When Winston Churchill said on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” he observed that Europe had become divided into two spheres of influence: one dominated by the Anglo-Saxon allies and the other by the Soviet Union.1 However, the division of Europe already had a longer history. The concepts of Western Europe (civilized, rich, progressive) and Eastern Europe (uncivilized, poor, backward) were already present in the European imagination in the eighteenth century.2 A Polish historian, Andrzej Nowak, has recently pointed out that the very concept of Eastern Europe can be traced back to the official justifications of the imperialistic expansion of Russia. For instance, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Emperor Peter I constructed an image of Russia as both European and Asian, with a mission of civilizing the uncivilized, and Eastern Europe was key to that allegedly civilizing and indeed imperialistic and colonialist project. Interestingly, it was during Peter’s reign that the ancient border of Europe on the river Don was replaced by Russian cartographers with a new border, on the Ural Mountains, which remains the accepted boundary even now. Nowak argues that the very concept of Eastern Europe is an ideological space of Russia’s special interests and rights, negotiated with what has become “Western Europe.”3

If we read the actual text of Churchill’s speech at Fulton, we’ll see that he speaks of the iron curtain dividing something unnamed (Europe?) from what he calls “the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe,” which have fallen into the Soviet sphere. Indeed, several important intellectuals from that miserable place in between “the West” and Russia protested, without much success, of course, against that ideological redrawing of the spiritual map of Europe. In 1983, Milan Kundera published an essay in the French journal Le Debat, entitled “Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale” (A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe),4 in which he argued that Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary are in no sense “Eastern Europe” but instead lie at the heart of the continent and, spiritually, belong to what then was already called the West.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the countries of Central Europe were trying to repair the damage of the past centuries by reconnecting with the imaginary West, two Polish historians born in 1920s wrote histories of that part of Europe, trying to emphasize its peculiarities. In 1992, Piotr Wandycz, a Polish émigré teaching at Yale, published The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present,5 while in 1998 Jerzy Kłoczowski (who, unlike Wandycz, remained in communist Poland after the war) published a groundbreaking study in Polish, whose title in English would be Younger Europe: Central-Eastern Europe and the Christian Civilization of the Middle Ages.6 What Kundera called “Central Europe,” Wandycz called “East Central Europe,” and Kłoczowski coined his own term, “Younger Europe,” but all of them were speaking about the three medieval kingdoms that joined Christian civilization in the eleventh century: Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland. In a broader sense, however, Kłoczowski speaks of Younger Europe as also comprising Scandinavia and the Eastern and Southern Slavic lands, baptized by the Byzantine Empire, so the whole region extends between the Baltic, the Adriatic, and the Black Seas.

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Both Wandycz and Kłoczowski argued that the identity of Central Europe is founded on a special relation to the idea of freedom, but also to the ideas of equality, justice, and tolerance or peaceful coexistence of different social groups. This part of Europe began to flourish during the European crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Poland became the political center of the region at the dawn of modernity, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by virtue of its union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included large parts of Ruthenia. At the same time, Bohemia and Hungary, under the Habsburg rule, went into decline. Even a short glance at history makes it clear that Central Europe developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, because both its Western neighbor, Germany, and its Eastern neighbor, Ruthenia, were politically fragmented and in deep crisis. However, as soon as they became united and powerful, Central Europe started to diminish.

The identity of Younger Europe consists in a certain in-between status. Since its beginning it has looked toward the (imaginary) West as the source and root of Christian civilization, which it eagerly joined, but it has also looked toward the (imaginary) East as the force inimical to that civilization. As a result, it came to define itself as the antemurale Christianitatis (“bulwark of Christendom”). Already in the late Middle Ages it was subject to pressures from all geographical directions. From the West came the pressure of the older and more advanced German civilization, with German settlers arriving in large numbers to live in Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary. From the East, the pressure came from the more numerous East Slavic peoples, whom Moscow had the ambition to unite under its rule since the early fifteenth century. From the South, the pressure of the Muslim expansion continued, which, in the form of the Ottoman Empire, strived to conquer the whole of Christian Europe since the second half of the fourteenth century. This has been, certainly, quite a tragic situation, for Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, but, at the same time, the constant effort of defending their spiritual and political identity against these three pressures created a strong sense of freedom as the highest political and moral good. The matter was more complex because one of those pressures, the German culture, did not only act through sheer force, like Russia and Turkey; on the contrary, it was attractive as the mediator of the ancient European civilization as it was consistent and at times ruthless in its eastward expansion.

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Another highly significant factor, when we talk about Central Europe, is its internal diversity. From the Middle Ages, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland have had to contain various ethnicities, languages, and cultures. The Finno-Ugric Hungarians ruled over Slovaks in the north, Croatians and Serbs in the south, and Wallachians (or Romanians) in the East. In fourteenth-century Bohemia there were already numerous German settlers, particularly in cities, which could be seen also in Poland, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the inhabitants of the rich, northern region, reconquered by Poland from the hands of the Teutonic Order, were increasingly German speaking. Hungary had its own, large and internally coherent population of “Saxons” in Transylvania.

Poland also invited a large population of Jews, which grew enormously and were given royal privileges; when the Jews were expelled from Spain and most of the Western European kingdoms, they were welcomed in Poland. The union with Lithuania and Ruthenia created additional opportunities and problems. A similar, maybe even more important challenge was religious diversity, which followed the ethnic and linguistic one. First, Eastern Orthodox and Catholics, but then also Protestants of different denominations, and even Muslims were living together in Central Europe. And there were neither large-scale persecutions nor religious civil wars (apart from Hussite Wars in the fifteenth century). There were conflicts, of course, but historians point out that the religious identity of Catholics and Protestants in Central Europe was more “fuzzy-edged” than in other parts of Europe. There was vitriolic polemic, as everywhere, but also serious attempts at reconciliation and never an idea of eliminating the heretics altogether by force. This was very different from what was going on in Italy, Spain, France, England, or Sweden at the time (not to mention Russia and Turkey, of course).

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Another point is the social structure of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, which also developed differently in the late Middle Ages. The political nation in these kingdoms consisted of an unusually large nobility, which enjoyed, as an estate, equal rights and liberties unheard of in other parts of Europe. Political power was not centralized, as in the West (absolutism) or the East and South (despotism). The political constitution sought for in Bohemia and Hungary, and established successfully in Poland-Lithuania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, is called either proto-democratic, by historians who like it, or anarchic, by those who do not. The Western or Russian historiography of the last two centuries blamed the fall of Central Europe on its “excessive freedom.” However, there is a different narrative to be told as well: freedom, equality, and tolerance run in the veins of Central Europe, despite its miserable history, or perhaps because of it.

In my recent book Plato and Jesus, not Caesar,7 I have argued that because of all these factors, and also because of its “younger,” aspiring status with regard to “older” Christian kingdoms (to use Kłoczowski’s terminology), the spiritual identity of Central Europe is based on a specific relationship with metaphysics and religion. I think two points are essential. First, modernity in Central Europe did not follow the path of relentless atheism, materialism, and liberalism, but retained some links to the premodern Christian Platonic vision of reality as theophanic, that is, as a manifestation of God and deeply “enchanted” (to use Max Weber’s term).

Second, from that theophanic vision, preserved for a very long time despite secularization, stems a political vision, which, in very premodern terms, is grounded in metaphysics and, especially, in the theophanic idea that Man is the image of God and therefore dynamically participates in God’s nature. In Central Europe there is, paradoxically, both a great emphasis on the practice of politics in contrast with speculation and theory, and a great stress that politics and morality must be ultimately grounded in God who is the source of all reality and of humankind in particular. The modern, liberal project of destroying the link between politics and metaphysics, and of making metaphysics and religion private affairs outside the political sphere, was never fully embraced in Central Europe, despite its serious devotion to what in the modern period came to be called “the West,” but was and is, in fact, “the past” (as a living inspiration).

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In the late fourteenth century, when the University of Paris and German universities were dominated by nominalism, at the University of Prague Jan Hus and his followers were staunch Platonists, claiming that dedication to eternal Truth is the ultimate reason of religious, political, and social reforms. Around the same time, when the German lawyers representing the Teutonic Order were arguing before the pope and emperor that Pagan Prussians or Lithuanians should be exterminated by Christians and their land taken, Paweł Włodkowic from the University of Cracow argued, following Thomas Aquinas, that all men, regardless of ethnicity and religion, are the image of God and enjoy the same rights based on natural law and the metaphysical structure of created reality.

A bit later, the Hungarian court of Matthias Corvinus was fascinated by the Florentine Platonism of Marsilio Ficino with all its Neoplatonism, astrology, magic, alchemy, and hermeticism, and Ficino himself was invited to create a second Platonic Academy in Buda (although he never made it to Hungary). These medieval seeds developed and bore fruit in early seventeenth-century Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland, where philosophers such as Jan Jesenský (or Jeszenszky, since he claimed to be a Hungarian subject), Jan Amos Komenský, and Valerian Magni were engaging in not only theoretical but practical politics, following their metaphysical and religious principles.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the nations of Central Europe were colonized by the German Empires of Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs from the West, and the Russian Empire from the East, this tradition could still be seen. In Czechia, Tomaš Masaryk, Jan Patočka, and Václav Havel belong to this Christian Platonic tradition. In Poland, Adam Mickiewicz, Wincenty Lutosławski, and Józef Czapski, not to mention John Paul II, represent this spiritual heritage. The same goes for Polish Hassidism, which was the modern, highly original version of the Neoplatonic mysticism of the Kabbala in Central Eastern Europe, which inspired Martin Buber, who grew up in Lwów (Lviv) and once described himself as “a Polish Jew.” In Hungary, Béla Hamvas and György Lukács can be seen as intellectual giants of that tradition as well. Lukács, who was fascinated by Platonism and was mocked by his comrade Béla Kun for being a “Communist theologian,” represents a perverted relationship between metaphysics and politics. Hamvas, one of the (still unknown) geniuses of the twentieth century, was censored and persecuted in Hungary on personal orders from Lukács because he rejected all the modern political ideologies and believed that humans cannot turn the earth into heaven, but still can and even must live on earth in a heavenly way.

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Despite the dominance of liberalism in Europe and its former colonies, we have been hearing in recent decades, in the so-called “West,” increasingly metaphysical and religious language in politics. Usually, it is domesticated and toned down to ideas such as “identity” and “meaning,” when it is argued that the West must be self-confident and recover the meaning of its existence if it is to face the challenge of mass migration, Islam, or the autocratic axis of China, Russia, and Iran. This language seems less prominent in internal affairs, where the right-wing parties in Western Europe, like their left-wing counterparts, seem to be non-metaphysical and non-religious, often in an openly Nietzschean way.

The countries of Central or Younger Europe (including the countries historically influenced by them, like the Baltic states or Ukraine) have in significant ways tried to imitate “the West” and have become secularized and liberal as a result. However, I think that on some deeper level they have retained their historical spiritual identity—perhaps in their national subconscious, if there is such a thing. The countries between Germany and Russia or between the Baltic, the Adriatic, and the Black Seas have their own peculiar spiritual identity, and, perhaps because their experience of modernity didn’t consist in the enjoyment of power, wealth, and prestige but in the loss of all these things, they may be indispensable to Europe, or to “the West” broadly conceived. Not by creating some alternative European Union or by a naïve belief that virtue will be rewarded in worldly terms. Central Europe has been as pragmatic in terms of politics as it has been Platonic and Romantic. These are no contradictions. What Central Europe has to offer operates on a different level of reality, and we may yet come to appreciate that level, not only in our individual but also in our social and political lives.

Mateusz Stróżyński is Professor of Classics and Philosophy at the Institute of Classical Philology of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). His recent books include Plotinus on the Contemplation of the Intelligible World (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Plato and Jesus, not Caesar: Metaphysics of Freedom and Tyranny in Younger Europe (Brill, 2026).

While Donald Trump is playing his cards for the upcoming election, a diverse range of reactions has emerged among Iranian opposition groups regarding his stance on Iran. Much of the opposition continues to attack one another, with Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi receiving the overwhelming share of the criticism. Meanwhile, many Iranians are being held in solitary confinement, many more have been arbitrarily arrested, and others remain at risk of execution. Notably, the Islamic Republic executed 1,634 people in 2025, accounting for 82 percent of all recorded executions worldwide. Unfortunately, the statistics for the first six months of 2026 show a further sharp increase. Yet the fate of many protesters who have been disappeared since January 2026 remains unclear to this day. Let us delve into the convergence of catastrophes in Iran, both present and historical.

Ceasefire

After almost forty days of war, a ceasefire was implemented on April 8, 2026, initially planned to last two weeks, although it was later extended until a deal acceptable to the United States was reached. The Islamic regime’s media presented the ceasefire as a victory. During the war several high-profile figures were assassinated, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and, allegedly, his son Mojtaba Khamenei, who was first reported to have been severely injured and later was said to have succeeded his father. Meanwhile, the Islamic regime remains in power, continuing its long-standing rhetoric against Israel and the United States, even after being unable to hold a funeral for its leader for more than four months. The funeral was later made possible after permission was granted and arrangements were made with the United States.

The death of Ali Larijani—the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and philosopher—made it feasible for Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the spokesperson of the Islamic parliament, to establish himself as a main decision-maker. Ghalibaf has been a member of the IRGC since its early days and has been an unsuccessful candidate in presidential elections four times. He was one of the main figures during the Iran–Iraq War, which many believe led to unnecessary deaths of Iranian soldiers. Later, he served as chief of the Police Command and mayor of Tehran. During the 1999 student protests, while serving as commander of the IRGC Air Force, he was among the officials accused by some of involvement in the crackdown, during which several students were reportedly injured or killed, with some allegedly thrown from rooftops. His tenure as mayor was also marked by corruption allegations. He has been a member of the Islamic parliament since 2020, during which time he played a key role in both the Iranian–Russian treaty signed in 2025 and the Iran–China 25-year Cooperation Program signed in 2021. Many believe that the content of these agreements has led Iran to lose part of its sovereignty, along with causing significant economic damage.

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Considering Ghalibaf’s background, he could be anything but a desirable representative of Iranians; however, due to his entanglement with different fundamentalist groups within the regime—which are equally corrupt—he might be able to convince the main body of regime members to comply with the agreement with the United States. In this context, some fear that Trump’s only aim is to halt Iran’s nuclear and missile programs in order to secure the safety of the West and neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf, while using the deaths of over 36,500 Iranians as a bargaining tool without addressing the deeper problems within Iran and leaving Iranians to come to terms with the Islamic regime on their own.

Particularization of Suffering

Iran is a land rich in tales, poetry, and literature. This is also reflected in its political discourse, where different groups promote their own versions of events. This was especially visible in the aftermath of the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 while in the custody of the morality police, which led to widespread protests across Iran known as the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. Some estimates report that at least five hundred people were killed in connection with the subsequent unrest. Four years later, the fate of many individuals arrested during these protests remains unclear. In particular, six protesters linked to the “Ekbatan Town” case have remained in prison since then, with their fates unknown.

However, after the death of Amini, left-leaning human rights activists promoted a meticulously engineered narrative framing her death primarily as a case of Kurdish oppression. The reality is that many groups in Iran are subjected to discrimination. Before Amini’s death, in one example, Reyhaneh Jabbari was executed after, in an act of self-defense, she caused the death of a former agent of the Ministry of Intelligence. In a broader perspective, under the ideology of the Islamic Republic, national identity is often subordinated to religious identity, where Shia Islam is intended to function as the glue of an ummah. In fact, all ordinary Iranians are subjected to discrimination, though the intensity of oppression varies across groups and genders.

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Most recently, the Minab incident was framed by the different groups in favor of their own narratives, including Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who condemned it as a crime against humanity, accusing the United States of violating international humanitarian law. Simultaneously, Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari along with U.S. House Democrats tried to introduce articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, accusing him of committing war crimes based on the Minab incident. Whether these developments are coincidental or part of a coordinated narrative remains an open question. It is not clear what their stances are regarding the deaths of more than 36,500 people in January 2026, the ongoing persecution of protesters, and the frequent executions of those held in captivity.

Appropriation of suffering by a single group could indeed constitute a distortion of reality, given that large segments of society are being affected. The reality is that Iranians are facing a level of brutality with no historical precedent. Even the destruction caused by the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century is not an adequate analogy, given the intensity of the current turmoil and the indiscriminate cruelty toward the protesters. It could be seen as a continuation of the suppression imposed on Iranians by the Safavid dynasty, during which the majority of the population was forcibly converted to Shi’ism in the sixteenth century. This might have marked the beginning of injecting apocalyptic ideas into society.

The effects of the current situation will resonate throughout Iranian society for generations to come. It is not only that many families, in some cases, have lost several loved ones simultaneously, but also that their properties have been confiscated. Economically, many jobs have been eliminated, and people are experiencing significant hardship. The cost of medicine has increased sharply, and much of the available medication is of low quality, adding another layer of complexity to patient care. The educational system had already been severely compromised by COVID-19 and the war in June 2025, and the recent conflict has only exacerbated the situation. Malnutrition among a large proportion of the population due to inflation is another unfortunate reality that could lower the average cognitive potential of future generations. All of these factors are draining the capacity of Iranians to rebuild their country, and more irreversible damage will be inflicted on Iranians as long as the Islamic regime remains in power.

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Iranian Mentality

The trajectory of developments in Iran and in the Middle East in general is characterized by endless cycles of violence, followed by the perpetual victimization of the survivors. The prevailing narrative traces the current tragic situation back to the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and overemphasizes the role of SAVAK, whose activities had drastically tarnished the reputation of the Shah Mohammad Reza in the West. However, it does not encapsulate the whole complexity of the Iranian mentality, which is intertwined with superstition, nihilism, and religion, and compounded by a lack of knowledge about the modern world. The role of Ali Shariati, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, Reza Baraheni, and many others known in the West as intellectuals in shaping such an amalgam should be taken into account. The appearance of a charismatic figure like Khomeini, who opposed modernization yet attracted many ostensible intellectuals, indicates that Iranians have developed a particular mentality throughout history.

