Middle East war: The Empire has no clothes

THERE is a particular kind of moment in history when the powerful, in their arrogance, do something so naked, so unfiltered, that the mythology holding power together cracks in real time.

- CHLOE MALULEKE

A DEMONSTRATOR holds a placard in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., US, on April 7. | XINHUA

(XINHUA)

The US war against Iran has been that moment.Not because the US has never behaved this way before, it has, consistently and for decades. But because Donald Trump does not do subtlety. Where previous administrations conducted the same foreign policy through carefully worded press releases and diplomatic euphemism, Trump announces it on Truth Social in all-capitals. He posted that “a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again’, unless Iran met his demands. He didn’t create a new American foreign policy. He simply made the old one visible and once you've seen it, you cannot unsee it.

The entire architecture of American moral authority depends on American violence remaining either invisible or justifiable, while any resistance to it is immediately classified as terrorism, barbarism, or irrationality and right now it has been stripped of its facade. Which is why we need to talk about what happened at the power plants.

The Iranian people are not a monolith of regime loyalty; anyone who suggests otherwise is either ignorant or deliberately misleading. In January 2026, they rose up in the largest anti-government protests since the revolution, across more than 100 cities, with chants calling openly for regime change. At least 6 800 civilians were killed and over 53 000 detained by the IRGC and Basij in the crackdown that followed. These are people who have every reason to despise their government and they know it better than any Western think tank ever will.