A Nawruz Reflection on War, Hypocrisy, and the Promise of Renewal
Before I begin, allow me to share a simple thought—one expressed beautifully by the poet Pablo Neruda: you may cut all the flowers, but you cannot stop the spring from coming (“Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera”). In the Persian tradition, we echo the same truth: no matter how harsh the autumn, no matter how unforgiving the winter, the rose will return and blossom. It is inevitable. It is woven into the very rhythm of existence.
And so, as we stand on the threshold of Nawruz—the renewal of the year—I offer you all my warmest greetings. Nawruz is not merely a cultural observance tied to a single people or place; it is a cosmic reminder. It speaks to the turning of the earth itself, to cycles of renewal that belong to all of humanity. Even in a world marked by turbulence and uncertainty, the promise of renewal persists. Spring comes.
But this year, spring arrives to a world that has set itself on fire.
What we are witnessing in the case of Iran is not a new trend in the undermining of international law. This dangerous, reckless, and aggressive approach began after the 7th of October attacks in Israel and has since spilled over the entire region. Whatever the reasons—or excuses—for restraint in reaction to the aftermath of 7th October were, humanity is reaching a point of no return. What continues in the US-Israeli invasion of Iran is the normalisation of terror: assassinating diplomats and heads of state was precisely the kind of act that the other side was supposed to fight or resist. When the self-declared guardian of the international order practises the very methods it attributes to its enemies, we are no longer in the realm of geopolitical hypocrisy. We are in the realm of civilisational collapse.
It is not sufficient merely to point out that this war—the US-Israeli invasion—is illegal and in violation of all the norms of the international community. We need to gaze humanity in the eye and remind ourselves that we are spiralling into a downward vortex of devastation and debasement. This war commenced with the assassination of senior political and military leaders of Iran. It does not matter what one’s political ideology is: this act—which comes in a long series of earlier illegal actions—is precisely what this self-declared ‘just war’ was meant to avoid, to prevent, to combat. One side accuses the other of destabilisation and the spread of terror, and yet it commits precisely the same horrifying crime. What is even more shocking is that the side depicted as the guilty one did not actually start this war. The war was not ‘pre-emptive’—it was nothing other than the thuggish and roguish behaviour of two states in open defiance of international law. In short, international law and the international community have been reduced to an almost entirely obsolete, redundant, and meaningless body of institutions with no power to halt anything, nor to commence any diplomatic solution to the current crisis.
The great sociologist Norbert Elias spent a lifetime studying what he called ‘the civilizing process’—the slow, centuries-long transformation by which societies moved from the unrestrained exercise of violence towards regulated conduct, internal pacification, and the monopolisation of force within the framework of the state. Elias warned, with the quiet precision of someone who had lost both parents to the machinery of the Holocaust, that this process was neither inevitable nor irreversible. “Strong regressive movements are certainly not inconceivable,” he wrote. “The conditions of life in World War I automatically enforced a breakdown of some of the taboos of peacetime civilization.” What we are witnessing today—the normalisation of assassination, the aerial bombardment of civilian infrastructure, the wholesale destruction of a nation’s capacity to sustain life—is not merely a regressive movement. It is a full-scale decivilising process unfolding in real time, conducted by the very states that claim to be civilisation’s custodians.
Elias made another observation that is devastating in its relevance to the present moment. He noted that as Western nations consolidated their power, they “came to see themselves as bearers of an existing or finished civilization to others, as standard-bearers of expanding civilization.” The consciousness of their own superiority, he wrote, “from now on serves at least those nations which have become colonial conquerors, and therefore a kind of upper class to large sections of the non-European world, as a justification of their rule.” This sentence, written in the shadow of the Second World War, describes with uncanny precision the operating logic of the current catastrophe. The United States and Israel do not merely wage war—they wage war in the name of civilisation, in the name of order, in the name of values they systematically violate with every missile that strikes a school, a hospital, a residential neighbourhood. The civilising mission has become the decivilising instrument.
What appeared like a slip of the tongue by the German Chancellor during the twelve-day invasion of Iran fully depicts the mood of European states: someone else is doing the dirty work that Europeans feel too embarrassed to face in their own mirror of past and present. Europe’s silence was not neutrality—it was complicity dressed in diplomatic restraint. It took the European states unconscionable time to break their silence against the impunity of the Israeli war machine. And when they finally spoke, the words arrived too late and too softly to matter. The fiasco could only be ended with a purportedly much larger display of American bombing power—a ‘resolution’ that resolved nothing except the demonstration that violence remains the final arbiter of international affairs.
The catastrophe did not end there. The resumption of violence was entirely predictable, but its eruption in the middle of yet another negotiation was perhaps less so—not for everyone, except the assassinated former Supreme Leader of Iran, who seemed to have been ironically vindicated in his prediction. Here lies one of the bitterest ironies of this crisis: the very leader whose removal was meant to create the conditions for ‘peace’ had warned that the conditions for war were being manufactured. His assassination did not end the cycle of violence—it consecrated it.
