The Banditry of a Declining Empire
By Tom Somah
History is full of the desperate convulsions of declining empires. As their influence fades, they become more obsessive in their attempt to preserve a status quo that keeps them unrivalled in the plunder of other nations' resources, sovereign wealth and human dignity.
These are powers that have grown morally bankrupt. Contemptuous of domestic accountability and international law, they act as though they are answerable to no one. They are restrained by nothing. Ashamed of nothing.
The Iran Farce
The claim that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon and poses an existential threat to the West has become one of the most convenient myths in modern foreign policy. It is repeated through the corridors of power with the solemnity of truth by the same political and media establishments that have turned suspicion, exaggeration and fear into instruments of policy.
We have heard this refrain before. It was sung over Iraq with the same grave faces, the same classified dossiers, and the same theatrical urgency. What followed was not liberation. It was deliberate destruction. A civilisation was dismembered. A nation was bled into rubble. And those who composed that tragic hymn have never answered for a single note.
What Iran represents, to those who manufacture these threats, is not simply danger. It is disobedience. It is the refusal of a sovereign state to be disciplined into submission by Washington's imperial preferences and Tel Aviv's regional anxieties.
In the theatre of Western geopolitics, defiance is rebranded as menace. Sovereignty is repackaged as aggression. Every nation that refuses to kneel is prepared for the role of villain.
The farce is not Iran's nuclear programme. The farce is the audience that continues to applaud the performance.
And the performance is well funded. Think tanks are staffed by former officials and weapons specialists who often speak less like independent experts than advocates for permanent confrontation. Cable networks turn speculation into certainty between commercial breaks. Politicians cite intelligence assessments they have barely read to justify wars they will never fight, on behalf of interests they rarely dare to name in public.
The architecture of the lie is sophisticated because the lie has been profitable. It has paid in contracts, influence, military budgets and the geopolitical remaking of regions judged insufficiently obedient.
One must ask: who benefits from the constant portrayal of Iran as a permanent menace?
Not the Iranian people, who have endured decades of sanctions designed to make ordinary life so unbearable that the population turns against its own government. Not the peoples of the Middle East, who have watched their region broken apart by interventions presented as humanitarian missions but carried out with the logic of conquest.
The beneficiaries form a narrower company: the arms manufacturers whose quarterly reports flourish in seasons of manufactured crisis; the intelligence agencies that justify their budgets by the size of the threats they construct; and the political class which, across administrations and party lines, has learnt that fear remains one of the most reliable currencies in democratic governance.
Iraq was the proof of concept. Libya was the refinement. The ruins of both nations now stand as a warning to any state foolish enough to surrender the very deterrent the West has spent decades insisting it must never possess. Gaddafi abandoned his weapons programme. He was later captured, brutalised and killed while Western leaders posed for cameras and called it progress.
The lesson was not lost on Tehran. It was not lost on Pyongyang. Indeed, the lesson may have been the point.
Iran has not occupied foreign territory in the manner of the great colonial and imperial powers. It has not blockaded civilian populations, demolished homes on an industrial scale, or carried out the indiscriminate slaughter of children and families sheltering in the ruins of what were once their lives. The existential threat in this story has never been Iran alone. It has been the lie itself and the machinery of power that requires the lie to keep running.
Iran signed and honoured the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It was not Tehran that walked away. It was Washington, in 2018, without legal justification and without consequence for those who tore the agreement apart. Yet it is Iran that is sanctioned, isolated, bombed and condemned in the carefully choreographed theatre of Western moral outrage.
And then there is the contradiction that exposes the entire farce. Donald Trump declared before the world that, after a twelve-day war, Iran's key nuclear facilities had been "completely and totally obliterated". His words, not ours.
Yet the same administration continues to justify further pressure, and even the possibility of renewed aggression, on the grounds that Iran's nuclear infrastructure remains a threat. One of these claims is false. Possibly both are. Taken together, they reveal something more damning than ordinary dishonesty: a power that no longer feels obliged to make its contradictions coherent, because it has concluded that no one with the authority to challenge it will even try.
Still, much of the world's leadership responds with silence, submission or applause. Having perfected the art of flattering dangerous men, they lend legitimacy to the very forces responsible for the mayhem inflicted upon Iran.
The Nuclear Hypocrisy
Iran has not been shown to have developed a nuclear bomb. The United States, the only nation ever to have used nuclear weapons in war, dropping them on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, now presents itself to the world as the guardian of non-proliferation. The architects of nuclear annihilation have appointed themselves judges of who may and may not pursue nuclear technology.
The audacity is breathtaking. The hypocrisy is boundless. And the silence of the international community is a condemnation that history will not easily forgive.
The issue is not that nuclear weapons are desirable. They are among the most terrifying inventions of the modern age. The issue is the grotesque double standard by which some nations may possess them, threaten with them, modernise them and hide behind them, while others are punished for the suspicion that they might one day seek the same protection. This is not non-proliferation. It is hierarchy dressed as law.
The Litany of Destruction
The record speaks for itself. From the CIA-orchestrated coup against Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953, to decades of American-backed military dictatorships across South America; from the destruction of Iraq on fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction that were never found, to the reduction of Libya from one of Africa's most prosperous states to a fractured land where human beings could be sold in open-air slave markets, the pattern is unmistakable.
This litany is not a matter of interpretation. It is documented history.
These are not the actions of nations with the moral authority to lecture others about human rights, terrorism or the rule of law. These are the actions of states that have betrayed the very principles they claim to uphold. Again and again, they have demonstrated that international law is too often a weapon to be used against the weak and ignored by the powerful.
When adversaries act, the language is terrorism, aggression and barbarism. When empires act, the language changes. Then it becomes intervention, stabilisation, democracy promotion or the defence of the rules-based order. The crime does not disappear. It is merely renamed by those powerful enough to control the dictionary.
The Irrelevance of the United Nations
When powerful nations destroy weaker sovereign states, the United Nations convenes meetings. It passes resolutions. It issues statements of concern. It appoints special rapporteurs. It does almost everything except the one thing it was created to do: protect the vulnerable from the powerful.
The Security Council, with its five permanent members wielding veto power, is structurally designed to ensure that the world's most powerful nations are rarely held accountable for their crimes. It is not a true system of collective security. It is a system of collective impunity dressed in the language of international order.
Until that architecture is fundamentally reformed, and until the nations of the Global South refuse to lend legitimacy to institutions designed to manage their subjugation, the United Nations will remain what it has largely become: a stage on which powerful nations perform concern while conducting destruction.
This is not an argument against international cooperation. It is an argument against pretending that the present system is neutral. It is not. It reflects the balance of power that emerged from another century, another war and another world. The tragedy is that billions of people are still expected to live under its consequences.
A Final Word
The narratives are sophisticated. The media infrastructure that amplifies them is global. The financial systems that reward compliance and punish dissent are formidable. But narratives, however sophisticated, eventually collide with reality.
Empires, however powerful, eventually decline. Their armies may remain vast. Their currencies may still command markets. Their media may still shape opinion. But decline announces itself first in moral exhaustion: in the inability to tell the truth, in the addiction to enemies, and in the need to destroy what cannot be controlled.
Iran is not the first country to be cast as a menace because it refused obedience. It will not be the last. But the pattern is now too familiar to be mistaken for accident. The villain is chosen. The threat is inflated. The experts are assembled. The public is frightened. The sanctions begin. The bombs are prepared. Then, when the ruins are visible, the architects of destruction move on to the next emergency.
And still they demand that the world call this arrangement order rather than domination.
One day, these lies will be named plainly: instruments of domination sold as civilisation.
That is the banditry of a declining empire.