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

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 strikes on February 28 were launched mid-diplomacy, during an active round of negotiations over Iran's nuclear programme. Khamenei was killed. Senior officials were killed. Anda US Tomahawk missile struck an elementary school, killing children, parents, and teachers, later attributed to reliance on outdated intelligence data. The US military ran the numbers through an AI system, the AI was working from old maps, and over a hundred children paid for that administrative error with their lives. By late March, Iran had documented damage to at least 120 historical sites from American and Israeli strikes.

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.