The world’s most dangerous nation is Canada’s southern neighbour, and it is a threat to Canada

A full-scale US assault—tariffs, sanctions, border closures, financial pressure, military action—would result in Canada becoming a vassal state. 

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack

The United States is the most war‑embracing and dangerous nation in the world. Its record over the last 35 years—and many decades before that—makes this impossible to deny. No other country has launched more wars, bombed more nations, imposed more devastating sanctions, or destabilized more societies. Western politicians insist that China, Russia, or Iran threaten global peace. But the historical evidence points in only one direction—the greatest threat to world peace is the United States itself.

And other than the nations the US attacks, the country that stands to lose the most if the US goes rogue is Canada—America’s closest neighbour, largest trading partner, and most economically dependent ally. Canada’s prosperity, sovereignty, and security are tied to a declining superpower whose foreign policy has become increasingly reckless, militarized, and unpredictable.

This is not hyperbole, its reality.

Bill Clinton: The quiet architect of catastrophe

The calamity that the world faces today began in 1990s following the Persian Gulf War and the end of the Cold War, a time when the US was the only global superpower, a time often remembered as a peaceful decade. In reality, the 90s were the prelude to the global violence that took place in subsequent decades. Under President Bill Clinton, the United States imposed one of the most devastating sanctions regimes in modern history on Iraq. These sanctions crippled Iraq’s economy, destroyed its infrastructure, and led to widespread malnutrition and disease. UNICEF estimated that approximately 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result.

When asked in a 1996 60 Minutes interview whether the deaths of half a million children were “worth it,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.” It was a moment of moral clarity where the vile mindset of senior American officials was revealed for what it was—one where: Washington openly admitted that mass civilian death, and those of children no less, was an acceptable cost of American power.

In 1998, Clinton also ordered the bombing of Sudan’s Al‑Shifa pharmaceutical plant, claiming—without evidence—that it was producing chemical weapons. In reality, the plant produced 50–60% of Sudan’s medicines, including treatments for malaria and tuberculosis, and its destruction plunged Sudan into a public health crisis that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in subsequent years.

These were not isolated mistakes. They were early signals of a country that had embraced militarism as a permanent operating principle.

George W. Bush is a war criminal shielded by power

George W. Bush’s invasions of Afghanistan which led to a 20 year war and occupation, and its war o Iraq reshaped the Middle East and South Asia. The Iraq War—launched based on lies about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)—was illegal under international law and lacked United Nations authorization. By the international legal standards applied to other leaders, Bush should have been tried and convicted at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for launching a war of aggression, and as the leader of a nation that committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The consequences of the war were catastrophic.  It is estimated that up to a million Iraqis were killed or died from the destruction of the civilian infrastructure of Iraqi society. Millions more were displaced, and a region was destabilized for generations. Iraq had long been a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, and its destruction removed a major political counterweight to Israeli regional ambitions. Israel had openly identified Iraq as a strategic threat and quietly encouraged US confrontation with Saddam Hussein.

Yet Bush has never faced accountability for the destruction caused by his policies. His war crimes have been sanitized through political power, media complicity, the passage of time, and the myth of American exceptionalism.

Barrack Obama: The drone executioner

Under Barack Obama, US warfare expanded dramatically. Obama did not merely inherit Bush’s war machine and continue operating it, he refined it, technologized it, and made it more lethal.  Central to this transformation was the massive enlargement of the CIA’s drone assassination program.

Military drone warfare intensified in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, turning these countries into unacknowledged killing fields.  American missiles struck homes, weddings, funerals, marketplaces, and entire villages. Independent investigations repeatedly found that the vast majority of those killed were civilians, including children.  The Obama administration even adopted a policy that counted any “military‑aged male” in a strike zone as a “combatant” unless proven otherwise—a bureaucratic trick that erased civilian casualties from official records.

These were extrajudicial executions carried out across sovereign nations with which the United States was not formally at war. By any reasonable standard, Barack Obama is a war criminal, as is Hillary Clinton, who championed and defended these operations. Senior US officials who designed and expanded the drone program belong in international tribunals, not lecture halls or corporate boards.

The fact that Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 is one of the most grotesque ironies of the century. Based on his record in office his prize should have been rescinded long ago.

The destruction of Libya

Libya stands out as one of the most consequential and destructive interventions of the 21st century. Obama and Clinton sold the NATO bombing campaign to the UN Security Council as a humanitarian mission in support of Arab Spring protestors. In reality, it was a plan to destroy a functioning state, one which plunged Libya into civil war, and opened the door to slave markets, and effectively made it into a failed state.

Libya was not bombed simply because of the Arab Spring. It was bombed because Muammar Gaddafi threatened Western financial dominance. Gaddafi had proposed a Pan‑African Gold Dinar, a currency backed by gold rather than the US dollar. His plan included: an African central bank; an African investment bank; an African monetary fund, a unified African military, and a common African passport.

These institutions would have reduced Western financial and political control and allowed African nations to trade oil and other natural resources based on the intrinsic value of gold.  Crucially, Gaddafi’s plan threatened the petrodollar system, which underpins American financial hegemony.

Libya was also a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, and  Israel had long viewed Libya as a regional adversary and quietly supported Western pressure against Gaddafi.

By any reasonable standard, Obama, Clinton, and the leaders of NATO nations that participated in the bombing are unindicted war criminals.

Syria and Iran were targeted for supporting Palestinians

Syria and Iran have long stood outside the orbit of American and Israeli geopolitical control. Both nations have been consistent, vocal, and material supporters of the Palestinian cause for decades. And in Washington’s worldview—shaped heavily by Israeli lobbying—this alone has been enough to mark them for punishment.