Many Iranians hold two striking views to delegate their own responsibility when it comes to assigning blame for the current situation, namely, Islam and Iran. On one hand, among those with secular tendencies who are inclined toward a pre-Islamic vision of Iran, Islam is presented as the sole cause, with the medieval epos Shahnameh serving as the primary source of inspiration for their ideal society. On the other hand, some opposition groups seem to have rejected the Islamic regime, while remaining inclined toward a more religious but moderate stance. They often present themselves within a human rights framework, commonly associated with left-leaning views. In their view, the concept of Iran itself is an obstacle to addressing discrimination against minorities.

Both groups have failed to recognize that today’s adversary will inevitably become tomorrow’s neighbor, even in the case of a transition to a secular government in Iran or the recognition of varying degrees of autonomy for different minorities with unclear territorial boundaries. Sustained hostility in such a context would lead to prolonged instability, given the region’s strong interdependence and the fact that neighboring states share deep historical, cultural, and religious ties. In the absence of durable external guarantees or cooperative regional frameworks, small and newly formed states would face significant challenges in maintaining stability and security.

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Furthermore, neither group places sufficient emphasis on individual responsibility within Iranian society. What has emerged is a mentality shaped over centuries of common political and cultural experiences, marked by a tension between collective memory and present political frustration. This is often expressed through the idealization of the past and unrealized expectations for the future. In Kierkegaardian terms, this can be interpreted as a form of anxiety arising from an unresolved relation between possibility and actuality. Any viable political or institutional framework would need to account for this historically sedimented tension, rather than assuming a purely event-driven account of social behavior.

Iranians were driven into a more passive way of life due to the conquest of the country by the Safavid dynasty at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was reflected by the fact that the quality and quantity of men of letters, culture, and science dwindled significantly. Needless to say, the Safavids originally emerged from a Sufi order. Historically, the idea of Velayat-e Faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist), the main pillar of the Islamic regime, can be traced back to this era, when many Shia clerics were invited to Iran from Lebanon to strengthen the ideological backbone of the newly established Shia state.

Reincarnation of the Islamic Regime?

There is a risk that the Islamic regime might reincarnate in another form, such as a military or oligarchic dictatorship, leading to another abortive attempt by Iranians to reconcile their potential with their actuality and reclaim their country. This aim would not have been realized without addressing the underlying cause, i.e., the Iranian mentality. Iranians have not yet honestly answered the question of what was truly wrong with the Shah’s regime. In their attempt to remove him, they appealed to seemingly contradictory ideologies, ranging from Marxism and communism to Shia Islam, ultimately contributing to the emergence of revolutionary martyrology. Given the developments after 9/11, one can say that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was the epicenter of many of the events that have unfolded to this day.

In recent years, there has been overwhelming interest in Prince Reza Pahlavi among the younger generations. However, such a burning desire for him might be just another detour, allowing Iranians to remain passive by assigning their own responsibilities to him and postponing their collective task of achieving the level of individual growth needed to develop a modern mentality and build a modern society. Time seems to have a different existence in the Middle East and Iran, and experience is a rare commodity that is not transmitted, leaving each generation prone to repeating the same set of mistakes. Under such conditions, progress will never be born.

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In fact, a constitutional monarchy might be the optimal outcome of Iran’s political history. Many argue that the Islamic Revolution represented a profound deviation in the development of a modern Iranian society. During the constitutional era, which included participation from a diverse range of groups, e.g., Azeris, the central issue was not “Should Iran remain intact or should parts of it secede?” but rather “How should Iran be governed?” The concept of ethnic separation in its current form had not yet fully taken shape. Organized ethnic separatist movements gained strength in the twentieth century, particularly in the period after World War I and the formation of modern nation-states in the region. Therefore, they offer limited relevance for understanding the main political trajectory of Iran today.

The Islamic Revolution was fueled by widespread perceptions of the Shah’s regime as corrupt, repressive, and overly reliant on foreign powers, at the expense of Iran’s sovereignty and cultural identity—perceptions that, in retrospect, seem to be significantly exaggerated. Today, Iran is on the edge of becoming a failed state: no functioning economy remains, people are worn out, and the education and healthcare systems are failing. Inside Iran, people often see the problem differently from activists outside the country. What is most important for ordinary Iranians is a return to a normal life, which includes a separation between state and religion. However, what is unfolding before the eyes of millions of helpless observers is the replacement of a theocratic dictatorship with a military and oligarchic one.

Given the Shah’s mindset, one criticism is that he did not grant people sufficient political agency, while economically many Iranians experienced a comfortable life, at least in the major cities. Consequently, the majority of the population, being religious despite their Western appearance, tried to replace a secular leader with a religious one, expecting the same level of comfort after removing the Shah while remaining passive. This is more evident among the upper-middle-class population, who continued to enjoy comfortable lives until quite recently, when nuclear sanctions were introduced, although many lower-class people had been struggling for much longer.

Conclusion

After the January 2026 massacre, it might seem that Iranian society has become suicidal. Yet even the deaths of thousands of the most promising members of the younger generation have not led to a regime change. It seems that Iranians must first address the rejection of revolutionary martyrology, including the weaponization of death and the instrumentalization of suffering (shahadat), primarily promoted in the 1960s and 1970s by Shariati. Given the perceived emotional character of Iranian society, expecting the emergence of a purely rational society may not be realistic. Perhaps a more moderate framework could be built upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati: the love of life as it is, understood as active rather than passive. Let us do what we can, although we know it may not lead to a desirable outcome.

Azam Jahandideh holds a PhD in mathematics from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her primary research interest is mathematical physics, while her hobbies include philosophy, history, and literature. In her spare time, she occasionally contributes reports on Iran to the Polish press.

Tomasz Wiśniewski is a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of History at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He is interested in political theology, philosophy of history, and intellectual history of modernity. From March to June 2026, he was a Józef Tischner Junior Visiting Fellow at Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Human Sciences) in Vienna.

“No cooperation, no toleration, nothing at all”—that’s how German chancellor Friedrich Merz described his relationship with the right-populist AfD (Alternative for Germany). It’s a pledge he repeated once again this July, just before retreating into his summer break. “I will do everything in my power to stop Germany’s right-populists from gaining power,” he said.

“Brandmauer” (firewall) is the term used to describe the established parties’ joint pledge to exclude the populists from any meaningful parliamentary participation.

With important state elections due in September in three federal states, nervousness within the establishment over how long this Brandmauer can hold has reached fever pitch. The AfD, which has been topping national polls for months, is expected to emerge as the strongest party in at least two states. In one, Saxony-Anhalt, polls suggest the populists could become so strong that no government could be formed against them, a scenario Merz alluded to in his summer speech, and one that has led some within his own party to question the logic of a policy they now see as increasingly self-limiting.

In official rhetoric, the Brandmauer is aimed at a party and its leadership. In reality, it is also an attempt to quarantine the party’s voters—a voter base that has not shrunk but grown. In the February 2025 national election, the AfD came out as the second-strongest political force, securing over 20 percent of the vote. It is now polling at around 27 percent, comfortably ahead of the ruling CDU (polling at 22 percent).

As such, the Brandmauer is more than a technical matter of vote counts and coalition arithmetic. It goes to the heart of a basic question: who owns democracy?

“The firewall is not a tactical maneuver, but a shield for democracy. It protects us from a situation where parties that call into question our freedom, human dignity, and equality—in other words, the very foundations of our democracy—come to be regarded, step by step, as the norm,” says YouTuber and Green Party member Chantal Kopf.

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The justification for excluding the biggest opposition party rests partly on Germany’s doctrine of “defensive democracy.” The AfD, the argument goes, is not a normal party: if allowed to expand unchecked, it will pull the country back into the abyss of far-right dictatorship. The doctrine was established after the war, ostensibly as a lesson drawn from the Nazi era. Intended to protect the fledgling democracy from any Nazi revival, it gives the state—governments and courts alike—far-reaching powers, including the power to ban parties deemed a threat to the constitutional order (“freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung”). The call to ban the party—a demand made by leading politicians from within all the mainstream parties—would of course be the most radical imposition of the Brandmauer.

But there is a deep flaw in the idea that democracy needs protecting from the people, the demos itself. And the firewall has had a genuinely corrosive effect on Germany’s democratic culture.

One such effect is that it has forced parties that would once have seen themselves standing at quite different, even opposite, ends of the political spectrum into what amount to permanent coalitions.

A case in point is Germany’s current, deeply unpopular governing coalition between the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD). Merz’s CDU was pushed into this arrangement after winning only 28 percent of the vote. Its coalition partner was even less popular: the SPD received just 16 percent, its worst result since the Second World War, making it the biggest loser of the election.

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The result was that voters who wanted change, including many who had voted CDU precisely to get rid of the old guard, instead saw politics dominated once more by a party they had hoped to see gone. Small wonder that four out of five Germans today say they are dissatisfied with the government’s work. Part of this deep unpopularity stems from the fact that a coalition built this way can only ever reach compromises based on the lowest common denominator—and, tellingly, the chancellor’s own pre-summer-break assessment presented the coalition’s mere survival as its greatest achievement.

Then there are the self-restricting effects on parliamentary debate. The Brandmauer forbids parties from voting alongside the AfD on any issue, however minor. When a Green Party motion to protect small butcher shops passed in the Saxony state parliament in May with the help of AfD votes, it caused a scandal, and the Greens felt compelled to publicly distance themselves from their own vote.

The AfD has even been barred from forming a government in places where it won the election outright, as in Thuringia in 2024, where it took over 34 percent of the vote. Because every other party—including the Left Party, toward which the CDU officially also maintains a noncooperation policy—banded together, the post of minister-president went to the CDU instead. This was not an exclusion of the AfD based on failed negotiations, but an outcome of the pre-committed Brandmauer. AfD members are likewise excluded from standard parliamentary posts, such as deputy speaker or committee chair, that would normally go to the second-largest group.

All this has given the AfD a certain martyr status. It has also underscored a new political reality: an increasingly homogeneous party landscape, with the AfD in the role of the main, if not the only, opposition party.

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As in other countries where populism has risen against a tired establishment, the AfD has long since stopped being a mere protest party and become a genuine movement for change. There is, of course, room for fair and rational criticism of the AfD—its continuing difficulty purging individual members who hold openly revisionist views of history, or its muted criticism of Putin’s authoritarianism, to name two. But there is more than a little authoritarianism in the effort to exclude—and, as some now demand, even ban—a party backed by roughly a quarter of the electorate.

It would be wrong to see the AfD’s success as simply a backlash against individual policy decisions. As the sociologist Frank Furedi argues, the rise of populism is driven by a broader rejection of the modern elite’s values: its embrace of multiculturalism, supranationalism, open borders, and net-zero, among others.

The barely concealed disdain often shown toward ordinary voters’ concerns has only fueled the party’s rise—disdain exemplified by Germany’s labor minister, Bärbel Bas (SPD), who in a May speech celebrating diversity argued that migration was needed not just for economic reasons but also to prevent a slide into what she called societal “Einheitsgrau” (uniform gray) or “Einheitsbraun” (uniform brown). With this, she implied that traditional German society was either dull (“gray”) or outright Nazi (“brown”). Her statement confirmed the suspicions of those who had long believed that the establishment’s embrace of mass migration was linked to attempts to change and “reform” society.

A lack of dissenting voices within the mainstream consensus contributed to the formation of the AfD in the first place. As early as 2012—a year before the party’s founding, at the height of the eurozone debt crisis, when every party in Germany had rallied behind Angela Merkel’s leadership—the sociologist Philip Manow described a “race to outdo one another in pro-EU rhetoric” between government and opposition, one that produced a sense of “complete powerlessness on the part of the sovereign, who is in fact the democratic authority.”1

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This uniformity of mainstream opinion has been repeated many times, not least in the decision to phase out nuclear power in favor of renewables. True, the Greens and the Left might want to reach net-zero somewhat faster than much of the CDU. Some parties have even promised stricter border controls in response to the AfD’s rise, though only within existing EU rules. But the underlying pattern holds: voters who want real change gravitate to the populists. The formation of a new governing coalition drawn entirely from the parties that have ruled Germany for decades—parties that many blame for the country’s deep social and economic problems—has only proven them right.

Supporters of the Brandmauer may invoke human rights and freedom, but their version of freedom clearly excludes one of the most important rights of all: the right of voters to express discontent with mainstream politics in a way that actually matters.

Democracy, as the American political scientist James Burnham wrote in 1943, means a political system built on liberty—a liberty “summed up and focused in the right of opposition, the right of the opponents of the currently governing élite to express publicly their opposition views and to organize to implement those views.”2

Until now, AfD voters have been able to express their concerns, and the populist opposition in Germany has grown so strong that no governing party can afford to ignore them. But the ever louder calls to ban the party outright, together with the ongoing effort to keep AfD politicians away from executive power, show that a serious problem remains.

Defending democracy means speaking out against the Brandmauer.

Sabine Beppler-Spahl is an economist and a freelance writer and author. She lives in Berlin and is chair of the liberal think tank Freiblickinstitut.

K. saw only a single tower, and could not make out whether it was a dwelling or belonged to a church. Flocks of crows were circling around it. His eyes fixed on the castle, K. went on, paying no attention to anything else. But as he came closer he thought the castle disappointing . . .1

Kafka’s description of the castle in The Castle resonates strangely when standing before the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. K. approaches what should be a meaningful structure, only to find it “disappointing”—a word that lands with quiet devastation. The castle fails not through ugliness but through a kind of deliberate withholding: it will not give itself to you. The Obama Presidential Center invites comparison with Kafka’s castle in its remoteness and opacity.

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects has cited the work of Constantin Brâncuși as a formal inspiration for the tower’s monolithic presence. As architect Billie Tsien told the Guardian, “He talked a lot about his love of Brâncuși,” describing how Obama’s own enthusiasm for the sculptor shaped the building’s form.2 But formal inspiration borrowed from sculpture does not transfer cleanly to architecture. Brâncuși’s power lies precisely in the self-contained wholeness of objects that ask nothing of the body except to look. A building cannot make that demand. It must be entered, navigated, and lived in, and on those terms the Brâncuși analogy collapses. This comparison reveals a fundamental confusion between two different arts. Sculpture is an object you read from the outside; its meaning is surface and silhouette. Nobody enters a sculpture. Architecture, by contrast, is an art you inhabit—its obligation is not just to be seen, but to receive the human body, and to negotiate between outside and inside.

More critically, this sculptural ambition runs against the very grain of what modern architecture historically stood for. From Mies van der Rohe’s glass curtain walls to Le Corbusier’s pilotis and the democratic ideals of the Bauhaus, modernism was founded on the principles of transparency, accessibility, and human scale. It sought an architecture for everyone, rejecting monumentality, opacity, and aristocratic grandeur. The Obama Center presents a formal language more readily associated with monumentality and enclosure than with architectural transparency or civic accessibility. Like Kafka’s castle, it is visible but unreachable in spirit—a monument that humbles the visitor rather than welcoming them.

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Chicago is one of the most architecturally consequential cities in the world, where American architecture found its own voice. Louis Sullivan developed his ornamental organicism there, rejecting European historicism in favor of an architecture rooted in the American experience.3 Frank Lloyd Wright extended this impulse, developing an architecture that spread across the land and treated topography and nature as generative forces rather than obstacles. What defined both men, beyond formal language, was a deep commitment to the human being as the measure of architecture. Wright’s buildings, though monumental in ambition, remain approachable. Their understated entrances draw visitors in through curiosity rather than grandeur.4 This contrasts with churches or castles, where scale and verticality emphasize hierarchy and the individual’s smallness before authority.

The Obama Center departs from the modernist emphasis on transparency and civic openness, as well as from the Chicago tradition of human-scaled democratic architecture. Instead, it borrows the language of sculpture and monument, achieving presence at the cost of belonging. The result is a contradiction between architectural language and democratic ideals.

If Chicago offers one local standard against which to measure this failure, a global one confirms it. More broadly, community centers succeed when they are grounded, literal, and responsive to the communities they serve. They work with local materials, engage local builders, and subordinate architectural ambition to human need. Renzo Piano’s work in Nouméa, the Tjibaou Cultural Center, and Alvar Aalto’s civic buildings such as the Säynätsalo Town Hall in Finland operate on this principle.

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Piano studied local building traditions, translating the form of traditional Kanak buildings into a structure built from iroko wood and steel, designed to breathe with the Pacific wind rather than resist it. It does not announce itself from a distance. It reveals itself slowly, at walking pace, at human scale.5 Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall follows the same principle: built for a small industrial community in local red brick, with an intimate council chamber and a courtyard that invites rather than commands. For a civic building, its modesty is almost radical. It tells the people it serves that they are not subjects of authority but participants in it.6 However refined their architecture, they remain fundamentally down to earth, oriented toward the people who will use them daily rather than toward the skyline or the history books.

The Obama Center does not belong to this tradition. It belongs instead to a much older and more troubling one: the architecture of power that uses scale and monumentality to assert authority rather than invite participation. The great medieval universities, the cathedrals, the fortified institutions of learning were deliberately forbidding, their gates a threshold that filtered the worthy from the unworthy. Modern architecture was born precisely as a rejection of this logic. It emerged from an urgent social need, housing for factory workers, schools, functional and dignified spaces for ordinary people who had been excluded from beauty and comfort as a matter of course.

