When US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth spoke of causing “death and destruction from the sky all day long” in Iran, it was not simply an aggressive summons to havoc or an apocalyptic prophecy. Intentionally or not, it was a reminder of the utter global moral void of this moment.
All wars are terrible. But this Israel-US-Iran war, perhaps more than most, seems to have been unleashed with the sole objective of perpetuating its own fury. This war exists to achieve no aim. It is not a war to conquer or liberate. Even granting it the purpose of weakening Iran is granting it too much dignity. Its real aim is simply the continuation of its own violence. The war is about performance: An expression of power rather than an instrument for rational purposes. If it has a purpose, it is only this: To test the next generation of technology — missiles, AI, targeting systems, cyber warfare.
That is why the questions we are asking about this war miss the point. Did we learn the lessons of Iraq? Was there a plan for the day after? Why does the stated objective keep shifting: Is it denuclearisation, regime change, or the break-up of Iran? What can air power alone achieve? Did you anticipate that Iran would climb the escalatory ladder and try to impose severe economic costs on its neighbours?
These questions presume that the war has coherent purposes. But the modus operandi of the Trump administration has been the nihilistic display of power and spectacle, shifting from one theatre to another. It will break every international law imaginable and flout hard-won precedents: Assassinating heads of state, sinking defenceless ships returning from goodwill missions without warning. The list will go on. The response will simply be the nihilist’s version of that immortal line: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
The overweening nihilism of American and Israeli military power — we will strike anywhere and anytime with impunity —has met its counterpart in the nihilism of desperation embodied by the Iranian regime. The US and Iran have, to put it mildly, a complicated history. Iran became vulnerable in the way countries often do when they become the object of excessive American attention. It responded by cultivating proxies, pursuing a nuclear programme, and presenting itself as an ideological vanguard. The regime was politically odious. But it also converted its defensiveness and insecurity into a nihilism of its own. In retrospect, what is striking about Iran’s strategy of survival is that it, too, failed to calibrate ends and means. After Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel, Iran turned out to be a power with all bark and little bite; for all its sound and fury, a country with a simulacrum of defence. Iran, it appears, was the perfect target, not because it posed an imminent threat, but because it was incapable of posing much of one at all. Its performative bluff had long been called out. The wars of power that the US wished to wage did not need a reason. They only needed a pretext. Iran simply provided it. Iran has now responded, in a final act of desperation, by trying to raise the costs of war by drawing the rest of the world into the conflict. It has embraced the desperate version of “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
And then there is the rest of the world, with its own paralytic version of the same refrain. The moral stunting of the current crop of world leaders is astonishing. Watching Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz exude confusion about their stand on the war is like watching children trip over themselves because their shoelaces have been tied together. The Gulf monarchies are hardly better. Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and Mohammed bin Zayed in the UAE, after years of senseless proxy wars from Sudan to Yemen, have left their regimes ideologically hollow. Their mixture of ingratiating themselves with the West, while clamping down on their own civil societies since the Arab Spring, has produced leaders who no longer know what they stand for.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi does no better. This war has revealed the degree to which India has become a supplicant to American demands. If one believes that Modi’s embrace of Netanyahu or India’s tongue-tied silence has anything to do with protecting the Indian diaspora in the Gulf, one is simply in denial about the vacuous reorientation of India’s foreign policy. China, meanwhile, appears paralysed. Part of this may be quiet satisfaction at watching the US inflict another wound upon itself. But more likely, it reflects a deeper limitation: For all its power in a bilateral contest with the US, China still cannot lead an international coalition for peace, or against atrocity. The easiest adaptive preference becomes the same refrain: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
In the US, there is resistance within the Democratic Party. But it takes the easy refuge of procedural virtue, and debates over Congress’s war powers. Perhaps the young have been chastened by the repressive powers of the state we saw deployed against protests last year. We have all devised new strategies of moral evasion.
The real obscenity of this moment is not simply the war itself; it is the normalisation of a world in which war has become performance. But if the great powers have chosen nihilism, the rest of the world still has a choice. The task now is not to take sides in this theatre of destruction, but to refuse the premise that the will to violence must dictate the terms of politics. What is required is states willing to say that aimless wars waged as spectacle, fought to test technologies, will not be legitimised by silence. Or else the chorus of this dying civilisation will be: “Frankly, my dear, we did not give a damn.”
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
