“The war on sovereignty.”

Iran is now a front-line state.

Made in America. Israeli jets en route to Iran, 13 June 2025. (I.D.F.)

29 JUNE—No, not yet by a long way. There is no calculating as of now the extravagant costs of the Israeli–American bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic—which is certain to resume at some point despite the rickety ceasefire now in place. We think of the fatalities of these wanton assaults, truth being ever war’s first casualty. Apart from the deaths of innocents, there are the risks of political chaos, the destruction of an economy, the damage to productive capacities, the social dislocations, the ruined dreams of countless Iranians who had been preparing to contribute one or another way to the human cause.

The list goes on and we may never be able to complete it—certainly not since the Air Force’s B–2 bombers have flown alongside Israeli jets, so making the United States directly a party to these daily acts of barbarity.

But we must not omit the principle of national sovereignty as we weigh the damage of what we now witness. An American-led war on sovereignty has blighted the community of nations for many decades. Many of us know this, and those who missed this elephant in the living room should now face it squarely. In my view the United States and Israel just opened a decisive front in this long-running combat. Let us not leave so extreme and momentous a breach off our list.

As the Zionist state extends its illegal aggressions further into West Asia—with some measure of American support at every stage—the fundamental implications of this its 21–month spree of criminality and terror are bitterly plain. The Israeli–American operation against Iran—and it seems to me by no means over—confirms an era of lawlessness and disorder such as humanity has not known for centuries. It is time, I mean to say, to consider in a world-historical context the conduct of the Zionist state and its American sponsor as they abuse the territorial integrity of another West Asian nation, possibly on the way to another “regime change”—this quite openly now.

It has been evident for some time—my date for this point of departure is 11 September 2001—that “the international rules-based order” is a preposterous misnomer for a long regime of chaos, violence, and at times near-anarchy. I think of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of that year, the invasion of Iraq two years later, the bombing of Libya eight years after that, the Central Intelligence Agency’s long, covert operation to topple the Assad regime in Syria, Israel’s incessant attacks against Iran, covert and overt, and now the genocide in Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon, the grinding, barely visible assaults on Venezuela and Nicaragua. If Iran is a front-line state in the war against sovereignty, so should we think of these latter.

Disorder, then, is nothing new. The extreme degree of disorder with which we live, to make this point another way, will have endured 24 years this autumn.

One could cast the U.S.–Israeli aerial invasion of Iran as another page in this book. As an exercise of raw power in the name of raw power it is comparable with many others that preceded it—another unrestrained, uninhibited contravention of international law and all norms associated with it. Its perpetrators make no apology for themselves, just as in the past. And there appears to be no prospect of an effective multilateral censure or intervention in the cause of global justice.

But this reading would be to miss the larger significance of what transpires in West Asia daily. Israel and the United States, have embarked—carelessly, thoughtlessly but also strategically—on an adventure that cannot end well for them and stands to harm many others aside from the Iranians. Straight off the top, the White House and the Pentagon continue to repeat President Trump’s rash, impulsive declaration immediately after the B–2s flew that Iran’s nuclear programs have been “completely and totally obliterated.” But, given this a quite obviously untrue, the risk of future attacks, and so the continued risk of nuclear contamination, remains.

Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned of this in a statement to the U.N. Security Council the very day the bombs fell. Attacking of Iran’s nuclear research and development sites, he said, would risk releasing catastrophic levels of radioactivity that would require mass evacuations on both sides of the Persian Gulf. Grossi singled out the Bushehr nuclear power plant on Iran’s gulf coast. The plant still stands, and it is hardly the only survivor of the Israeli–U.S. onslaught.

Iran is not the outcome of lines drawn on maps a century ago in the manner of Sykes and Picot. It is an old civilization with a singularly strong sense of national identity—a point apparently lost in Tel Aviv and Washington. It will not tip over or disintegrate as Iraq did after the 2003 invasion, or as Syria, crippled by years of covert Central Intelligence Agency operations, did late last year. Iran has made it clear severally since the bombs fell, and as anyone who knows the country and its people would have anticipated, that it will defend its sovereignty against any power that challenges it; its right to run nuclear programs has long stood as a totemic signifier of this determination.