There was, in fact, a closer and more fitting architectural lineage available to this project than either modernism or the Chicago school. Given Obama’s own Kenyan heritage, the building’s silence on Kenyan architectural traditions is a missed opportunity rather than a neutral omission. As architectural historian Itohan Osayimwese argues in African Buildings, Kenyan architectural traditions were once marked by considerable formal and spatial complexity before being disrupted, dismantled, and displaced through colonial extraction, looting, and collecting practices.7 This history offers another architectural lineage that the Obama Presidential Center might have engaged more directly. Such a lineage would not have answered the modernist critique by itself, since transparency and human scale are formal commitments that any tradition can honor or ignore, but it would have grounded the building in a history more specifically its own.

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To erect a sculptural monument in the name of community, in the name of a presidency that presented itself as belonging to everyday people, is a symbolic contradiction that cannot be designed away. The architecture of self-aggrandizing monumentality, of power made stone, was precisely what dictators favored, all of whom despised modernism and suppressed it, replacing it with their own inflated classicism. That is not the lineage a democratic legacy should claim. The ultimate test of any building is not how it photographs from above but how it feels to stand before it, to enter it, to inhabit it. Architecture is experienced from the ground, at human speed, by human bodies. When a building only resolves itself from a distance or from the air, when its logic is compositional rather than inhabitable, it has answered the wrong question entirely.

Measured against the modernist tradition from which it departs, the Chicago architectural legacy it ignores, and the civic community it seeks to serve, the Obama Presidential Center remains most legible from a bird’s eye view. That is precisely the problem. A presidential legacy that defined itself through proximity to ordinary people deserved an architecture that works at eye level, at the scale of the street, the entrance, the hand on the door. Instead, it received a monument. And monuments, as Kafka understood about castles, can be seen by everyone and reached by no one.

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.

The Islamic Republic presents itself as something new, a revolution, a rupture, a divine mandate with no precedent in Iranian history. The historical record suggests otherwise. What looks like novelty is better understood as memory, a set of instincts about power, knowledge, women, and the West that the clerical establishment did not invent in 1979 but inherited from a much older arrangement. To understand where those instincts come from is to understand why the regime and the society it governs have never made peace.

The Pahlavi era is usually read as the great turning point in modern Iranian history, the moment the country broke from the Qajar dynasty (1786–1925)1—its despotism and clerical rule—toward secular modernization. They built modern schools, curtailed clerical authority over law, and pursued industrialization the Qajars never attempted. More than that, they built citizens: a growing professional class, women in universities and the workforce, a public increasingly literate, mobile, and accustomed to a state that had to at least perform responsiveness. By 1979, two different Irans existed in the same country: a society that had moved decisively toward citizenship, and a clerical apparatus that had never stopped thinking in the Qajar register of subjects to be governed. The revolution was not the clergy completing a process the Pahlavis began. It was the clergy capturing a revolution that belonged, at the outset, to the citizens the Pahlavis had created, and then using state power to force that society backward into the relationship the Qajars would have recognized. The Islamic Republic is not the fruit of Pahlavi Iran. It is the Qajar relationship reasserting itself against a Pahlavi society, which is exactly why the two have been at war for over four decades. Had the Pahlavi dynasty never come to power, it would be reasonable to argue that the Islamic Republic, not constitutional monarchy or secular nationalism, was the more “logical” successor to the Qajars. The Qajar kings rarely acted without the clergy’s consent, and in exchange the clergy was granted free rein over law, education, and the public. The clergy controlled the public sphere, while the shahs were left free to do as they pleased in private.

Nasser al-Din Shah (1831–1896), the fourth and longest-reigning ruler of the Qajar dynasty, is the clearest example of this arrangement.2 He lived a lifestyle forbidden to ordinary Muslims, protected by the simple fact that his transgressions stayed behind palace walls. He famously married two sisters simultaneously, a union prohibited even under Islam’s own rules of polygamy. He drank wine freely, but only within the confines of his harem, where it could not offend the clergy. The same logic governed his relationship to art and spectacle. Having encountered European theaters firsthand, Nasser al-Din Shah wanted one built in Tehran, but commissioning a public theater would have invited immediate charges of immorality. The solution was taxonomic: relabel the building as a venue for taziyeh, the ritual passion play commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hossein. The result was the Tekyeh Dowlat, a structure that was a theater in every architectural sense and a religious space in name only.

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What emerges is a system built on a simple compromise: the clergy governed the public face of Iranian life, while the monarchy was permitted private exemption from the rules it nominally enforced. This is precisely the structure the Islamic Republic would later inherit and formalize, except without the harem walls to contain it. This hypocrisy is not an invention of the Islamic Republic. Its roots lie in the Qajar state, which institutionalized the rigid split between private indulgence and public piety that earlier Iranian dynasties were not similarly bound by.

The Qajars were fascinated by Western progress yet did almost nothing to bring its substance—its technology, institutions, or knowledge—into Iran. The monarchy’s response to modernity was not reform but suppression. Iranians were barred from traveling abroad, travelogues and foreign magazines were restricted, and modern schools were banned. The target in each case was the same: any channel through which new ideas about governance, rights, or the organization of society might reach the population. The parallel between Qajar and Islamic Republic approaches to knowledge runs deeper than selective adoption of technology. It is structural. In both cases, the state pursued Western science and technology not to improve the conditions of the population but to strengthen its hold over them. Nasser al-Din Shah wanted new sources of tax revenue and a surveillance apparatus capable of suppressing popular uprisings.3 The Islamic Republic wants precisely the same things. The technology is newer; the logic is identical.

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The car offers the sharpest illustration. Iran had no roads. Travel between cities was possible only on horseback or by mule, and even carriages were largely unusable. When Qajar kings acquired automobiles, the vehicles had to be shipped across the Caspian Sea and then carried on horseback to Tehran, where they were driven inside the walled enclosure of the harem.4 The country had no infrastructure that could accommodate them. That was not the point. The continuity into the present is difficult to ignore. The Islamic Republic’s ruling families drive luxury foreign cars in Tehran while imports of the same vehicles remain banned for the general public. The logic is identical to the Qajar court: modern technology is permitted, even embraced, as a tool of private pleasure and elite comfort, while any form of it that might empower or connect the broader population is kept out of reach. Modernity, across both dynasties, was not rejected but privatized.

When Christian missionaries sought to open schools in Iran, they were permitted to do so only in a few cities of the country, and only for Assyrian and Armenian Christians. Muslims were barred from attending.5 In Tehran’s first census, literacy and education statistics placed Zoroastrians, Jews, and Armenians at the top, and Muslims at the bottom.6 Persecution of religious minorities was nonetheless real and often brutal. Under the Qajar dynasty, Jews faced systematic legal discrimination alongside recurring communal violence. Mobs attacked Jewish neighborhoods in Shiraz, Tehran, and other cities, looting and burning homes. The situation in Mashhad was more extreme still. There, clergies forced the entire Jewish community to convert to Islam and forbade them from leaving the city—a condition that remained in place until the Pahlavi dynasty took power.7 Yet these same communities maintained robust internal traditions of literacy and learning—institutions that Muslim Iranians, excluded from any comparable secular education, were structurally prevented from developing. It was this preserved intellectual infrastructure that positioned the Jewish community as primary custodians of the Iranian musical tradition, keeping alive a body of knowledge that the state’s own policies had ensured no one else was equipped to hold.

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The logic behind Muslim exclusion was spelled out in the texts of the period. Muslims had no need for secular education. They had the seminary. The clergy’s position was unambiguous. Modern schools spread heresy. This opposition extended to Iranian-run institutions as much as foreign ones. Iranian-owned schools were attacked and in multiple cases burned by mobs acting under clerical direction. The target was content, not origin. Any curriculum placing empirical inquiry or civic knowledge alongside religious instruction was treated as an assault on the clerical order. What emerged was a workaround. Elite families hired private tutors for their sons. Daughters received nothing. The reasoning was that female literacy was not merely unnecessary but dangerous. A woman who could write could compose letters to strange men, conduct secret correspondence, and find lovers. Writing was treated not as a cognitive skill but as a vector of sexual transgression, and suppressed on those grounds.8

The Islamic Republic inherited this logic and built it into the architecture of the state. By labeling the entire education system “Islamic,” it ensured that theology is not a separate subject but a constant undercurrent—present from a child’s first day of school through to a doctorate, regardless of whether the field is biology, architecture, or engineering. Students are taught the Quranic account of creation alongside the scientific one, embedding a direct contradiction at the center of the curriculum. Science is permitted where it serves the state and contained where it threatens the order on which the state depends.

The same principle governs universities. Shortly after the 1979 revolution, the regime shut down all higher education for three years under the banner of a “Cultural Revolution,” purging faculty deemed insufficiently loyal. When institutions reopened, hiring was governed not by academic merit but by gozinesh-e aqidati—a formal screening process testing candidates on Islamic doctrine and political allegiance. Admissions follow the same principle: Basij members and IRGC families receive priority placement, women compete for whatever remains, and certain fields are closed to them entirely as “unsuitable.”9 The system is designed less to cultivate knowledge than to reproduce political loyalty.

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The treatment of women and children follows an equally direct line. During the Qajar era, girls were often married as young as eight or nine. Men could take multiple wives and as many sigheh—temporary wives—as they wished, while women had no rights in matters of divorce or consent.10 It is no coincidence that one of the first acts of the Islamic Republic after the revolution was to dismantle the Pahlavi-era Family Protection Law. The law had set the minimum marriage age for girls at eighteen and placed significant restrictions on polygamy.11 Both were abolished. The state goes further, actively promoting polygamy. State television runs segments featuring polygamous families, presenting the arrangement as the normatively correct form of household organization. The format is instructive, featuring young wives, multiple children, a shared domestic space, and no visible exit. The message is that this is what a properly ordered Muslim family looks like, and that the desire for anything else is a deviation to be corrected rather than a right to be protected.

The case of Aliakbar Sanati is illustrative. When Sanati attempted to establish an orphanage in Kerman during the Qajar era, the clergy mobilized against him. Documented accounts from the period describe children as young as four being put to work, by both Iranian and foreign companies, producing the fine carpets and textiles for which Kerman was famous.12 Sanati spent two years fighting for permission to open the orphanage, and even then was allowed to take in only boys; girls, the clergy maintained, were better off married as young as possible. The same logic governs the Islamic Republic’s promotion of early marriage today. Girls are not viewed as children with a claim to education, autonomy, or protection, but as reproductive resources. The state’s interest in early marriage is demographic and military: more births, younger, producing a larger pool of men available for conscription and ideological formation.

The Qajar kings maintained vast harems and hundreds of wives, and their sons were dispatched as governors across Iran from a young age, making kinship the backbone of imperial administration. The Islamic Republic operates on a similar principle. Since the revolution, a tight circle of clerical families, bound together by marriage, has held Iran in its grip, parceling out power among themselves.13 What Pahlavi modernization accomplished was cracking this circle open. Education and state-building carved real pathways upward for people born into rural poverty or urban obscurity, letting them rise into professional and even ministerial ranks.

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The clergy’s objection to Pahlavi was never to dynastic or authoritarian rule in principle. They had supported the Qajars until their final days. What they opposed was the idea that ordinary people have the right to govern themselves. The doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, the ideological foundation of the Islamic Republic, holds that only qualified religious jurists are fit to rule. In this framework, democracy is not simply impractical but sinful. A state that allowed anyone, regardless of background, to rise and govern was not an alternative model but a violation of divine order. The Guardian Council is where this theology becomes policy. Every candidate for elected office must pass clerical vetting before reaching the ballot, ensuring that the range of political choice is decided in advance by a small group of jurists. Elections happen, but the question of who may participate is settled before any vote is cast. This logic of controlled access extended well beyond politics. In culture, architecture, and the details of everyday life, the same impulse asserted itself: the clergy’s role was not only to determine who could govern but to decide what people may see, build, wear, and become. That ambition, total and ancient, is the thread running through everything this essay has traced, from the harem walls of the Qajar court to the ballot-vetting of the Guardian Council, a single unbroken insistence that the people governed are not the people who decide.

The war between the Islamic Republic and Iranian society is, at its core, a war between two different ideas of what a human being is. The Pahlavis, whatever their failures, built a society of citizens, people who understood themselves as having rights, futures, and a claim on the institutions that governed them. The Islamic Republic has spent many years trying to unmake that understanding, to reduce a citizenry back into subjects: governable, reproducible, conscriptable, and silent. That project has deep roots, older than the revolution and older than the Pahlavis. But the Qajar inheritance is not only a story about power and its abuses. It is also a story about the limits of that power, and about what happens when a state built on the logic of subjects encounters a population that has already decided it is something else entirely.

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.

Colombia has just had its own political earthquake. The metaphor of a tectonic shift, which Adrian Pabst recently used in these pages to frame the outcome of May’s local elections in the UK, is just as apt here, perhaps more so, given the results of Colombia’s presidential election. Thanks to a razor-thin margin, but with more of the electorate voting than ever before, Abelardo de la Espriella, a political unknown less than a year ago, a defense attorney to the indefensible, a candidate pledging support to (and seeking support from) America and Israel, a proud Catholic (married with four young children), and an unapologetic nationalist, will become president on August 7. On that day, too, diplomatic relations with Israel, broken by the present government in response to Israel’s military response to October 7, will be restored.

Some context: While Colombia is the Americas’ second oldest continuous democracy, it has nonetheless suffered almost constantly from internal instability, as elites (and their local followers) with differing convictions, liberal and conservative, have battled each other via all means, including open violence, to establish control not so much over the national territory but over the regions deemed worth fighting over. An authoritative history of the country by David Bushnell is called Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. The title, however, like many headlines, is betrayed by the content of the story. A more honest one might have emphasized that Colombia is, rather, a nation like any other, meaning that it struggles (perhaps more intensely, perhaps less successfully, so far) to actually be a nation (just like Spain and France, the United States and the United Kingdom do). And certainly, no one doubts that the last six decades or so have been marked by intensified internal conflict, which, though dressed up as political, is fundamentally driven by rent-seeking criminal groups that extract massive utilities via narcotrafficking and other illegal activities from the territories and populations they control. Perhaps the most compelling evidence supporting this claim is that since a peace agreement was signed now ten years ago, supposedly to end the internal conflict, cocaine production has only increased along with the criminality necessary to make it so.

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A first real response to Colombia’s modern internal problems rooted in the criminal control of vast swathes of the national territory was attempted during the two presidential periods of Álvaro Uribe (2002–2006, 2006–2010). Uribe employed the country’s armed forces in an attempt to assert sovereignty against well-armed, well-organized, and well-financed enemies. His initiative weakened them such that, during the second Juan Manuel Santos period (2010–2014, 2014–2018), the biggest criminal group sat at the negotiating table and a peace agreement was signed. It is of note that though Santos was Uribe’s minister of defense and designated successor, ratified by the vote, he broke with Uribe in pursuing an impetuous peace with actors who still held some cards at the negotiating table, whereas Uribe was pursuing their total defeat. Colombians themselves voted against the peace accords in a national plebiscite. This in 2016, the year of Brexit and Trump. But politics in Colombia is such that the accords were signed despite popular rejection; this act of popular sovereignty was annulled when Santos ushered the accords through the Congress, which, as is said, represents the people, though it is perhaps more pliable than they are.

Critics of the accords had argued that they gave too much to rebels and secured too little basis for peace and prosperity in Colombia, and Ivan Duque (2018–2022) seemed to win his election by promising to modify them to favor sovereignty and state legitimacy. Doomed perhaps by the Covid pandemic in 2020, Duque produced no heir for the elections of 2022, and former guerrillero Gustavo Petro, who has held various political posts since demobilizing in 1990, and boosted by the socialist ethos that seemed necessary to many during lockdowns, finally became Colombia’s president. Heading what is known as the Pacto Histórico, which represents itself as the broadest movement ever of Colombia’s diverse subaltern populations, Petro promised Paz Total (Total Peace) and committed the state to what he called a “politics of life.”

What this meant was that the state would implement a one-sided ceasefire policy toward criminal organizations, making a farce of Colombian sovereignty, and invite them to the negotiating table. Petro’s avowedly progressive government would set an example by refusing violence outright, by meeting its antagonists as equals, treating them with dignity and respect, so as to hash out a way forward that would break Colombia’s cycles of violence once and for all.

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Though the good intentions didn’t produce the hoped-for results, the Petro government has simply ignored this reality. As anyone approaching the situation disinterestedly would have expected, criminal groups have used the government’s ceasefire-first policy to further organize and control more territory even as they sit at negotiation tables. The result of the government’s pacifism is that murder and extortion are up and coca production is reaching record highs. Nonetheless, the realities of clientelism seemed to convince observers that Petro’s chosen heir, Iván Cepeda, who pledged continuity with the failed Petro policies, would likely win the presidential elections in the first round. Even as the state’s armed forces came under attack from emboldened criminal organizations in the run-up to these elections, Cepeda reiterated his unmitigated commitment to the politics of life and Total Peace. He was so sure of victory that he barely even campaigned, expecting to receive more than fifty percent of the vote and thus win the presidency in the first round.

Meanwhile many Colombians, approaching fifty percent as it turns out, judged the present government’s policies more harshly. The numbers coming in on the night of May 31, the first round of voting, revealed a country polarized, despite the presence of multiple candidates on the ballot representing a range of political options. Though he led in the pre-election polls, though he enjoyed all the advantages of incumbency (since Petro actively supported him), Iván Cepeda took only 40.90 percent of the vote. It was enough for second place. Taking a distant third place, and thus evidencing the collapse of uribista conservatism, was Paloma Valencia, senator of the Centro Democrático. After acknowledging her loss, both she and Uribe himself threw their weight behind the night’s winner, Abelardo de la Espriella, the outsider, who invoked the nation, the pueblo, the patria, with every other breath, who called Colombia’s rebel criminal organizations bandidos and promised to treat them as such. Indeed, it is most likely for this last reason that he won the night, showing the polls once more to be little better than guesses, with 43.74 percent of the vote. He and Cepeda went head-to-head in the June 21 runoff.

