right to commit mass violence against their own citizens. Read today, however, this argument appears to belong to a different historical moment. What has changed is not only policy but the moral vocabulary itself. The language of human rights and protection has receded in favor of deterrence, stability, and strategic interest. In the case of Ukraine, the dominant justification concerns the defense of state sovereignty rather than the protection of populations. With regard to Iran, concerns focus on nuclear proliferation and regional destabilization, while the suffering of the Iranian population, though acknowledged, does not serve as the primary rationale for policy. Schneider’s Kosovo essay thus marks a moment when European intellectual discourse still entertained the possibility that military force could be justified in explicitly moral terms.

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A third dimension of Schneider’s argument concerns his critique of pacifism, particularly in the German context. In the decades after World War II, a strong anti-military reflex developed in West Germany, a salutary reaction against the legacy of Nazi crimes. Yet this was not a universal pacifism; it was only a historically specific and limited claim: because of its past, Germany should abstain from military involvement. Schneider exposed the paradox at the heart of this position:

In the discussion of whether Germany should participate in the Bosnia intervention, it was bizarre and, frankly, ghoulish to hear how a recognition of the history of German guilt was turned into a privilege. Thus, some were prepared to accept the possibility that young Swedes, Danes, French, and Dutch might risk their lives for human rights; yet, given the Nazi past, Germans, so it was claimed, should be spared.

Here the guilt of the past ceases to be a burden and turns instead into a justification for nonparticipation, effectively outsourcing the labor of moral responsibility to others. With modest modifications, this logic persists in contemporary Europe, not only in Germany. There is an expectation that others, the United States and sometimes Israel, do what the German chancellor called the “dirty work,” which Europe avoids. In response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, European states have provided financial and military support, yet direct participation remains unthinkable. Similarly, in the context of the conflict involving Iran, European leaders condemn destabilizing actions by Iran and Hezbollah—they do know what is wrong—while nonetheless criticizing U.S. policy and limiting themselves to, at best, defensive or indirect measures. Schneider’s critique exposes the moral asymmetry of such positions: abstention may preserve safety and the psychological advantage of ethical purity, but it does not confer innocence.

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This leads to Schneider’s most forceful claim: the rejection of intervention does not constitute a higher moral stance. On the contrary, it may entail complicity through passivity:

Well before the massacres in Bosnia, it was clear that one does not remain innocent if one refrains from offering timely opposition to dictators and tyrants, if necessary with force….The opponents of intervention cannot lay claim to some higher morality. They should face up to the fact that they passively stand by and watch the expulsion and massacre of civilians, while they almost automatically minimize or relativize their suffering…

Schneider does not reject diplomacy as such, but he warns against its misuse as a delaying tactic that allows violence to continue. This insight leads him to a reconsideration of timing in the use of force. Rather than treating military action as a “last resort,” he suggests that earlier intervention may prevent greater harm:

The only way the current bombing war in Kosovo might have been prevented would have been through war, a much earlier military intervention….It is, therefore, time to rethink the notion that military force should only be used as a “last resort.”

This argument challenges a deeply ingrained moral intuition. The idea that force must always come last may, paradoxically, increase the scale of violence by allowing dictators to rampage and conflicts to escalate unchecked. Schneider’s position thus combines moral seriousness with a realpolitical willingness to confront tragic choices: the refusal to act may itself be a form of moral failure.

Read today, Schneider’s Kosovo essay appears less as a policy prescription than as a reminder of a lost moral vocabulary. It reflects a moment when European intellectual life still grappled with the possibility that force could serve the ends of human dignity. Its distance from current debates is precisely what makes it illuminating. In an era increasingly defined by strategic calculation and geopolitical realism, Schneider’s insistence on the ethical stakes of intervention challenges us. He understood the importance that individuals take part in the civic project, even including through the projection of military force. He himself stood out as a perceptive citizen, an astute observer of the political scene, and a consistent critic of public hypocrisy, the best legacy of 1968. We were fortunate to be able to publish him in Telos.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Russell A. Berman is Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and former editor of Telos. He is now President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

I vividly remember perhaps my earliest Nowruz. The exact moment of the new year, vernal equinox, changes every year. That year, it arrived at midnight. We were in our ancestral village, in my grandparents’ house. There was no electricity. Only the faint light of an oil lamp. Just before the new year, my grandfather returned from his orchard outside the village. A farmer, he spent most of his days there caring for the trees. In his hands, he carried a small block of earth. From it grew a Nowruz tulip, a local flower that blooms each year around the arrival of the new year. My grandfather had not cut the flower, he never cut flowers. Instead, he brought the tulip with its roots still in a clump of soil. After Nowruz, he would take it back and return it to the earth where it belonged.

The Haft Sīn is the Nowruz spread that Iranians prepare to welcome the new year. It includes seven items whose names begin with the Persian letter s. Each one symbolizes a wish for the coming year. Flowers and fresh green sprouts are also placed on the spread. They welcome spring and symbolize hope for a good harvest. A small bowl with a goldfish and colored eggs are also part of the table. We caught a small fish from the river that ran through the valley below the mountain where our village rested. It swam in a bowl on the Haft Sīn table during the celebration, and the next morning we returned it to the river. For the eggs, my grandmother took me to the henhouse early in the morning. She showed me how to choose them, which ones to leave so they could become chicks, which ones to throw away, and which ones we could collect to eat after Nowruz.

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When my grandfather arrived with the Nowruz tulip, we gathered around the Haft Sīn spread. He turned on his old radio. Together, we listened for the countdown to the new year. After the new year arrived, my grandfather entertained us with shadow plays. He made figures with his hands in the light of the lamp. Later, we fell asleep listening to my grandmother’s fairy tales, stories about a little girl who saved her hometown from a Div, a mythical monster. Except for the radio, we celebrated Nowruz almost the same way my ancestors must have done thousands of years ago. In the same village. In a simple house. Gathered around an oil lamp. Hoping for a prosperous new year. Ritual has a power in this way, it folds time. A single night can carry centuries within it. Many countries have been shaped by migration. Their earliest languages and rituals have often been lost. Iranians, however, show a rare continuity.

The memory has stayed with me. The smell of fresh bread. The wind against the wooden doors and windows. The flickering light on the walls of the mud-brick house. Spaces like these shape our inner worlds long before we understand them. Perhaps that is why I studied architecture. Nowruz has always been a celebration of life’s small gifts, nothing grand, nothing loud, just moments of hope. A few years later, I witnessed my first Islamic Qurban feast. It took place in my hometown, in Meydan. Hundreds of lambs stood crowded together, waiting for their throats to be cut, their blood offered in thanks to Allah, recalling Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. It was not hard for me to know which traditions I felt close to, which celebrations I wanted to honor, and which rituals I wished to be part of.

But under a totalitarian regime, even the most intimate traditions become politicized. Nothing escapes government interference, especially Nowruz. These regimes want isolated individuals, stripped of their individuality and turned into obedient masses. Nowruz does the opposite. It brings people together and reconnects them with family, memory, and the shared rhythms of life. Power tries to control rituals, calendars, and bodies. The Islamic Republic attempted to discipline time itself by replacing Nowruz with Islamic events. But ritual survived power. At first, officials insisted that people should prioritize what they called proper Islamic celebrations: the birth of Mohammad or the day he received revelation. Yet society did not abandon Nowruz. It remained deeply rooted in everyday life and memory. Some influential clerics openly criticized it. Morteza Motahhari, a prominent religious thinker and a close disciple of Khomeini, called Nowruz rituals a superstition. To them, Nowruz was irrational folklore. Rituals like the Qurban sacrifice, however, appeared perfectly logical and legitimate. But again, people did not let go of Nowruz. After all, who can truly forget the first day of spring?

Eventually, the clergy attempted a different strategy: to Islamize the celebration rather than eliminate it. They introduced Arabic prayers that, they claimed, should be recited at the moment of the new year, as if the arrival of spring needed religious validation in order to be complete. Yet the unease with Nowruz remained visible. In his annual New Year speeches, Ali Khamenei never sat beside a Haft Sīn table or any of the traditional symbols of Nowruz. Instead, he appeared with only a Qur’an on the table beside him while addressing the nation.

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In this way, something as gentle as Nowruz has been turned into a political battlefield. In Persian, Nowruz literally means “new day.” Yet the word ruz also carries a broader meaning: it signifies an era, an age, or a moment in history. This is why Nowruz has endured. It is not merely a date on a calendar. It is the human belief that the world can begin again. Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, the human capacity to begin again, resonates deeply with the spirit of Nowruz. As a celebration of a new day and the renewal of spring, Nowruz reflects all beginnings.

This Nowruz, after Khamenei’s death, would be more than the turning of the year. It would mark the beginning of a new era for many Iranians. We would grow green sprouts in the names of those killed in the protests and uprisings of the past forty-seven years. And when we looked at the Nowruz tulips, we would not wish for a better future anymore. We would look at them knowing that a new and prosperous era for Iran has begun.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Mohadeseh Salari Sardari grew up in Bandar Abbas in southern Iran and trained as an architect in Iran before pursuing her PhD in the United States. She is completing her PhD dissertation, Literary Selves and Architectural Space, in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University. Her research explores the intersections of architecture, literature, gender, and spatial politics in modern Iran. She is currently a lecturer in Stanford University’s Department of Comparative Literature and has worked with museum collections and exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the RISD Museum. Her work on Iranian literature, art, and culture has been published in both Persian and English.

Beginnings: Habermas and the Early Telos Milieu

Jürgen Habermas passed away on March 14 at the age of 96. By far the most prominent German philosopher of his generation, he became a leading intellectual in the Federal Republic and gained extensive international renown. Telos had a long engagement with his work, with references to Habermas stretching back to the early 1970s, that is, to the very first years of the journal, which was founded in 1968. The Telos discussion of Habermas would continue for decades. A detailed analysis of that engagement—as part of the larger American reception of Habermas—would surely be a worthwhile project. Here are some of the key parameters.

One might frame that reception history in terms of the history of Critical Theory, with two lineages initially close to each other, then diverging, and, half a century later, displaying a surprising similarity. Habermas’s intellectual career was, of course, intimately connected to the Critical Theory of the Institute for Social Research, the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Horkheimer. Telos, in its early years, understood itself as a conduit for “European theory”—at first meaning phenomenology, Critical Theory, and Italian Marxism—as alternatives to what was perceived as the anti-theoretical empiricism of American social science.

Both Habermas and Telos initially emerged from the Left, or more specifically from the New Left, but both quickly distanced themselves from the excesses of the radicalized student movement. Habermas famously denounced the movement’s intolerance and propensity to violence as a form of “left fascism,” while Paul Piccone, the founder and longtime editor of Telos, spoke of the “self-dismantling of Marxism,” until it appeared that there was nothing left in Marxism worth saving.

The Public Sphere and Diverging Agendas

An initial focus of discussion was the concept Habermas had developed in his early work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. The public sphere, or Öffentlichkeit, meant discursive participation in the formation of opinion through rational exchange, outside the private sphere of economy and family but also outside the structures of governmental authority. The implicit prioritization of language—that is, discussion—anticipated Habermas’s later grand theme. A key argument of the book was that the public sphere of the eighteenth century established a norm of universal participation that had been subverted by the twentieth century through an occupation of the public sphere by economic and political forces, leading to a “refeudalization.” The ideal of reaching a judgment through consensus had been replaced by what Noam Chomsky would label “manufactured consent.” Habermas proposed measuring the manipulated present against the aspirations of that origin.

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In the 1970s, Telos found a home at Washington University in St. Louis, where Piccone was serving as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. Across the campus, Peter Uwe Hohendahl chaired the German department. Hohendahl made the public sphere a key category for his own scholarship on literary history. Yet these two critical theorists were positioned differently on the question of the public sphere.

For Hohendahl—as for Habermas—the issue was the retrieval of the normativity of the original project of the bourgeois public sphere, which meant rational and fully (or aspirationally fully) inclusive communication. For Piccone and the group around him, the focus lay more on the flaws of contemporary forms of controlled opinion and their attendant conformism. The two positions were by no means incompatible, but they pointed toward alternative agendas: on the one hand, elaborating the terms of a rational society; on the other, criticizing structures of domination. In practice, the former could engender a reformist politics, while the latter maintained the aversion toward concrete political praxis that had been associated with the older generation of the Frankfurt School.

The circle of figures associated with Telos extended far beyond St. Louis to include some of the leading American readers of Habermas, especially in New York, alongside affiliates elsewhere in the United States and Europe. Adorno died in 1969, so it is at least remarkable that the splits that developed within Telos came to be defined in terms of proponents of Adorno on the one hand and Habermas on the other. As in similar developments elsewhere in intellectual history, some of the attendant altercations involved personalities. Yet another component was the divergence just described: the normativity of rationality versus the critique of domination, whereby proponents of the latter stance would eventually prove more willing to engage cultural dimensions otherwise dismissed as irrational—community, religion, tradition, and decisionism. Indeed, these separating tendencies could be read as two distinct, equally legitimate, but ultimately antagonistic derivatives of Critical Theory’s key text, Dialectic of Enlightenment. The Habermasian position represented the hypostasis of enlightenment, while the Adornian wing emphasized its critique.

Germany, America, and the Political Context of Theory

The Telos encounters with Habermas also unfolded within different political contexts. For Habermas himself, the lifelong project involved the establishment of a culture of liberal democracy, first in the Bonn Republic of West Germany and later in the Berlin Republic of unified Germany. A core element in this project was his advocacy of “constitutional patriotism” as the foundation of German political community, in opposition to nationalism, let alone ethnonationalism. This agenda represented, intentionally and consistently, the aspiration to achieve a break with the Nazi past. One might describe this stance as anti-totalitarian, against both Nazism and communism. Indeed, Habermas also articulated a critique of Marxism. Yet for him, and for many of his followers, criticism of communism was never similarly robust, presumably because “anti-communism” had come to appear, during the Cold War, as a conservative position.

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For Telos, and more broadly for critical theory in the United States, it was not a Nazi past that overshadowed discussion but rather the development of the American administrative state, the legacy of the New Deal, and then the policy crises and “malaise” of the 1970s and the Reagan era. The points of political orientation in Germany and the United States were therefore different enough to send theoretical discussions down different roads. Habermas’s great work on communicative rationality, unmistakably meant as an alternative to the mass manipulation associated with the Nazi past, was effectively a linguistic turn, a prioritization of public speech. Yet for Piccone this centrality of language privileged precisely those actors who could command elaborate speech codes, that is, an intellectual elite, while disprivileging other social strata—a viewpoint sharpened by the influence of Alvin Gouldner and Christopher Lasch.

From this perspective, Habermas’s rationalism came to mean the elevation of rational experts. But there was already, in the United States, a skepticism toward “the best and the brightest,” to invoke the title of David Halberstam’s book on how an intellectual elite had led the country into the Vietnam War. That dissatisfaction with elites anticipated the later anti-elitism of twenty-first-century populism. Indeed, the war and the antiwar movement may be the key to the difference between the German and the American lineages of Critical Theory. Habermas was always writing against the Nazi past, while the American discussion in the 1970s and 1980s, including in Telos, was shaped by the repercussions of Vietnam.

A further political difference of the era, which informed the theoretical divergences, concerned the Cold War and its conclusion. As part of its break with Marxism, Telos staked out definitively anti-communist positions, aided in part by its collaborations with East European and Soviet dissident voices. This was never a priority for the German Left. Matters came to a head in the missile debates of the mid-1980s, surrounding the NATO decision to station medium-range cruise missiles in Germany as part of the Reagan-era arms buildup. Massive protests of the West German peace movement ensued, which Habermas supporters tended to endorse, while others around Piccone supported NATO. Here the ultimate theoretical difference involved the extent to which one would break with orthodox Marxism; the political difference involved Cold War military strategy. Until today, a difference of interpretation remains. Americans tend to see 1989—the opening of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet empire—as a result of the Reagan arms buildup, with which Russia could not compete. Germans on the Left tend to explain the outcome in terms of Ostpolitik and/or the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev.