Syria became a battlefield for US airstrikes under Barack Obama, with bombings justified under the banner of fighting ISIS and supporting Arab Spring protesters in that country. But the reality was far more complex. The United States armed and supported militant groups, imposed sweeping sanctions, and carried out airstrikes that devastated civilian infrastructure. The Costs of War Project at Brown University documents tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Syria attributable to US military operations, sanctions‑driven deprivation, and the cascading effects of regional destabilization.

Syria’s long‑standing support for Palestinian resistance movements made it a target for Israeli pressure, with Israel openly advocating for US confrontation with Damascus, viewing Syria’s alliance with Hezbollah and Iran as a strategic threat. Washington obliged, turning Syria into another front in its endless war doctrine.

Iran is the ultimate target of US–Israeli aggression

Iran has been under US sanctions for more than four decades—sanctions that have crippled its economy, restricted access to medicine, and harmed millions of civilians. These sanctions are not defensive measures but instruments of economic warfare. They are designed to break Iran’s political will by destabilize its society and forcing regime change.

• In recent years, the US–Israeli campaign against Iran has escalated dramatically. The pattern is unmistakable:
• In June 2025 Israel launched strikes deep inside Iran, targeting infrastructure and military sites;
• From February 2026 onward the United States joined Israel in coordinated attacks, striking Iranian facilities, air defenses, and civilian areas;
• These attacks were carried out without UN authorization, making them illegal under international law;
• Western governments refused to condemn the strikes, revealing a profound moral bankruptcy at the heart of the so‑called “rules‑based international order.”

Iran’s crime, in the eyes of Washington and Tel Aviv, is not terrorism, nuclear ambition, or regional aggression. Iran’s crime is supporting Palestine, resisting Israeli expansionism, and refusing to submit to US geopolitical control.

The human toll: A region bleeding from US wars

The Costs of War Project provides the most authoritative accounting of the devastation:

• Iraq: Over 300,000 direct deaths, and more than 1 million indirect deaths.
• Afghanistan: Over 176,000 direct deaths, and more than 1 million indirect deaths.
• Pakistan: Tens of thousands killed by US drone strikes and counterterror operations.
• Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria: Hundreds of thousands more killed through US airstrikes, proxy wars, sanctions, and destabilization.

Across the region, the total death toll attributable to US wars since 9/11 exceeds 4.6 million people—a figure Brown University describes as “conservative.”

Iran now stands on the brink of becoming the next Iraq, the next Libya, the next Syria—another nation shattered because it refused to bow to American and Israeli power.

The US–Israeli attack on Iran—both in 2025 and since February 2026— is illegal, unprovoked, and geopolitically reckless. It exposes the West’s hypocrisy: preaching human rights while committing war crimes. It reveals that the “rules‑based order” is a myth—an ideological shield for Western militarism. And it shows that the US is willing to ignite a regional war that could kill millions, destabilize global markets, and plunge the world into crisis.

Canada: The neighbour living beside a volcano

Canada is the country most economically intertwined with the United Staten, with Canada’s manufacturing sector exporting nearly 75% of Canadian exports go to the US—energy, agricultural produce, steel, aluminum, manufactured goods, and supply chains are deeply dependent on the  American market. If the United States ever turned its economic or military power against Canada, the consequences would be catastrophic.  Canada has received only a taste of that aggression with Donald Trump’s tariff war.

However, if the US launched a full‑scale economic assault—tariffs, sanctions, border closures, or financial pressure—would devastate Canada’s economy within months. If such an assault were combined with military action, Canada would be unable to resist. The Canadian Armed Forces, professional and dedicated though they are, are simply not built to withstand the overwhelming force of the US military. Canada would be routed in weeks, if not days, if Washington ever chose to attack.

This is not speculation. It is history.

The last time Canada had a formal defence plan for responding to a US invasion was in the 1920s and 1930s: Defence Scheme No. 1, a strategy that involved pre‑emptively invading parts of the United States to slow an American advance. The plan was eventually abandoned because it was suicidal.

More recently, Canadian military planners quietly modelled a Taliban‑style insurgency as the only viable response to a hypothetical US invasion. The Canadian government even acknowledged this modelling publicly. Analysts have noted that both countries historically planned for conflict scenarios, though Canada’s options have always been limited.

If the United States continues down its current path of militarism, economic coercion, and geopolitical recklessness, Canada will not simply feel the shockwaves—it will be struck by the full force of the blast. No other country on Earth is as exposed to American instability as Canada. Every major artery of Canadian prosperity—trade, energy, manufacturing, agriculture, finance, supply chains—runs directly through the US. When Washington shakes, Ottawa trembles. When Washington lashes out, Canada gets bruisedbleeds. And if Washington goes rogue, Canada will become the first and most vulnerable casualty.

Canada must recognize that the greatest threat to its future is not a distant authoritarian power—it is the increasingly unstable superpower next door. If the United States continues down its current trajectory—endless wars of aggression abroad, economic blackmail against allies, and a foreign policy that tries to control and dominate other nations—Canada will be the first nation to suffer the consequences. The question is no longer whether Canada is vulnerable. The question is whether Canada is prepared to confront the reality that its greatest existential threat comes not from across an ocean, but from across a border, and Canadian leaders have to ask themselves are we prepared for this scenario, and what is the price Canadians are willing to pay to defend ourselves.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.  