The polls got it wrong again leading up to the runoff, showing a comfortable win for de la Espriella. In the event, the margins were close. He eked out victory by only a 250,000-vote margin. Of course, a one-vote margin is enough. The loser demanded a recount, but this is normal and amounted to nothing. De la Espriella will become president.

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What is an observer to make of all this? Where is the interest for readers of Telos? What seems to be contested here are two different understandings of sovereignty. The conception of sovereignty espoused by the left-wing government of Petro (and by his successor manqué) is entirely performative. It consists in denouncing imperialism in one form or another, peaking with calls to U.S. servicemen by Petro in New York encouraging them to disobey orders and with the breaking of relations with Israel. Such a move reeks of a lack of self-awareness, since one could easily make the case against Colombia that is made against Israel, of being some kind of illegitimate entity. But sovereignty so conceived is entirely inconsequential at home, where it counts. It sees armed, criminal groups as equals to the state. Though the post-Uribe governments of Santos and Duque ceded real sovereignty to the criminal groups, it was Petro’s Pacto Histórico that made the practice of state pacifism normative, that made abdication of sovereignty a point of principle and doctrine (unless it amounted to denouncing sovereign acts by other governments).

Here is the problem that a so-called “politics of life” cannot face in any adequate way, but which at least one half of the Colombian electorate seems to understand. The criminal, armed organizations of Colombia are not committed to peace or life, or even to Colombia. Their comparative advantage and their core competency, the thing that lets them establish their own de facto republics, taxing and conscripting and indeed governing where the Republic of Colombia does not (cannot), is precisely their willingness to kill. They operate in terms Charles Tilly would recognize, enriching themselves by engaging in war-making and (para)state-making while the state itself looks on, or looks away. And there is nothing that would incentivize them to wind things down. That off-ramp, the peace accords of 2016, has shown itself already to be the beginning of a road to nowhere. To sit across a table from such organizations and offer them the dignity of recognition is surrender. You treat them like equals. They treat you like a mug. Colombia’s political earthquake is rattling the status quo because while the supposedly viable politicians of the right and left offered the population more negotiations, the largest segment of the Colombian electorate appears to have rejected that strategy, to have understood that negotiation with people who will kill for cash cedes too much. It cedes the thing a state cannot cede and remain a state: the monopoly on legitimate violence.

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De la Espriella, like all leaders since at least Biblical times, is a flawed vessel. But in giving him the presidency, voters seem to recognize that he is the only candidate who says out loud what ails Colombia: you do not negotiate with enemies who do not share your ideals and goals, your axioms. You simply give them a choice: surrender, or we will defeat you. Everyone wants to end the violence that plagues Colombia, but while Cepeda’s program of continued recognition would have led to only more futile dialogue, the electorate appears to have opted for something more effective.

This is why the result of presidential voting in Colombia should not be read as merely a swing of the political pendulum, following a trend seen in other countries of the region. This is not really about a more or less expected oscillation between left and right. Nor is it what some have described as a salto al vacío, a leap into the void (New York Times) or de la Espriella’s shortcomings in matters of taste or style (The Guardian). Such characterizations simply avoid reality. What we’re seeing most acutely in Colombia is that the liberal-procedural settlement (the “end of history,” as a wit once described it), based on the conviction that every conflict yields to inclusion, that the circle of legitimate interlocutors can be extended indefinitely, that recognition dissolves antagonism, has foundered. That supposedly irresistible historical force has collided with an immovable social object, with the one actor it cannot absorb: the criminal anti-liberal, the criminal egoist. The left reacts to the victory of de la Espriella fearing that he will repeat the real mistakes made by Uribe. This is possible, of course, but there is no reason to assume it probable, especially given the rotund condemnation of Uribe’s mistakes. The left seems quite unconcerned, however, when it comes to the reality of all the freedoms curtailed, all the lives cut short, all the children recruited, all the sexual abuse and forced abortions, which is the empirical consequence of allowing criminal control of territories and populations heretofore abandoned or ignored by the state. In short, the left seems quite unperturbed about the continued viability, via endless and fruitless negotiations, of the organized criminal who makes civilized life impossible. De la Espriella’s presidency, properly understood, promises not a rejection of rights or of democracy, but the recovery of their precondition. It insists on Hobbes before Locke. There is, obviously, no rule of law where the criminal rules.

By empowering him, the Colombian electorate, albeit by only the slightest plurality, shows that it has concluded that there is no need for more recognition. There is a need for the state to be sovereign. First, then, the monopoly on violence, then the land registries and rural courts, the local credit and primary schools and health posts and enforceable property rights that the country needs. These needs cannot be met when the territory is governed by criminals. The armed groups will not permit the second. And the first will never be settled by treating them as allies in the cause of life.

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It is not all so simple, of course. Cepeda won the vote by large margins in some regions. Still, some of his strongest results came from territories where criminal organizations expanded significantly during the Petro administration, where the state’s Paz Total strategy ceded sovereignty to groups it was supposedly seeking to demobilize. In Roberto Payán, Nariño, for instance, Cepeda took nearly 95 percent of the vote. Whether such results reflect differing incentives, differing priorities for voters, or coercion of them by armed actors is difficult to determine. On the one hand, communities living amid chronic violence may rationally prefer an imperfect status quo to a possibly catastrophic military confrontation. On the other, government by criminal groups suggests the possibility of political intimidation. As the local “joke” has it, citizens in these areas had to vote for la política de la vida . . . or face the mortal consequences. Cepeda’s success in these regions therefore cannot by itself settle the debate over security policy. Indeed, if life in large parts of the country is increasingly dominated by criminal organizations, that may itself be perhaps the clearest evidence of the need for a properly military solution to the problem.

That said, even though the voters have given him the presidency, there is no guarantee that de la Espriella and his team will be successful in their attempt to do what needs to be done. The state is riven with egoists driven by petty and sectoral interests of their own, for starters. And then again, the criminal organizations, in one guise or another, have confronted many seeking to bring them to heel, whether with carrots or sticks, and they’ve outlasted them all. But de la Espriella, at least, has spelled out the solution, in practical, non-utopian terms—in what are, in fact, human terms. For you cannot build a country on territory you do not control, by negotiating with those who control it in your place, whose state-making does not aspire to anything like nationness, but is content and indeed motivated to remain at the level of organized, criminal rent-seeking. In a better world, the world of Macondo perhaps, negotiation would be enough. But this is Colombia, and the reality is that life here, for far too many, is far from magical. Though many still seem to be able to vote as if yet more words were enough to change that reality, de la Espriella, by making sovereignty the fundamental issue, has forged a plurality that believes otherwise.

Gregory J. Lobo is a philosophical anthropologist at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia. His most recent book is Nationism. In Defence of Open Societies (Alibri, 2024).

Money is essentially the property of the community, not of the prince.
—Nicole Oresme, De Moneta, c. 1360

In a single hour on the last Monday of June, the Supreme Court buried and half-resurrected nearly a century of bad New Deal–era precedent. In Trump v. Slaughter, the chief justice interred Humphrey’s Executor, restoring the constitutional rule that officers who wield the executive power answer to the president, who answers to the people. Minutes later, in Trump v. Cook, the same chief justice exempted a single institution from the rule he had just restored. The Federal Reserve, five justices held, stands apart. Its governors may not be removed except for a “cause” that courts will scrutinize. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett dissented in various registers. The lineup alone should give pause; the reasoning gives more.

What is remarkable about Cook is not its bottom line, which resolved only an application for a stay and left the merits for another day, but the material out of which the exemption was built. The Court did not rest on constitutional text; there is none. It did not rest on structure; the structural argument had just prevailed, in the other case, for the other side. It rested on a genealogy. The United States, the Court declared, has a “long tradition of independent central banking,” descending from the Bank of North America, which “predates even our Constitution,” through the First and Second Banks of the United States, to the Eccles Building. The Fed, we are assured, “maintains the balance struck by the founding generation under modern circumstances”; the Court would not unsettle what it called, borrowing Justice Alito’s phrase, a “special arrangement sanctioned by history.”

When a court can no longer justify an institution’s insulation by argument, it reaches for pedigree. And pedigree, as any student of religion knows, is the signature of sacral rather than constitutional authority. Churches legitimate themselves by apostolic succession; constitutional institutions are supposed to legitimate themselves by conferred and accountable power. The question Cook raises, and the question this essay pursues, is what it means that the American republic now secures its most powerful domestic institution by the first method rather than the second.

Begin with the tradition itself, because it will not bear the weight. The First Bank was chartered in 1791 over the constitutional objections of Madison and Jefferson, who argued that Congress possessed no enumerated power to charter a corporation and that “necessary and proper” meant necessary, not merely convenient; the objections were serious enough that Washington solicited formal opinions before signing. The Bank’s recharter died in 1811, substantially on constitutional grounds. Madison acquiesced in the Second Bank in 1816 only through his doctrine that repeated practice had “liquidated” the constitutional question, a theory of settlement by exhaustion. McCulloch blessed the Bank in 1819, and Andrew Jackson refused the blessing. His 1832 veto message denied that the Court’s precedent could bind the political branches, and the people ratified the refusal by reelecting him overwhelmingly. The Bank died in 1836. There followed seventy-seven years, more than a third of the republic’s existence, in which the United States deliberately had no central bank at all. This, then, is the “long tradition,” an institution contested for every year of its life, killed twice, and then renounced for two generations. Examined honestly, the majority’s own history of the Banks testifies for the dissent.

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The deeper problem is that even a friendlier reading of the Banks proves the wrong proposition. The First and Second Banks were majority privately owned, profit-seeking commercial corporations in which the government held a minority stake; Hamilton defended the First Bank precisely on the ground that its powers resembled those of a private mercantile partnership. They set no policy rates, conducted no open market operations, pursued no employment mandate, and were disciplined externally by specie convertibility. Their independence was the independence of private property from the state. The Federal Reserve’s independence is the inverse, sovereign public power insulated from the elected executive, whose appointment authority operates on a fourteen-year lag, insulation by calendar where the law would not suffice. Justice Thomas’s dissent presses this point, and presses one more that the majority leaves discreetly unexamined. The Fed’s actual intellectual ancestry runs not to Philadelphia in 1791 but to Berlin. Paul Warburg, the architect of the Federal Reserve Act, campaigned openly to transplant the model of the German Reichsbank, and Woodrow Wilson, who insisted on a governing board of experts, had spent a career admiring Prussian administration and doubting the competence of democratic publics. The First Bank is the Fed’s icon, not its parent. Its parent is the European administrative state.

Which is why Europe is not a digression here but the experiment’s completion. If one wants to know where the Cook premises lead, one looks where they have been carried to their logical end. The euro liquidated national currencies that were condensed national narratives—the Deutsche Mark above all, that strange vessel into which postwar Germany, remembering the wheelbarrows of Weimar, poured the pride it was forbidden to invest elsewhere—and replaced them with money belonging to no people, issued by an institution answerable to none. Or answerable, as the Greeks would learn, to one nation in particular. The euro did not so much create money belonging to no one as universalize German money without German accountability, ordoliberal discipline exported without representation. The European Central Bank is the purest independence design ever attempted. Its mandate and insulation are entrenched at treaty level, revisable only by the unanimous consent of every member state, which is to say never. The Federal Reserve’s independence is a statute Congress could amend on any Tuesday. Britain is more candid still. The Bank of England’s independence is a statutory grant of 1997, and the Treasury retains the power to direct the Bank in extremis, delegation with the string left visible. The ECB’s independence is placed beyond politics by construction. It is Cook’s footnote grown into a constitution.

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And the record of that perfected independence is a record of coercion. In 2011, the ECB’s president sent confidential letters to the elected governments of Italy and Spain dictating labor market and fiscal reforms as the tacit price of bond purchases. Ireland was informed that emergency liquidity would end unless it accepted a program and made bank creditors whole. Cyprus was given days to accept EU and IMF reforms before its economy would be shuttered. And in the summer of 2015, the ECB capped emergency assistance to Greek banks in the middle of a standoff with a newly elected government, closing the country’s banking system less than a fortnight after a referendum in which the voters had rejected the creditors’ terms; the government capitulated inside a month. Whatever one thinks of that government’s economics, the mechanism deserves a name: an unelected monetary authority used control of the payment system to break an elected ministry. Berlusconi’s replacement by a technocratic cabinet under bond market pressure in 2011 belongs to the same file. Independence from voters revealed itself, under stress, as discipline administered to voters. The institution was never neutral between Greek citizens and Greek creditors; it simply had a constituency other than the demos.

The German Federal Constitutional Court has spent three decades naming this drift in juridical language. From its Maastricht judgment of 1993, warning that the Union must never seize Kompetenz-Kompetenz, the power to define its own powers, through Gauweiler, to the Weiss judgment of 2020, in which the court at Karlsruhe, a hundred miles and a full theory of legitimacy from the ECB’s towers in Frankfurt, for the first time declared an act of a European institution ultra vires in open defiance of the European Court of Justice, the anxiety has been constant. Monetary policy, once insulated and self-interpreting, silently annexes fiscal and economic competence, and no one can call it home because it answers to no one. Jackson’s veto message and the Weiss judgment are the same protest separated by two centuries: the political sovereign refusing to concede that a monetary institution’s self-description settles the constitutional question.

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There remains the case that unmasks the whole arrangement. The Bank of Russia is, on paper, an independent central bank, and by common consent a superbly run one. Its governor, Elvira Nabiullina, was named central bank governor of the year by Euromoney in 2015 and by The Banker in 2017, celebrated by the very Western institutions her craft would later frustrate. She even perfected the sacral communication style of the guild. For years, markets parsed the brooches she wore to press conferences as oracular guidance, a hawk when rates rose, a dove when they fell, a language she eventually acknowledged as her own. Then came February 2022. With half the reserves frozen, she executed the textbook without flaw, the policy rate to twenty percent, capital controls, the exchange closed, the pre-built payment infrastructure switched on. The war economy quickly returned to vigor. Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the discussions, that she sought to resign in the invasion’s first weeks and was told by Putin to stay. At her emergency address she wore black, and no brooch at all.

The lesson is not that Russia has a good central banker, though it does, and her excellence is precisely what makes the case damning. The lesson is that in the hour of the exception, independence evaporated, as it always does, because when sovereignty is genuinely at stake every central bank aligns with the state that houses it. Carl Schmitt compressed the point into a sentence long ago: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The corollary from Moscow is that the priesthood serves whoever commands the temple. Nor did the West behave differently in kind. By freezing another central bank’s reserves, it proved a plain proposition. Money held inside another sovereign’s system is held at that sovereign’s pleasure, and reserves are not property but permission. It also wielded the ultimate sanction of any communion, excommunication, at civilizational scale, and the response has been schism, parallel payment rails, bilateral settlement, a counter-communion under construction. Excommunication disciplines only those who cannot found a rival church.

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In Frankfurt, insulation from voters became coercion of voters; in Moscow, statutory independence dissolved on contact with the sovereign decision. What, then, does independence produce in Washington? Not neutrality; there is no such thing. Insulation never removes an institution from politics; it only selects its master. Cut off from the constitutional chain that runs from officer to president to electorate, the institution answers instead to whatever constituency can still discipline it, which in Washington means the bond market, the banks it regulates and rescues, the profession that credentials its staff, the peer consensus of Basel and Jackson Hole. What the American vernacular has come to call the deep state is, in the monetary context, exactly this and nothing more occult, not a cabal but a class, a permanent estate to which accountability silently migrates when the removal chain is severed, its governance laundered as expertise. Autocracy assigns money to the prince. Technocracy assigns it to the priesthood. The constitutional wager, the American wager, was that whoever holds it must give account.

The pragmatist will answer that the Fed, whatever its pedigree, works. The nineteenth century was one panic after another, they will say, and no sane nation would hand the money supply to a new institution in a deranged age. The ledger is more mixed than the memory, including as it does the Depression the Fed deepened, the great inflation it accommodated, and the recent one it pronounced transitory; “it works” is the epitaph of every establishment, composed a year too early. But grant the premise whole. Prudence is an argument addressed to the wrong branch. If insulation is wise, Congress may enact it with open eyes, as Parliament did in 1997. Wisdom is a case for legislation, not a license for a Court to find immunity in a pedigree.

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This is why the theological vocabulary is not ornament but diagnosis. Central bank independence is secularized libertas ecclesiae, the medieval freedom of the church from lay investiture reborn as the freedom of the monetary magisterium from presidential removal, and the Cook opinion reads like nothing so much as a concordat, the temporal power conceding the temple’s immunity in exchange for peace.

And the sacred, once transferred, can be turned against its former custodian. In January 2013 the Bank of Italy, citing the Holy See’s failures against money laundering, forbade Deutsche Bank’s Italian unit from processing electronic payments inside Vatican City. For six weeks the original sacral institution of the West could not accept a card or dispense cash from a machine; the Vatican Museums, five million visitors a year, went cash-only amid the Vatileaks winter and the scandals then engulfing the Institute for the Works of Religion, the Holy See’s own bank, whose accounts had drawn money-laundering scrutiny for decades. On February 11, Benedict XVI announced the first papal abdication in six centuries. The next day, the terminals came back on, switched to a Swiss processor conveniently beyond the reach of European banking law; Rome escaped the interdict the way the excommunicated always have, by finding a communion outside the writ of the new church. Benedict spoke only of his failing strength, and nothing requires disbelieving him. But no medieval chronicler would have missed the shape of the story: an interdict laid upon Rome and lifted the day after the pontiff announced his departure. For a thousand years the Church suspended sacraments to discipline princes. In 2013 a central bank suspended payments to discipline the Church, and the discipline held until the throne was vacated. Libertas ecclesiae now runs at the pleasure of the bank. Whatever can excommunicate the Vatican has become the thing the Vatican used to be.