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Religion, Translation, and Late Habermas

In this brief overview of Telos and its engagement with Habermas, the final stage involves religion, beginning with Habermas’s 2004 conversation with then-Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI the following year. The two figures indisputably represented alternative traditions: rationalism and religion. Moreover, at that point Ratzinger was widely, and not wrongly, viewed as a conservative in dogmatic matters, even though later he would argue strongly for the compatibility of religion and reason.

In the conversation, Habermas, ever the rationalist, insisted on the neutrality of the state in matters of religion. Nonetheless, he conceded that religion might carry moral insights that the state should implement. The significant issue was not merely that state policy might at times coincide with Church teaching, but that the religious tradition had access to moral insights reached not by rational deliberation alone but by virtue of its own distinctive apprehension of existence, including, for example, the experience of the holy, the reading of sacred texts, or even revelation.

Habermas continued to grapple with the question of religion in his late opus, Also a History of Philosophy. The relationship between faith and knowledge appears there as a process of “translation”—once again reflecting his focus on language—from religious into postmetaphysical claims. In other words, religion remains a source for normative morality, even for the secular state and society.

This historicization of the relationship between religion and rationality, including their relation to the state, echoes an older motif of Critical Theory: the connection between the presumably irrational—myth—and its rational consequences. At the same time, Habermas’s turn toward the productivity of religion deserves comparison with, and contrast to, the Telos turn toward religion, tradition, and community dating from the 1990s. Here lies the surprising convergence between Telos and Habermas after years of dramatic separation. For Telos, engagement with religion involved political theology, collaboration with Radical Orthodoxy in England, and at times the suggestion that religion might be the Critical Theory of the contemporary moment.

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Convergences: Habermas, Schmitt, and Böckenförde

The controversial component, however, in the journal’s turn toward questions of religion was the journal’s interest in the principal source of political theology, the work of Carl Schmitt. Opening the Schmitt discussion in the 1990s was regarded as deeply controversial, given Schmitt’s Nazi associations. Yet the broad Schmitt reception, in Europe, in the United States, and far beyond Telos, has hardly centered on his worst political judgments. Neither has it been a matter of trying to justify his endorsement of Nazi rule. The point is that he nonetheless had other important insights.

The contrast between Schmitt’s decisionism and Habermas’s communicative rationality deserves a much fuller elaboration. Here, however, in a brief reflection written in the immediate aftermath of Habermas’s passing, the point is that both Telos and Habermas—and, in a different register, Schmitt—came to explore the significance of religion. Indeed, Habermas’s view that postmetaphysical thought draws on metaphysical sources is consistent with Schmitt’s political theology and, more specifically, with the claim put forward by Schmitt’s student Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, whose famous dictum states that “the liberal, secularized state lives by presuppositions that it cannot itself guarantee.”

How close was the Habermasian exploration of religious tradition to Böckenförde? Böckenförde was certainly close to Schmitt. Yet in the exploration of those “presuppositions,” including religion and other aspects of tradition, the polemical distinction between rationalism and irrationalism becomes increasingly untenable. The normativity of rational discussion, which Habermas located at the origin of his work on the public sphere, evidently depends on nonrational cultural substances. That recognition may mark the deepest point of contact between Habermas and the intellectual trajectory of Telos: after decades of divergence, both came to confront the persistence and validity of irrational traditional elements that inform postsecular modernity.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Russell A. Berman is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he directs the Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World. He previously served as Senior Advisor on the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State and as a Commissioner on the Commission on Unalienable Rights. He is currently a member of the National Humanities Council. He is the Editor Emeritus of Telos and President of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

Modern nationalist movements are torn between identity as a subjective narrative and identity as an institutional construction. This tension is perhaps most visible when we look at the Palestinian nationalist movement through the lens of poststructuralist theory, and specifically the works of Judith Butler. There is an instructive parallel between the tenets of postmodern gender theory and a specific form of nationalism that has fetishized the symbolic performance of nationalism instead of seeing it consummated in the social construction of the state. By prioritizing symbolic accidents over functional essence, Palestinian nationalism has created a condition of teleological suspension that indefinitely defers the consummation of Palestinian statehood, while enabling apocalyptic gestures such as the would-be genocidal invasion Hamas launched on October 7, 2023.

Judith Butler’s concept of performativity offers the clearest lens for this dysfunction. The term “performative” is often dismissed with the added adverb “merely,” as if “performative” were merely an academic euphemism for “fake” or “insincere.” That forgets the folk wisdom of “fake it ’til you make it.” Performativity, for Butler, refers to a repetitive practice that produces the effect of an identity. Butler draws from the theory of speech acts to argue that realities are often constructed through the continuous repetition of symbols, rituals, and language. In her seminal books, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Butler argues that we do not “have” a gender; rather, we “do” gender, and through that doing, we create the illusion that there is an internal, preexisting essence behind the performance.

When this logic is applied to the political sphere, specifically to the Palestinian national movement, a structural similarity to gender theory emerges. The Palestinian national movement has not been a precursor to a Palestinian state, but a performance affirmed through symbols (the flag, the key), historical narratives, violent resistance, and international advocacy. The nation exists within the repetitive acts of resistance and declaration rather than in the concrete structures of governing, such as taxation, law enforcement, and infrastructure maintenance.

Palestinian performative nationalism has become a permanent revolutionary praxis rather than a pre-state project. The 1993 dictum of today’s Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, that “the mind of the revolution is very different from the mind of the state” is a trenchant comment on the movement from within, but it has remained a merely verbal critique. For previous national movements up to Zionism, performative nationalism was part of the actual social construction of a nation-state. Performative nationalism was in part the glorification of constructing water and sewage systems, managing economies, and securing borders. With Palestinian nationalism, as with transgender performance, the work ends with the production of the identity.

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In the context of nationalism, performative movements treat the trappings of nationhood—flags, anthems, resistance aesthetics, even, as we shall see, performative violence and international recognition—as if they were the essence of a nation-state. While these features are associated with nations, they do not constitute the whole of a state’s functional reality, which includes the enforcement of law, the collection of taxes, and the capacity for maintaining and protecting the population and defending the borders.

This fetishism mimics some outward performances of a state without constructing the machinery. In gender theory, this gap is ontological: because changing biological sex is impossible, the performance must be the fetishistic substitute for the reality. In the Palestinian case too, the anticipatory performance substitutes for its intrinsic goal. For the Palestinian movement, the performance does not act as a substitute for an impossible reality, but as a diversion from a possible one.

The current state of Palestinian nationalism is the result of a historical lineage of “mimetic nationalism.” In the early twentieth century, nationalist movements were iterative: the Zionists studied and copied the Irish struggle, and the Palestinians subsequently modeled their movement on the Zionists. The Irish national movement, however, eventually pivoted to the mundane work of statecraft, establishing the Free State, an army, a police force, and all the other apparatus of modern statehood. Éamon de Valera, who preferred irredentist resistance to the obligations of statehood, was crushed by the Treaty supporters of the Irish Free State in the Irish Civil War.

Zionists explicitly studied Irish guerrilla tactics but were obsessed with constructing bureaucracy and its material instantiations. They focused on building power plants, ports, and healthcare systems—effectively constructing a “state within a state” under the British Mandate. The performances of nationalism—the anthems, the flags, the diplomatic representations—were always understood as costuming for the material and bodily construction that is state-building.

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In contrast, the Palestinian movement has fetishized external and superficial aspects of the performance of statehood. Gender theory says that the clothes make the woman, and, correspondingly, Palestinian nationalism performs as if some of the trappings of nationalism could make the state. The Palestinian national movement mimics the Jews’ armed struggle against the British and the Arabs from 1945 to 1948 rather than the proto-state Zionism that made that moment of resistance a stage of state-building.

Building a functioning Palestinian economy and fiscal system independent of Israel is omitted in part because the “refugee” identity—the core of the performance—requires a state of dependence on international aid, such as UNRWA. To become self-sufficient would be to stop performing the role of the victim. Consequently, the state does not arrive because neither Palestinians nor foreign powers engage in the essential work of building it.

A fundamental misunderstanding of political ontology contributes to the failure of state-building in the Palestinian context. As Eugen Weber argues in Peasants into Frenchmen, state-building is an act of colonialism, in some places largely externally imposed, in others like post‑1815 France internally driven. Weber demonstrates that national unity in France was not natural but was manufactured by a colonizing center in Paris that aggressively erased local cultures, imposed a standardized language, and utilized compulsory schooling and military conscription to turn disparate groups into a single nation.

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Zionism succeeded because it both pursued this colonial praxis and collaborated in the British colonization of Palestine. The pre-state Jewish community (the Yishuv) imposed Hebrew over Yiddish, created a militia and an offensive strike force, and established centralized institutions. Like the French, the Italians, and the Chinese, the Jews colonized themselves to create their modern state. Like other peoples within the modern British Empire, they also allowed the British to colonize them as long as that colonization served the mandated end of building a Jewish national home.

The Palestinian movement, identifying purely as “postcolonial,” is structurally incapable of this process. If national identity is constructed entirely around resisting power and resisting imposition, the leadership cannot build a state, because, as Eugen Weber explained, a modern state is always and everywhere an imposition. To master the machinery of sovereignty, the Palestinian leadership (whether Fatah or Hamas) would have to superadd policing their own people and extracting revenue from them to the performance of resistance.

Palestinians and their foreign supporters blame their failures of modernization on “the occupation.” There are certainly cases where imperial or colonial powers have prevented the acquisition of state capacity by those despotically ruled. The United States has always carefully managed its Native American “subject nations” to prevent them from empowering themselves by conducting their own relations with European powers, or by accepting immigrants and assimilating them.

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Palestine under British and Jewish rule is, however, not one of those cases. By refusing the status of subjects under the British Mandate or under Israeli occupation, Palestinians failed to acquire the institutional levers necessary to become citizens of their own state. The refusal to participate in the colonial work of state-building is illustrated by the Palestinian response to the British Mandate. In the 1920s, specifically with the 1922 Legislative Council proposal, the British offered a representative body to the Arab majority. The Arabs rejected it because participation would have implied recognition of the Balfour Declaration and acceptance of the legitimacy of the terms of the Mandate.

Under the Mandate the Palestinians even refused superficial performative aspects of nationalism. In 1926, Lord Plumer, the second High Commissioner, was invited by the Jews to a major athletic competition. At a ceremony in Tel Aviv, Plumer stood for the Zionist anthem, Hatikvah, prompting outrage from Arab delegations who accused him of bias. Plumer responded by asking the delegation if they had a national anthem for him to stand for. When they admitted they did not, he advised them to “get one as soon as possible.” It took the Palestinian movement over 60 years to heed this advice.

In the nearly eight decades since the British left, the Palestinians have mastered some of the performative aspects, but to a substantial degree neglected or refused the work of state construction. Beginning with the First Intifada they ceased to collaborate strategically with Israel, thus preventing the Jews from building the state apparatus for them eventually to take over.

Contrary to the postcolonial narrative that views all imperial presence as purely destructive, the history of successful state-building often involves a phase of indirect rule, where institutions are built for an emerging nation under the security umbrella of a hegemonic power. The Zionist movement understood this pragmatically. They utilized the British Mandate as a “cocoon,” allowing the British to handle the heavy lifting of external defense and external security. This freed the Yishuv to focus their energy entirely on the mundane internal construction of a state: collecting taxes, building power plants, and managing healthcare.

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The tragedy of the Palestinian national movement is the repeated refusal to utilize the space of indirect rule for governance. The Oslo Accords were, structurally, an offer of indirect rule—an opportunity for the PLO to build a civil state while Israel bore the cost of external defense. However, Yasser Arafat, and later Hamas, rejected the logic of governance. For Arafat, the autonomy granted by Oslo was not a platform for building a state but a sanctuary for preparing violence. By prioritizing the capacity to kill Jews over the capacity to govern Palestinians, the movement remained trapped in a performative loop: forever staging the revolution, never constructing the state.

When the British left in 1948, the Zionists did not need to build a state from nothing; they merely needed to rename the one they had partly built and partly co-opted. Israel has repeatedly allowed Palestinians to conduct their own diplomacy and raise resources from European and Arab countries. The Palestinians have chosen to invest those resources in infiltration tunnels, improvised and purchased weapons, and payment to families of martyrs, rather than more permanent forms of state construction.

The ultimate trap of performative nationalism is found in acts of spectacular violence that attempt to summon a new reality through blood sacrifice. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, can be analyzed as “apocalyptic performativity”—an attempt to force the embodied world to align with a performative fantasy through sheer magnitude of rape and killing.

This substitution of spectacular violence for institution-building echoes other historical cases, most chillingly the Hutu Power movement in Rwanda up to the genocide of 1994. Both the Rwandan genocide and October 7th involve a group trying to solve a deficit of state-building by wholesale murder. Like the Palestinians relying upon UNRWA instead of building a tax system and a parastate to provide actual public services, the Hutu-dominated government of Rwanda outsourced public services to foreign aid agencies and NGOs. Lacking the capacity to defeat the RPF rebels on the battlefield, the Hutu government turned to the systematic slaughter of defenseless civilians to perform the purification of the nation. In both Gaza and Rwanda, performative violence did not achieve by itself what can only be done through socially constructed state power (if, sometimes, genocidal state power); rather, this violence invited its destruction by a more institutionalized military force of a state or, in the case of the RPF, of a state in waiting. Genocide for both Hamas and the militant Hutus was not a political-military strategy but a performative substitute for one. For that fetishistic substitution, Butler’s poststructuralist gender theory serves as apologist and cheerleader.

The political-philosophical problem can be summarized viscerally as “all wedding, no consummation.” The “wedding” is the ceremony of statehood: the flags, embassies, UN resolutions, and cultural cachet—an anticipatory display. Consummation would require producing state institutions on the ground. This would require enforcing law and order and building an economy and a bureaucracy that would enable the Palestinian nation-state to operate entirely or principally from Palestinian ways and means.

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The Palestinian movement acts as if the ceremony is the marriage. They act as if the ceremony is loud enough, and if enough important guests attend, then a Palestinian state will spontaneously appear without the need for all the foundations of state construction. Herzl’s novel Altneuland was the performance of a vision and a promise, yes, but the modern Zionist movement Herzl created treated his novel as an inspiration for political and economic instantiation.

The Palestinian national movement has won over the audience (international opinion) and perfected the symbols of nationhood, yet it lacks the constructed reality of a state because the Palestinian national movement has refused to undertake the colonial labor of state-building and has successfully resisted or refused to allow it to be done sufficiently for the Palestinians by others, such as the British or the Israelis. The tragedy is that the partial performance has succeeded too well; the Palestinian national movement is waiting for the state to appear without internal or external colonization because they have perfected some of the performative aspects.

The Palestinian national movement has refused much of the praxis of state-building, but unlike the Kurds or the Zapatistas it is not content with becoming a nonstate autonomous community. Until the movement transitions from the ceremonies to the infrastructure of sovereignty, it remains a performance of nationalism that avoids the state-building that is supposed to consummate it.

Poststructuralist theorists view the instantiation of gender in the biological family or the instantiation of embodied power in the nation-state as oppressive structures that should be deconstructed. As Corinne Blackmer has pointed out, this leads the organized trans community to reject the successfully embodied performance that is the Jewish state. Conversely, the Palestinian movement they admire seems trapped in a fetishistic display where the performance of resistance becomes the highest possible achievement.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Michael S. Kochin is Associate Professor in the School of Political Science, Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University, and Visiting Scholar in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America and the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College in Washington, DC.