Trump’s Iran war speech revealed an American imperial crusade disguised as "defence"

With its war against Iran and other aggressions—Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland—the United States has shown itself to be the greatest threat to global peace and stability in 90 years.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

 

If anyone familiar with the history of the Middle East over the past 150 years had been thoughtfully absorbing President Donald Trump’s April 1, 2026, address to the nation, the words emanating from the screen would have transported them not to the present-day battlefield in Iran, but to the drawing rooms of 19th-century European chancelleries. There, kings and prime ministers justified the carving up of Africa at the Berlin Conference and the conquest of ancient Asian societies by invoking divine mandate and racial superiority.

This colonial mindset, once used to legitimize European domination over “uncivilized” peoples and their resources, has found a strikingly modern echo in Trump’s rhetoric. Beneath the boasts of military success and appeals to American strength lies the same underlying assumption: that certain racialized societies are inherently chaotic and backward, requiring the forceful hand of a superior power to impose order. The speech did not merely announce tactical victories; it revealed a deeper imperial logic that treats the Middle East as a theatre for great-power manoeuvring rather than a region of sovereign nations with millennia-old civilizations.

Trump’s triumphant declaration—that in just one month the US had destroyed Iran’s navy, reduced its air force to ruins, killed its leaders, and decimated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—read like a dispatch from a European viceroy announcing the subjugation of some “backward” colonial territory. He framed America as the indispensable force restoring order to a “fanatical regime” whose citizens have been chanting “Death to America” for decades, while congratulating troops on victories “like few people have ever seen before.” Yet the real barbarian in this picture is not Iran, a nation that has never invaded or attacked another sovereign state since long before the United States achieved independence. It is the United States itself—an agent of chaos and destruction that has destabilized the Middle East for generations in pursuit of its own geopolitical agenda and its enduring desire to control the region’s oil resources.

Trump’s speech was a masterclass in reductive Orientalism, the kind Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said dissected decades ago in his critique, where he asserted that European and Western powers simplify and stereotype the region and its societies as primitive, irrational, violent, despotic, fanatic, and essentially inferior to Western societies, and thus in need of civilizing. The president cast Iran as the world’s “No. 1 state sponsor of terror,” responsible for everything from the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing to the October 7 Hamas attack, while glossing over America’s own violent and destructive history of intervention. From the overthrow of governments in Central America, to the 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, to the illegal Iraq War, and support for proxy wars that have turned the Middle East into a perpetual theatre of instability and conflict.

He boasted that the US is now “totally independent of the Middle East” thanks to his Venezuelan oil venture, yet insisted on remaining in the region “to help our allies.” This is the colonial logic laid bare. The US doesn’t’ need their resources, but will bomb their societies into submission to dictate who controls them. It mirrors the European scramble for Africa, where powers like Britain and France invoked civilizing missions while securing diamonds, rubber, and trade routes. Trump’s divine flourishes—”God bless” the astronauts and troops—echo the manifest destiny that sanctified earlier empires, now repackaged as another example of American military aggression and exceptionalism.

This war is not only completely illegal it is unnecessary and unprovoked, as there was no impending threat to the US, as verified by intelligence leaks. In reality, it is the fulfillment of a fantasy Benjamin Netanyahu has harboured for nearly 40 years. For the better part of four decades, he has repeatedly claimed that Iran was weeks or months away from a nuclear bomb, using the spectre of a nuclearized Iran to lobby Washington for military action while sabotaging diplomacy at every turn. Wisely, no previous American president was reckless enough to listen to him and be sucked into a war of choice. They understood what Trump chose to ignore—subjugating Iran, a civilization with roots stretching back millennia, is impossible without catastrophic consequences. Previous administrations recognized the quagmire that would follow—endless insurgency, regional upheaval, and the risk of wider war. Trump, in his address, claimed to have corrected their “mistakes” by killing General Qassem Soleimani and tearing up Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. He presented these as acts of strength, but the truth is they were the opening salvos in a conflict that Netanyahu has long craved, that could be reminiscent of the US failure in Vietnam.

Additionally, Iran remains the last major Middle Eastern power that unequivocally supports freedom and justice for Palestinians. Through funding, arms, and diplomatic backing to groups resisting Israel’s occupation, Tehran has stood as a patron where other Middle East nations—Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia—have been neutralized through diplomacy, economic incentives, or military action. Remove it, and Palestinians face a future of more Israeli subjugation, oppression, and occupation with no significant state-level ally left to help them achieve freedom.

Trump’s address barely mentioned Gaza, and didn’t even use the word “genocide”, focusing instead on Israel’s security as a core justification. This omission is deliberate, with the war serving as a grotesque distraction. As global eyes remain fixed on Iranian missile sites and oil tankers set ablaze, Israel continues its documented campaign of mass murder in the enclave—a genocide that the world has done nothing to halt. With attention diverted to the war against Israel presses forward unchecked, continuing the destruction of Gaza and the annihilation of its people.

The speech’s tone of bravado cannot mask the deeper truth—that the United States is showing itself to be the greatest threat to world peace and global economic stability in 90 years with its aggressions against Iran, (and Venezuela, Cuba, and Greenland). Trump claimed “core strategic objectives are nearing completion,” but the conflict has already exposed America’s limits. Despite its military might, the US has failed to achieve a swift victory. Iran’s resilience—its ability to absorb strikes and maintain asymmetric pressure—signals to Russia and China that Washington is not invincible despite its military power. If the mightiest military in the world cannot impose its will on a mid-tier adversary without calling for help from its NATO allies, Moscow and Beijing may calculate they could fare even better were a conflict to breakout with the US.