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René Girard taught that founding myths exist to conceal founding conflict, and the Court’s serene procession from 1781 to 2026 is such a myth, now canonized. Even the concurrence confesses the sacral reflex. Justice Kavanaugh would not risk the upheaval of leaving the Fed’s status uncertain, some settled questions being too dangerous to reopen. Treating a constitutional question as unthinkable is precisely how one recognizes that an institution has left the constitutional order for the sacred one. In the most iconoclastic era in American memory, the one icon the Court chose to preserve was the temple of money.

The objection will come that America is thin soil for the sacred, that a nation of Congregationalists who take communion with Wonder Bread and tap water never truly sacralized anything. It sacralized one thing: the Book, as text and as object, read by every plowboy and sworn upon in every courtroom. American sacrality is textual, and so is American constitutionalism. Sanford Levinson long ago distinguished what he called “protestant” constitutional interpretation, which locates authority in the text alone, open to every citizen, from “catholic” interpretation, which supplements text with unwritten tradition mediated by an authoritative magisterium. Originalism is not one method among many; it is the hermeneutic of a sola scriptura republic, whose founding document lies in a marble shrine under honor guard. Measured against the nation’s own civil religion, Cook is a category error, a catholic ruling delivered in a protestant church, apostolic succession through the Bank of North America offered to a people that swears on the text. Jackson understood this in his bones. His veto message, with its warning that mere precedent is a dangerous source of authority, is the protestant hermeneutic in action, the layman reading the text against the magisterium.

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Luther, who watched a temporal power drape itself in spiritual immunity, supplies the closing word, along with the bishop of Lisieux. Money is a creature, Luther insisted, and the most seductive idol on earth; whatever we are told must never be questioned has become a god, and the Large Catechism warns where hearts that cling to it end. Money belongs to the temporal kingdom, where everything gives account. And Oresme, writing while princes debased coin, located the ownership of money neither in the prince nor in any guild of experts but in the community itself. The American founders carried Oresme’s point one step further. In a republic, even the prince gives account. That is the principle Slaughter honored on the same June morning that Cook abandoned. And the problem with Cook is not that the Federal Reserve won. There are serious constitutional arguments for an insulated central bank, and Congress is free to write them into law. The problem is how the Fed won. The Court did not point to any power the Constitution confers. It pointed to a pedigree, and it warned that the question was too dangerous to reopen. That is how a priesthood defends itself, not how a court reasons. Whether the Federal Reserve deserves its independence is a question the American people, through the leaders they elect, may still answer. What they should not accept is a Court that placed the question beyond asking. Nothing in this republic is sacred in that sense. Whatever governs must answer.

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

The belief in a savior, ultimate salvation, and the final battle between good and evil has deep roots in Iranian cultural imagination, even before Islam. This is particularly evident in late Zoroastrian eschatological traditions surrounding the figure of the Saoshyant and the final renovation of the world (Frashokereti).1 The “horizon of the end” in Iranian political theology cannot be solely reduced to Shi’a theology or its later political formulations. Over the centuries, in conjunction with Shi’a messianism, this developed a distinct form of religious and historical imagination that can be understood as a type of “Iranian Shi’ism.” This outcome is not merely an achievement of the modern state or ideology but a result of the historical sedimentation of two traditions in the collective consciousness of the people. Consequently, apocalyptic concepts in Iran typically intensify during times of crisis, instability, and disorder, becoming a language for interpreting the situation and the possibility of rupture. The reflection of this convergence can be found not only in official texts but also in popular narratives—for example, in the Rostam-nāmeh, an anonymous epic poem where Rostam, the legendary hero of the Iranian epic tradition, eventually converts to Shi’ism upon encountering Ali, the first Imam of the Shi’a.2 Its significance lies not in historical authenticity but in its cultural implications: the link between Iran’s mythical hero and the central figure of Shi’ism, and the fusion of Iranian epic imagination with the messianic eschatological horizon.

It is precisely this deep-seated cultural and symbolic grammar that structures contemporary Iranian politics, presenting a scene of “unequal symmetry” between state power and popular resistance. Power has co-opted this eschatological grammar, transforming it into a “katechonic” logic of deterrence and delay to preserve the existing order and postpone the end. Conversely, resistance draws on this same horizon—often secularized as demands for justice, dignity, and truth—to urge a decisive “rupture” and “acceleration” toward that very end. Though vastly unequal in means—pitting state violence against popular vulnerability—both sides are bound by a shared, end-oriented semantic framework within their historical imagination. This distinguishes Iranian politics from mere power calculations, turning it into a stage for realizing or postponing a final moment.

This linguistic horizon extends beyond religious or revolutionary discourses, permeating modern Iranian politics. For instance, during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911)—a period when messianic groups like the Shaykhis, Babis, and Azalis actively blended political reform with apocalyptic zeal—the naming of certain newspapers, such as Sur-e Esrâfil (The Trumpet of Israfil), Sobh-e Sadegh (The True Dawn), and Habl al-Matin (The Firm Rope), attests to a similar presence of religious-eschatological language in the public sphere. In 1974, Mohammad Reza Shah’s establishment of the “Rastakhiz Party” (Resurgence Party) articulated a political project laden with resurrectionist overtones, indicating that the Pahlavi state’s political imagination retained a revivalist language. This experience was, of course, not unprecedented. Such examples demonstrate that the language of the end, resurrection, and impending collapse becomes part of the common articulation of political action in Iran during periods of political crisis, whether in the guise of the state or resistance.

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When this fertile intellectual terrain encountered modernity, it confronted the fundamental concept of “revolution.” From the moment of its arrival, the concept appeared structured by a temporal tension. From the Latin revolvere—to roll back or return—the term evoked restoration of an original principle. Yet within modern political language, it simultaneously signified rupture, transformation, and the opening of a new historical horizon. The concept thus carried a Janus‑faced orientation: toward return and restoration, and toward rupture and the creation of the new. When it entered the Iranian context, this tension did not disappear; the concept arrived already bearing this dual temporal structure. Rather, it intertwined with deep layers of ethics, theology, and ritual.3 In the Iranian experience, “revolution” was not merely a political upheaval but became an event that promised a new future while simultaneously demanding a return to an authentic, primordial, or suppressed truth. Consequently, it was able to link the modern concept of progress with an apocalyptic, messianic, and eschatological imagination, securing a distinguished position in Iranian politics in relation to the horizon of the end.

A significant example of this intersection is evident in Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh’s engagement with the concept of revolution. Akhundzadeh, an early socio-historical critic of Iran in the modern era and likely one of the first to introduce the modern connotation of this concept into the Iranian intellectual sphere, uses the word “révolution.” However, his significance lies not merely in transmitting a word. Within the framework of what he understood as a form of “Islamic Protestantism,” Akhundzadeh found a historical model for such a rupture in the medieval Isma‘ili declaration of Qiyama (Resurrection) at Alamut, which he interpreted as a symbolic abolition of religious law in favor of absolute freedom and the beginning of a new historical order. The importance of this narrative for the present discussion lies not in its historical authenticity but in Akhundzadeh’s use of it: he employs a model where freedom passes through the declaration of the Qiyamah and the eschatological moment to formulate his reformist ideals. Modern rupture in Iran is born not from the philosophy of progress but from an apocalyptic moment, where freedom, the abrogation of Sharia, and the establishment of a new order are linked to the declaration of the end of an era. Thus, the concept of “révolution” was shaped from its inception at the crossroads of the modern future and the symbolic apocalypse, a connection whose resonance reached its peak political dynamism in the twentieth century, in the views of figures like Ali Shariati and the activists of the 1979 Revolution.

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For Shariati, an intellectual influential among many revolutionaries, revolution is not reducible to a mere transfer of political power; rather, it is a form of historical, ethical, and existential awakening. Concepts such as “return to the self,” “resurrection,” “Alavi Shi’ism,” “martyrdom,” and “waiting” (Entezar) are interconnected in his works, transforming politics into an arena for the revival of a suppressed truth. While criticizing passive and fatalistic waiting, Shariati does not abandon Mahdist waiting; instead, he transforms it into a negating, historical, and revolutionary force:

belief in waiting, belief in the period of occultation, and belief in the inevitability of salvation in the end times, is not a sedative but rather the greatest negating force…the most powerful weapon for the destruction of corruption, the greatest blow for crushing oppression, and the greatest energy for moving toward the future.4

Within this framework, waiting is not a sign of stagnation but a source of historical energy and will directed toward the future. Occultation (Ghaybat) also does not mean the suspension of politics, but a state in which the believing and revolutionary subject becomes active. From this perspective, Shariati’s conception of revolution, while possessing that same Janus-faced aspect, also entails an eschatological imagination. History becomes the field of confrontation between truth and falsehood, uprising acquires a sacred meaning, and martyrdom is linked to the possibility of collective revival and the opening of a new horizon for history.

Following the 1979 Revolution, the eschatological horizon did not disappear but continued in a different logic within the governmental formulation. In Ruhollah Khomeini’s thought, politics finds meaning in the era of occultation: society cannot remain in suspension until the advent, so a vicegerent order must be established to preserve Sharia and prevent chaos. Hence, Wilayat al-Faqih is understood as a mechanism for managing the interval between occultation and advent. Here, too, the trace of the Janus-face is visible: while Khomeini understood the revolution within the horizon of a religious and promised future, he simultaneously spoke of reviving and returning to Islamic civilization; as if opening the future were only possible through rediscovering an authentic past.

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This logic is reinforced by the famous principle that “preserving the system is the most necessary of obligations,” now central to the political discourse of the Islamic Republic. Khomeini gave this principle one of its most radical formulations when he stated that “preserving the Islamic Republic is more obligatory than the life of the Twelfth Imam.”5 In this sense, the Islamic Republic may be said to possess a katechonic temporality: power understands itself not as the actualizer of the end times, but as the guardian of the order that precedes them. In Christian political theology, the katechon names the force that restrains the end and preserves historical order before the apocalypse. This comparison neither equates Shi’ism with Christianity nor simply transfers a Christian concept into Shi’a jurisprudence; rather, it clarifies a temporal logic in which “preparing the ground for the advent” becomes tied to “preserving the system,” and Mahdist waiting shifts from rupture to continuity and delay. Within this official interpretation, the system is represented as protected from ultimate harm, even endowed with a kind of divine guarantee, as reflected in Ayatollah Araki’s claim that “Imam Mahdi pays attention to this country.”6 Power thereby casts itself under the protection of the promised savior, rendering survival and delay natural and legitimate.

This logic can be linked to the broader discussion of political theology in Iran: as Shahin Nasiri emphasizes the political theology of Iranian despotism,7 resistance against despotism also does not stand entirely outside this horizon. If power formulates itself in a sacred, salvific, historical, and sometimes apocalyptic language, many forms of resistance operate within the same semantic reservoir. Therefore, political conflict in Iran is not merely a confrontation between religion and secularism or two secular forces, but rather a clash of two theological imaginations that both define politics in relation to salvation, the end, and the possibility of a new foundation. However, emphasis must be placed on the concept of “unequal symmetry”: the shared horizon of language between power and resistance does not mean their equality, because the state possesses the instruments of repression, prisons, law, media, and the official organization of power, while resistance usually operates from a vulnerable, scattered, and costly position. Nevertheless, both can draw from common concepts such as the end, salvation, martyrdom, purification, standing to the end, and the moment of judgment at the level of language, imagination, and temporal relation.

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If the political theology of power in Iran is linked to preserving order, delaying the end, and managing the era of occultation, the political theology of resistance often operates differently: by constructing a subject who prepares themselves for danger, suffering, rupture, and steadfastness. However, this logic should not be sought solely at the level of abstract concepts; the language of the streets, media, and contemporary protest actions also shows that the apocalyptic mindset has permeated the public political culture. Expressions such as “We will stand to the end” on the walls of Khamenei’s supporters, “the last battle” in the slogans of Pahlavi supporters, and “the last chance” in the discourse of some diasporic Iranian media, all indicate that political crisis is often understood not as a problem for governance, compromise, and gradual organization, but within the horizon of rupture, judgment, and final confrontation. In such a horizon, politics slides from the logic of mechanism to the logic of revelation: a moment when truth must be revealed, evil must be eradicated, and a new order born.

It is at this point that the political theology of resistance intertwines with discussions of subjectivity, suffering, askesis, violence, and political mysticism. The political actor within this semantic framework is not merely a claimant or organizer but a subject who prepares themselves for danger, repression, violence, and sometimes direct confrontation. Askesis—understood as practice, discipline, and self-cultivation through discipline and endurance of suffering—in the context of resistance becomes a form of self-care amidst transgression. The streets, prisons, mourning, repression, and violence can be arenas for such practice; places where political suffering finds meaning in a language close to political mysticism. In this logic, encountering violence is not merely a destructive experience but is sometimes understood as a form of catharsis: passing through pain and danger as moral purification, overcoming fear, and the rebirth of the protesting subject. Therefore, violence, whether as state violence or as the imagination of confrontation and reciprocal response, can acquire a meaning beyond political tactic within the apocalyptic horizon, becoming a sign of passage, purification, and entry into a new phase.

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This form of political mysticism in Iran is shaped by a cultural background that encompasses a wide range of apocalyptic concepts, particularly the tradition of martyrdom. Hence, even in the discourse of secular forces, this language can be reproduced: suffering, blood, the names of the deceased, and collective mourning become signs of truth, authenticity, and the beginning of a new order. In the course of contemporary protests, this logic has intensified: while the Green Movement still spoke, to some extent, in the language of law, votes, reform, and a return to official mechanisms, in subsequent uprisings—and particularly in the violent situation experienced during the late December 2025–early January 2026 protests—the horizon of rupture, confrontation, and the end of the existing order became more pronounced. This shift indicates that protest politics is gradually moving from demanding the reform of mechanisms to imagining the final moment and a decisive rupture.

However, this “mysticism of resistance,” despite generating immense moral force and astonishing courage, carries a profound structural risk. The capture of the political arena by apocalyptic theology empties politics of its fundamental meaning—namely, the step-by-step management of the public sphere and the understanding of protracted temporality. When every act of protest is understood as the “last battle” and a final confrontation, the slow, terrestrial time of politics is devoured in favor of the accelerated, theological time. In this messianic horizon, the necessity of arduous work for organization, institutional building, networking, and creating stable coalitions is marginalized; for subjects who see themselves on the verge of a moment of rupture find no reason to invest in the long-term politics and representative mechanisms. Consequently, despite passionate uprisings and sacrifices, the lack of institutions and organization in Iranian resistance is not merely a tactical flaw or sociological weakness but is linked to the dominance of this very rupture-oriented theology, which ceaselessly sacrifices the long-term “strategy” before the promised moment of “salvation,” preventing the effervescent energy of revolts from transforming into stable institutional capacity.

Mahdi Panjalipour is an independent researcher focusing on political theology, political economy, and contemporary social movements in Iran. His research explores the intersection of messianic imaginaries, political mysticism, theories of resistance, and counterrevolution in the Middle East.

The sudden spectacular rise of a right-wing populist party in Australia might seem entirely unsurprising given that something similar seems to be happening in many Western countries. Australia’s One Nation (technically Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, often referred to by the acronym PHON) can thus be easily understood as a local correlate to Reform UK or the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

Living in Australia, and specifically in the rural hinterland where PHON’s rise has been most pronounced, I have however been puzzled by this as perhaps by no other political phenomenon I have encountered in my life. The most puzzling—indeed uncanny—aspect of this is the way I see absolutely nothing anywhere either online or in real life that reflects this phenomenon. I have heard or seen no one signal any support for this party. It has come up in conversation only with the very politically interested in the context of discussions of the polling, and even then this does not seem to be much discussed.

Moreover, not only are there no outward signs of this psephological phenomenon but nothing seems to have changed either that might have caused it. Yes, we are beset by several crises that have been occurring in much the same way in many other countries with the same results, but none of these have particularly coincided with the rise of One Nation. One Nation has existed for almost thirty years, far longer than the aforementioned populist right-wing formations in other countries. We have endemic cost-of-living crises and the highest rates of immigration anywhere in the world, but these are respectively a slow-burning issue and a long-standing one: this is very different from the UK, where record high immigration suddenly occurred in a discrete event a few years ago, increasingly and accurately referred to as the “Boriswave,” which might directly be linked to anti-immigrant sentiment. One might say that Australia is, as so often, rather late to the party, but this doesn’t explain why it has decided to arrive at this point. One might point to the appearance of prominent new backers of ON, to billionaire mining magnate Gina Reinhart and former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, but in both cases we can see this as much of an effect of the party’s trajectory as a cause: certainly it began well before they climbed on board.

I have reached the conclusion that the cause is quite simple, amounting to the recent playing out of what has been referred to as the Great Realignment. In Australia as elsewhere in the West, social liberalism increasingly aligns with higher income and educational attainment and thus traditional center-left and center-right parties that draw their key personnel and support from the university-educated have found themselves increasingly detached from a working class with quite different values. This has tended to make conventional center-right political formations, such as the mainstream U.S. GOP, the Conservatives in Britain, or Christian Democrats in Germany, which depended on an unspoken alignment of the wealthy with the lower orders around social conservatism, increasingly unviable as a political proposition, and hence is one of the main causes of the growth of Reform and the AfD, as well as, of course, MAGA in the United States.