A recent decision by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal (BCHRT) here in Canada has caused an international uproar. Barry Neufeld, a former elected school trustee from Chilliwack, B.C., a city east of Vancouver, found himself on the wrong side of a complaint alleging he discriminated against transgender teaching staff when he made public statements opposing a gender-affirming curriculum in B.C. schools. After more than eight years of wrangling, the BCHRT released its determination on the case last week, finding against Neufeld and awarding the complainants the remarkable sum of $750,000 Canadian, or about $550,000 in American dollars.

The BCHRT decided that numerous statements and social media posts from Neufeld breached provisions of the province’s human rights code, including bans on the publication of hate speech. The Tribunal also found that Neufeld’s actions, taken in his capacity as a school board trustee, created a poisoned workplace for LGBTQ teaching staff. Specifically, the BCHRT ruled that Neufeld’s denial of transgender identity as distinct from sex at birth was an “existential” denial of the existence of trans individuals. Critics of the decision, including even British comedian John Cleese, have called it a threat to free speech and an effort to chill public debate on trans issues.

While the legal aspects of the case are fascinating on their own, I want to move beyond the confines of law to consider the broader power dynamics at play, both in terms of the decision itself and the public reaction. Specifically, I want to uncover the homogenizing effects of state-authorized disciplinary entities such as human rights commissions as they act to deploy and control political speech in a modern democracy like Canada.

In doing so, I will look at three aspects of the case. First, using my own scholarship on the self-incriminating dynamics of a cancellation event, I will demonstrate how the BCHRT was complicit in and exploited Neufeld’s self-condemnation. Second, engaging a critical theory lens, I will consider how the contemporary notion of human rights as monopolized by the state through punitive administrative tribunals narrows the boundaries of acceptable public speech. Finally, I will analyze the response to the Neufeld decision as an instance of the growing efforts of non-state-authorized actors to counter the homogeneity of contemporary disciplinary rights with dissenting heterogeneous sources of authority. This analysis draws on my own experience as a Commissioner and Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

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Cancellation as Self-Inflicted Silencing

Though there are many glaring statements that stand out in the BCHRT decision, one is of particular interest for our discussion. In 2017, as the B.C. government was issuing its Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) educational program for grade students, Neufeld, then a public school trustee, posted a Facebook statement in which he referred to the SOGI program as a “weapon of propaganda” designed to instruct students that “gender is not biologically determined, but a social construct.” Neufeld went on to characterize gender-affirming care as a form of “child abuse.”

The post was Neufeld’s first public foray into the topic, and though it would not be his last, it evoked an immediate response that mirrors the tripartite dynamic of a cancel culture event. As the BCHRT decision notes, the Facebook post “raised alarms within and outside the [school] District.” As a result, Neufeld did something that is the norm in the ritualized domination of speech we call cancel culture: he apologized. Regardless of whether it was warranted, Neufeld stated that “I want to apologize to those who felt hurt by my opinion.” He added that “in a free and democratic society, there should be room for respectful discussion and dissent.”

While his post contains many of the standard phrases common to a cancellation event apology, what is most interesting is that the BCHRT decision decided to reproduce the statement with its own commentary, writing: “Unfortunately, Mr. Neufeld’s commitment to respectful discussion and dissent did not last.” In my own research on cancel culture, I have identified three parties that are necessary for a cancellation event to occur. These include: (a) the cancelers who initially call out a statement for the purposes of virtue signaling to their own political in-group; (b) the target who routinely implicates themselves in an alleged harm by issuing a subtly coerced apology or statement; and (c) third-party institutions such as employers who complete and verify the cancellation dynamic by terminating or otherwise deplatforming the target.

In Neufeld’s case, we immediately encounter this hermetic and self-confirming tripartite structure in the decision’s initial pages. Alarms are raised by cancelers. Neufeld as the target becomes complicit in his own prosecution by issuing his apology. The BCHRT takes on the role of a third-party institution that uses the apology as proof of his guilt. As with the vast majority of cancellation targets, Neufeld unwittingly provided the rope to hang himself, so to speak. His apology, designed to placate critics, instead renders him complicit in his own silencing by condemning his past speech and providing ammunition for those third parties, such as the BCHRT, who might turn his words against him. In this sense, the power imbalance inherent in a cancellation event is embedded in the BCHRT’s decision.

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Negativity and the Homogeneity of Human Rights

One of the main criticisms of the BCHRT’s decision in the Neufeld case concerns the chilling effect it will have on free speech, especially given the exorbitant damages award of $750,000. The point of these critiques is that free and robust public discussion, even offensive discussion, is necessary for a properly functioning liberal democracy. While the law and the decision cite the importance of free expression, the legal analysis employed by administrative tribunals uses a balancing approach between acceptable speech that expresses an opinion, on the one hand, and hate speech that allegedly harms individuals’ dignity or incites discrimination, on the other. This analysis, as deployed by the BCHRT, increasingly expands the ambit of hate speech at the expense of free speech.

However, it also has an additional and perhaps more insidious effect. By protecting certain speech and condemning other speech, state-authorized disciplinary regimes prioritize certain identities and sources of authority. Here it is useful to turn to the work of critical theorist and Telos founder Paul Piccone. In his writings, Piccone sought to understand the crisis of liberal democracy apparent in the twentieth century and again evident across the Western world in the domestic and international turmoil of the twenty-first century. In particular, he was concerned with the stifling uniformity of acceptable political speech that was becoming the hallmark of liberal democracies. In a view shared with many in the critical theory school, Piccone argued that liberal democracy was pushing aside and subsuming all other authorities, from religion and educational hierarchies to class and sexual distinctions. His response was to call for a populist deployment of excluded authorities on a local level to counter the overweening integrating force of the state.

Writing in the Hegelian tradition, Piccone believed that a level of negativity via robust contending authorities was necessary to produce social and political progress. If all authorities become standardized and subject to the pretensions of administrative conformity, as in the case of contemporary human rights commissions, liberal democracies will ossify and become what I have elsewhere called “prosecutorial democracies.” For Piccone, it is not only free speech that must be protected but the substantive and varied sources of political authority that prevent the homogeneity of human rights.

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Applying Piccone’s analysis to the Neufeld case, the BCHRT decision appears as yet another effort by a disciplinary regime to control and limit acceptable speech while designating dissent as hateful, discriminatory, and objectionable. This comes to light when we consider that many of Neufeld’s posts contain religious references regarding the creation of two biological sexes as dispositive over socially constructed gender roles. Now, to those who would accuse Neufeld, and perhaps Piccone, of supporting Christian nationalism by referring to religious authority, it is fairly clear that this accusation misses the mark. In Neufeld’s case, he is certainly inspired by a specific religious position; however, as Piccone would argue, to maintain the health of our democracies, representatives of numerous heterogeneous authorities are required. Neufeld’s position would be one of those authorities. As far as Piccone is concerned, religion is just one of many countervailing social authorities that can stand against the homogenizing impact of late-modern liberal democracy; others include local political, social, and labor organizations.

The Reaction to the BCHRT

As I have noted, Neufeld’s case has drawn international attention. The vast majority of those commenting on it are appalled by the hefty fine, with some likening it to a new form of social justice blasphemy laws. In this regard, human rights have turned from the guarantor of a liberal framework for freedom to a prioritization of specific social actors. Not only are state-authorized entities determining what speech is condoned, they are implicitly giving preference to particular identity claims over others. This approach dovetails with the intention of cancel culture to silence dissent while privileging specific groups.

Those groups chosen for preferment tend to include ones that are most likely to challenge moral and political paradigms, especially Western paradigms. While Piccone would not oppose the diversity of differing authorities, what we are seeing now is entirely the opposite of diversity. Rather, under the rubric of inclusion, specific identities are given prominence for their presumed ability to challenge Western dominance. As with the Neufeld case, this includes transgenderism—but a form of transgenderism that eschews the sexual binary that once animated transitioning to the opposite sex, in favor of the gender fluidity espoused by authors such as Judith Butler. For this reason, among the most salient of allegations are those where the target is accused of transphobia, Islamophobia, or racism. Gone is the impetus to protect women from sexism, gay men from homophobia, or Jews from antisemitism; these groups are now themselves considered adjacent to the would-be oppressive white, straight male.

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However, as the broad negative reaction to the Neufeld case indicates, while state-controlled administrative tribunals are actively narrowing the range of public speech, dissenting non-state actors are emerging, effectively giving teeth to Piccone’s remedy to the homogenization of rights and speech. These groups and individuals are largely immune to the silencing allegations leveled against them and increasingly assert their own interpretation of their rights in opposition to state-sanctioned regimes. This includes women challenging the entrance of trans individuals into women’s spaces and sports, gay men calling out efforts to pigeonhole younger gay men into transgender categories, and Iranians rediscovering dormant and suppressed religious and cultural traditions against the Islamist Iranian regime. While many of these opposing voices make their claims under the protection of liberal human rights, they do so explicitly in contrast to the contemporary capture of rights language by state-authorized ideologies within in our increasingly prosecutorial democracies.

Although the Neufeld case highlights the dangers of conformist disciplinary regimes and the tyranny of contemporary human rights doctrine for healthy democratic debate, the reaction to the decision also points to a diverse group of dissenting authorities rising up to challenge the state-approved narrative on rights. This is largely in line with Piccone’s prescription for populist movements operating at the local level. Whether this political and social movement will assist Neufeld in his legal appeal of the BCHRT decision remains to be seen.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Collin May, a lawyer and writer in Calgary, Canada, is the former Chief of the Alberta Human Rights Commission and an adjunct lecturer in community health sciences at the University of Calgary. He is currently completing a book on the future of cancel culture.

Preliminary research on the relationship between antisemitism and the campus encampment protests of spring 2024 found that anti-Israel beliefs were more prevalent among female students than male students. Given that Israeli women were sexually violated, mutilated, and murdered on camera by Hamas terrorists on October 7, these findings are notable, and might be surprising, were they not reflective of similar dynamics off-campus. For example, it took UN Women two months to issue, under pressure, a lukewarm acknowledgement of the brutal sexual violence against Israeli women, which was more than the National Women’s Studies Association did when they vaguely noted the “gendered and sexualized harms” that occur during war without even mentioning October 7—but condemned Israel’s “systemic violent campaigns” against Palestinians.

In their May 2025 article on Telos Insights, Russell A. Berman and Rebecca A. Kobrin posited eight potential reasons for the disproportionate representation of women within the encampments. Some possible explanations centered around statistical representation, such as that more women than men lean left politically or that women are likelier to be involved in humanities disciplines wherein support for protests was fostered. Others considered women’s allegiance with Palestinians they perceived to be victims in light of women’s experiences of gender oppression, a “preexisting grievance mentality,” or the media emphasis on Gazan women and children as casualties of war. Two theories dipped into more psychosocial waters, with Berman and Kobrin suggesting a possible “appeal of patriarchy” and a related “anti-intellectual pleasure” in romanticizing a violent male paradigm, represented by the Hamas rapist, that differs from the “degraded masculinity” of collegiate young men of the twenty-first century.

My sense is that all of these suppositions help to explain why so many women have aligned with a violent misogynistic movement like Hamas, but I’ll offer one more possibility, which relates not directly to gender but to racial identity development. Some research on campus attitudes related to the Israel–Hamas war found that white scholars were more likely than scholars of color to oppose Israel’s military response. Specifically, then, my supposition relates to the overrepresentation of white women in anti-Israel activism since October 7. To unpack this supposition, I’ll briefly examine the role of antiracism in the context of anti-Israel activism, followed by an overview of racial identity development theories, before I consider how this helps us understand the actions and attitudes of white women. Finally, I’ll tie these three elements together to explain how white women’s support of Hamas as a “resistance” movement reifies both racial and gender privilege.

Racial Framings of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Contemporary narratives about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, reinforced by the strategic infusion of anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda into academic disciplines within the humanities, frequently frame Zionism as a colonial racism that must be eradicated and, subsequently, view Hamas terror as a justifiable form of resistance to ensure Palestinian liberation from racialized colonial injustice. Many young pro-Palestine activists thus see Palestinian nationalism not only as a social justice imperative but as a specifically antiracist movement. That so many of today’s antiracist activists shortsightedly assume that racism, privilege, and power operate the exact same ways transnationally enables them to apply Western frameworks of race and racism to the rest of the world, including Israel and Palestine, without engaging the critical reflexivity needed to recognize the ethnocentricity of such an approach. When mapped onto the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, a binary racial framework combines with existing antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and turns Israel and Jews into “hyper-whites” or “superwhites,” regardless of skin color.

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In 2024, during the encampments, I spoke with a white woman professor in an elite, predominantly white institution who claimed she was “proud” of her students for engaging in protest because they “aren’t usually political.” (Apparently, the content of students’ political protest was less significant to this professor than the very fact of their politicization. Still, I imagine she would have exhibited less pride had her students protested against diversity and inclusion initiatives or in support of ICE raids, or if they had worn white robes and hoods instead of keffiyehs and balaclavas.) Notably, this professor remarked that her students “weren’t very active when George Floyd was killed” in the summer of 2020. Remember one of the classic functions of antisemitism: political displacement, or scapegoating. In a society where racial discourse has traditionally operated along a Black/white binary, and wherein Black men have been significant targets of police brutality, police officers are viewed by many in social justice circles as functionaries of systemic racial injustice. At a predominantly white institution, where white students benefit from the privileges of whiteness, white students protesting the murder of a Black man by police would require a critical examination of the privileges they have but which Floyd had not. In comparison, protesting the murder, thousands of miles away, of Palestinians, whom they conceptualize as nonwhite victims (regardless of Palestinians’ skin color, the actions of Hamas terrorists, or the agency of Palestinians in supporting Hamas to represent them) by the Israeli military, which they view as the arm of the white state (regardless of Israelis’ skin color or the needs and right of a state to defend itself against genocidal terrorism) is far easier.

In other words, by protesting against Israel, white students in the United States can believe they are challenging systemic injustice without any requirement to substantively engage with their own privilege or complicity. For white American student activists, the psychic benefits of displacing whiteness, racism, and systemic injustice onto Israel negate any potential impulse to question their own standing in the United States or their presumptions about the issues supposedly central to their activism. They need not wonder, for example, why the only Jewish country in the world is framed as an exclusionary, global, colonial superpower, despite being surrounded by countries from which Jews were exiled, how it is that so many supposedly white Israelis actually have dark skin, or why the Israeli military was in Gaza in the first place, despite not having had a presence there in nearly a decade leading up to the October 7 massacre of Israelis by the Palestinian-elected terrorist group Hamas.

Moreover, because whiteness has historical roots in European Christianity, and because Judaism has historically been Christianity’s immediate Other, those who frame Israeli Jews as white oppressors are actually reinforcing, not challenging, whiteness. Ill-informed anti-Israel activism thus cements both a Christian-inflected white worldview and a reductive antiracist stance that requires little education on the issues they claim to care about and even less self-examination.

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Racial Identity Development

In the wake of 2020’s pseudo-racial reckoning—I say “pseudo” because it hasn’t actually eradicated anti-Black racism—students, especially young white students, have been increasingly, if self-consciously, cognizant of the privileges afforded to those with light skin in the United States. Many theories of racial identity development suggest that, as one learns about injustice, they can become consumed by the need to share their new knowledge with others, but that individuals ideally will move into a place of integration wherein racial identity is only part of a healthy self-concept. In Asian American identity development models, for example, this incorporation is preceded by an “awakening” marked by anti-establishment perspectives, often influenced by “campus politics.”1 Black identity development theories suggest that once individuals recognize the saliency of anti-Black racism, they may initially devote their energies less to developing a healthy Black self-image than to overtly challenging and rejecting everything they associate with whiteness.2 Notably, many identity development scholars label this stage “resistance.” It should not escape readers that this is the same term anti-Israel activists have used to praise Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

There are many horrific aspects of equating gang rape and mass murder to “resistance,” but an intriguing aspect to this equivalency is that, in racial identity development, resistance is not the goal but instead an ideally temporary phase marked by anger and rage rather than a healthy self-concept. One must move past this phase to integrate their new knowledge alongside all the other knowledges and characteristics of themselves, to develop a healthy identity as an individual in a socially structured world. For white people, this may entail a process of continued self-reflection and learning from other cultural groups, rather than denigrating or idealizing other people based on shared identity characteristics. Anti-white attitudes and activism at the resistance stage of white identity development demonstrate neither allyship nor enlightenment, in large part because these efforts are motivated not by the desire to build a more equitable world but instead, as identity development theorists Rita Hardiman and Molly Keehn have noted, by “negative feelings such as guilt and shame which lead people to want to distance themselves from their whiteness.”3

It seems that contemporary social justice theorists and activists have gotten stuck in early stages of racial identity development, and, rather than grapple with what they have learned about systems of racism and colonialism (or recognize that they have learned precious little, if anything at all, about Jewishness or antisemitism), they are driven not by collective cultural understandings or overlapping identities but instead by resistance to those outside of their designated community and a missionary impulse to spread the word.