This war has not stabilized the region; instead it has brought the world palpably closer to World War Three, with supply chains fracturing, oil markets convulsing, and alliances realigning. Trump’s claim that “America is winning bigger than ever” rings hollow against the funerals at Dover Air Force Base and the American lives already lost.

As people listened to the address, they would likely be reminded of the casual racism that has underpinned American Middle East policy for decades. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld under George W. Bush once reportedly dismissed Arabs as “lazy” because they sat atop too much oil. Texas Rep. Keith Self has claimed Islam is “stuck in the 8th century,” while Sen. Lindsey Graham quipped that anything starting with “Al” in the Middle East is bad news—oblivious that “algebra,” “alchemy,” and “algorithm” entered Western knowledge through Arab and Persian scholarship. Florida Rep. Randy Fine’s preference for a dog over a Muslim ignores Jalal ad-Din Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet whose wisdom graces countless lives today, or the fact that Arab numerals underpin modern mathematics.

These stereotypes, as Said warned, erase the Middle Eastern society’s foundational contributions to human civilization. No one denies the region’s post-colonial challenges resulting from Western intervention—artificial borders drawn by former colonial masters, autocracies born of foreign meddling, and tensions exacerbated by external destabilization. But the notion that it requires Western “wisdom” imported at the barrel of a gun is the same conceit that justified colonial conquest. Iranians, like all peoples, deserve safety, freedom, and respect, not bombs justified by clichés of a “blood-stained land.”

Essentially, Trump’s address was more than just a war update. It was a declaration of imperial continuity. By aligning so brazenly with Netanyahu’s long-sought war against Iran, the US has cast itself as the latest in a line of powers convinced of their divine right to reshape ancient societies.

Iran did not seek this fight but it is prepared to fight to the bitter end to preserve its society and sovereignty. The chaos we now see in the Persian Gulf originates in Washington’s endless quest for dominance. As gasoline prices continue to rise and the shadows of a wider war lengthen, Americans should ask--who is the true threat to civilization—the nation defending its people and territorial integrity against an unprovoked attack, or the superpower carving up the map once more?

History’s verdict on 19th-century colonialism is clear. The question is whether we will see that historic barbarism repeated, or finally reject it and then toss it onto the trash heap of history where it belongs.  

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Israel, the US, and the dawn of "technologically advanced barbarism"

Humanity has reached a profound existential inflection point. The fragile 75-year interlude of relative global peace that followed the Second World War is now over.

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

The following was inspired by a speech delivered by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges at Princeton on March 25, 2026.

The world stands at a metaphorical precipice, pushed by two nations that have surrendered to the ugly and dangerous impulses of fascism. Because of Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu and the United States under Donald Trump—two narcissistic psychopaths—the world is tumbling toward an time of war, global instability, and economic chaos that we haven’t seen since the 1930s.

As in the past, the rich and powerful will navigate the descent with their yachts, private planes and fortified compounds, and profit from the oncoming misery, insulated by influence and wealth. However, average people, as they always do when the powerful wage war for power, control, and resources, will bear the brunt of the misery with ruined lives, shattered economies, and generational trauma. This is not hyperbole. It is the endpoint of the collapse of the post-World War Two international rules-based order, an order now openly defied by one of the architects of that order (the US), and a nation (Israel) which benefitted from that order since its creation as a settler-colonial state.

The immediate evidence supporting this view has unfolded in the Middle East beginning in October 2023. For more than 900 days Israel has unleashed unrelenting violence in Gaza—labelled a genocide by the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, the International Association of Genocide Scholars and prominent Israeli Holocaust scholars Raz Segal, Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg. The apartheid nation has reduced swaths of the territory to rubble in what has been called by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges as the opening act of a new global order defined by “technologically advanced barbarism.”

Saturation bombing, forced displacement, and the deliberate targetting of civilian infrastructure have created a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions across the Middle East. In Gaza, over two million Palestinians have been rendered refugees in their own land. And now Israel’s aggression has expanded, with southern Lebanon facing obliteration, as the tactics of the Gaza plan are used as a “blueprint for destruction” perversely framed as a “path to peace” by Israel. More than one million Lebanese—one-fifth of the population—have been ethnically cleansed in mere weeks. Simultaneously, the US-backed war on Iran, launched February 28, 2026, has displaced three million Iranians. In all three conflicts more than six million have been made homeless across the region, a demographic change that clears a path for the idea of a “Greater Israel” stretching “from the Nile to the Euphrates.” This is no isolated geopolitical spasm. It is a deliberate replay of the chaos inflicted on Iraq, Syria, and Libya by the US and its key Middle East ally.

In Iraq, 23 years after the 2003 US invasion, the country lurches under economic headwinds, with the government’s almost total dependence on oil revenues to fund government operations, forcing austerity measures that threaten public salaries and pensions, while unemployment and corruption fuel street protests. Stability is relative, and prosperity remains elusive. The Iraqi economy, more than 90% percent dependent on oil, offers no buffer against regional shocks, like the war against Iran.

Syria, a little over a year after Bashar al-Assad’s fall in late 2024, has achieved fragile transitional gains under Ahmed al-Sharaa—sanctions relief, some territorial integration with territory controlled by Kurdish forces, and an end to the Assad torture state. But it remains economically devastated by 14 years of war, with reconstruction stalled, and new threats from the expanding Israel-US conflict looming over its borders, risking renewed fragmentation.

Then there is Libya, a nation made into a failed state since the 2011 NATO intervention, which endures in a delicately managed stalemate between the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity and the eastern Libyan Arab Armed Forces. Militias control its resources and territory, while oil-funded patronage creates division rather than resolution. Elections remain indefinitely postponed as repression rises, and the country teeters on the brink of renewed collapse, exporting instability across its borders.