The European posture throughout this catastrophe deserves pointed censure. Holbach, writing in 1774—a passage Elias chose to highlight—declared that “there is nothing that places more obstacles in the way of public happiness, of the progress of human reason, of the entire civilization of men than the continual wars into which thoughtless princes are drawn at every moment.” Two hundred and fifty years later, the thoughtless princes have merely changed their titles. They sit in chancelleries and foreign ministries, speaking the language of human rights while facilitating human destruction. The European states, whose twentieth-century history is written in the blood of two world wars, colonial extraction, and the Holocaust, have learned precisely the wrong lesson from their own past. They have not learned that the logic of ‘civilising’ violence is always a lie. They have learned only to outsource it.
This is what makes the doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ the most dangerous oxymoron of our age. Every intervention justified in humanitarian terms has produced humanitarian catastrophe. Iraq, Libya, Syria—these are not aberrations. They are the pattern. And Iran is now being fed into the same machinery, with the same rhetoric and the same catastrophic disregard for those who will actually pay the price. The intervention promised liberation; it delivered devastation. It promised order; it produced chaos. It promised civilisation; it enacted its collapse.
But what is really at stake? The Middle East? Global economy? Energy prices? The declining power of the American hegemon? The rise of China and Russia in the backdrop? All of these are credible frameworks within which to analyse the current crisis, alongside the unexpected survival—thus far—of the current regime in Iran. But the deeper issue is civilisation and culture themselves. We are no longer talking about the clash of civilisations. We are witnessing the collapse of civilisation at the hands of those who masquerade as benevolent liberators but have, in very real terms, become embodiments of plain and naked barbarity.
Elias understood this danger with extraordinary clarity. He wrote that “the ‘civilization’ which we are accustomed to regard as a possession that comes to us apparently ready-made, without our asking how we actually came to possess it, is a process or part of a process in which we are ourselves involved.” Civilisation is not a trophy one places on a shelf. It is not the property of any single nation or alliance. It is a process—fragile, reversible, dependent at every moment on the willingness of human beings to constrain their most destructive impulses. When that willingness collapses—when the restraints that centuries of painful progress have imposed on the exercise of raw power are discarded in favour of assassination, aerial bombardment, and the wholesale destruction of civilian life—civilisation does not merely stall. It reverses. And Mirabeau’s insight, which Elias preserved for us, becomes prophecy rather than history: the cycle “from barbarism to decadence through civilization” can reverse itself, and the machine can run down if no alert and principled hand winds it back up.
I write this on the day of Nawruz—the day the earth itself reminds us that renewal is built into the structure of reality. But renewal is not automatic for human civilisation in the way it is for the turning of the seasons. The earth will turn. The equinox will arrive. The flowers will break through the soil whether or not we deserve them. Human civilisation enjoys no such guarantee. It requires cultivation—a word that shares its root with culture, and with the very idea of tending something fragile into existence. The civilising process, as Elias demonstrated, took centuries of slow, painful, often unconscious transformation. Its reversal can take weeks. We have seen those weeks. We are living in them.
And yet.
I return to where I began—to Neruda, and to the Persian tradition that breathes through Nawruz. The promise of spring is not a guarantee that the gardeners will be worthy of the garden. It is a reminder that the garden persists despite the gardeners. That the capacity for renewal is written into the fabric of existence itself, waiting—always waiting—for human beings to rise to the occasion of their own better nature.
This is not naivety. It is the deepest realism available to us. Every civilisation that has endured has done so not because it avoided catastrophe but because, in the aftermath, enough people chose to rebuild rather than to destroy, to tend rather than to burn, to remember rather than to repeat. The Persian poetic tradition—from Rumi’s insistence that “spring is the resurrection brining life back” and even in death we find life and promote it, to Hafez’s radical trust in the turning of fortune—has always understood this.
The plea I make today is not political in the narrow sense. It is civilisational. It is a plea for the return to the most elementary recognition that international law is not an optional courtesy extended by the powerful to the weak—it is the architecture of coexistence without which we are all reduced to the law of the jungle. It is a plea for Europeans to look in their own mirror and recognise that the violence they facilitate today will define their legacy tomorrow. It is a plea for those who speak of liberation to ask whether the liberated have a voice in the terms of their own freedom—or whether, as in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, they are merely rubble upon which someone else’s geopolitical architecture is constructed.
And it is a plea, above all, for civilisation itself—not as a badge of Western superiority, not as a weapon of cultural imperialism, but as the slow, fragile, precious achievement of human beings learning, over centuries, to resolve their conflicts without annihilating each other. That achievement is burning. Those who lit the fire call themselves its protectors.
Spring will come. It always does. The question is whether, when it arrives, we will have left anything standing worthy of its light.
Nawruz Mubarak. May the new year find us worthy of renewal.
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