Politics as Usual

Mary Turfah writes on Iran.

By Mary TurfahJune 25, 2025

• Politics

AFTER THE UNITED STATES attacked Iran directly on Saturday, June 21, leaders across the West urged calm. The president of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, shared this series of phrases in a single post on X:

Iran must never acquire the bomb. 
With tensions in the Middle East at a new peak, stability must be the priority. 
And respect for international law is critical. 
Now is the moment for Iran to engage in a credible diplomatic solution.
The negotiating table is the only place to end this crisis.

Where to begin? “Iran must never acquire the bomb” has the same effect as “Israel has the right to defend itself.” (They are, in fact, derived from the same idea.) Iran wasn’t—at least at the time of the most recent Israeli attack against it—trying to acquire nuclear weapons, although you wouldn’t know this from the media blitz that’s surrounded the attack. And who is the European Union, among whose member states a few are in possession of nuclear weapons, to tell a sovereign country what it should and shouldn’t do?

We learned last week that Israel had carried out a “preemptive strike” against Iran. Yes, Israel did attack first. But if you suspend time and prescribe—without material evidence and based on cultivated racism—a set of intentions, this doesn’t have to be true. Iran is a threat to peace, by which we mean American hegemony in the region. Iran: bad. Israel: good. Or, at best, a flattening: many bad actors. A preemptive strike requires that the attacker already perceives a threat, already recognizes itself as the victim. Israel certainly does. 

A little over a week after Israel preemptively struck Iran, it was clear things weren’t going so well for Israel. The intelligence gathering and weapons deliveries and air protection provided by the United States weren’t enough. And so the United States formally stepped in. “U.S. Enters War with Iran” ran the headline in The New York Times. “Enters” is an interesting choice. When Donald Trump was asked, following Israel’s initial attacks on Iran on Friday, June 13, if he knew about them, he’d scoffed. The United States had used the negotiations to provide cover for Israel, to maximize the strikes’ success. 

On Saturday night, after the US dropped their own bombs on Iran, the president declared in a post on Truth Social: mission accomplished. He called for PEACE in all caps and invited Iran back to the negotiating table. This was the “peace” he’d promised as part of his campaign, the “peace through strength” Netanyahu occasionally tweets about, a regional stability based on total domination, absolute sovereignty concentrated into the hands of a single actor—which isn’t sovereignty at all.

To call for peace after an act of aggression is to endorse the aggression. It’s to say that one party gets to act, and the other has to take it. This is the basic logic of supremacy. Reading statements like von der Leyen’s, I find myself wondering if these people believe themselves, or if they say these things to make the rest of us feel like we’re going crazy, to displace the conversation. Either way, they have that effect. Tensions. Crisis. Respect for international law. The negotiating table. We might recall that this round of aggression started with Iran at the negotiating table, seated across from a constituency that represents not our world’s collective interest but that of a single country. Iran was engaging in (indirect) talks with the United States regarding its right—granted to it under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons—to enrich uranium, in exchange for the United States entertaining the possibility of lifting unilateral (and illegal) sanctions meant to strangle Iran’s economy, when Israel attacked Iran. 

It takes a certain audacity to invoke international law while one is endorsing a thoroughly documented genocide. It is the confidence of the side by whom the rules are made, rather than to whom they apply. On June 23, 2025, French president Emmanuel Macron issued a statement: “There is no legality in these strikes, even if France supports the objective of preventing Iran from getting the nuclear bomb.” 

After Saturday’s strikes, American media took a familiar inward turn, debating whether Trump would be able to achieve what he was after. Many noted the unpopularity of this war compared to George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq (a campaign of aggression also justified by allegations that the targeted country possessed weapons of mass destruction). According to polls, a majority of Americans don’t want a war with Iran, although a majority still thinks Iran poses a “threat” to the United States. To echo Macron’s sentiment, we’re against this, but— 

In mainstream news coverage, I didn’t see much concern over the possibility of fallout from the attack, including exposure to radiation that could impact the lives of millions of people. That whether the United States should bomb nuclear reactors was even a conversation shows the point we’ve reached when it comes to disregarding the lives of other people. Although maybe this isn’t true—maybe we’ve been here for a while. The United States is the only country to have dropped a nuclear bomb on a civilian population. (Not once but twice.) And despite the threat to humanity the United States has proven itself to be, it still has nuclear weapons, because it makes the rules. 