In each case there is a pattern—Western-orchestrated regime change or destabilization that results in failed or fractured states, where ordinary citizens inherit poverty, displacement, death and endless insecurity while external powers secure oil, influence, or outright control, and in the process deny it to rivals like Russia or China. The architects of this disorder—Israel and the United States—have taken the strategy used on these three nations and are using it to accelerate the collapse of the rules-based international order which has maintained a fragile global peace for almost eight decades.

In all of this bodies like the United Nations and International Court of Justice, once guardrails against Darwinian power politics, have been relegated to the sidelines. Their resolutions and rulings are contemptuously ignored by these two rogue nations. Fundamental human rights, the evolution towards more open borders between trade partners, and international law lie shattered.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney captured the world’s attention in his January 20, 2026, address at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he spoke of a “rupture, not a transition.” He declared that the old order was dead and was not coming back. He said publicly what had been discussed privately in the back rooms of governments in Ottawa, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and beyond since the return of Donald Trump to the Oval Office—great powers now wield economic integration as coercion, tariffs as leverage, and supply chains as weaknesses. “The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must,” he warned, urging middle powers to unite in realism rather than nostalgia.

The post-1945 era of relative world peace—over 75 years without global war, however imperfect—has ended. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s illusory “peace in our time”—a statement made after signing the Munich Agreement with Adolph Hitler on September 30, 1938 allowing Germany to annex the Sudetenland—finds its modern echo in the hollow invocations of the “rules-based order” by leaders who exempt themselves and their nations whenever politically expedient.

This psychopathic display of power knows no limits for strong military powers like the US and Israel, making the weak their prey whenever they desire. Oppose them, refuse to bow to their capricious demands, and you face economic blackmail through strangled trade, sanctions, or face the prospect of being targeted with missiles and bombs. Netanyahu has lobbied Washington for four decades to launch a war against Iran but previous administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, wisely refused, recognizing that there was no existential threat and foreseeing disaster if they took a step in that direction. Trump, prodded by fervent Zionists Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, foolishly took the bait and went where past presidents were too intelligent to tread. Joseph Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned and in his resignation letter stated plainly that Iran posed “no imminent threat,” and that the war began “due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Shifting rationales for the war have included: halting Iran’s nuclear program—which Trump said had been “obliterated“ in the US attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025—the threat of Iranian missiles, regime change, and threats of state terrorism. They all served as deception for the Greater Israel plan, a vision which included shattering Iran into ethnic and religious enclaves like what happened in Iraq, Syria and Libya. Another goal was to secure the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves and 12% of the global crude oil supply, and controlling what would be left of Iran through proxies. The same thing happened to Iraq, Syria, Libya, and is now happening in Lebanon.

Israel justifies its military actions by invoking the Holocaust and taking advantage of Western guilt over the international community’s failure to halt Nazi atrocities. Yet this invocation reveals a profound hypocrisy when nearly all major Holocaust institutions and scholars steadfastly refuse to condemn the ongoing events in Gaza or draw any historical parallels, effectively hijacking the memory of the Holocaust. They have transformed this singular event into a shield that sanctifies eternal Jewish victimhood while absolving Israel of the crimes of settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.

Effectively the slogan “Never Again” has been narrowed to mean “Never Again only for Jews,” with any attempt by Holocaust-related institutions or individual scholars to express even modest sympathy for Palestinian suffering triggering a swift, orchestrated backlash from Zionist organizations and their online trolls. They often include public denunciations, threats of funding cuts, or character assassination, creating a glaring “Palestinian exception” to universal lessons about preventing mass atrocity crimes.

Concrete examples illustrate this selective enforcement. In September 2025, the Holocaust Museum LA posted on Instagram a message stating “‘Never Again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews,” accompanied by imagery suggesting shared humanity. Many interpreted it as a subtle acknowledgement of Palestinian suffering amid the Gaza genocide. After a barrage of criticism and accusations of politicizing the Holocaust, the museum quickly deleted the post and issued an apology, promising more careful vetting of future content to “avoid misinterpretation.”

In a related incident around April 2025, staff at Germany’s Buchenwald Memorial pressured a visitor to remove her Palestinian keffiyeh (black-and-white scarf), claiming it violated house rules during a commemoration event. A German court later upheld the memorial’s right to refuse entry in such cases when the scarf was worn as a political statement. Critics, including the European Legal Support Center, argued that this reflected broader censorship where expressions of solidarity with Palestinians or references to genocide in the current context are increasingly suppressed at European Holocaust memorial sites, often with implicit or explicit support from German authorities.

Scholars who dare cross the line also face intense personal and professional repercussions. Israeli Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg drew fierce criticism for publicly stating “Yes, this is genocide” regarding Gaza. He highlighted an unprecedented level of dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society that he had never witnessed before in his lifetime. Similarly, American-Israeli scholar Raz Segal faced significant backlash—including the withdrawal of a job offer to lead a Holocaust and genocide studies centre—for his October 2023 article in Jewish Currents titled “A Textbook Case of Genocide,” in which he analyzed Israel’s actions in Gaza through the lens of the UN Genocide Convention.

German Holocaust historian Michael Wildt, a leading expert on the Nazi regime, was slandered by the tabloid BILD as a “Jew-hater” after voicing concerns about the situation in Palestine. The article received endorsement from Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, amplifying the attack.