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White Women’s Transaction of Privilege

The pressure to disavow racial privilege may be stronger for white women, who are often seen as beneficiaries or even stewards of white privilege, a view exemplified in popular culture and discourse by the “Karen” figure. Indeed, as Tenisha L. Tevis, Naomi W. Nishi, and I have found, white women seem to be overrepresented in social justice work in educational spaces, a dynamic that may reflect white women’s efforts to avoid being seen as racist or to assuage guilt over their own privileges. “Paradoxically,” we point out in The Gendered Transaction of Whiteness: White Women in Educational Spaces, “the white woman who takes on antiracist work to signal that she is a good white woman who cares about antiracist work actually reifies the logics of whiteness through that very same virtue-signaling behavior.”

White women may be so used to gender subordination and so inculcated into the ways of whiteness that they accept and even transact gendered oppression for the privileges of being included, if in a subordinate role, in the white patriarchy. For the white woman who experiences gendered subordination but light skin privilege, efforts to distance from whiteness may lead to a fetishization of “resistance” that excuses the rape and murder of women if committed by peoples assumed to be nonwhite. What she may not consciously realize, however, is that this fetishization is intrinsically racializing and misogynistic. Because she accepts the subordination of gender to race, she ascribes the same hierarchical system of identity classification to others: thus, an Israeli woman is first Israeli and therefore not a victim, and a Muslim man is first a Muslim, not a rapist. Rather than integrate all aspects of her social identity—or consider anyone else’s—the white woman who proclaims herself an intersectional feminist paradoxically essentializes according to supposed racial categories those with whom she claims allyship.

Reifying Privilege through Allyship

It is not surprising that student activists are stuck in early stages of any sort of identity development, since they are likelier than not to be adolescents and young adults. After all, part of what characterizes most student activism is the youth of the protestors. It is more troubling that scholars and educators encourage students to embrace a rageful resistance rather than a healthy integration. Alas, one racial identity theory in particular may help us understand that dynamic and why it is so prevalent. Janet Helms’s white identity development theory is problematic for multiple reasons, including its presumption of Jewish whiteness and limited accounting for populations outside the Black/white binary, but it is foundational in social justice circles. This model suggests that the white person who abandons anti-Black racism will experience a “cognitive restructuring” and “a euphoria perhaps akin to a religious rebirth”; at this stage, the white person focuses on “the goal of changing White people.” That this impulse to proselytize, so to speak, is informed by Christian discourses, the same Christian discourses that inform whiteness, goes unacknowledged in Helms’s work.

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Though a full examination of the reasons for the limited examination of Christianity in social justice frameworks is outside the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that Christianity, specifically through the significant involvement of Black churches, historically provided a foundational framework for civil rights activism in the United States. For some populations, then, while Christianity once determined the tangible and conceptual structures of oppression, it also provided the tools for liberation. Still, Christianity remains a largely unexamined dimension of whiteness and racism as well as antisemitism.

The supposed antiracists who acknowledge antisemitism only insofar as it is committed by right-wing pundits or Christian Nationalists should—but rarely do—consider how their own activism might be informed by similar, if less overtly expressed, belief systems. The white woman who performatively resists the whiteness into which she has been socialized but rationalizes the motivating ideologies and impacts of Islamist fundamentalist violence as “resistance” merely trades one patriarchy for another. That both Christianity’s and Islam’s intrinsic Other, by virtue of cultural history and religious origin, is Judaism means that any antisemitism the white woman has absorbed from Christian society she may have limited reason to question in the context of Islamism.

Today’s student activists may have learned the terminology of critical literacy, but they haven’t learned how to fully apply its cognitive dispositions, and they are so preoccupied with pointing out Israel’s white oppressor colonial racism that they aren’t stopping to consider that maybe they themselves are the racists.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Mara Lee Grayson’s books include Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary (Peter Lang, 2023) and Teaching Racial Literacy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). Previously a tenured associate professor of rhetoric and composition at California State University, Dominguez Hills, she now works as the director of education for the Campus Climate Initiative at Hillel International.

Editor’s note: This article was completed and scheduled to be published before the attack on Iran on February 28.

As the latest round of negotiations between Iran and the United States concluded this Tuesday in Geneva, substantial numbers of American troops continued deploying to bases and forward positions across the greater Middle East. The talks followed Donald Trump’s aggressive rhetoric more than forty days earlier, when he openly backed and encouraged Iranian demonstrators after the eruption of widespread anti-regime protests, which were met with a brutal crackdown by Iranian security forces, with reported death tolls reaching into the multiple thousands.

The significant reinforcement of U.S. forces in the region reflects the administration’s reliance on coercive diplomacy to pressure Tehran in the face of continued Iranian intransigence. Yet the outcome of the Geneva talks revealed little substantive movement, particularly on Iran’s insistence on its right to enrich uranium on its own soil.

Trump now confronts a dilemma he likely did not anticipate at the height of the Iranian protests, when he declared on Truth Social on January 1 that the United States was “locked and loaded and ready to go.” He has since shifted from maximalist demands regarding the Iranian regime’s response to the protests, to negotiations focused solely on the nuclear issue. The question of whether, and when, to use force against Iran runs directly against his political instincts: an approach that places dealmaking at the center of his foreign policy and is animated by a deep aversion to protracted conflicts.

The current American force posture highlights the wide range of military options available to Washington, from a rapid, concentrated strike to a more sustained campaign. What remains unclear is the strategic endgame and whether a viable exit strategy exists that would allow the president to claim tangible success while containing regional escalation. This includes recent reports highlighting doubts expressed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, regarding the feasibility of a major U.S. operation without triggering a broader and protracted regional conflict. This uncertainty, and the high risk of a wider regional conflagration, could ultimately undermine Trump’s ability to expand the Abraham Accords, the signature foreign policy achievement of his first term, and to build a regional order that genuinely reduces Washington’s military footprint.

The Middle East Paradox

Donald Trump’s return to the White House was expected to usher in a phase of reduced American kinetic involvement in the Middle East. Yet the widening gap between his rhetoric and prior political commitments has produced a paradox: a president committed to ending “endless wars” and recasting the region as an arena for dealmaking could, in practice, preside over a regional conflagration. This tension was reflected in the National Security Strategy (NSS) released in early December 2025, which offered an implicit critique of decades of American interventionism, particularly the neoconservative project of exporting liberal democratic values, and reframed the Middle East as a theater for “partnership, friendship, and investment,” that is “no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was.”

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These themes resonated with anti-interventionist elements on the Republican far right and resurfaced during the Twelve Day War, when critics portrayed escalation as a betrayal of Trump’s promise to end “endless wars.” Trump’s response, however, was revealing. Attacks from figures such as Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon were met with open defiance, with the president declaring, “I’m the one that developed ‘America First.’ . . . For those people who say they want peace—you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon.” The subsequent B-2 strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz underscored Trump’s preferred model of intervention: the application of overwhelming force with minimal long-term investment, and a highly personalized approach that keeps the movement’s ideology subordinate to his immediate strategic calculations.

This episode highlights the degree to which MAGA is organized around Trump personally, functioning less as a coherent ideology than as a flexible vehicle shaped by his immediate political and strategic calculations. The resulting tension between an anti-interventionist narrative and a readiness to use force when expedient continues to shape U.S. policy in the Middle East and complicates America’s long-term strategic planning in the aftermath of a potential strike.

Israel’s Calculus

A significant factor in America’s strategic calculus has been substantial pressure on the part of Israel for decisive U.S. action against Iran. For Jerusalem, the long-standing focus on Iran’s nuclear program has now given way to significant worries about Iran’s rapidly expanding ballistic missile arsenal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli defense establishment see Iran’s ballistic missiles as the most pressing strategic threat facing the Jewish state, particularly after the American airstrikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities during Operation Midnight Hammer. Jerusalem’s stance has been underlined to the Trump administration in the frequent meetings between the prime minister and the president, yet the framework of the negotiations between the United States and Iran has focused only on the narrow nuclear issue, despite Israel’s best efforts to push for Iranian concessions on its missile program and support for its proxies throughout the region. Yet, despite these gaps, Israel and the United States remain highly coordinated, and a potential Iranian response would likely lead to direct Israeli involvement in tandem with the United States, bringing to bear Israel’s own considerable firepower together with its unsurpassed intelligence on Iranian targets.

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The Immediate Response

While Washington and Jerusalem stand ready to strike Iranian targets, the most immediate and consequential arena for an Iranian response is likely to be the Gulf, where hydrocarbon infrastructure and military assets in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar would be most exposed to retaliation. These worries, as well as the desire of the Gulf monarchies to deescalate any further tensions that would harm the tenuous détente with Iran, are the central focus of their strategic calculus. Iranian proxies, such as the Shi’a militias in Iraq, a weakened Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, could be brought to bear on Western as well as Israeli targets in a multi-front escalation.

Additionally, worries abound over potential Iranian actions targeting global shipping, including the possible disruption or closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical maritime artery through which more than 20 percent of global energy supplies transit, raising the risk of severe economic repercussions well beyond the region. A disruption in oil supply also could have significant impact on global prices, particularly in a critical midterm election year in the United States. While American officials, most prominently Energy Secretary Chris Wright, pointed to the lack of a global price shock during last summer’s Twelve Day War, the past is not always prologue, and a disruption of Iranian oil supply—around 5 percent of global output, could still impact prices.

The Day After: The Regional and Global Balance

The most pressing question for American strategic planners remains: what does Washington aim to accomplish over the long term? The consequences of the choice before the administration, whether to continue to pursue a diplomatic agreement with Tehran or, more consequentially, to resort to force, will constitute a critical test for President Trump and a defining moment of his presidency. The implications of a military campaign would shape perceptions of American power from the Middle East to Moscow and Beijing, with far-reaching geostrategic implications for the international system, particularly in light of the lessons drawn from the U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Another inconclusive or protracted conflict would further shape global perceptions of U.S. power and credibility, reinforcing doubts not only regarding Washington’s ability to stabilize the Middle East, but also about its capacity to sustain long-term competition in other critical theaters. This is particularly significant when viewed through the lens of Washington’s broader strategic competition: Russia would likely interpret another Middle Eastern conflict as a diversion that creates additional space for expanded operations in Ukraine, while China would closely scrutinize American military performance and strategic behavior that could directly inform Beijing’s own calculations in the Indo-Pacific arena and beyond.

The Trump administration’s preferred option remains the resolution of the current standoff through diplomatic means, which would see Iran agree to freeze uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief. If this is the case, it will serve as a textbook example of the success of American coercive diplomacy. Conversely, any perception of American capitulation to Iranian demands, including a performative deal to save face, particularly if accompanied by a withdrawal of the U.S. Navy carrier groups and forward-deployed forces, would deal a significant blow to Washington’s credibility and deterrence.

If Trump decides to attack, the most optimistic scenario rests on the assumption that a sustained and concentrated military blow would shatter the Iranian regime’s will, forcing Tehran back to the negotiating table from a position of near-total inferiority, akin to the moment at the end of the Iran–Iraq War when the Ayatollah Khomeini was compelled to “drink from the poisoned chalice” in order to preserve the Islamic Republic. The core analytical premise underpinning this scenario is that an Iran that is functionally and structurally weakened would have little choice but to seek an agreement largely capitulating to American demands, most notably on the issue of uranium enrichment. With this logic, an attack need not explicitly aim at regime change, an outcome for which there are no guarantees, but rather at destabilizing Iran sufficiently to encourage renewed mass protests and elite fragmentation and discord. Additionally, a targeted American campaign aimed at degrading the foundations of Iran’s leadership and critical infrastructure, all while encouraging renewed public protests, but stopping short of explicitly pursuing regime change—leading to changes within the construction of the regime, could emerge as a plausible outcome, achieved without the deployment of U.S. ground forces or direct political intervention. Yet this still leaves significant questions as to what Washington’s long-term strategic plan would be. A military move to seek regime change remains the least likely outcome, and is far from guaranteed, even if Trump has previously spoken openly about his desire to see the Iranian regime overthrown.

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An American attack remains burdened by a range of negative scenarios and, absent clearly defined strategic objectives, risks producing outcomes directly opposed to those intended. A large-scale American strike that fails to produce a durable agreement, alter the balance of power within the Iranian regime, or threaten its survival—leaving its current leadership and uranium enrichment capabilities intact—would be widely perceived by regional and global actors as a colossal failure, severely harming American interests. The Iranian regime would likely move to accelerate decisively toward nuclear weapons as a form of insurance policy, shortening breakout times and eliminating any remaining constraints. Such a move would then likely trigger a regional nuclear arms race, with states such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey reassessing their own nuclear options. As a result, an American strike without defined strategic objectives could thus institutionalize regional nuclear proliferation rather than prevent it.

At the regional level, American military action would likely reinforce ongoing geopolitical realignments, regardless of its outcome. The split and evolving rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), driven by their own competition for leadership within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Arab world, has also been driven by the Saudi desire to balance against Israel through an evolving regional alignment that includes Turkey and Qatar—particularly given Israel’s close strategic alignment with the UAE.

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For Riyadh in particular, the pre-October 7 regional order—defined by a tense but largely self-contained balance between Israel and Iran and its proxy network—served Saudi interests by constraining both competing regional powers. Israel’s systematic dismantling of the Iranian “ring of fire” of proxy forces since the October 7 attacks has altered that equilibrium, with the Jewish state seen as the unrestrained regional hegemon. Yet an American success in defanging Iran would give the Trump administration greater ability to coerce the Saudis to rebalance its regional alignment with Qatar and Turkey, force Israel to make concessions on the Palestinian issue, and finally achieve the long-awaited expansion of the Abraham Accords. Likewise, Israel’s strategic standing will be impacted directly by the results of a conflict with Iran. A significant success will reinforce its image as the Middle East’s regional heavyweight, with American political and military backing. An American failure—and certainly one in which Israel is an active participant—combined with significant Iranian strikes on the Israeli home front would have a dramatic impact on the perception of Israel’s strength and deterrence in the eyes of regional actors.

Ultimately, Washington’s ability to shape the regional order will hinge on the outcome of any military operation, or its ability to craft a sustainable deal that limits Iran’s nuclear program. What cannot be denied is that the aftermath of a potential American campaign against Iran would carry far-reaching and potentially fateful consequences. Success would reinforce American deterrence, reassure allies, and strengthen U.S. leverage in expanding the Abraham Accords. Failure, by contrast, without either a diplomatic agreement or a change to the status quo in Iran, would weaken U.S. credibility in the region and potentially draw it into a protracted conflict in the Middle East. In this sense, the decision to go to war, and its outcome, will shape perceptions of American power among both allies and rivals, with lasting implications for the international system and the United States’ global strategic position for years to come.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Eldad Shavit is a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and previously served in senior roles in Israel Defense Intelligence and the Mossad, where he served as the head of the research and analysis division.