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In Australia specifically, the rise of One Nation is therefore a symptom of the collapse of a quite peculiar conventional center-right formation, called the Coalition or LNP (Liberal-National Party—although technically this appellation refers only to its Queensland branch). The Coalition is a permanent coalition of two political parties: the National Party, which represented rural interests, and the Liberal Party, which can best be thought of as itself a broad church of urban and suburban opponents of the Labor Party, including some social liberals (so-called “wets”) but typically dominated by economically and socially conservative views. The Coalition has thus operated for decades on the basis of economic neoliberalism (with a partial protectionist carve-out for agriculture to please the Nationals) and social conservatism that appealed to sections of the wealthy, working class, and rural voters.

The Coalition model collapsed in essence because relatively wealthy electorates have become overwhelmingly socially progressive. Wealthy parts of Sydney and Melbourne were the absolute core of the historic Liberal Party, but many dramatically flipped in 2022 to so-called “teal” challengers (so called after their campaign color-coding), women candidates who were economically conservative but in particular rejected Coalition hesitancy on climate action. This altered the electoral dynamics so as to make Coalition government in many states and at a federal level suddenly seem impossible.

In light of this, the Liberal Party chose a new leader (ex officio also then the leader of the Coalition), Sussan Ley. In effect, Ley, a moderate, attempted to tail the teals and move the Coalition back towards the center. It was this that proximally caused One Nation’s rise. One Nation itself did nothing in particular to catalyze it; rather, the Coalition began unsuccessfully chasing its own lost core and in so doing thoroughly alienated its outer suburban and rural voters.

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One Nation’s new rise terminated in a plateau when the Liberals ditched Ley and replaced her with outer-suburban right winger Angus Taylor, who immediately began moving the party back toward the right. While this stemmed the hemorrhaging of support to One Nation, it has done little to win any voters back, and offers no particular prospect of winning back the lost urbanite core, where indeed the teals are beginning to coalesce into a formal political party.

It might be added that the Nationals had their own considerable woes stretching back a decade, emanating principally from rural perceptions they were too compromised and insufficiently representing “the bush.” Consequently, they had already been partially displaced by an alternative rural party, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, before they declined in turn, clearing the ground for One Nation apparently to become the new countryside default.

The Labor Party’s response to the rise of One Nation has been muted. While promising to cut immigration numbers and alleviate cost-of-living pressures, there is little evidence of the government delivering either thing, and the electorate certainly doesn’t seem convinced. By far their most voluble response so far has been the May 2026 budget, in which Labor quite deliberately broke a campaign promise and restricted so-called “negative gearing” on investment property. A long-standing third rail of Australian politics, negative gearing allows owners to deduct costs of maintenance from their taxable income, which has long been seen as a subsidy to older, wealthier real estate investors, and hence a force for house price growth in the context of ever-cratering housing affordability. Far from seeing off One Nation, this is clearly oriented toward the youth vote and thus seems if anything directed to head off the threat to Labor from the left, specifically the Australian Greens who, like the Green Party in England, have made significant gains from Labor among left-wing and Muslim voters due to widespread outrage over Israeli actions in Gaza. This makes tactical sense for the Australian Labor Party, for which the rise of One Nation might be seen as nonthreatening due to its effect of dividing the right to Labor’s advantage. Nonetheless, the budget was generally panned, and, while it did swiftly reverse creeping Green gains against Labor, its main effect seems to have been to restart One Nation’s previously stalled rise at the expense of both Liberals and Labor, leading to a novel situation in which One Nation has now become the front-running party in some polls.

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The below graph shows One Nation’s meteoric rise in orange, beginning steadily from the last Australian federal election in 2025—Ley became Liberal leader effectively immediately at the election as her relatively right-wing predecessor lost his seat. The apparently exponential growth in PHON support terminates abruptly exactly when Angus Taylor becomes Liberal leader in February 2026, and it instead begins to slowly decline until Labor present their May budget, when it begins to grow again rapidly—May also saw the by-election triggered by the resignation of Sussan Ley upon her leadership ouster, which was won by One Nation. Notably, when PHON polling waxes, both Coalition and Labor wane, whereas the Liberal-National rebound under Taylor corresponded to both Labor and PHON decline.

One Nation is itself a very strange beast. It has always been centered on—though has not always been led by or even included—the figure of Pauline Hanson, an unprepossessing regional shopkeeper turned politician who was dumped by the Liberal Party as a candidate on the eve of the 1996 general election over her views but won anyway. She formed a new party, which within two years took 23 percent of the vote in the state election in her native Queensland. However, it failed to replicate this success at the national poll later the same year: Hanson herself lost her seat, and the party descended into infighting, culminating in it losing so many members that it not only could not maintain its registration but was also found to have registered itself illegally, for which Hanson and a key ally were briefly imprisoned. The party then spent more than two decades vacillating in the electoral wilderness: it has continued to exist, sometimes under slightly different names, sometimes without its eponymous founder, and occasionally one or two members have been elected, often then to leave the party or lose their seats in due course.

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Reputationally, the party has long been perceived by many, particularly on the left, in the way parties of the far right typically are: as fascists, beyond the pale of polite consideration. Again typically, this is rather hyperbolic. One Nation’s distinction had always been opposition to immigration, but a culturalist one: the name referred to the ideal of a singular Australian nation that welcomed immigrants who assimilated to Australian norms and conversely demanded that Australians Aborigines also assimilate to this singular culture. In the context of Australia’s extraordinarily high per capita migration intake, this meant a position on immigration that would retain substantial if much reduced levels. Of course, critics, particularly on the left, have seen all this as a barely veiled racism. In our hyperpoliticized times, there is no shortage of critics on the online right who, contrariwise, see One Nation as weak beer and not racist enough. Importantly, though, there is no significant political force to the right of them. Until recently, the largest political force in Australia to the right of Hanson was the explicitly Nazi National Socialist Network (NSN), which has since disbanded and been banned.

PHON support is anti-immigrant, anti-elite, relatively conservative, a complaint about cost-of-living pressure, etc. But I do not believe the rise in One Nation’s support betokens any particularly shift in public views on these questions, so much as a conclusion that neither the Coalition nor Labor will address them, after years or decades of signaling that they would and then not delivering. In this regard, the shift is very similar to that seen in the UK contemporarily.

One Nation is growing then effectively as a repository for sentiments that have no other vehicle. The party has little to commend it. It is organizationally fragile such that it is hard to believe it would cohere in the event it won any significant representation. It is ideologically inconsistent such that it does not represent any clear proposition. Scarcely a week passes without a prominent figure in the party contradicting previously announced policy positions. Its platform is a hodgepodge and, for example, involves no foreign policy position. One Nation is not so much isolationist as simply uninterested in the outside world, engaging with it largely through trying to outflank the major parties to the right in opposing China and supporting Israel. Generally PHON has deliberately aligned itself with Trump’s America, but just last week a senior member of the party shocked almost everyone by describing the United States as “the world’s greatest terrorist organisation.”

Of course, similar things might be said about other right-wing populist parties abroad, but in their cases this is more a matter of them being new and unproven organizations. One Nation might be unique in the longevity of its track record of dysfunction and cognitive vacuousness. In such a situation, one might reasonably expect some new, more coherent force to emerge. The Liberal Party actually does have, in its not insubstantial hard right, the resources to become a more competent vehicle of this type.

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It is worth mentioning in this regard that Australia’s electoral system is dramatically different from those of most other countries in at least two relevant respects. One is that voting is compulsory, meaning that there is no significant reservoir of nonvoters that might be mobilized by a movement that speaks to an unrepresented constituency. Mandatory preferential voting in Australia means that, in the crucial federal lower house at least, all voters must direct their votes in preferential order such that every single valid ballot will ultimately be cast for one of the two front-running parties. This means that all left- and right-wing votes tend to fall behind the leading left and right candidates, which would mean the determining question of which party will dominate will depend on whether One Nation or Coalition can lead in first preferences. That said, many Coalition preferences may in fact flow instead to Labor as moderate voters of the right prefer the center-left to the hard right, constituting an effective cordon sanitaire against One Nation. This implies that One Nation besting the Coalition in first preferences across the country might redound to the electoral benefit of the currently governing Labor Party in the House of Representatives. The prognosis for Australian politics from here remains necessarily unclear. The remaining question, much as with Reform UK, is whether PHON can attract enough Labor voters for it to break through, not just by displacing the Tories but also by leveraging alienation of relatively socially conservative suburban Laborites.

The silence I hear at backyard barbecues around One Nation’s rise may thus be attributed to the quietness of the politics it displaces: no one was loudly declaring their intention to vote for the Coalition previously either. Voting in Australia’s compulsory, preferential system, away from the heated invectives of university campuses and inner-city protests, lends itself to a quiet, resigned lesser-evilism. Our Saturday elections revolve for many more around getting a “democracy sausage” at the polling place than around the numbers they put on the ballot. Of course, this banality of process does not rule out that dramatic results might yet emanate from it.

Mark G. E. Kelly is Executive Director of the Telos–Paul Piccone Institute. He is Associate Professor and Program Lead in Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of six books, most recently Normal Now: Individualism as Conformity (Polity, 2022).

Article 5(1) of the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz) declares: “Everyone shall have the right to freely express and disseminate his opinions. There shall be no censorship.” As a foundational constitutional guarantee, the provision appears unambiguous.

That commitment to free speech has been hollowed out through a set of overlapping criminal statutes, government-backed enforcement networks, and targeted prosecutions—particularly since 2015. As a result, the space for political speech has narrowed, with concrete and measurable consequences: thousands of criminal prosecutions per year, police raids on private homes over social media posts, and a documented chilling effect on public discourse. Polling by the Allensbach Institute, Germany’s foremost survey organization, indicates that a majority of German citizens feel unable to express their political views freely.

The phenomenon has attracted comments from international observers, including the Economist and a segment on the CBS program 60 Minutes. This program drew wider Anglophone attention to the issue and featured prosecutors who described, with obvious schadenfreude, how painful it is for people when their mobile phones are taken away.

Section 188 and the Criminalization of Political Insult

This situation has been brought about by a series of new laws, such as Section 188 of Germany’s criminal code (Strafgesetzbuch), enacted in 2021 during the final year of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship, which creates a specific criminal offense for insult, malicious gossip, and defamation directed at persons in political life. Its immediate legislative pretext was the assassination in 2019 of Walter Lübcke, a regional politician murdered by a far-right extremist with a documented history of violent activity stretching back to his adolescence—largely predating the era of social media. The invocation of Lübcke’s killing as justification for a law regulating online expression was, from the outset, strained: incitement to violence and acts of violence were already criminalized under existing provisions of German law, and the perpetrator’s radicalization bore no evident causal relationship to unmoderated social media commentary.

The law’s actual scope is much broader and does not restrict itself to far-right speech, threats, or incitement. It applies to any expression deemed sufficiently insulting or defamatory toward a public figure in political life—a category whose boundaries are determined through prosecution and judicial interpretation rather than statutory precision. The result has been a wave of criminal proceedings against private citizens for comments that, in most comparable liberal democracies, would fall within the ordinary protections afforded to political speech.

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Enforcement has been facilitated by a network of organizations whose business model it is to monitor digital platforms for potential violations. Among the most prominent of these are So Done or HateAid, NGOs that provide legal assistance to complainants and which work in close cooperation with politicians who bring charges. The institutional architecture thus combines state prosecutorial power with quasi-private surveillance infrastructure.

Documented cases illustrate the range of conduct now subject to criminal sanction. In one recent and widely reported instance, police initiated an investigation against a retired citizen who had shared a Facebook graphic depicting CDU leader Friedrich Merz as Pinocchio; the case, which caused some public amusement, was ultimately dropped, but only after the formal machinery of criminal investigation had been set in motion. More consequentially, Stefan Niehof—also a pensioner—had his home searched and his computer seized following a social media post characterizing Robert Habeck, then Federal Minister for Economic Affairs, as a moron. The circulation of a photograph showing Niehof accompanied by his daughter, who has Down syndrome, also generated substantial public attention and briefly brought the disproportionality of such enforcement into sharp relief.

The case of a construction engineer from Dortmund is perhaps the most instructive for the purposes of assessing the law’s scope. In April 2022, the man sent a letter to Manuela Schwesig, Minister-President of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, expressing sharp criticism of her role in promoting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline with Russia—a project subsequently discredited in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The letter was intemperate in tone (he invited her to join his colleagues in construction, rather than selling the public lies) but contained no threat. The public prosecutor nonetheless sought a monetary fine of €3,000. When the defendant declined to pay, the matter proceeded to a custodial sentence. In August 2023, he was arrested at his workplace and imprisoned for thirty days.

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Defensive Democracy and Its Transformation

The intellectual and constitutional foundations of Germany’s restrictive approach to political speech lie in the concept of streitbare Demokratie—variously translated as “militant,” “fortified,” or “defensive” democracy. Developed in the postwar Federal Republic, the doctrine holds that a democratic order need not remain neutral in the face of movements that seek to exploit its freedoms in order to destroy it. The concept finds expression in several constitutional provisions, including Article 18 (forfeiture of basic rights for anti-constitutional purposes) and Article 21(2) (the prohibition of political parties whose aims threaten the free democratic basic order).

The concept was accompanied by a promise not to repeat the mistakes of the Weimar Republic. From the outset, however, it was also linked to a fear of the electorate, whom many within the elites held responsible for the rise of fascism. The architects of the Basic Law sought to build a constitutional order that would de facto protect democracy from the electorate.

Originally, the concept was designed to address existential threats to constitutional order—the prospect of organized movements dismantling democratic institutions from within. Yet the logic of defensive democracy has proved very flexible. As the concept’s boundaries have been extended, and as the designation of “threats to democracy” has been applied to an increasingly broad range of political positions and speech acts, the doctrine has been transformed from a safeguard against authoritarianism into a mechanism for entrenching political incumbency, especially with the rise of new populism.

The 2015 refugee crisis was a structural catalyst for this transformation. The scale and speed of irregular migration into Germany exposed deep divisions within the electorate, accelerating the growth of the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The party’s electoral success confounded the expectations of the established parties. Unable to win back the trust of large sections of voters, mainstream politicians and their media supporters attempted to delegitimize their critics. The expansion of speech restrictions was central to this strategy. Critics of migration policy were characterized as xenophobes, their speech was labeled hateful or far-right adjacent, and legal mechanisms were used to penalize its expression.

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The Broader Legislative Framework

Section 188 operates within a wider statutory architecture that compounds its restrictive effects. Section 130 of the Criminal Code—the Volksverhetzung provision, or incitement to hatred—has a longer history, originating in postwar efforts to suppress neo-Nazi agitation. It criminalizes the disturbance of public peace through incitement to hatred, violence, or arbitrariness against national, racial, religious, or ethnic groups, or against individuals on the basis of group membership. The provision has been subject to repeated legislative amendment, and its scope too has expanded considerably in the past years.

The application of Section 130 to critics of Islam is particularly revealing. In May 2024, Michael Stürzenberger, an activist associated with the anti-Islam organization Pax Europa, and a victim of an Islamist-motivated attack, was fined €3,600 under the provision for statements made at a rally in October 2020. This was an extension of an earlier conviction in a lower court, where Stürzenberger had received a six-month prison sentence without probation—a sentence that he successfully appealed. However, before the appeal case began, Stürzenberger was seriously injured in a terrorist attack in which a policeman was killed (the attacker had pledged allegiance to ISIS). The irony could not be starker: while terrorism attempted to silence him through violence, the state has attempted to do so through its anti-free speech laws.

Further provisions include Section 166 (defamation of religious beliefs), Section 86 (dissemination of material from unconstitutional or terrorist organizations) and Section 86a (use of symbols of such organizations). The application of Section 86a to far-right AfD politician Björn Höcke in May 2024—resulting in a fine of €13,000 for using the phrase “Alles für Deutschland” (“Everything for Germany”), a slogan associated with the SA during the Third Reich—illustrates the operation of these provisions. The charge was initiated by a member of the Green Party. That Höcke’s party subsequently won 32.8 percent of the vote in the September 2024 Thuringian state election—the largest share of any party—suggests that legal stigmatization has not achieved its intended deterrent effect on the electorate.

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Consequences: Alienation, Chilling Effects, and Political Failure

The scale of enforcement under these provisions is substantial. The cumulative total of individuals affected by speech-related criminal proceedings over the preceding several years runs to tens of thousands. Police crime statistics recorded over 4,500 breaches of Section 188 in 2025 alone, and in 2024 the Federal Ministry of Justice recorded approximately 26,000 prosecutions for various “propaganda offences.”

The chilling effect of speech restrictions is not merely theoretical but can be observed empirically in patterns of self-censorship, as shown in the Allensbach surveys. This effect is particularly pronounced in debates around highly contested issues such as migration, climate change, and measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

But citizens who feel that legitimate avenues of expression have been foreclosed do not moderate their views; they redirect their political energy and anger. The electoral growth of the AfD is, at least in part, a structural consequence of a strategy that attempted to contain populist sentiment through legal coercion rather than political engagement.

In Defense of Classical Liberal Protections

Hans-Georg Maassen, the former President of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), has characterized Section 188 as cementing “a two-tier society” and has questioned why elected politicians—who possess greater institutional resources than private citizens to rebut criticism—should receive elevated legal protection from public insult. Indeed, in a truly free and liberal society, the arrow of constitutional protection should run from citizen to state, not the reverse. Public figures who seek and exercise power accept heightened scrutiny, including scrutiny that is immoderate in tone, as a condition of democratic accountability.