These cases expose the contradiction at the heart of contemporary Holocaust remembrance. The atrocity, which resulted in the death of over 17 million people, six million Jews among them, is upheld as a singular, incomparable event whose lessons must never be diluted. Yet any analogy or universal application of “Never Again” to Palestinian suffering is denounced as trivialization, antisemitism, or betrayal. This selective memory does more than protect a narrative, it undermines the very moral foundation of Holocaust education. If the purpose is truly to guard against future genocides by confronting the dark potentials of dehumanization, ethnic supremacy, and unchecked power, then exempting one group from scrutiny while weaponizing historical trauma against another reveals a profound ethical failure.

The result is a distorted framework in which Jewish suffering retains unique sanctity, while Palestinian deaths are framed as unfortunate necessities of self-defence or security. This hypocrisy erodes the universalist promise of “Never Again,” and risks turning Holocaust institutions into instruments that perpetuate, rather than prevent, cycles of violence and exclusion. True remembrance would demand consistency by applying the same rigorous standards of scrutiny, empathy, and prevention to all instances of mass suffering, without exception. Until that consistency is restored, invocations of the Holocaust in defence of current policies will continue to ring hollow for much of the global audience, particularly in the Global South, which recognizes patterns of selective outrage all too well.

History has shown that genocide is not an anomaly in human affairs. Rather, it is deeply encoded in the patterns of behaviour exhibited by European colonial powers and, more broadly, by “white” and nominally Christian nations throughout modern history.

The British, for instance, nearly annihilated Tasmania’s Aboriginal population through systematic dispossession, violence, and displacement. In the Belgian Congo, King Leopold II’s regime (1885–1908) unleashed mass murder and horrific atrocities against Black Africans, with a death toll estimates as high as ten million, with millions more suffering mutilation, including limb amputations, as punishment for failing to meet rubber quotas.

Germany carried out the slaughter of the Herero and Nama peoples in German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia) between 1904 and 1908. This campaign featured explicit extermination orders and the establishment of concentration camps, resulting in the deaths of up to 80,000 Herero (more than 80 percent of their population), and 10,000 Nama (roughly half of theirs).

During World War Two, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill played a central role in the 1943 Bengal famine. He refused to divert food aid to millions of starving Indians, reportedly dismissing them as “a beastly people with a beastly religion.” The famine claimed more than three million lives, and is classified as genocide by many scholars.

The United States, for its part, dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. These attacks killed over 140,000 civilians in Hiroshima and approximately 74,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, with total deaths topping 240,000 when including later effects from injuries and radiation. The bombings were justified as necessary to end the war quickly, despite objections from numerous American political, military, and scientific figures who argued that the use of atomic weapons was unnecessary with Japan already on the verge of defeat.

These grim episodes form a consistent and damning historical thread. Whenever European and Western powers have exercised unchecked dominance, the dehumanization of non-European peoples has repeatedly paved the way for mass killing on an industrial scale. Such atrocities are almost always followed by elaborate rationalizations that minimize, justify, or try to erase the crimes from collective memory. Far from isolated aberrations, these events reveal a recurring pattern—one that thoroughly undermines any claim of unique moral exceptionalism by the modern West.

The violence that has engulfed Gaza since October 2023—indiscriminate bombing, deliberate starvation tactics, targeting of civilians, the routine dehumanization of Palestinians as “human animals,” and genocide—represents only the opening chapter of what is coming down the road, according to Hedges. The aggression now spreading to Lebanon and Iran simply extends the same blueprint tested and refined in Gaza. The age of “technologically advanced barbarism,” is here. It is an era in which psychopathic elites—the billionaire “Epstein class” and their political enablers in Washington, Tel Aviv and beyond—operate with superficial charm, grandiosity, habitual deceit, lack of a moral compass, and an absence of remorse.

Humanity has reached a profound, existential inflection point. The fragile 75-year interlude of relative global peace that followed the Second World War is now over. Today, Israel and the United States stand as the greatest threats to world stability. They are exporting chaos across the Middle East without a thought about its impact on the innocent or the economic impacts of their actions around the world. Meanwhile, ordinary people—workers, families, and the displaced—will continue to pay the heaviest price in blood, poverty, and shattered futures.

The choice before the vast majority of humanity is stark and urgent. We can either actively obstruct this descent into a law-of-the-jungle world order, or we can surrender to it. Whatever happens, history will render a harsh and unforgiving verdict on Israel and the US, nations which have deliberately set us on this dangerous path.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

Gaza Genocide and the US-Israeli War on Iran signal the collapse of the “international rules-based order”

We are witnessing a repeat of the 1930s, where the League of Nations collapsed because it could not—or would not—restrain the aggression of its powerful members.

 

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this can be found on Substack.

For nearly eight decades, the global community has been lectured on the sanctity of the “international rules-based order.” We were told that the post-World War Two framework—built upon the wreckage of the Holocaust and codified through the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Conventions—was a shield for the vulnerable and a leash for the powerful. This order was founded on the promise of “Never Again,” a solemn vow that the industrial-scale extermination of a people would never be permitted to recur.

 

However, as we enter the 31st month of Israel’s genocide on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—with a so-called ceasefire proving illusory and the slaughter continuing unabated—that shield has been revealed as a sieve, and the vow as a hollow ethno-specific mantra. Compounding this betrayal is the US-Israeli illegal war of aggression launched against Iran on February 28, 2026. In both instances, the two nations have flagrantly violated the aforementioned treaties and conventions, and the fundamental norms of international law. Together, these atrocities signal the effective collapse of the international rules-based order and the myth of universal human rights.