Jesse R. Weinberg is a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and the coordinator of the Israel and the Global Powers research program at the institute.

By chance this past January found me working on Leo Strauss’s “What Is Political Philosophy?” while sojourning in Jerusalem.1 It just so happens that it was “in this city, and in this land,” “on this sacred soil” and bearing “what Jerusalem stands for” ever in mind, that some seventy years earlier Strauss had originally delivered this essay as three lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.2 The cause of my situation was twofold. First, I had spent the first five days of January teaching the essay as part of the University of Austin’s yearly Symposium on Leo Strauss. I was also scheduled to deliver a paper in early February at Notre Dame’s Political Theory Colloquium. For the latter occasion, I had decided to prepare my own commentary on Strauss’s text, to be submitted for review toward the end of the month. So it happened that my January was to be entirely devoted to reading, teaching, interpreting, and writing on Strauss’s piece. The second cause was an invitation from my friend Titus Techera to join a group of academic and media-adjacent people for a study tour of Israel, with a focus on Jewish history and Israeli politics, scheduled for about a week between my return from Austin and the submission of my paper to the colloquium. January thus became overwhelmingly busy. Sensing the urgency of the situation, I hurried to write the paper as quickly as I could while still in Austin, up until the tour began, but my commentary on Strauss quickly ballooned, so that it was looking more and more like I was going to produce a short book rather than a long essay. Restricting myself to Strauss’s first lecture helped somewhat, but it quickly became evident that I would still have to spend some of my time in Jerusalem working on “What Is Political Philosophy?” Such was indeed the case: in the early mornings and late evenings, or while riding around the country by bus, I found the occasional hour to read Strauss, write my notes on his text, read related materials from Spinoza to Swift and beyond, and outline the remaining paragraphs of my essay. So did the world find me.

There was a second connection between the text and my trip, and that was famed Zionist and Israeli national hero Theodor Herzl, whom Strauss mentions briefly but pointedly in the first lecture, but whose name also graced the group that had organized my trip and on whose behalf Mr. Techera had invited me, The Herzl Institute. The Herzl Institute is home to a number of initiatives advancing Jewish thought, education, and history, all with the purpose of meeting “the challenges ahead through a more rigorous engagement with the riches of Hebrew Scripture and rabbinic sources.” The institute’s president is noted Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazony, who through the Edmund Burke Foundation, for which he serves as chairman, organizes the National Conservatism Conference. These activities, along with his books on the State of Israel, nationalism, and conservatism, have earned Dr. Hazony his well-deserved reputation as a prominent voice in the nationalist wing of the global conservative movement. It would be poor manners on my part not to express my gratitude for the great generosity of my hosts and the thoughtful care they put into the program, evident in every aspect of the week’s activities.

The week started with a lecture by Dr. Hazony on the Biblical roots of Israeli nationalism. He focused on two passages in particular, Deuteronomy 30 and Ezekiel 37, both of which attest that the return of the Jews to their land will be both a spiritual and a political affair. The spiritual return is obviously first in importance, if not also to be first in time, which in turn raises questions of great importance, if not of the highest importance, about the religious or spiritual depth and legitimacy of the State of Israel today and in its recent history. I do not here refer to the questions of identity that emerge between the secular left and the religious right in Israel. These questions are rather secondary to the more profound questions that typically arise only at the margins among the orthodox, between the religious right and the anti-Zionists among the Haredim or, as they are typically referred to in the West, “the ultra-Orthodox.” That these questions are asked only at the margins does not make them any less important. That impression is rather a product of the shallowness instilled in us by the modern, liberal state, and the narrow questions it compels us to ask. The deeper question, regarding the character of the return or teshuva, has dogged Zionism since its ascendancy in the late nineteenth century, and it is one with which Strauss, too, wrestled as a young Zionist in Germany.

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Strauss recounted his struggle in his late autobiographical “Preface” to the 1965 edition of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, originally published in 1928, that is, at the end of his Zionist period. Both here and in “What Is Political Philosophy?,” Strauss criticized the “strictly political Zionism” of Herzl and Leon Pinsker for paying insufficient attention to “the foundation, the authoritative layer, of Jewish heritage.” For that foundation does not present itself as purely political, nor even as cultural, and hence as a product of the human mind, but “as a divine gift, as divine revelation.”3 Strauss already saw early on that Herzl’s and Pinsker’s project of political and cultural Zionism presupposed a critique of divine revelation, such as Spinoza had purported to provide. Strauss eventually captured this realization in strikingly poetic language:

Considerations like [these] made one wonder whether an unqualified return to Jewish orthodoxy was not both possible and necessary—was not at the same time the solution to the problem of the Jew lost in the non-Jewish modern world and the only course compatible with sheer consistency or intellectual probity. Vague difficulties remained like small faraway clouds on a beautiful summer sky. They soon took the shape of Spinoza.4

In the wake of this realization, Strauss undertook what Herzl and Pinsker had ignored, and what Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig had, on his telling, recognized but understood inadequately and thus accomplished only incompletely, namely, a rigorous evaluation of the assumptions underlying Spinoza’s approach to Biblical criticism and a corresponding modification of its results. The insufficiency of political Zionism thus compelled Strauss, as a matter of “intellectual probity” and under the pressures of reason itself, to take seriously the possibility of orthodoxy and therefore the tenability of the apparently naïve belief in miracles and divine revelation.

Strauss alludes to this problem in “What Is Political Philosophy?,” though he is careful only to allude to it and not to state it outright—it was certainly a sensitive issue for his audience in 1954–55, much as it is for their heirs today. He mentions Herzl and Pinsker as examples of political theory, indicating that for the full elaboration of their position one must look beyond them, ultimately to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, specifically its third and sixteenth chapters. In the next paragraph, Strauss offers just a definition of political theology, though an admirably succinct one, as “political teachings which are based on divine revelation.”5 A mere glance at Herzl’s Judenstaat or Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation suffices to reveal the total absence of references to “Hebrew Scripture and rabbinic sources.” Strauss, on the other hand, had opened “What Is Political Philosophy?” with a quote from Isaiah’s prophecy of the return of the Jewish people to their land.6 We do not mean to suggest that Strauss was of all things a political theologian. We mean only to indicate with what seriousness the political philosopher, in contrast with the political theorist, takes the claims of the righteous and the faithful, a seriousness far greater than the political theorist. I must add that, on this account, I am reluctant to call Dr. Hazony a political theorist, at least of Herzl’s or Pinsker’s type. His work in political theory seems instead ministerial to a project that falls more properly under the banner of political theology. Obscuring the situation is the fact that Dr. Hazony has not published his thoughts on the Biblical basis of the State of Israel. I will return to this fact near the end.

Naturally enough, then, did the issue of Herzl’s “secularism” arise during the question-and-answer period following Dr. Hazony’s opening remarks. And naturally, too, did he come prepared with a brief essay of Herzl’s relevant to this question, the “Menorah” of 1897.7 Dr. Hazony read at length, and to evident effect, Herzl’s description of an artist whose experience of unabating and growing antisemitism fills him with such “psychic torment” as to encourage in him a “return to Judaism.” Herzl represents the choice as between secularism and orthodoxy, and in particular an orthodoxy characterized by the conviction that the return to Judaism is “the only one way out of this Jewish suffering.” In the passages cited by Strauss, Spinoza had criticized the Biblical and divine basis of the election of the Jewish people and had supplied instead a natural basis to the modern liberal state, and a quasi-Hobbesian one at that. In the “Menorah,” Herzl evidently accepts, wittingly or not, Spinoza’s proposed natural basis for the modern state and attempts therefrom to envision a sort of return, if not to orthodoxy and to the promised land, at least to the beginnings of religious observance and practice. There is an all-too-obvious problem with his vision, not least in that Herzl roots the spiritual choice to return in the material necessity of physical survival. Herzl therefore has no response to the Haredim who refuse to end the Galut through human means. Or rather his response is too lacking in the sweet and sentimental tone found in “Menorah” to be included therein. The artist’s detractors are by and large secular skeptics, too much under the sway of the Spinozist justification for assimilation; thanks to “the courage of his conviction,” however, he is well-equipped simply to ignore them. Herzl can thus spare his artist the dirty work of addressing secularists and anti-Zionists directly—he instead takes that work upon himself. The most notorious of his addresses is his “Mauschel,” published only a few months earlier and in the same publication. There Herzl engages in what can only be called the character assassination of his opponents, returning again and again to the refrain: “No true Jew can be anti-Zionist.” To be sure, Herzl does attempt to carve out room for genuine criticism or even opposition, yet he is obviously inconsistent on this point. His inconsistencies suggest not a sophisticated or nuanced position so much as a moral discomfort with the unseemly passions his most determined opponents arouse in him. Need we even point out that he is willing to slander not just the apostate Spinoza with the derogatory term “Mauschel” but also those rabbis opposed to his project?

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The heart of the matter concerns what state of the soul ought to govern the spiritual return of the Jews, and whether it should occur before or after the political return to the promised land. The latter question is not for me to answer, but the former, in any case, is a question of political psychology. Herzl’s vision—of fear for survival engendering sentimental affection, engendering practice and ritual, which are then deepened and made enduring in the next generations—is lacking in a crucial respect, the philosophic critique of the Enlightenment, more precisely, the philosophic critique of the Enlightenment critique of religion, still more precisely, the philosophic critique of Spinoza. The difficulty appears to be that those most competent to criticize Spinoza, the orthodox, are not inclined to spend much time on him, to say nothing of taking him deadly seriously, while those willing to take him quite seriously are not inclined to be persuaded back to orthodoxy. Something like this difficulty is at play throughout Strauss’s later “Preface” to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, and it should deepen our appreciation for his rare combination of rigorous critique, on one hand, and openness to old and apparently outdated possibilities, on the other. Strauss aside, we see in this case that religious orthodoxy’s great friend and Enlightenment secularism’s great enemy is political philosophy—in other words, that political theology might find in political philosophy an ally, not to say a handmaid, in its critique of modernity. Orthodoxy of all kinds has proven stubborn to the Enlightenment project, a testament to modernity’s spiritual shortcomings, while political philosophy stands equipped to expose its rational shortcomings, if nothing else. In so doing, political philosophy opens the door to a reacquaintance with the deepest, most powerful longings of the human soul and so makes possible a spiritual return that would otherwise risk remaining unwittingly under the influence of modern ideas. Some such insight seems to me to inform Strauss’s critique of Herzl, whose wavering between the sentimental and the fearful betrays an unorthodox kinship with various trends of modern thought.

Political theology might better be understood, then, as a way of life, rather than as a primarily scholarly or academic pursuit. For it requires a certain diligence not just about how Scripture applies to the general situation a people finds itself in but also about how it inspires the various tasks each undertakes, day to day, week to week, year to year, and over one’s lifetime as a whole. This is what I saw every day as we made our way around Israel. A vintner in the West Bank proudly summarized his chosen way of life by quoting Scripture: “Thou shalt yet plant vines upon the mountains of Samaria” (Jeremiah 3:15). A farmer in the Golan Heights had us meet him beside his fields, and surveying their expanse he spoke of how he, as a modern farmer, diligently met the numerous strictures the Halakha places upon his work. The Torah commands the sacrifice of “a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke” (Numbers 19:2), and in case Israel should one day succeed in building a third temple, there wait near Shiloh, the ancient site of the tabernacle, a few such heifers, sourced from Texas. And I would be remiss to omit how every speaker or guest I encountered would enumerate their children and grandchildren, how many grandparents I met who were in their early 50s, how diligently, in short, all heed the command “Be fruitful, and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Amid the proceedings Dr. Hazony attended the funeral of his uncle, whose children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren numbered over a hundred. These examples, and many others besides, attest to how deeply and granularly Scripture and the Halakha pervade the daily existence of many modern Israelis, compelling them to the thoughtful integration of their ancient, prophesied destiny of return into every aspect of their modern lives—these are people convinced that the theological life is worth living. What makes their way of life especially political is the pervasive sense that each is doing his job in contributing to the national task of return and revival—also of defense. This was evident from a discussion of defense technologies by Dr. Yuval Steinitz of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, all the more from a dinner we shared with some soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). We enjoyed a meal of grilled meats outdoors at their camp; it was a scene that, like many others in Israel, reminded one of Plato’s Republic. But I was reminded, too, of God’s command to Joshua and his troops: “Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law” (Joshua 1:7).

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The case for the secular left in Israel was made for us by Adam Shinar, Associate Professor of Law at the Harry Radzyner Law School at Reichman University. Prof. Shinar gave us his rundown of the controversy concerning proposed reforms to the Israeli Supreme Court; we also heard the opposing view from Simcha Rothman, the Knesset Member who has led the charge for judicial reform. Proposed by the Netanyahu government in January 2023, the reform and the controversy surrounding it are less important to me here than the question both parties admit is at stake in the issue: whether Israeli’s identity as a Jewish state is to take priority over its identity as a liberal democracy, or vice versa. On July 26, 2023, the New York Times published an op-ed penned by Shinar arguing against the proposed reforms, in which he expressed consternation about gender diversity and Palestinian and other minorities.8 Tensions between the left and right boiled over into protests that summer, yet it was all effectively neutralized when, on October 7, 2023, Hamas-led terror attacks initiated a war in Gaza that continues to this day. Hamas likely sought to exploit the existing political tensions in Israel, but much to their surprise—and to the surprise, too, of many Israelis—the attacks brought in their wake a marked uptick in religious sentiment and devotion among Israelis. It is not hard to see why. As they made their way out into the Gaza envelope, the attackers came upon a music festival, where they engaged in the rape, murder, and mutilation of nearly 400 of the young people in attendance. Those targeted were hardly members of the religious right—that’s obvious enough from how they had chosen to spend the holiday sabbath of Simchat Torah. That is, there could be no denial that the attackers did not seek freedom from their oppressors, as the narrative on the left typically goes, but were out for blood, for Jewish blood. Is it any wonder, then, that the secular left in Israel has lost power, to the point of nearly ceasing to exist?

Prof. Shinar is clearly an exception. As of the time of writing, his profile on the social media platform X still features his op-ed pinned to the top of his feed: the events of six weeks later have, it appears, not aroused an appreciable change of heart. In keeping with his liberal priorities, he complained, both during and after his remarks, about not being able to take public transportation on the Sabbath. In a land brimming with religious self-sacrifice, it is laughable to bristle so at such inconveniences. More distasteful, however, was his urgent desire to leave Jerusalem, where he had come to speak with us, and return to Tel Aviv, expressing without reservation and before his orthodox hosts his aversion toward his people’s ancestral home. I bring this up not to accuse him of poor manners but of gross contradiction, that he is at once devoted to his promised land but not to its holiest sites. This is typical, I have been told, of the left-leaning residents of Tel Aviv. I spoke with a young liberal woman while there, and she referred to Jerusalem as “our most violently treasured heap of stone and concrete.” She at least had enough taste for consistency of opinion that she was eager to emigrate to the United States. Had she Shinar’s devotion, or Shinar her consistency, they might have confronted the full weight of their souls’ commitment and asked themselves what sort of life it demands of them. They might have asked themselves, as Strauss had a century earlier, whether a return to orthodoxy is possible, and possible for them, whether their path, in other words, is one of assimilation, of flight, or of return.

Strauss faced a similar and starker version of this question during his emigration from Germany in the 1930s. In an interesting exchange with his old friend Jacob Klein, Strauss articulates with uncharacteristic frankness the extent of his religious devotion:

And even if we were to be huddled into the ghetto once again and thus be compelled to go to the synagogue and to observe the law in its entirety, then this too we would have to do as philosophers, i.e., with a reserve which, if ever so tacit, must for that very reason be all the more determined....[R]evelation and philosophy are at one in their opposition to sophistry, i.e., the whole of modern philosophy.