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The German case raises a question of broader comparative relevance: at what point does a democracy’s institutional self-defense become indistinguishable from the authoritarianism it purports to resist? The doctrine of streitbare Demokratie was conceived as a safeguard against totalitarian subversion. Its contemporary application—the prosecution of pensioners for satirical Facebook posts, the imprisonment of citizens for critical correspondence with politicians, the fining of opposition politicians for the use of historically resonant phrases—has departed so far from that original purpose as to constitute a qualitative transformation rather than a mere extension.

The case for robust free expression rests not on the intrinsic value of any particular utterance but on the systemic properties of open discourse: its capacity to surface legitimate grievances, to subject power to scrutiny, to allow bad ideas to be challenged and refuted rather than suppressed and preserved. Germany’s legislative trajectory over the past decade suggests a governing class that has lost confidence in these systemic properties—that has concluded, in effect, that political competition can be managed more reliably through legal constraint than through the persuasive resources of democratic argument. This is both empirically mistaken and normatively dangerous.

Sabine Beppler-Spahl studied economics at Hamburg University. She is chair of the German liberal think tank Freiblickinstitut and the Germany correspondent for Spiked. She also writes regularly for the European Conservative.

I.

Cole Tomas Allen, the young man who walked into the Washington Hilton on Saturday night with a shotgun, a handgun, multiple knives, and a stated intention to kill the president of the United States, gave a charming interview to ABC7 in Los Angeles in 2017. He was a Caltech senior studying mechanical engineering. He had designed a prototype emergency brake to keep wheelchairs from skidding when their wheel brakes engaged. The reporter found him gracious and articulate. The brake worked.

In the almost decade between his star turns, Allen took a master’s in computer science at Cal State Dominguez Hills, tutored high school students at C2 Education in Torrance, and was named the company’s Teacher of the Month in December 2024. The parents of his students told the Los Angeles Times he was intelligent, soft-spoken, and on the nicer side. His professor at Cal State remembered him in the front row, attentive, polite, and frequently emailing about coursework. On Saturday night, having traveled by train from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, he sent his family a note ten minutes before the attack. He apologized to those whose trust he had abused. He said he did not expect forgiveness. In the writings he left behind, he called himself the “Friendly Federal Assassin.”

How does the boy who built a wheelchair brake become the assassin at the magnetometer? The reporters covering the case have proposed mental illness, online radicalization, isolation. None of these answers is wrong. None is sufficient. They describe the surface, but the deeper architecture demands our attention.

Allen is the third in eighteen months. Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson in December 2024. Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk in September 2025. Each of these young men explained himself before he acted. Each presented his act as service to the nation. Each accepted, or anticipated, his own death as the price of that “service.” The framework authorizing their reasoning is older than effective altruism, but effective altruism is its current respectable form. The corrective is older still. It is a verse of John’s Gospel that our culture has either forgotten or, having half-remembered, inverted.

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II.

Allen, apparently obsessed with saving the nation by sacrificing its president, is a modern echo of the gospels’ Caiaphas.

“It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.” The high priest spoke at a council convened after the raising of Lazarus, when the religious authorities had concluded that the Jesus movement, left alone, would provoke a Roman crackdown destroying the temple and the nation with it. The calculation, on its face, is prudence. It is the kind of arithmetic any administrator runs. It produced unanimity in the council and discharged a social tension that had become unbearable. The gospel writer treats the line as both prophetic and damning in the same breath.

René Girard located here the mechanism by which human societies have always discharged collective tension. Unanimous violence against an innocent victim produces social cohesion, the appearance of justice, and a feeling of relief so profound that participants experience it as a sacred event. The mechanism works in the technical sense. Cultures across history have used it. What the gospels do, on Girard’s reading, is take the side of the victim and expose the lie. Once exposed, the mechanism cannot work the same way again. The lynch mob becomes suspect even when its victim looks guilty. The persecution texts of the ancient world give way, slowly, to texts that worry about scapegoats.

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This is one source of an intuition that Western societies, including their secular members, treat as bedrock: the individual is inviolable; human sacrifice is categorically forbidden; the lynching is suspect even when the lynched man looks like a villain. These intuitions are not universal. They are not present in every civilization. Aztec sacrifice, Carthaginian Tophet, the burning of widows on funeral pyres are recent on the scale of recorded history. The reason most contemporary Westerners recoil from them is not that human nature has improved. It is that our ancestors read, and we still half-remember, a particular text. The atheist horrified by ritual killing is borrowing intellectual furniture from a faith he does not profess, and may find that, absent care, that furniture may not be bequeathed to the next generation.

III.

Mangione wrote the script. Robinson and Allen are reading from it.

The Mangione manifesto reasoned, in the language it could find, from harms in aggregate to a license for individual action. The American health insurance regime kills people; therefore the executive of a major insurer must die. The math is the giveaway. The math assumes that lives are fungible, that suffering can be summed across persons, and that the sum can be set against a particular killing as its justification. Once the premises are granted, the conclusion follows. Read carefully, the manifesto is not the work of a deranged mind. It is the work of a logically consistent one, operating from premises Christianity was supposed to have rendered unthinkable.

Tyler Robinson is the harder case. The reasoning, on what we know of it, was structurally identical to Mangione’s, with different inputs. Charlie Kirk’s speech was causing harm; the harm had to be stopped. Speech replaces insurance claims; the conclusion follows along the same path. Kirk was, by any honest accounting, the most prominent voice persuading young men of his generation toward the conservative tradition. He was killed for that work, by another young man of the same generation reasoning from the same premises that had moved Mangione nine months earlier.

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Allen completes the figure. The “Friendly Federal Assassin” is Caiaphas in modern dress: the same prudential frame, the same self-presentation as servant of the nation, the same willingness to absorb personal destruction as the price of the service. Allen intends, on his own account, to save the country. He accepts his own death in the bargain. That is the deeper Girardian point. The scapegoater becomes scapegoat. The cycle does not stop. The president has described the manifesto as expressing hatred for Christians; whether the text bears that out in detail is a question for the trial. The structure of Allen’s reasoning, whatever his explicit theological views, is the structure that the Christian tradition was supposed to have foreclosed.

Allen is not crazy in any legal or clinical sense. He sat in the front row. He was Teacher of the Month. He was reasoning. The reasoning leads where it leads when the prohibition is gone.

IV.

Caiaphas needed Pilate. He still does.

The Pilate of John 18 and 19 is not the architect of the killing. He examines the prisoner, finds no fault in him, says so on the record, and authorizes the killing anyway. He cannot afford the political cost of intervention. He washes his hands, declares himself innocent, and returns to administration. The killing proceeds.

The pattern of the past eighteen months on the institutional left has been the pattern of Pilate. Mainstream organs that shape liberal opinion did not endorse Mangione’s act. They did, in publication after publication, treat his manifesto as a document deserving sympathetic exegesis and his person as an object of unsettling cultural fascination. They did not endorse Robinson’s killing of Kirk. They did, with rare exceptions, treat Kirk’s death as an occasion to revisit Kirk’s rhetoric rather than to denounce the architecture of reasoning that produced his killer. They will not endorse Allen. They have already begun to amplify him. Norah O’Donnell, interviewing the president the day after the attack, read Allen’s denunciation of him aloud from the manifesto, the words “pedophile, rapist, and traitor” delivered in the measured cadence of network news, the assassin’s accusation laundered through the authority of CBS into a question the president was invited to answer. This is the work Pilate’s procurators do once the killing is underway. They give the charge a hearing. They treat the killer’s grievance as a contribution to public discourse. They will, in the days to come, find ways to write that the country’s politics had become unbearable for sensitive young men.

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This is the Pilate move. It does not require approval of the killings. It requires only the choice not to intervene against the architecture that produces them. The intervention would mean naming the moral grammar of utilitarian aggregation as defective, repudiating the networks that have grown wealthy and respectable on its terms, and acknowledging that a political coalition that has lately mocked Christian moral seriousness as theocratic threat is now reaping a harvest its mockery helped to sow. The institutional left will not make the intervention. The political costs are too high. The energy of the men at the magnetometer does work, in the structure of contemporary politics, that mainstream voices would not do themselves. So, the hands are washed, the case is found wanting on its merits, and the killing proceeds.

The defense is always that these are isolated cases, lone wolves, mentally unwell young men whose acts cannot be generalized. The defense does not survive three cases reasoning from identical premises within eighteen months.

V.

The architects of the authorizing architecture are not bad people. This is the part of the argument that requires care. The casualties of a wrong idea are often the people who took it most seriously.

Peter Singer at Princeton has spent fifty years arguing, with patience and rigor, that geographic distance ought not block moral obligation and that the comparison of outcomes across persons is the proper grammar of ethical thought. The argument has produced real charity and saved real lives. It has also produced a moral grammar that lacks any categorical prohibition on the scapegoat. Singer’s frame can absorb such a prohibition only as an empirical generalization about the long-run consequences of permitting killing. It cannot ground the prohibition as inviolable in itself.

Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried at Stanford Law have done careful, humane work on responsibility and consequentialism. Their philosophical project is serious. Their son Sam took the philosophy he had inherited seriously and acted on it. Under the pressure of running an exchange in a falling market, he discovered that the architecture he had been taught could not hold a line a more ancient grammar would have held. He is a talented young man lost to a wrong formation, one of the casualties of an idea, worth another chance if the idea around him is ever named clearly enough to be repudiated.

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The same charity is owed his parents and the broader effective-altruist community. They are people of conscience working on serious problems. The question their architecture cannot answer, because no consequentialist architecture can answer it from inside, is why the inviolability of the individual ought to function as a non-negotiable constraint on the aggregation of welfare. That premise was historically supplied by a religious tradition the academy has spent a generation treating as embarrassment. Stripped of the premise, consequentialism is arithmetic, and arithmetic licenses whatever the numbers favor. This is not a failure of the philosophers; it is a structural limit of philosophy unaided by what theologians used to call revelation. A generation of our most gifted young people is being formed in the architecture. Some end at FTX. A smaller number, formed in adjacent architectures with sharper edges and weaker ties, end at a magnetometer.

VI.

Allen will be prosecuted. The federal indictment names attempted assassination, interstate transport of a firearm in furtherance of a violent crime, and discharge of a firearm during a violent crime. Conviction is overdetermined. He will spend his life in federal prison.

This is necessary. It is not sufficient.

Positive law forbids the killing. Positive law cannot supply the moral grammar that makes the prohibition feel natural. Hart’s minimum content of natural law gestures toward the insight; Fuller’s morality of law gestures toward it from the other direction. The deeper Thomistic point, recovered in Pope Leo XIV’s Vatican Tribunal address last month and treated at length in these pages, is that positive law presupposes a populace that will not reason its way around it. When the populace makes the move, the law has nothing to say that the populace will hear. Allen knew the law. The law did not deter him. Criminal law’s deterrence model assumes a baseline of socialization that recoils from killing. When the socialization fails, the law can punish the killer. It cannot reach the next one through punishment alone. The genuinely persuaded man who has already accepted his own death is the case the criminal law was never built to handle.

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Schmitt’s formulation belongs here. The sovereign decides on the exception. The state’s monopoly on legitimate force is the renunciation, by every other actor, of the right to decide which deaths serve the nation. When private citizens reclaim the right, the polity has either revolution or terror. The American settlement assumes that even those who hate one another will not kill each other. That assumption is doing more work than the Constitution acknowledges, and the work is not legal work.

The asymmetry should be named. Mangione, Robinson, and Allen are men of the left. The American right has its own histories of violence. In this particular moment, the active assassin script is a script of the left. The most plausible reading is that the secular left has gone further down the road of forgetting than the secular right has. The right’s secularism still trades on a residual Christian inheritance, often without acknowledging the source. The left’s secularism, especially in its technocratic and effective-altruist forms, has taken the deeper drink. The grammar of aggregate welfare without inviolable individual claims has done its work first where it took root first.

We are not going to legislate our way out of this. The criminal statutes will not do the work. Hardened protective details will reduce frequency but will not address the source of this violence. The assassination of public figures by gifted young men reasoning from utilitarian premises is not a legal problem. It is a catechetical one. The catechism that produced the Western refusal to sacrifice the one for the many was Christian. The substitutes on offer—humanism, effective altruism, technocratic liberalism—are not catechisms. They are denominational variations on the position Caiaphas took in the council. They will produce more Cole Allens. They cannot help producing them. The broader culture still benefits from the Christian inheritance while forgetting its source. Whether it recognizes what it is losing in time to recover it is the open question of our generation. All signs derived from the Hilton on Saturday night were discouraging.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

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

In 2012, Xi Jinping promoted the idea of a “new era of great power relations,” a term that had been introduced in China decades earlier, but which took on new meaning given China’s remarkable economic development. It was, early on, a sort of invitation to then U.S. president Barack Obama and a signal of Chinese newfound confidence as a leader in a global order to which it hoped to contribute not only materially but in terms of values and norms. President Obama demurred and his successor, Donald Trump, gave a clearer response in his 2017 National Security Strategy, which spoke of a new era of great power competition. Even so, for several years Xi Jinping promoted the concept of a “new era of great power relations,” and it was dissected and evaluated at length by Chinese scholars and sinologists. In the end, he adjusted to a “new era of international politics.”

In a forthcoming essay, Chen Gang and I explore why Xi Jinping was unable to persuade audiences, domestic and international, to endorse the idea of a “new era of great power relations.” In a striking contrast, U.S. president Donald Trump, with little interest in conceptual elaboration, generated a seemingly endless discussion of how he has brought about changes in the international system, and, despite severe criticism, many political leaders have proven themselves willing to engage with the shifts he has introduced, such as the global tariff-cum-bilateral negotiation scheme he launched without warning in April 2025.

This essay offers a preliminary analysis of the foreign policy of the second Trump administration. While there is so much to address, as with his earlier administration, the current administration has moved quickly and delivered constant rhetorical displays to attract attention. But this mandate features much bolder and more definitive policy moves, as well as a more confident and less leaky administration, which largely acts first and explains later. For reasons of space, I hoped to limit the discussion to the Western Hemisphere, the area identified by the National Security Strategy (NSS) of December 2025 and the National Defense Strategy (NDS) of January 2026 as the most important region for U.S. security. Yet the ongoing military activities in Iran make such a restriction impossible.

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Since returning to the presidency in January 2025, Donald Trump publicly considered making Canada the 51st state, suggested possible military tactics to control Greenland, and insisted on U.S. control of the Panama Canal. The United States has deployed its military forces to blow up boats in the Caribbean alleged to be engaged in drug-trafficking, has captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, and has exerted pressure on regional governments to prevent oil shipments to Cuba. In addition to raising tariffs on the entire world, Trump raised additional tariffs in response to actions taken by presidents (Colombian president Gustavo Petro) or supreme courts (in Brazil), endorsed presidential candidates (Honduras), and pushed an IMF support loan to help presidents regarded as fellow travelers (Argentina).

The above represents a considerable change in the scope and intensity of U.S. foreign policy activity in the Western Hemisphere. Many analysts have criticized the Trump administration for pursuing a so-called “sphere of influence” policy, which they see represented in U.S. government efforts to dominate the Western Hemisphere and expressions of interest in withdrawal from other regions (Western Europe, the Middle East, East Asia). Critics worry not only about abandoning allies—such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea—but also about ceding legitimacy to aggressive action by China, Russia, and others in their perceived respective “spheres of influence.”

While Trump’s policies may have such consequences, these are certainly not their goals. Critics confuse “backyard” and “sphere of influence.” A great power may be concerned about activities, including those sponsored by other great powers, in its backyard. But in order for a great power to have a sphere of influence, that sphere must be recognized by other great powers as a geopolitical fact. The Trump administration recognizes only one sphere of influence, that of the United States. It may recognize the security concerns of Russia or China (or Turkey, etc.), but it also sells weapons to neighbors and actively pursues freedom of navigation activities in regions critical to the security of other great powers. The United States is not alone in not recognizing a Chinese or Russian sphere of influence. Many countries, including China, operate in Russia’s “near abroad,” and there is considerable diversity of geopolitical alignment amongst countries bordering and proximate to China. So Trump 2.0 policies do not really seem to be what analysts identify (or fear) as a sphere of influence foreign policy.

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That said, the Trump administration expressly aims to recalibrate relations with its allies, with the latter taking more of a leading role in local/regional security concerns and the United States operating as a second level of defense. This is most visible in the U.S. plan for South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to play more of a role in security within the First Island Chain and the United States more involved in the Second Island Chain. There are risks with such a recalibration, but this is not—at least in terms of strategy—conceding or legitimating spheres of influence.

The criticism of the Trump administration pursuing a sphere of influence foreign policy is part of a broader conceptualization of policies that find parallels in the nineteenth century, especially in the form of great power competition. The Trump administration would no doubt accept this characterization, as it sees foreign policy in realist terms, with states being most prudent when they pursue national interest according to their limited capabilities. More tellingly, the National Security Strategy refers often and positively to the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, and proposes the development of a “Trump Corollary” (which news agencies have dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine”). This hemispheric strategy has been to pressure governments to reduce exposure to Russia, China, and Iran, and conceive new collective efforts in areas of security and migration (primarily or, at least, initially). The various activities mentioned earlier are representative of largely unilateral efforts to these ends, while the Shield of the Americas (or the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition), announced in March 2026, is a multilateral, ongoing cooperative effort.

While there are visible analogs between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. policy in Latin America and the current Trump administration strategy in the Western Hemisphere, the most directly resonant comparison is in tactics. That is, moving and then parking an armada in the Caribbean (or other seas) and demanding significant foreign policy concessions seem ripped from history textbook discussions of gunboat diplomacy. That practice, a tactic used first by European countries and then the United States and Japan, involved showing potential naval power outside a port in order to intimidate a polity considered less militarily capable into backing down on a particular case or range of policies. If the presence of the vessels was insufficient, the port might be shelled. Yet, for the most part, gunboat diplomacy was seen as a diplomatic tactic—coercive, but short of war.