The discrepancy between the “official” reality and the truth on the ground in Gaza is the first indication of this collapse. As of January 2026, mainstream Western outlets cautiously cite a Palestinian death toll topping 75,000. Yet rigorous academic and epidemiological analyses reveal a far more harrowing reality. Peer-reviewed studies and models, including those by Australian scholars Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, Israeli academic Yaakov Garb’s analysis published by Harvard, and The Lancet’s projections, demonstrate that when accounting for bodies buried under millions of tons of rubble, indirect deaths from the total collapse of healthcare, starvation, and untreated disease, the true toll exceeds 680,000 lives—primarily women and children—as of April 2025, with the figure climbing further into 2026 as the Israeli assault continues.

If we accept the figures from these studies—derived from the same scientific methodologies used in other global conflicts—the scale of the slaughter rivals or exceeds the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Yet unlike Rwanda, which the West later lamented as a failure of intervention, the Gaza genocide is a willful failure to intervene in the most transparent genocide in human history. The “rules-based order” is not failing because it’s weak. It is failing because its architects are the primary financiers of the carnage being inflicted on the Middle-East.

The United States has funnelled over $21 billion in military aid to Israel since October 2023, with billions more arriving from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada. These nations, which frequently invoke international law to sanction adversaries, have simultaneously provided the diplomatic cover and the weapons required to systematically level 80% of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. By weaponizing international law against the powerless while suspending it for their allies, the Western alliance has exposed the “order” as a criminal cabal that prioritizes geopolitical hegemony over human life.

This betrayal is rooted in a profound, institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia that permeates Western institutions and discourse. The systematic dehumanization of Palestinians—who have endured more than a century of occupation, dispossession, and Zionist settler-colonialism—has been crucial in sustaining Western silence and complicity amid the ongoing horrors in Gaza.

A stark illustration of this double standard emerged in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023. The killing of 1,195 people during the Hamas-led attacks triggered swift, intense moral outrage across the Western world, with leaders and media outlets universally condemning the violence as an atrocity. Yet as the Palestinian death toll in Gaza climbed to ten, fifty, and eventually hundreds of times that number—reaching catastrophic scales through relentless bombardment—the same Western leaders responded with only tepid, “measured” appeals for restraint, even as they continued supplying Israel with massive quantities of bombs, missiles and other munitions.

Investigations, including reports from Israeli sources like Ha’aretz and international bodies such as the UN Commission of Inquiry, have since revealed that the October 7 death toll included casualties from Israeli forces’ application of the controversial Hannibal Directive in multiple locations. This procedure, aimed at preventing captures of Israeli Jews at all costs (even if it risked or caused the deaths of Israelis), was invoked during the chaos, leading to incidents that killed hundreds of civilians and potentially endangered others. Despite these complexities and the acknowledgement in some accounts that not all deaths were solely attributable to Hamas, the Western reaction remained one-sided--unqualified horror at Palestinian-perpetrated violence contrasted sharply with muted or enabling responses to Israel’s far deadlier genocidal campaign.

This selective outrage underscores how deeply entrenched biases allow the West to rationalize or overlook massive Palestinian suffering while amplifying lesser-scale violence against Israelis, perpetuating a hierarchy of human worth that has enabled the ongoing catastrophe.

The moral abyss is further deepened by the “visibility” of this genocide. Unlike the Holocaust, which the Nazi regime attempted to hide in isolated camps like Auschwitz, the annihilation of Gaza is the first live-streamed genocide in human history. We see the emaciated frames of starving children and the obliteration of entire families in high definition on our smartphones. We see Israeli soldiers filming their own war crimes for social media, mocking the ruins of schools and mosques. The world watches in real-time as a population of approximately 2 million is squeezed into “safe zones” that are then systematically bombarded.

The fact that this transparency has prompted no meaningful intervention from the powers that defeated the Nazis is a devastating indictment of those nations and our era. It suggests that the “international community” is not a collective of nations bound by law, but a hierarchy of human value where Palestinian blood is deemed “lesser” than that of those within the Western sphere of influence.

The invocation of “Never Again” has been particularly perverted. Originally intended as a universal promise to protect all of humanity from the “crime of crimes,” it has been narrowed into a tool of Jewish exceptionalism. Every year, Western leaders hypocritically stand at Holocaust memorials and pledge to uphold justice, even as they provide the white phosphorus and intelligence used to displace 99% of Gaza’s population. This victim-perpetrator inversion, where the state committing genocide is shielded from accountability by the memory of a previous genocide, is a moral perversity that the international legal system cannot survive.

We are witnessing a repeat of the 1930s, where the League of Nations collapsed because it could not—or would not—restrain the aggression of its powerful members. Today, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice are being rendered obsolete not by their own design, but by the brazen defiance of the United States and its allies. When the ICC seeks warrants for war crimes, it is threatened with sanctions by Washington. When the UN General Assembly votes for a ceasefire, it is ignored.

The betrayal extends directly to the US-Israeli war against Iran. On February 28, under President Donald Trump and in coordination with Israel, the United States launched unprovoked strikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and leadership—including the assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and members of his family. A girls’ elementary school in Minab was deliberately hit, killing at least 165 children, alongside strikes on hospitals and civilian areas with no military value. These actions constitute a blatant and criminal war of aggression with no UN Security Council authorization and no valid claim of imminent self-defence under the UN Charter. Additionally, diplomatic talks with Iran were making significant progress hours before the strikes, and leaks from within the US intelligence establishment confirmed no imminent Iranian threat or nuclear warhead capability.

