RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the wake of Israel’s pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the wider war that erupted just two weeks ago—a revealing fracture has split the American and the Australian right. Some of its loudest voices—Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and an army of self-styled realists—now openly question Israel’s actions and America’s commitment to its ally. 

Their scepticism, on the surface, is understandable. Decades of American misadventures abroad have left voters instinctively wary of foreign entanglements. But beneath this wariness lies a deeper blind spot that cripples the West’s ability to deal with regimes like Iran: modern Westerners have forgotten what it means to wage politics according to an uncompromising metaphysic.

Iran sits on one of the world’s greatest oil reserves. Its people are literate, resourceful, and capable of great cultural and technological feats. Yet it remains an economic backwater—poor, unstable, and brutal. For the Western materialist mind, this defies reason. Surely, if the regime wanted prosperity, it could have it.

But that is precisely the point: it does not. The Iranian state is not an ordinary government seeking wealth or security. It is an eschatological machine—an empire run by clerics whose sole claim to legitimacy is their absolute commitment to an idea: the destruction of Israel and, in time, the humiliation of the West.

This is not rhetoric for domestic consumption alone; it is the regime’s raison d’être. Westerners, whose secular technocracies run on the premise that all problems can be traded or regulated away, cannot comprehend this. They see a nuclear deal here, a sanctions relief there, and imagine they are negotiating with rational actors who prize prosperity above purpose. 

Meanwhile, Iran’s rulers wield the ancient tool of taqiyya—sanctioned religious deceit—with skill. They sign treaties they have no intention of honouring, they exploit the predictable churn of American partisan politics, and they bank on the fact that every Western government will sooner or later be replaced by one more pliant or distracted.

Inside Iran, the average citizen knows that complaining about hardship risks prison. The suffering is not a policy failure; it is the acceptable price for metaphysical victory. The regime can survive hunger and isolation far more easily than it can survive abandoning its ideological mission.

Until the West recovers a political vocabulary that includes the reality of non-negotiable ideas—until it understands that some enemies are animated by visions stronger than dollars or treaties—its foreign policy will remain a tragic farce. We will keep tearing ourselves apart with illusions of normal diplomacy while Tehran’s clerics calmly wait for the next gullible administration to appear.

A serious foreign policy begins by acknowledging the obvious: you cannot bargain with those who believe history itself is on their side. You can only contain them—and you can only contain them if you first remember that your own civilisation, too, once had a metaphysic worth defending.

Until the West recovers a political vocabulary that includes the reality of non-negotiable ideas—until it understands that some enemies are animated by visions stronger than dollars or treaties—its foreign policy will remain a tragic farce