I have seen people write, since Israel launched its attacks, “No war with Iran!” We need to be honest about the consequences of our actions: the United States has been at war with Iran since it implemented sanctions intended to cripple Iran’s economy after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, since the US strong-armed multiple European countries into not providing Iran with enriched uranium (Iran hadn’t initially intended to enrich its own) in the 1980s, since it weaponized the International Atomic Energy Agency in the 2000s. The United States calls these “maximum pressure” campaigns. The United States has surrounded Iran with American military bases located in supposedly sovereign countries. It’s often from these bases—hosted by Arab countries that issue empty words condemning the genocide against Gaza—that Israeli military needs are met. It’s from these bases that the invasions and occupations of neighboring countries in the region are made possible.

I’ve heard people say that we’re fighting Israel’s war. It’s convenient to think like this. The idea of a bumbling empire is self-protective: it allows us a moral off-ramp, a path to redeemability as Israeli aggression gets less palatable. Israel is a symptom of a mindset, not a cause. That mindset has a lot of names—colonial domination, Zionism, imperialism, supremacy—depending on how we come at it, each fueled by an arrogance so big yet so fragile that its viability depends on an almost total untethering from every aspect of reality except where the application of force is concerned. If we stopped funding genocide, would our dozens of military bases in the Middle East disappear? Would they somehow become better-intentioned? 

American innocence relies on an incoherent politics, an often willful misunderstanding of this country’s role in the world and its “special relationship” with Israel. The United States isn’t being dragged anywhere—least of all by its glorified military base. The United States doesn’t act against its interests for Israel’s sake; it doesn’t stumble into quagmires and mistakes. That it often operates against the preferences of its citizenry inside and outside its borders is a reflection not of the hold a lobby has on our political class, but something simpler: that where the interests of capital are concerned, this isn’t a democracy. We don’t live in a country that represents us, not where it concerns the lives of other people—and, more and more often, not even where it concerns our own—because we don’t care enough that it doesn’t. War is an industry. It sustains this country. We are sustained by mass death.

Israel commits atrocities, and the media frets about blowback. The concern isn’t the action, only whether it will have consequences. Israel has “targeted” Iranian scientists, nuclear and otherwise, for decades. Under international law, these are civilians. The United States has almost certainly helped Israel with gathering intelligence for these operations (both directly and indirectly, since Israel, a settler colony, is subsidized by the US). Israeli attacks are celebrated in the American media for their audacity and their “precision”—like it’s a game, and the United States and Israel are on one team, hyping each other up. At the highest levels of government, that “special relationship” isn’t one between two countries, but an empire—America—and those expanding its Eastern frontier, ensuring the reach of its global regime. Today, the United States is making decisions that, I think and hope, signal the decline of American empire in the region. And the US is steering its own sinking ship.

I learned that the United States had decided to bomb Iran while I was on call at the hospital, after seeing a woman who’d had a brick smashed into her face, once, and before seeing a man who’d had not-clear-what smashed into his so many times that his brain had bled and herniated. My initial, pathetic task was to stitch a laceration on his forehead. A Band-Aid solution, if you will. I want to say the whole thing feels like a metaphor. But these are real people, here as there, and turning what they’re facing into vessels to help me understand my world obscures the fact that I’m in theirs too. It keeps me from having to think about how I exist in relation to them—in other words: politics. 

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Featured image: Photo from “President Donald Trump and his national security team meet in the Situation Room of the White House,” June 21, 2025. CC0, whitehouse.gov. Accessed June 23, 2025. Image has been edited and cropped.