Chastising Klein for his “conversion to theism” in 1933 amid the Jewish emigration from Germany, Strauss bluntly stated his position: “there is no need to ‘crawl back to the cross,’ I mean, to speak of ‘God.’”9 It is from this ironic and consistent perspective that Strauss embraced Zionism, not from the confused devotion of Shinar, nor from the courageous conviction of Herzl’s artist. What the left in Israel might learn from Strauss is that their pretense of Enlightenment rationality amounts to little more than “sophistry”—they might learn, in other words, the high expectations modern atheism has of reason, in the face of reason’s much more limited powers. Strauss himself would years later speak of a “shipwreck” in his thinking that disrupted the tidy and confident picture he painted in his correspondence with Klein.10 His path from Spinoza led him to Maimonides, Al-Farabi, and the Socratics, while also forcing a deepened confrontation with modernity, in particular with Machiavelli, as articulating the alternative to the Socratic orientation by fundamental problems.11 Strauss thus placed an incredible onus on would-be atheists and secularists, a great burden of proof to earn their conclusions rather than follow them blindly as unquestioned convictions. Whatever one thinks of Strauss’s work on the problem of reason and revelation, however misguided one might find his inquiries, one cannot deny that he proves by his example, positively or negatively, the need to take orthodoxy seriously.

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Shinar is in a way emblematic of the problem Strauss identifies in Herzl’s vision. The return that fear engenders risks being misinterpreted under the rubric of Spinozistic self-defense, according to which the alternatives of return or assimilation are a matter of practical judgment rather than prophetic vision and divine providence. Strauss summarized the consequences of Herzl’s position as follows:

Political Zionism, then, strictly understood was the movement of an elite on behalf of a community constituted by common descent and common degradation, for the restoration of their honor through the acquisition of statehood and therefore of a country—of any country: the land which the strictly political Zionism promised to the Jews was not necessarily the land of Israel.12

Strauss refers here to Herzl’s proposal of establishing a Jewish state in Uganda, an effort, I have been told, that still affects his reputation today, particularly among the Haredim. Why “in this land” and “on this sacred soil,” if not because it was promised to you by your God and His prophets? And if that promise still moves you and binds your soul, why not also His law, without your adherence to which His promise must needs remain unfulfilled? Dr. Hazony’s wife, Yael Hazony, told the story of traveling to Israel to stay with her future husband’s uncle and aunt. She recalled fondly how Dr. Hazony’s aunt one day looked out onto the land and said, “Isn’t it beautiful?” The future Mrs. Hazony then responded, “But it’s just a bunch of rocks.” “Yes, but they’re Jewish rocks,” she replied with evident gratitude and joy. Could a religious sentiment so admirably fond and grateful in its devotion to rocky soil ever arise in the souls of those who dismiss Jerusalem itself as a “heap of stone and concrete”?

I’ll conclude by returning to the subject of Dr. Hazony’s opening lecture, the Biblical roots of the State of Israel. Much of Dr. Hazony’s work involves a noble and quite successful effort to build and strengthen the often-faltering bridges between Israel and her Western allies, against the twin, and increasingly linked, threats of the secular left and radical Islam. His work on nationalism in particular has identified a deep kinship between the Biblical story of God’s chosen people, His nation, and those on the right across the West who wish to restore to their nation a healthy confidence in their common descent. On Dr. Hazony’s account, the American formula “one Nation under God” gives voice to a national and religious devotion that is Biblical in origin and global in significance.13 It is a striking feature of the nationalist movement that it is international in reach. The same could not be said of the German nationalists a century earlier. No doubt it is the postwar international liberal order’s indefatigable erosion of our particular devotions and commitments that has produced a global backlash. Dr. Hazony has the good sense to see that the events of the Second World War have tamed considerably the wilder passions of yesteryear’s nationalists. But my travels in Israel made me wish to hear him expound at greater length upon something everywhere evident but that he has not yet articulated sufficiently, namely, the political theology of the modern State of Israel. Dr. Hazony strikes me as better positioned than anyone else to offer an account, in terms of Scripture itself and with great theoretical clarity, of how the State of Israel today might fulfill its prophesied destiny, God’s ancient promise of return, on one hand, while remaining a modern, technological nation-state, if not also a liberal democracy, on the other. When I asked Dr. Hazony at the end of the week whether he has written on the Biblical foundations of the State of Israel, he said that he has not. I would be grateful for such reflections from his pen, and I trust the same is true also of his fellow Israelis.

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Postscript on War

Another word is called for on Israel as a modern, technological state. October 7th had the spiritual effect described above, as well as the political effect of galvanization around the defense of Israel. Dr. Steinitz told the story of the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran, an engagement that was almost entirely technological in character. He told likewise of the incredible advances in military technology, namely, their Iron Beam laser defense system and Trophy active tank defense system. These terrifying wonders, awesome in their capabilities, are absolutely essential to the survival and success of the modern State of Israel, surrounded as she is on every side by her enemies—seven against Israel, as it were. It is therefore a matter of the highest existential importance that she settle the question of how an ancient religion can also be a modern technological state. Spinoza refers to the welfare of an imperium as the “highest law.”14 That the Halakah allows one to suspend strict obedience for the sake of national security and survival suggests some agreement between the Bible and modern philosophy when it comes to war. But there is also reason to suspect great disagreement. The classics, Strauss argued, “demanded the strict moral-political supervision of inventions,” that is, of technology. Thus,

the good and wise city will determine which inventions are to be made use of and which are to be suppressed. Yet they were forced to make one crucial exception. They had to admit the necessity of encouraging inventions pertaining to the art of war. They had to bow to the necessity of defense or of resistance....They had to admit in other words that in an important respect the good city has to take its bearings by the practice of bad cities or that the bad impose their law on the good.15

But today, when these necessities bear upon us with untold weight, is it still possible for Israel to retain its ancient conviction? What today provokes greater fear, reverence, or awe? Scripture or Leviathan?

I end with a Biblical example, the story of Naboth and Jezebel, a favorite of Strauss’s.16 Asked by King Ahab for his vineyards, the obedient Naboth refuses, as God has forbidden him to give away his ancestral inheritance (1 Kings 21:1–3). Ahab thwarted, Jezebel comes to his aid by falsely accusing Naboth of cursing both God and king, the result of which is Naboth’s death by stoning (vv. 9–14). Naboth does eventually receive justice with the ascent of Jehu, but his vengeance turns out to be shockingly morally suspect, not least in his following God’s Machiavellian advice, or rather command, to “eliminate the blood line of the prince” (see 2 Kings 9:6–8 and Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 4). Jehu’s other morally suspect actions in this chapter include conspiracy (vv. 2, 14), deceit (vv. 11–12), inciting sedition (vv. 18–19), and killing a fleeing man from behind (vv. 23–24). We might excuse these actions as necessary to justice, or as matters of political necessity, but this is only to affirm the difficulty that it is not those without blame, like Naboth, who ensure justice perseveres, but those who recognize the necessity of morally suspect acts to righting the wrongs of this world. It is ultimately Jehu who stands up to the line of Ahab on Naboth’s soil (vv. 21, 24–25). Naboth may be blameless, but righteousness so pure makes one the victim of conspiracies and plots; it is rather Jehu’s willingness to plot, like Jezebel, but in service of God and his prophet Elisha, in service of God’s plan, that gives him, and not Naboth, the right to rule. But however much Jehu’s plotting, especially his elimination of Ahab’s line, may be in service of the Lord, it also makes his house deserving of divine punishment (see Hosea 1:4–5). Jehu’s line is punished for the very act that God’s prophet had commanded him to perform. The forbidden is necessary, the Bible concedes, but also necessarily punished. To which Machiavelli might well reply, “This point is deserving of notice and of being imitated by others.”

Topics: Israel Initiative

Alex Priou is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Austin and Roubos Sabbatical Scholar at the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of three books on Plato, most recently Musings on Plato's Symposium, as well as numerous articles on ancient Greek philosophy and poetry and the history of political philosophy. He writes regularly at The Close Read on Substack.

Thomas Kuhn famously argued that scientific revolutions occur when mounting anomalies create a crisis within an established paradigm, eventually producing a paradigm shift that transforms a field’s underlying worldview. Although Kuhn developed this concept to explain changes within science, the term is now often used more broadly to describe profound transformations in societies. What has unfolded in Iran in recent years marks not just another cycle of protest but a paradigm shift in the worldview of many Iranians. Some observers were stunned by the radical nature of the protests in Iran; it defied their expectations of an “Islamic country.” Inside Iran, however, this defiance did not come as a surprise. For many Iranians, the gap between public belief and the regime’s Islamic ideology has been widening for years.

The surprise among external observers reveals how persistent the assumption has been that Iran is fundamentally, or uniformly, an “Islamic” society; implicit in this assumption has been the notion that Iran’s political structure reflects a shared religious worldview with Iranian people. That assumption is increasingly untenable. The protests went beyond anger at policy or leadership. They expressed a deep rejection of Islamic ideology. Recent analyses, including research sponsored by Stanford Iranian Studies on Tehran protests from 2009 to 2023, show a clear shift in the language and demand of protests. Earlier demonstrations used reformist and religious rhetoric within the Islamic Republic’s framework. Recent protests are openly anti-clerical and secular.1 Focusing on slogans alone, however, still misses the broader transformation. Religion itself is disappearing from Iranian society.

A central feature of the twenty-first-century protests in Iran is the collapse of a historical coalition that shaped nearly every major political movement of the twentieth century: the moral and organizational authority of the clergy, the bazaar, intellectuals, and dissatisfied members of the public. For over a century, from the Constitutional Revolution to the 1979 revolution, clerical figures were often its legitimizing force. Large segments of the population followed them, mobilized under their guidance, and in many cases were willing to die for causes framed in religious terms. In the two decades before the 1979 revolution, even many radical communists in Iran, such as Khosrow Golsorkhi, articulated their struggle by using Islamic symbolism, invoking Imam Hussein as a model or pioneer of radical socialism. That pattern has now been broken.

In twentieth-century Iran, protesters rarely targeted Islam or the clergy. Reformist and nationalist intellectuals worked within a religious framework and largely avoided direct criticism of religion. They could challenge political authority, but openly confronting Islam carried severe social and personal risks. Criticizing Islam was even declared to be an illegal act. Those who crossed that line paid heavily. Some, like Fathali Akhundzade, articulated radical secular critiques but did so from outside Iran. The limits of secular critique persisted even under Reza Shah, whose rule the Islamic Republic now portrays as aggressively anti-clerical. Efforts to limit clerical power never eliminated religious institutions. Figures like Mohammad Ali Foroughi, the prime minister, and Ali Asghar Hekmat, the minister of education, cultivated pragmatic ties with religious authorities. Ahmad Kasravi’s fierce denunciations of clerical power and Islam led to his assassination by religious militants in 1946. Even intellectuals who disagreed with clerical dominance frequently regarded figures like Kasravi as too radical and destabilizing. The response from intellectuals to his killing was almost nonexistent. Virtually all stories, plays, and poems of Sadegh Hedayat, a modern Iranian writer and fierce critic of Islam, were banned during his life. He died by suicide in 1951 after the assassination of his brother-in-law, Prime Minister Ali Razmara. Razmara was killed by members of Navab Safavi’s Fada’iyan-e Islam, the group that had also assassinated Ahmad Kasravi.

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All of that has changed today. Not only secularization but a radical criticism of Shi’ism has spread beyond small intellectual circles into broader society. This shift is visible in everyday life. Ideas once considered extreme now serve as a starting point. For centuries, the clerical establishment claimed authority over life’s most intimate moments—language, birth, naming, marriage, and death. Religious approval was required for legal and social legitimacy. Everyday choices were subject to clerical control or influence. The message was clear: the religious system would authorize the life cycle, and without that authorization, people faced exclusion and pressure. Naming practices provide a revealing indicator of this transformation. In early twentieth-century Iran, choosing nonreligious or explicitly pre-Islamic Iranian names carried negative social consequences. Families often felt pressure to select names aligned with Islamic tradition, not only out of belief but out of caution. People with nonconforming names sometimes drew suspicion or were linked to persecuted religious minorities, such as the Baháʼís. Now civil registry data from the past three decades shows a steady shift away from religious names toward historically Iranian and more secular ones.2

This shift also appears in life-cycle rituals, especially marriages and funerals, where clerical authority once seemed absolute. Over the past decades, a parallel culture has developed in which people comply with the state’s religious requirements only to the extent necessary for legal survival while creating alternative ceremonies that reflect historical Iranian values and identities. Marriage shows the shift clearly. Iran has no civil marriage, so couples still complete the Islamic contract for legal recognition. Yet many couples now hold separate ceremonies rooted in Iran’s history, literature, and secular culture. They treat the religious contract as paperwork and seek meaning in alternative celebrations. These include mixed-gender gatherings and dancing, both of which are banned by religious authorities in Iran. In these counter-religious celebrations, couples recite Persian poetry instead of the Arabic aqd ceremony and serve wine despite its prohibition and prosecution under the Islamic Republic.

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Funerals show an even sharper change. In Islam, proper burial and the recitation of prayers for the dead, including the talqin—reciting Quranic verses in the ear of the dead—are considered essential. Today many families in Iran choose otherwise. Instead of inviting a mullah to recite prayers, rowzeh, and the Qur’an, they hold memorials in secular spaces. These gatherings often include classical Iranian music and poetry readings, which is notable given the long-standing restrictions on music and musical instruments in Islamic law. During recent protests, people buried victims without Islamic rituals. They gathered around music, poetry, mourning dance, and symbolic acts like cutting hair and invoking the Shahnameh and Iran’s historical flags. Life-cycle rituals once anchored religious authority, and mosque-centered rites once dominated. Even state media now acknowledge declining religious participation and empty mosques. The state still enforces religious law, but many people redefine these rituals themselves, and Islam has lost much of its influence over birth, marriage, and death. Authority is shifting.

This shift is cultural and psychological as well as political. Language is often an accurate registry for such changes. Iranians are making this shift visible in everyday speech. Many now replace Islamic expressions such as salaam, inshallah (allah willing), and mashallah (allah be praised) with Persian, nonreligious alternatives like doroud (hello), omidvaram (I hope so), and afarin (best wishes), emphasizing human agency over divine will. People are building identities and practices outside a religious framework. Public festivals show the same pattern. After 1979, the state tried to center religious holidays and sideline Iranian celebrations. Nowruz, the first day of spring, and Shab-e Chelleh, the winter solstice, survived mostly in private. Festivals like Sadeh and Mehregan lingered on the margins, but in recent years they have returned to public space. Nowruz has become a powerful marker of national identity, and other festivals are increasingly visible in cities. The state promotes Muharram and Safar as months of mourning, yet many now use this period for travel rather than religious rituals or pilgrimages. The tension between Iranian cultural traditions and Islam has deep roots. Influential medieval religious authorities such as al-Ghazali long condemned pre-Islamic festivals, yet these traditions endured, and many have been revived as forms of cultural resistance.

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Survey data from independent research groups outside state control points to a sharp decline of Islamic belief and identity in Iran. Even among those who still describe themselves as religious, many draw a firm line between private belief and any support for an Islamic political order. The GAMAAN survey on religion in Iran in 2020 reported that only about 32 percent of respondents identified as Shi‘i Muslim, roughly 5 percent as Sunni Muslim, and around 72 percent opposed the compulsory hijab.3 These figures were recorded before the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, which exposed an even deeper rejection of Islamic rule and identity. Large segments of the population now reject religious identification altogether.