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With the standardization of international law, the collapse of colonialism, the Cold War re-spatialization of politics, and the politics of decolonization, gunboat diplomacy became increasingly viewed as illegitimate and inefficient. The Trump administration’s redeployment of a vast number of naval vessels to the Caribbean to pressure South American governments and the later destruction of boats alleged to be drug trafficking fit within norms and tactics of an earlier era of intense great power competition. The pressure campaign on Cuba, with the aim of producing a change in policy and leadership, if not in regime, follows a similar script. The rendition of Maduro seems to be gunboat diplomacy 2.0. In this case, the naval presence in the Caribbean followed and juxtaposed diplomacy, which was the case in earlier gunboat diplomacy. But the success of the rendition was largely due to an intelligence operation that predated the arrival of the boats. This intelligence and diplomacy, then showing the flag with naval presence, is characteristic of the U.S. war with Iran.

If there are tactical similarities between U.S. operations in Venezuela and Iran, there are nevertheless very important strategic differences. The NSS and NDS make clear that U.S. foreign policy should be narrowly focused on national interest, which means that the United States should prioritize the Western Hemisphere and East Asia, deprioritize the Middle East and Western Europe, practice realism and not worry about types of regimes outside of the Americas and Europe, and avoid “regime change wars.” Up until the February 28 opening of hostilities with Iran, U.S. foreign policy was rather consistent. Pressure was placed on European and East Asian allies for them to ramp up military spending and to invest more in U.S. industry. The Russia-Ukraine war was seen as a European conflict where the United States would increase its role as mediator and play a less automatic role as patron. Critics worried that Trump’s effort to get a deal from China might reduce military sales to Taiwan. In the Middle East, Trump endorsed former ISIS member turned nationalist Syrian president Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who won over the United States in a November 2025 visit, perhaps due to his play on the basketball court with U.S. military officials. Trump also was in the process of reengaging Iran in what seemed to many to be a return to the type of nuclear deal from which he walked away in 2018. Indeed, the military strikes occurred while Oman-led negotiations were allegedly progressing.

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Without making a clear case for why the attack on Iran was necessary, Trump has issued a series of demands, culminating in his call for “regime change” and “unconditional surrender,” as well as his threat that “a whole civilization” might “die.” Rather than working with regimes from regions outside of the Western Hemisphere and Europe that are oriented by distinct values, Trump has called upon the Iranian people to democratize their regime. The priority the NSS and NDS give to East Asian security seems challenged as Trump mentioned sending THAAD missiles from South Korea to the Middle East to replenish missiles spent responding to Iranian counterattacks (this has yet to be verified). Moreover, Iran has proven itself more resilient than perhaps Trump imagined. The decapitation of many leaders, which followed earlier rounds of decapitation, has led to neither the emergence of a “Delcy-Rodriguez figure” (a term that we who study Latin America would never have conceived prior to this January), nor a regime collapse, nor a generalized popular rebellion. Rather, Iranian missile strikes have continued, and, most importantly, Iran has shown that in choking off the Strait of Hormuz, it can hit the United States, indirectly, at the gas pump and squeeze U.S. allies who were uninvolved in the planning and decision-making of the U.S. military action but who bear much of the costs.

So why did President Trump authorize the military operation in Iran? His concern about Iran predates his first term in office, yet it is the authorization of the strikes and the deviation from the NSS/NDS strategy that are most surprising. It is likely that the mass protests and government repression convinced him that the regime was unpopular. The rapid slide of the Iran’s rial and the very widely reported drought in Iran, as well as the country’s foundering since Israel’s responses to the October 7 Hamas attacks, suggested that the government was vulnerable. In such a scenario, a very quick, kinetic attack, combined with decapitation, could allow for rapid escalation and then de-escalation with a more pliant Iran. The success of the operation in Venezuela and the pressure campaign in Cuba made it very possible that Trump could reverse the course of the Venezuelan government and possibly bring policy, if not regime change, in Cuba, something that has dogged U.S. presidents for six decades. The opportunity to do the same in Iran, a hostile regime for close to five decades, may have been too difficult to pass up, even if the Trump administration needed to break many of its own rules and principles to do so.

It is too soon to know what the consequences of this military engagement in the Middle East will be, but important questions remain. Is the attack a one-off deviation, or is it an extension of the principles of dominating the Western Hemisphere to a broader theater—perhaps bolstered because of the perceived success of Western Hemisphere operations and relatively muted responses from others—that there is only one, global sphere of influence, and that sphere is America’s? Either question raises further questions. Recent U.S. presidents have tried to respond to a global order in which China and the United States have, relative to twenty years ago, greater and lesser military and economic capabilities, respectively. These presidents have differed in terms of how they have leveraged (and treated) allies, engaged in global trade regimes and international organizations, and deployed military force, but all have tried to respond to a shifting global order as both leader and participant within that order. Trump’s Western Hemisphere policies and strategies prior to the war with Iran offered a consistent, if controversial, approach that seemed to deliberately direct U.S. and global order during an inflection point toward a new nomos. It is harder to evaluate his overall foreign policy strategy since the decision to attack Iran, and harder still given Iran’s resistance and the global consequences. What seems clear is that considerations of great power competition have moved from discussions among security officials to headline-leading speeches of heads of state across the world.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues • China Initiative

Tony Spanakos is Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. He has been a Fulbright Scholar (2002 Brazil, 2008 Venezuela) and visiting researcher at the East Asia Institute (Singapore 2009, 2017). He is co-editor of Reforming Brazil (Lexington), Conceptualising Comparative Politics (Routledge), and “The Legacy of Hugo Chavez,” a special issue of Latin American Perspectives. His work examines questions in the areas of democratization, the use of concepts, international relations, and political theory, giving particular attention to Latin America, East Asia, and U.S. relations with these regions.

I.

The confrontation between Pope Leo XIV and President Donald Trump over the American-Israeli war with Iran has generated considerable heat and rather less light. Trump called the first American pope weak and terrible for foreign policy. Leo responded that he had no fear of the Trump administration and would continue to preach the Gospel. The cycle looks like a political spat. In truth, it surfaces an ancient disagreement in Christian thought about faith and the use of force, a question the tradition has never fully resolved and that Leo has now restated at volume without reckoning with its implications.

Both figures deserve more charity than the exchange has produced. Trump’s instinct that a civilization under existential threat from a nuclear-armed adversary has the right and duty to defend itself is not theologically illiterate. It is the settled position of the Catholic Church whose leader is criticizing him, and in this exchange the president finds himself, improbably, its defender. Leo’s instinct that invoking divine blessing on the destruction of an entire people is politically reckless and spiritually dangerous is also not wrong. The positions become incompatible only when Leo reaches for language more absolute than the tradition warrants and Trump for divine endorsement more confident than any statesman should claim.

II.

Leo’s recent statements have followed an unfortunate arc. On Palm Sunday he said that Jesus “is the king of peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” adding that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war but rejects them.” On social media he wrote that “God does not bless any conflict” and that no disciple of Christ “is ever on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” He supported these claims with a citation from Isaiah 1:15, in which God tells Israel he will not listen to their prayers because their hands are full of blood.

These statements deserve a more careful reading than the political exchange has given them. The claim that God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war is one I cannot find any pacifist tradition actually defending. Taken literally, it nullifies the prayers of every Christian soldier who ever prayed for God’s protection, and those of every priest who ever ministered to a dying soldier making his peace with God. To advance it as papal teaching is to claim that the prayers of every Catholic sailor at Lepanto, every Union chaplain at Gettysburg, every G.I. and Tommy kneeling before Normandy, and Billy Graham across half a century with American presidents, went unheard in heaven. It contradicts the pastoral practice of the Church in every war through which it has ministered.

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The Isaiah citation deserves closer attention than it has received. The prophetic critique in Isaiah 1 is directed not at war but at a people who combined ritual observance with social injustice, bringing sacrifices to the temple while oppressing the poor and the widow. “Your hands are full of blood” is a charge of moral hypocrisy against a religious establishment, not a categorical indictment of military force. The same tradition that produced Isaiah also produced Joshua’s campaigns and the books of Maccabees, which sit inside the Catholic canon precisely because the Church has never read scripture against itself in this way. One suspects the verse was originally set aside for a different quarrel, perhaps a homily condemning immigration enforcement, and reached for without anyone checking.

“No one can use Christ to justify war” is not an exegetical argument. It is a doctrinal claim, and it stands in direct contradiction to the settled teaching of the Catholic Church over which Leo presides.

III.

The just war tradition is not a compromise between Christian ethics and political necessity. It is the product of taking the moral stakes of violence seriously enough to specify, with legal precision, the conditions under which violence is nonetheless permitted. Augustine argued that love of neighbor could require the use of force. Aquinas systematized the framework around legitimate authority, just cause, and right intention. The Salamanca School (Vitoria, Suárez) translated it into the jus gentium that founded modern international law, and Grotius carried the same structure into the Protestant and secular world.

Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes preserved it while emphasizing proportionality. The Catechism codifies it at paragraphs 2307 through 2317, and those paragraphs reward a closer reading than Leo’s homilies have invited.

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The Catechism urges prayer for peace, and then states that “governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.” The right is not grudgingly tolerated; it “cannot be denied.” Paragraph 2309 sets out the four jus ad bellum criteria (grave and lasting damage, last resort, serious prospects of success, proportionality) and expressly reserves their evaluation to “the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good,” that is, to statesmen, not to bishops and not to the pope. That reservation is a remarkable concession in a document not otherwise famous for reticence about papal authority, and one Leo appears to have forgotten or to be purposely flouting. Paragraph 2310 teaches that soldiers who carry out their duty honorably are “servants of the security and freedom of nations” who “truly contribute to the common good.” This is not the language of an institution that believes God refuses to hear warriors’ prayers. Paragraphs 2312 through 2314 set out the jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality, largely tracking the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law. Paragraph 2316 authorizes regulation of the arms trade but assumes, without embarrassment, a legitimate arms industry. Paragraph 2317 locates the roots of war in “injustice, excessive economic or social inequalities, envy, distrust, and pride,” a diagnosis Leo has in fact echoed. Nearly every one of the preceding paragraphs, however, contradicts something he has said in the past three weeks.

Jean Bethke Elshtain pressed the Augustinian point with force in Just War Against Terror: the love commandment does not merely permit but can require the protection of the innocent through force. Elshtain, writing as a Lutheran political theorist deeply engaged with the Catholic tradition and cited widely in international law scholarship, was no enthusiast of American power. She saw clearly that a pacifism unwilling to confront the reality of aggression does not end injustice but reassigns its victims. That argument is not easily answered by papal fiat.

Aquinas is the deeper problem. Leo quoted him with approval at the Vatican Tribunal just weeks before the Iran war escalated. The natural law framework he invoked there leads directly to conclusions about just war Leo is not drawing. A prince who fails to use the sword to protect his people from grave injustice fails in his duty. Having dragged the Angelic Doctor out of the attic for natural law, Leo may come to regret that Aquinas has a great deal more to say.

IV.

There is a pacifist strand in Christian history, and the Christians who have held it with full consistency deserve genuine respect. The Anabaptist tradition, represented today by the Mennonites and the Amish, holds categorically that Christian discipleship excludes participation in war or in any form of violence. Within Catholicism the purest twentieth-century expression was the Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day, whose political commitments sat well to the left of the Church’s magisterium.

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The witness of the consistent pacifists is not easily dismissed. Their refusal of the sword stands as a rebuke to Christians who reach for coercive means too quickly. But a rebuke is not a doctrine, and a personal witness is not a magisterium. What distinguishes the Mennonites from Leo’s position is that they have accepted the cost of their conviction. They do not run states. They refuse to serve in the military and accept the legal consequences of that refusal. They do not accept the protection of armed guards.

The Catholic Church is not a Mennonite community. Catholic men serve in the military in every country where Catholics live, and the Church supplies chaplains to attend to their spiritual needs. Leo both presides over a sovereign state and is protected by the Swiss Guard, an elite commando squad with modern weaponry hidden beneath their flamboyant costumes, charged with using lethal force to defend the pope. The pope who proclaims that no disciple of Christ is ever on the side of those “who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs” has armed men standing outside his bedroom door.

A liberal Catholic reader will object that the historical argument proves too much, since post-conciliar popes have contradicted immemorial teaching on a number of matters, from religious liberty and usury to, in Francis’s case, capital punishment. Benedict XVI distinguished a hermeneutic of continuity from a hermeneutic of rupture, favoring continuity; Francis preferred rupture. But even rupture requires the formal work of doctrinal development. Francis changed the Catechism text on capital punishment, published his reasoning, and left a paper trail. Leo so far has issued only homilies and social media posts. His soon-to-be-published first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is dedicated not to questions of war and peace but to the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence. If Leo intends to repudiate the Catechism’s just war doctrine, the honest and legally coherent path is to say so and defend the change through the ordinary magisterium. Homilies, however heartfelt, are not development of doctrine.

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V.

The Protestant and Orthodox traditions offer useful triangulation. Luther’s two-kingdoms theology sidesteps the question of whether God condones violence by dividing God’s reign into two realms: the spiritual, governed through the Gospel and grace, and the temporal, governed through law and the sword. A Christian soldier acts as an agent of the temporal order, not as a disciple of the Sermon on the Mount. The kingdoms must not be collapsed. A commander who claims God’s specific blessing on his campaign makes the same category error as the categorical pacifist, from the opposite direction, by baptizing coercive power with transcendent authority it does not possess.

Eastern Orthodoxy occupies a distinct and underappreciated position. It has no formal just war doctrine, nor is it pacifist. What it has is closer to “justifiable but never truly just” war: violence may be permitted as a tragic necessity but is never celebrated. Canon 13 of St. Basil the Great counsels that soldiers who kill in war, even legitimate war, be excluded from communion for three years as a penitential discipline. The canon was never universally enforced, but the claim is clear: killing, even when permitted, incurs a spiritual cost requiring cleansing. The Russian Orthodox Church under Patriarch Kirill has in recent years done precisely what the tradition warns against, blessing Russian military action in Ukraine and framing it as civilizational warfare. The damage to Russian Orthodoxy illustrates what happens when “justifiable but not just” collapses into crusade theology. It should give pause to anyone who reaches too quickly for divine endorsement, including a pope who reaches in the opposite direction too quickly for divine prohibition.

VI.

Carl Schmitt observed that politics cannot be reduced to moral categories because it rests on a friend-enemy distinction that universal moral claims do not dissolve but merely relocate. A state that claims to fight not an enemy but a criminal, not a war but a crusade, has not transcended the political; it has moralized it. Leo’s version runs formally in the opposite direction and practically in the same one.

When Leo says no disciple of Christ can be on the side of those who “once wielded the sword and today drop bombs,” the language is universal, but the application has been conspicuously one-sided. The Islamic Republic of Iran has waged proxy war against the West since 1979. It arms and directs Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. Its mining of the Strait of Hormuz inflicts far greater harm on the developing world’s poor, those the Church rightly cares about, than on Western militaries. It has pursued a nuclear weapons capability defying the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Leo has not addressed any of this with comparable intensity. He has reserved his categorical moral language for the American and Israeli response.

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This is the familiar pattern of the Cold War peace movements. Campaigns like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament framed themselves as bilateral calls for disarmament, but the practical effect ran one way: mass rallies in London and Bonn, silence in Moscow, and pressure for Western unilateralism that would have left the Warsaw Pact’s nuclear superiority undisturbed. Formal universalism paired with selective application is partisanship laundered through transcendent language. Schmitt saw this pattern clearly a century ago, and it is what Leo, intentionally or not, has reproduced.

VII.

The second observation is about asymmetry. Christianity is the only major world tradition in which categorical nonviolence has emerged as a serious internal option. Islam has its own well-developed jurisprudence of war and peace, with meaningful constraints on the conduct of warfare, though it draws different rules for conflicts among Muslims and with non-Muslims, and has produced no historic peace church along Mennonite or Quaker lines. The fourteen centuries of encounter between Christianity and Islam have been, in significant part, a military encounter. Catholic Europe fought off successive Islamic incursions at Tours under Charles Martel, at Lepanto, and at the gates of Vienna, and survived as Catholic because it fought. Eastern Europe, pressed in turn by Islamic and later Soviet power, did not fare as well. A Church committed to categorical pacifism in such a world would face a situation history has rarely resolved in the pacifist’s favor. Leo’s language, taken seriously, would require Catholics to accept that asymmetry as a condition of discipleship, and nothing he has said suggests he has thought through what that would mean for the Church he leads or for Western civilization.

The pacifists may still be right. The Mennonites who survived Soviet collectivization and Nazi occupation without arms are a witness with which the tradition must reckon. Their wager on divine protection is not irrational, but such protection is miraculous, and ordering a Church around the expectation of miracles is a presumption the natural law tradition has consistently warned against. If the pacifists are right, we will need miracles, and no magisterium can bind Catholics to that wager by homily.

The most honest thing Leo could say would not be that God never blesses conflict. It would be closer to this: the Church has lived in the tension between Gospel and sword since Constantine; the tradition has developed a precise legal grammar, preserved in the Catechism and in centuries of canon and international law, for acknowledging that tension; and any revision of that grammar must be done in the forms the tradition recognizes, through encyclical and council, not through homily and social media. Until then, paragraphs 2307 through 2317 remain the teaching of the Church, and the pope who departs from them in practice while leaving the text in place departs from his own magisterium.

Topics: Reflections & Dialogues

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.