Under the Geneva Conventions, the deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian objects qualifies as war crimes. Israeli and American hypocrisy is blatant and staggering in this regard when compared to the war in Ukraine. The same nations that imposed sanctions on Russia for its 2022 invasion of that nation and condemned it for bombing schools and hospitals, offered complicity, muted criticism, or outright endorsement for identical violations against Iran. This selective enforcement—condemning aggression when committed by adversaries but exempting allies—lays bare the double standards that have defined the international order from its inception in the late 1940s.

Both the Gaza genocide and the aggression against Iran directly contravene the foundational principles established by the Judgment at Nuremberg (1945-1946), the bedrock of all international law created after World War Two. The Nuremberg Tribunal declared that “to initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” It established individual accountability for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—principles that directly birthed the UN Charter (prohibiting aggression), the 1948 Genocide Convention (acts with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, as Israel’s systematic killings, starvation policies, and destruction of life conditions in Gaza fulfill), the Geneva Conventions (civilian protections violated in both Gaza’s bombardment and Iran’s school and hospital strikes), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By committing these crimes with impunity, the US and Israel have not merely violated these instruments, they have demolished the post-war legal order built explicitly on Nuremberg’s vow to prevent such atrocities from recurring.

In his special address at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney invoked Thucydides’ dictum that “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” He declared that the rules-based international order was “fading,” a “fiction,” an “illusion,” and no longer functioning “as advertised.” He acknowledged that nations like Canada had prospered under it for decades, but “we knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false—that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.”

Carney urged middle powers to accept the reality—a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic and military might as a weapon of coercion. This speech inadvertently confirms the core truth—that the order Carney described was never universal or impartial. It primarily benefitted the West and aligned powers—delivering prosperity and security to Canada, the US, and Europe—while adversaries and the Global South were its perpetual victims, subjected to occupation, sanctions, regime-change wars, economic colonialism, and now live-streamed genocide and unprovoked aggression.

Carney’s own actions and those of his government powerfully illustrate the selective nature of the rules-based order he described in Davos—one that privileges Western powers and their allies while leaving others to bear the consequences of the actions of the powerful. In the immediate aftermath of the US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, Carney quickly voiced support for the actions, framing them as necessary to prevent Iran from completing construction of nuclear weapons and to curb threats to regional stability, even as the UN and international law experts condemned the illegality of the actions. He has similarly refused to issue any outright condemnation of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has been condemned as such by genocide and Holocaust experts, and respected human rights organizations.

This pattern of selective outrage extended further when Canada joined European allies in condemning Iran’s actions in blocking or threatening the Strait of Hormuz—actions that disrupted global oil shipments—while remaining conspicuously silent on the longstanding and intensified US economic measures against Cuba, including an effective oil blockade that has exacerbated humanitarian hardships on the island without comparable international push back. Such inconsistencies reveal the hypocrisy Carney himself stated in his Davos remarks.

Palestinians and Iranians, positioned as non-Western and comparatively “weak” actors in this hierarchy, were always intended to endure the system’s double standards. Exemptions granted to the powerful—through sustained US arms shipments to Israel, repeated vetoes of accountability at the UN, selective enforcement of international norms, and diplomatic or rhetorical endorsement of aggressive actions like the Iran strikes—have ensured that the order was intended to serve Western hegemony rather than universal principles of humanity or equity. The unfolding realities in Gaza and Iran stand as irrefutable evidence. What was once presented as a principled global framework was, in practice, a mechanism of power that the dominant nations of the world discard or bend whenever it suits their interests.

The evidence that the rules-based order is now non-existent is overwhelming. After 30 months of ongoing genocide in Gaza, the most powerful nations of the world (primarily the US and NATO nations) have done nothing to stop Israel’s slaughter, which continues despite a so-called ceasefire that came into effect in October 2025. Billions in military aid flowed uninterrupted, International Court of Justice orders were defied, and UN resolutions vetoed. The same superpower that frequently lectured the world on abiding by international law enabled the carnage in Gaza, and then pivoted to fresh aggression against Iran without justification and without consequence.

The Gaza genocide and the US-Israeli war against Iran have shattered the illusion of a global conscience and of the international “rules based order.” They have shown that “Western humanity” is a bedtime fable, a “sick joke” told to citizens who want to believe their governments are the “good guys.” In reality, the “rules” only apply when they serve the interests of the powerful. For the Palestinian and Iranian people, the international order has not been a protector, but a jailer, an executioner, and a propagator of narratives of hate.

As the ruins of Gaza continue to smoulder and the skies over Iran fill with the smoke of an illegal war of aggression, these scenes stand as stark monuments to the end of the post-World War II era. We can no longer speak of “universal human rights” with any credibility while the world’s most powerful nations actively underwrite the systematic erasure of entire peoples. The so-called international rules-based order did not fade away gradually or die of natural causes—it was deliberately murdered in the streets of Gaza and the cities of Iran, with the full knowledge, material support, and diplomatic cover provided by the very nations that once positioned themselves as its chief guardians and moral exemplars.

Any hope for a genuine future of global justice cannot be rebuilt on the shattered, hypocritical foundations of this broken system. The mass graves in Gaza and the fresh rubble across Iran hold far more than the hundreds of thousands of victims claimed by US- and Israeli-led crimes; they also entomb the long-standing pretenses of Western moral authority. The comforting fairy tale—that a system of international laws applies equally to all nations—has been exposed as a dangerous illusion. We now confront a harsh moral abyss, thrust upon the world by the very powers that long preached restraint and accountability. In this new reality, the United States and Israel operate like unchecked gunslingers in a lawless frontier, casting themselves as the corrupt sheriffs determined to “clean up” the Middle East on their own terms, regardless of the human cost or the wreckage left behind.

© The View From Here. © Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.