This is why the current protest movement cannot be understood solely as a political uprising against a specific regime. It reflects a paradigm shift. Today, many protesters in Iran openly question Islam itself, at times through acts such as burning hijabs and rejecting symbols associated with Islam.4 The Islamic Republic appears aware of the shift. Clerics now justify the hijab by invoking Persepolis reliefs (the capital of the Achaemenid Empire in ancient Iran) and female figures from the Shahnameh (the Book of Kings is Iran’s epic mytho-historical work) rather than Fatemeh, the daughter of Muhammad. If in 1979 the most conjured symbols were Imam Hossein and Ashura, today figures like Kaveh the Blacksmith have taken their place, with protesters invoking the Shahnameh’s story of resistance against Zahhak, the mythical figure of Arab origin who ruled Iran for a thousand year and brutalized its youth. The revival of Iranian historical festivals and figures, the diversification of private belief, the emergence of parallel life-cycle rituals, and the language people use all point in the same direction: a society becoming more secular. A political transformation may or may not come quickly. A cultural and social transformation, however, has already occurred.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

Mohadeseh Salari Sardari grew up in Bandar Abbas in southern Iran and studied architecture there before pursuing her PhD in the United States. She is currently completing her PhD dissertation, Literary Selves and Architectural Space, at Brown University, which examines modern architectural history in Iran and the role of women in shaping Iran’s local modernity. She is currently a lecturer in Stanford University’s Department of Comparative Literature and has worked with museum collections and exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the RISD Museum. Her work on Iranian literature, art, and culture has been published in both Persian and English.

The Chinese New Leviathan: Cultural Subjectivity and Statecraft Today

The 2026 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Conference

March 20–21, 2026, in New York City

Co-sponsored by the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, City University of New York

Conference Registration

Registration for the conference is now open. Click here to register!

Keynote Speaker: Wang Hui (汪晖)

Renowned as a critical theorist and one of China’s leading intellectual historians, Wang Hui (Tsinghua University) will speak on the nexus of state, nation, and empire in modern Chinese history, and its implications for our understanding of modernity as such. His keynote address is entitled “China Under the Condition of Spatial Revolution at the Dawn of the Pacific Era.”

Conference Program (PDF)

Conference Description

Following the fruitful discussion that took place during our “China Keywords” conference in March 2025, our 2026 annual conference will focus on “The Chinese New Leviathan: Cultural Subjectivity and Statecraft Today.” The conference is part of TPPI’s five-year China Initiative, which aims to foster a critical and mutually regarding discussion of social and political theory between China and the West, well beyond the circles of China specialists. This outreach effort across political boundaries continues a tradition established by the journal Telos, which played a pivotal role in fostering a reciprocal encounter between intellectuals in the Anglosphere and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Essays from the “China Keywords” conference will appear in two special issues of the journal, beginning with Telos 213 (Winter 2025).

As one of the most potent and complex keywords in modern China, nationalism demands our rigorous theoretical engagement. It functions as a source of state legitimacy, a tool of social mobilization, and a site of intense public debate. From official state proclamations of rejuvenation to the pulse of online crowds, nationalism flows through China’s internal politics and its global stance. Its conceptualization has provided the intellectual context for the development of modern Chinese power, and it therefore needs to be understood both on endogenous terms and from a global philosophical perspective.

At our 2026 annual conference, presenters will move beyond descriptive accounts to theorize the multifaceted nature of Chinese nationalism, placing Chinese political thought in dialogue with Western critical theory and exploring points of convergence, divergence, and mutual illumination. Our original call for papers placed the possibility of such dialogue in the context of R. G. Collingwood’s The New Leviathan (1942) and Huimin Jin’s discussion of the ontology of self and subject in Telos 213 (Winter 2025). While some speakers and participants will be China specialists, we also warmly encourage non-specialists to join our conversation, and we welcome views from every political and ideological perspective. Indeed, the clash of radically divergent, often unconventional ideas is one of the hallmarks of our conferences.

Conference Location

The conference will be held at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute at 25 West 43rd St., 17th Floor, New York, NY 10036. The Calandra Institute is located in midtown Manhattan and is close to major subways stops. It is three blocks from Grand Central Station, two blocks from the Bryant Park subway stop, and three blocks from the Seventh Avenue/42nd Street subway stops. For more information about the Calandra Institute, visit their website at https://calandrainstitute.org.

These are nervous days for China’s senior military officers. Zhang Youxia, vice chairman of the Communist Party’s powerful Central Military Commission (CMC), has been placed under investigation for “serious violations of discipline and law.” Zhang Youxia, long regarded as an ally of paramount leader Xi Jinping, was the military’s second-highest-ranking officer, directly beneath Xi himself. He is the highest military leader to be brought down by the anti-corruption campaign that, since Xi took office in 2012, has disciplined millions of Party and state officials across all sectors of Chinese society.

With Zhang Youxia’s removal, the CMC has been effectively hollowed out: of the seven members who constituted the commission at the start of the current term, five have now been removed or are under investigation. Only two figures remain: Xi Jinping, who serves as chairman, and Zhang Shengmin, the military’s chief of discipline and anti-corruption enforcement.

What is going on? Why have so many generals been removed from power and punished? The short answer is that we outsiders do not know. What we can say, however, is that there is every indication that the anti-corruption drive is genuine, holding Chinese leaders, civilian and military alike, to stringent standards of competence and moral integrity.

Western Speculations

This is not the line most Western speculations pursue. Instead, the predominant explanans is a concealed struggle for power. Maybe Xi thwarted a coup or broke through stubborn factional resistance. Did he get paranoid? Or was Zhang’s purge a show of strength? Or did Zhang refuse an order to mobilize for an invasion of Taiwan? Perhaps Zhang was the bearer of bad news—that the PRC is nowhere near ready for such a move—and paid the price. You can speculate all you want.

One problem confronting all such speculations is that Xi seems to have been a major driver behind Zhang’s career. Their fathers, Zhang Zongxun and Xi Zhongxun, were comrades-in-arms during the Communist Revolution, both hailing from Shaanxi Province and serving together in the First Field Army during the civil war. This shared revolutionary pedigree placed their sons in overlapping elite networks as second-generation Reds. Zhang rose in the CMC in the wake of Xi’s rise to power.

Of course, with sufficient creativity, you can integrate this complicating factor into your speculative narrative. Western speculation tends to make a great deal out of very little; so much so that the British newspaper The Economist has joked about the return of Pekingology, the venerable Cold War–era craft of divining Chinese elite politics from communiqués, photographs, and telling omissions. Go wild: the wilder the hypothesis, the more Western audiences will like it.

Yet all the speculating operates almost exclusively within a register of cold-blooded power politics. In doing so, it risks missing what is probably the most important dimension of the ongoing purges under Xi Jinping: their moral—or spiritual, even quasi-religious—earnestness.

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Logic

This logic behind the purges becomes intelligible when placed within the broader arc of Xi’s rule. At the beginning of his tenure in 2012, Xi launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that ensnared figures once thought immune. Even former Politburo Standing Committee members were not exempt. Xi pledged to crack down on “tigers and flies,” signaling that no official was too senior or too insignificant to escape discipline.

In the 2010s, outside commentators severely underestimated Xi’s campaign, believing it would be temporary and mainly target political opponents. Yet Xi has demonstrated a willingness to act against allies and longtime associates if they compromised the system’s moral integrity. Even relatively minor infractions can trigger draconian consequences. And the campaign is ongoing.

To understand why Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is so extensive, durable, and uncompromising, it is necessary to reflect on how Xi likely understands his leadership role through the lens of Chinese political thought. The purges, if that is even the right word, have everything to do with a particular moral conception of politics and societal order. Xi considers it his task to enforce a moral puritanism upon leaders of the Party and the state, who are expected to serve as the highest moral exemplars but too often fall short.

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Less Differentiated

This, in turn, points to a dimension that Western observers often miss: the moral, spiritual, even semi-religious character of the Communist Party’s authority. In the Chinese tradition, political and religious authority have historically been far less sharply differentiated than in the modern West.

Western intuitions about Xi are therefore overly secular, shaped by centuries, indeed millennia, of conceptual and institutional differentiation between political and religious authority. From the medieval doctrine of the Two Swords and the uneasy interaction between emperor and pope in the Holy Roman Empire, to the early modern crystallization of the separation of church and state, Western political thought has been trained to see political leadership as largely non-sacral.

That hyper-differentiated Western scheme fits China poorly, because Xi is both Caesar and pope, while the Party-state under the CPC’s direction functions simultaneously as church and state. The CPC is the great teacher, charged with uplifting the people in a comprehensive sense, materially, morally, and spiritually.

This comprehensive, relatively undifferentiated understanding of leadership echoes a long imperial tradition that fused what Westerners conceive of as the separate realms of religion and politics. Chinese emperors up until the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) ruled as sons of heaven, maintaining cosmic and moral order through ritual sacrifices to heaven, earth, and ancestors; political failure, moral decay, and natural calamity were understood as signs of a loss of heavenly mandate rather than merely administrative shortcomings.

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Yes, the Communist Party of China is very modern, drawing heavily on Enlightenment rationalism and Romantic egalitarianism, that is, on imported Western categories of thought. Still, one of the many legacies of imperial China is the socio-structural situation in which the political center must fulfill tasks that Westerners, with their more cleanly differentiated template, would consider “religious,” an insight already incorporated into the mid-twentieth-century comparative theorizations by sociologists Talcott Parsons and Shmuel Eisenstadt.1

I mean to say that sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and sinologists have long known about this socio-structural legacy. The problem is that journalism and social media commentary tend not to carry over much of this theoretical knowledge, and therefore almost always process new events in a “naïve,” Western-centric manner.

Moral World Center

Zhongnanhai, the Party’s headquarters—fittingly located within a former imperial garden complex adjacent to the Forbidden City—is far more than the apex of political power as conceived in a Western, secular, and institutionally differentiated sense. It functions instead as China’s moral center, from which order radiates outward, through the Party, across the state, and into society at large, and beyond.

Corruption and incompetence at the very top are intolerable. Even a minor moral stain at the apex threatens China’s entire order.

That, in turn, would have international repercussions too. Foreigners beyond China’s borders would be adversely affected if the Chinese center were not properly ordered, because China has a distinctive mission on the world stage in the twenty-first century.

Westerners may scoff at the notion of such a Chinese mission, yet, through its industrial capacity and technological innovation, China already makes an unprecedented material contribution to the world. Beyond this lies China’s urgent “spiritual” responsibility to channel the emerging geopolitical multipolarity (or bipolarity) toward a peaceful world of mutually respectful diversity.

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To put it in Chinese terms, China makes the leading contribution to the emergence of a “new era” (新时代), in which different nations and civilizations are expected to harmonize, forming what official discourse calls a “community with a shared future for humanity” (人类命运共同体), a vision that some philosophers describe as a renewed tianxia world (天下世界). Political order rests on the moral rectitude of those who rule, especially in China, the country that is seen as bearing the Weltgeist (世界精神), to borrow the Hegelian formulation of philosopher Xu Jilin in his essay “New Tianxia-ism” (新天下主义, 2015).

I cannot lay out here the entire complex field of Chinese utopianisms and teleological imaginaries, Party-doctrinal concepts, and politico-moral idealisms—and doing so would in any case far exceed my competence. What should be clear, however, is that a very different moral metaphysics operates within the CPC, one that is largely invisible to Western audiences.

A simple heuristic can help avoid many misunderstandings: when confronted with the CPC’s lofty or stringent rhetoric and decisions, Western observers should think not “politics” alone, but “politics plus religion.”

Topics: China Initiative • Reflections & Dialogues

Eric Hendriks, a Dutch sociologist and graduate of the University of Chicago and Peking University, is Director of the China Initiative of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute.

One of the most troubling features of our current global order is not that injustice occurs, but that it can be indefinitely managed, deferred, and rendered procedurally invisible.

The international system was never designed to be morally ideal. Institutions such as the United Nations emerged above all to manage great-power rivalry, stabilize sovereignty, and prevent systemic war. Human rights, while rhetorically central, were always institutionally secondary—invoked selectively and enforced unevenly.

Yet today, the ethical cost of that design feels increasingly visible.

Nowhere is this dynamic more clearly illustrated than in the international community’s inability to move beyond condemnation toward meaningful accountability for the Iranian regime’s ongoing crackdown on its own citizens. The evidence is abundant. The suffering is visible. The legal mechanisms, at least in theory, exist. And yet the path toward international legal escalation—particularly through the International Criminal Court—remains blocked.

The blockage of accountability is especially evident in relation to the International Criminal Court. While the ICC does not operate under the same veto structure as the Security Council, its jurisdiction remains constrained by state consent, referral mechanisms, and enforcement capacity. In cases such as Iran—where the state signed but never ratified the Rome Statute, and is therefore not subject to the Court’s jurisdiction—meaningful escalation depends on Security Council referral, which returns the question of justice to the logic of great-power alignment.

Not because the case is unclear. But because the system itself has learned how to neutralize moral urgency.

At the center of this paralysis lies the veto power of the United Nations Security Council. Russia and China’s repeated use of the veto is often framed as obstructionism, or as cynical geopolitical maneuvering. But this framing, while emotionally satisfying, risks missing the deeper ethical problem. The veto does not deny that violence is occurring. It does not dispute that rights are being violated. It simply prevents consequence.

The veto suspends justice without ever having to argue against it.

This is a crucial distinction. What we are witnessing is not a clash over facts or values, but a quiet triumph of institutional process over responsibility. International law remains intact on paper, while its activation is indefinitely postponed by strategic alignment. The result is a form of moral stasis: the appearance of order without the substance of justice.

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Iran, in this sense, is not an exception. It is a case study.

The regime’s actions—mass arrests, executions, suppression of dissent—have been widely documented. Calls for international accountability are not radical demands; they are appeals made within the existing legal framework. Yet escalation stalls, not because evidence is lacking, but because the geopolitical cost of action outweighs the moral cost of inaction for powerful states.

This is where the ethical terrain becomes especially delicate.

The use of the veto by Russia and China does not rest on an assessment of Iran’s internal moral order, nor does it require an endorsement of repression. Their position is shaped by a broader logic: resistance to Western-led interventionism, preservation of sovereignty norms, and the maintenance of a global balance that limits external scrutiny of domestic conduct—including their own.

In this sense, the veto reflects not moral indifference, but moral displacement. Human suffering is not denied; it is subordinated to strategic continuity.

What emerges from this dynamic is not simply division, but a new form of convergence. A world increasingly organized around blocs that shield one another from accountability, bound together less by shared values than by shared interests. Power protects power. And the human cost is externalized.

The deeper tragedy is not that global actors disagree. Disagreement is inevitable. It is that the system now functions in a way that allows all sides to appear principled while innocence remains unprotected. Western powers issue statements and sanctions, constrained by their own inconsistencies and past interventions. Eastern powers invoke sovereignty and non-interference, secure in the knowledge that procedure itself will do the work of delay.

Between them, ordinary people are crushed—not by ideology alone, but by the architecture of global order.

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When procedure is absorbed into great-power competition—serving delay and stability rather than accountability—justice quietly disappears without ever being openly opposed.

This is the ethical wound that should concern us most. Not merely the failure to act in Iran’s case, but the gradual shrinking of the global moral imagination. Accountability becomes conditional. Law becomes selectively activated. Suffering becomes a negotiable variable within the calculus of stability.

The world now stands clearly divided, not simply between East and West, but between those for whom power remains accountable to human life and those for whom human life is an acceptable cost of geopolitical equilibrium. Yet even this division is misleading. In practice, the major powers increasingly resemble one another in the same tragic way: all claim restraint, all invoke process, and all manage outrage until it fades.

The lives lost in Iran are not lost because no one knows. They are lost because knowing no longer compels.

This is not a call for reckless intervention, nor an argument for moral absolutism. It is an invitation to reckon honestly with what our systems now permit. A reminder that legality without consequence is not neutrality—it is abdication.

The tragedy of our divided world is not simply that powers compete, but that in doing so they increasingly agree—implicitly—that the lives of ordinary people are expendable within the calculus of stability.

In such a world, the question is no longer who is right, but what kind of order we have learned to accept.

Milad Milani is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Western Sydney University. His work explores Islamic thought, mysticism, ethics, and political theology, with particular attention to questions of authority, tradition, and modernity. He is the author of Heidegger, Ontology, and the Destiny of Islam.

The following interview was conducted in Berlin in the summer of 2025 and was originally published in German in the online magazine haGalil.

Verena Buser

Dear Ahmed, I am very pleased that you are here. Can you please introduce yourself?

Ahmed Albaba

I was born and raised in a so-called refugee camp in the West Bank, but I prefer the name Judea and Samaria, for good reason. I can go into that if you like. I first studied psychology there and then came to Germany, where I completed my master’s and doctorate degrees in social science. My research focuses on the collective memory of Palestinian families in the camps. I was also active in several research projects in Israel and Jordan.

My work led to a change of perspective for me. As I reflected on my own biography, I asked myself the question: what prevents us Palestinians from having a democracy? And I concluded that there are two ways of thinking in Palestinian communities. Or rather two projects. The first project is a development project, one in which people are concerned with everyday life. They want normal things like a good job and a good family, a good house and so on. They want to develop society and lead a normal life.

On the other hand, there’s also another project. I call it the resistance project—this term is in common use, anyway—and it’s based on the “Palestinian cause.” The goal is to liberate Palestinians from the Jews. It’s based on an ideology of hate, and the aim is to fight—against the West, but above all against Israel, against Jews and against Zionism.

In the course of my research but also as a result of reflecting on lived experience, my biography and the history of my family, I became convinced that the second project is a major obstacle to the democratization, secularization, and modernization of Palestinian society in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

It is important for me to emphasize that I do not want to offend anyone when I say that the “Palestinian cause” is an obstacle for us Palestinians. What I actually want to say is that we Palestinians now have a great opportunity to free ourselves from these ideologies and also to modernize, secularize, and democratize our society. But to do this, we have to give up this struggle, this resistance project, which is also a terror project. And my experience shows me that such statements offend many Palestinians. They feel attacked when you say that. But it’s not actually against Palestinians or against anyone. It’s quite the opposite. It’s for Palestinians, for Palestinian society. I wish the best for this society, and I want to do something for it. My words and my actions are my contribution to this.

You get so caught up in this tradition of the “Palestinian cause.” It’s like a religion. You don’t always act rationally in terms of purpose but rather in terms of values. And if you act value-rationally—which can be driven purely by emotion—there is a danger that the outcome, i.e., the results, are not really in your own interests. But my approach is that we should think rationally for a purpose—pragmatically—and in this way we can modernize and democratize our society.

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Verena Buser

Can you explain to me how the “Palestinian cause” hinders the democratization or secularization processes?

Ahmed Albaba

It was created by the Arab world. The representatives of this project are Palestinian organizations founded by Arabs. I am referring specifically to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), established in 1964 by Gamal Abdel Nasser. At that time, there was no Israeli occupation. So the idea was to fight against the “Zionist project.” That was the 1960s, and now it’s 2025. But the language hasn’t changed. We can’t continue to think as if we were in living in the previous century. We need a new language. We can’t keep talking about the “fight against Zionism,” the “fight against Israel,” and the “fight against the Jews.” These are the obsolete slogans of the many factions of the PLO but also of political Islam.

This is a big obstacle, because the young generation is not striving for progress, not for economic goals, not for careers, not for things that are normal in the Western world. Instead, it fights against Zionism, Israel, and the Jews. The struggle takes place on various levels, including among Palestinian intellectuals, academics, and artists. Everyone in these circles is involved. They don’t deal with the real problems of society but create the image of an enemy and fight against it. And this fight costs us a lot.

In principle, the “Palestinian cause” operates on three levels. On a physical level, the goal is to physically eliminate Jews. There is this fantasy that if you eliminate Jews, then you liberate yourself.

On the next level, the narrative level, there are the contributions of academics and artists or historians. They try to establish a narrative in which Jews do not appear, i.e., to eliminate Jews at the narrative level. That’s why I say I come from Judea and Samaria—because by doing so I recognize that this area has a history, a Jewish history. The West Bank is a term that was established by the British Mandate administration. They created the East Bank and thus also this term, West Bank. So the Jordanians adopted it and the Palestinians as well. But if you look closely, the term “West Bank” is new. It’s a designation, not a name.

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Judea and Samaria, by contrast, is a term that has an ancient history. And it shows that we inhabitants of the place have a—very long—history. If we renounce it, then we renounce an important part of our identity. But in order to develop an identity, I think we have to recognize this Jewish component of our history—not only acknowledge it but also adopt it into our cultural self-understanding. We are Arabs, we are Muslims, we are Christians. Yes, but we also have this Jewish tradition, Jewish heritage, and we must affirm this aspect of our reality too.

To make this more concrete: There are the ruins of the Hisham Palace in Jericho. Pupils should be taken there to show that we have an Islamic history and so on. But five kilometers away is Herod’s Palace, and nobody goes there. I think that’s a sign of failure. You have a great history, a great tradition, a very, very old history. Why deny it? It’s not good for our culture, our identity, or our humanism. The complexity of our inheritance isn’t against anyone—it’s an enrichment.

Verena Buser

So is this “resistance project” also about a lack of ideological criticism?

Ahmed Albaba

The so-called resistance project is actually a terror project. They try to legitimize terror by using nice sounding words, but in reality it’s a justification and legitimization of terror. But terror is not actually in the interest of the Palestinians.

It distracts us from our real problems. We have a lot of problems in Palestinian society, but because of this so-called resistance project, there’s no capacity to focus on the real problems and deal with solutions. We have economic problems. We also have patriarchal structures. There are still honor killings. We need a solution. And the academics and the artists and so on, they don’t care about these problems. If there’s an art project, it’s about occupation and how to develop a narrative against the Zionist narrative. But do we really need that? For me it’s a pseudo-occupation. We need solutions for the real problems in society.

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Verena Buser

There’s a rather monolithic image of Palestinians in the West currently that’s been strongly influenced by so-called “pro-Palestinian demonstrations.” In contrast, your comments are very differentiated. Why do you think you could be described as an “unheard Palestinian voice”?

Ahmed Albaba

Well, first of all, I think it’s partly my own fault that my voice is not loud. But I also have good reasons why my voice is quieter than ideally it should be. Because of this “Palestinian cause,” many people, especially young people, believe that if they fight on these three levels—physical, narrative, and moral—then they are on the right side of history, and this belief gives them the justification, the legitimization for terrorist attacks, for denial and also for insults. The Palestinians know this because we grew up with it.

I was like that myself. I remember I was very young, maybe 18 or 19 years old. Someone was talking about a journalist whom he called a collaborator—he was working “with Jews, with the Yahud or Israel,” and was therefore a “traitor,” in effect. They told me to take the journalist’s camera away. I went to him and took his camera away. The man was so scared of me. It was unbelievable because he knew very well that I wasn’t alone, and if it came to a physical altercation other people would come and beat him.

Now I’m experiencing the same thing today. I’m the journalist who’s afraid of Palestinian teenagers who believe that if they beat me or kill me or ruin my reputation, then they’re doing something good for the “Palestinian cause.” That’s how they think. I used to think like that myself when I was their age, but now I realize we urgently need to change. It has to stop immediately! Because if the next generation thinks like that, then we don’t really have any chance of development, democracy, or modernization.

I believe that for many Palestinians who now have a job in Israel, for example, Israel is not the problem for them. On the contrary, Israel is the solution. Because it enables them to improve and establish their economic situation.

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Verena Buser

What motivates you to actively fight against antisemitism?

Ahmed Albaba

I believe that the most important thing of all is that we Palestinians fight against antisemitism, because antisemitism is the reason why these destructive ideologies we’re talking about became established and remain widespread in our society. So if we work against this hatred—I know it’s not that easy, but we have to work to make it go away—then we won’t be so easily manipulated. As long as hatred against Israel is entrenched, you can activate it to quickly mobilize people for terrorist attacks. Therefore, fighting antisemitism is important not only for Palestinians but for the whole world.

Antisemitism is an ideology of hate that divides entire societies. It’s only a matter of time before a society like that collapses—when the cohesion between people breaks down after antisemitism has become an everyday phenomenon. Social peace collapses. And history shows that successively, not just since 1948 in the Arab world, anti-Zionism too has become an ideology of a similar nature. As a consequence, almost all Jews in the Arab world were expelled. That had a negative impact on Arab societies as well.

There were lots of Jewish people who contributed much to society throughout the Middle East—for example, in Egypt. There were artists, people who made important economic contributions. Today there are no Jewish voices in Egypt. The same applies to all Arab countries, including Syria and Jordan. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are dangerous ideologies that are eating away at society from within.

Verena Buser

Thank you very much for the interview.

Dr. Albaba’s dissertation on “Palestinian Families in the Refugee Camps in the West Bank” is available online here.

Topics: Israel Initiative

Dr. Verena Buser, a Berlin-based historian of the Holocaust, is a research associate of the Holocaust Studies Program at Western Galilee College (Israel) and research associate to the Antisemitism Commissioner in the State of Brandenburg (Germany) and his deputy.

When Power Turns against Belonging

There is a simple question that refuses to go away, no matter how often it is displaced by politics, ideology, or strategy. It is not a question of systems or outcomes. It is older than constitutions and more enduring than revolutions.

How does a ruler come to fear the people he claims to represent?

This is not merely a failure of governance. It is a moral break. When power turns against those from whom it draws its legitimacy, something more than injustice has occurred. A bond has been broken; one that is not written into law but carried in memory, custom, and the quiet expectation that those who rule do so in care of what they have inherited.

To govern a people is not first to command them. It is to belong to them.

Belonging is not a matter of blood or belief, but of fidelity: to the land one inhabits, to the lives entrusted to one’s care, and to the future that must remain possible for those who come after. A ruler who governs without this fidelity may retain power, but he no longer stands within the moral horizon of the place he claims as his own.

This essay grows out of my recent ABC Religion & Ethics article on Iran’s ethical reawakening but seeks to think more slowly and more fundamentally about the moral breach now shaping Iran’s political destiny.

The tragedy now unfolding in Iran is often misnamed.

Custodianship and the Moral Shape of Power

Political power always tells a story about what it believes a country is.

Some regimes understand the land as an inheritance that is received rather than seized, held in trust rather than exploited. In such traditions, authority is justified not by force or ideological purity but by care: care for the people, for the continuity of culture, and for the future that must remain open even beyond the ruler’s own time. Power here is custodial. It does not own the nation; it safeguards it.

Other regimes tell a different story. They treat the country as an instrument; something to be mobilized, reshaped, or sacrificed in service of an abstract project. In these systems, the people are no longer ends in themselves. They become means: bodies to discipline, voices to silence, lives to expend. Power, once severed from care, becomes possessive. And possession, unlike stewardship, tolerates no refusal.

The conflict in Iran is best understood through this distinction.

Iran’s deepest political imagination—formed across ancient, imperial, poetic, and later religious horizons—has long resisted ideological absolutism. Political legitimacy was never grounded primarily in doctrine, but in the capacity to hold the country together: to protect the land, dignify its people, and preserve the conditions under which life could flourish. Even when authority was flawed, it was judged against this ethical expectation. A ruler who governed against the people risked losing not only power but moral standing.

The present regime stands outside this grammar.

It does not govern as a custodian of Iran but as a proprietor over it. The country is treated as a site of permanent mobilization, its people as raw material for a revolutionary project that admits no limits. Loyalty is demanded not to the nation but to an ideological apparatus that justifies endless sacrifice while offering no political horizon beyond obedience.

This is why repression in Iran is not incidental—it is structural.

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When the People Speak

A state that sees itself as the owner of the people must control appearance, speech, desire, and memory. It must regulate women’s bodies because autonomy threatens possession. It must suppress art because beauty cannot be commanded. It must distort truth because truth answers to no authority. What emerges is not merely authoritarian governance but a form of rule fundamentally at odds with the moral conditions that allow a society to recognize itself.

Against this, the Iranian people are not proposing a counter-ideology. They are asserting something far more elemental.

When the people begin to speak ethically, their words no longer sound like demands. They sound like recognitions. Again and again, the language returns to life, dignity, truth, and freedom. This repetition is not accidental. It signals a shared moral intuition struggling to find words adequate to its clarity.

To say “we want life” is not to propose a policy. It is to assert a limit. It is to say that power has crossed a threshold beyond which it no longer protects what it governs. The insistence on women’s freedom is not symbolic; it is diagnostic. A system that must control women’s bodies to preserve itself has already revealed how it understands the people as a whole.

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These protests do not reject Iran’s moral inheritance. They appeal to it. They draw upon an ethical memory in which truth stands against falsehood, dignity against humiliation, and life against domination. This memory persists across Iran’s history: in poetry, philosophy, and ordinary expectations about what authority owes those it governs.

What the chants give voice to is not rage but recognition: a clarity that the relationship between ruler and people has become irreparable. Once this recognition takes hold, reform ceases to be imaginable. A regime that must silence its citizens to survive has already conceded that it no longer governs with their consent, nor even in their name.

Fear becomes the signature of power that no longer believes in its own legitimacy.

Ērānzamin: Belonging as Moral Test

At a certain point, political language fails; not because the stakes are too complex, but because they are too simple.

One does not need a theory of sovereignty to ask whether a leader loves his people. One does not need a doctrine of legitimacy to recognize when power has turned predatory. There are moments when history reduces itself to a single moral test, and everything else—institutions, slogans, negotiations—falls away.

To belong to a land is to recognize oneself as answerable to those who share it and to those who will inherit it. Belonging binds authority to care. It establishes a limit beyond which power may not pass without becoming something else entirely.

A ruler who murders his people in order to rule them has already declared that he does not share their world. He may occupy the land and command its institutions, but he no longer stands within its moral soil. He governs over the country, not from within it.

This is why the struggle in Iran is so difficult to misread from within and so easy to misunderstand from without. For Iranians, the question is no longer whether reform is possible within the system. It is whether those who claim authority still belong to the same ethical world as the people they govern.

And the answer, resoundingly, is no.

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The West’s Difficulty with Ethical Struggles

Western responses to Iran are almost always framed in the language of management: de-escalation, engagement, restraint, negotiation. These reflexes presume a shared moral ground between rulers and ruled, a ground on which compromise remains meaningful.

In Iran, that ground has collapsed.

To treat the regime as a legitimate interlocutor is to repeat the misrecognition that sustains its power. For those risking their lives, diplomacy conducted in the name of stability does not sound pragmatic. It sounds like abandonment. Ethical struggles cannot be resolved through technocratic adjustment. They ask instead whether a form of power still deserves to exist.

This question is unsettling, particularly for political orders built on continuity and risk minimization. Yet refusing it carries consequences. Stability purchased at the expense of dignity is not stability at all, but deferred violence.

Destiny without Prophecy

History does not always announce itself with certainty. Sometimes it gathers quietly around a recognition that cannot be undone.

Iran has entered such a moment.

What is at stake is not the triumph of a new ideology, but the possibility that power might once again be reconciled with care. A people can endure hardship and imperfect rule. What they cannot endure indefinitely is being governed by those who do not love them.

A state that governs against life forfeits its claim to the future. It may persist through fear, but it cannot generate belonging. And without belonging, power becomes weight without ground—force without direction.

The Iranian people are not asking to be rescued. They are asking to be recognized.

They have remembered that belonging is not granted by power, but withdrawn from it. Once withdrawn, it cannot be coerced back into place. The world now faces a choice—not of intervention or indifference, but of recognition: whether it will continue to manage the problem or finally see the moral struggle that has already declared itself.

History will not ask who prevailed in the short term. It will ask who still loved the land enough to refuse its degradation—and who, when that refusal became unmistakable, chose to see it.

Milad Milani is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Western Sydney University. His work explores Islamic thought, mysticism, ethics, and political theology, with particular attention to questions of authority, tradition, and modernity. He is the author of Heidegger, Ontology, and the Destiny of Islam.