The Iran War and Beyond: Three Exiles, Three Threats, Three Ideas

The World As We Write

“The rules-based international order is not merely weakening. It is being actively dismantled by the state that built it.”

— Mark Carney, 2025

We are writing at a moment when the most solemn covenant in modern history is breaking in plain sight. The system constructed after 1945 --  built on the ruins of the deadliest war in human history, on the still-warm ashes of the Holocaust, on the specific and anguished promise that the civilized world would never again allow the systematic destruction of a people -- is failing its most fundamental test. Not quietly, not ambiguously, but loudly, visibly, and with the active complicity of the democracies that wrote its founding documents.

Gaza has become the covenant’s confession. The United Nations Security Council passed ceasefire resolutions -- they were vetoed, repeatedly, by the United States. The International Court of Justice issued provisional measures indicating a plausible risk of genocide and demanding immediate steps to protect civilians -- they were ignored. The General Assembly voted with overwhelming majorities, resolution after resolution, the voice of the overwhelming majority of the world’s nations  -- and nothing happened.

Humanitarian corridors were promised and closed. Aid was pledged and blocked. International journalists, UN workers, and medical staff were killed in strikes on clearly marked vehicles and buildings.

Every mechanism of the order built on the promise of ‘never again’ was activated in sequence, and every one failed -- not through malfunction or confusion, but through the deliberate, sustained, and legally documented choice of the most powerful democracy in the history of mankind to place itself and its allies above the rules it wrote, ratified, and for eight decades proclaimed as the foundation of civilized international life.

This is not a failure of the United Nations. It is the United Nations showing, with terrible and clarifying honesty, exactly what it is: A forum for the expression of powerless conscience. Its resolutions are the world’s moral record. Its vetoes are the world’s power structure.

When these two things diverge completely and persistently, as they have over Gaza, the institution does not fail. It reveals. And what it reveals is that the universalism it was built to embody has been replaced, without announcement or admission, by a selective legality in which the rules apply to the weak and are optional for the strong.

The Iran war has made the domestic dimension of this collapse equally visible. The United States -- the self-proclaimed apex of democratic civilization, the nation whose founding documents remain among the most eloquent arguments for government by consent ever written -- is conducting a war that no democratic mandate authorized. 

No declaration of war was passed by Congress, as the constitution requires. No sustained public debate preceded the decision. No clear objective was ever articulated that could be evaluated, debated, or voted upon.

War aims have shifted with bewildering speed: The destruction of nuclear capability, then regime change, then the targeting of oil infrastructure, then sudden suggestions that resolution was weeks away. The contradiction between maximalist rhetoric and the absence of coherent purpose creates the portrait of a superpower acting on institutional momentum rather than democratic will -- the military-industrial complex in motion, requiring neither mandate nor destination.

Polling consistently shows that a majority of American citizens oppose this war. They were not asked. This is the disconnect between state power and the people laid bare in the most consequential possible domain: The decision to kill and be killed in the name of a democracy, whose citizens were not consulted.

The greatest democracy in history is conducting its foreign policy as an empire -- its citizens spectators to decisions made in their name by a system of interlocking interests -- defence contractors, intelligence networks, geopolitical strategists, financial markets -- that operates with the permanence and self-sufficiency of a sovereign power within the sovereign power. Democracy survives the election. It does not survive the aftermath.

Mark Carney named what is happening with unusual precision for a serving statesman. The rules-based international order, he said, is not merely weakening under pressure -- it is being actively dismantled by the state that designed and built it. This is the crucial distinction. An order under strain can be repaired. An order being deliberately demolished by its own architect is a different kind of crisis. It is not a failure of the system. It is a choice.

And choices of this magnitude -- the withdrawal from multilateral institutions, the repudiation of treaty obligations, the treatment of international law as a menu from which the powerful select what suits them -- do not stay contained. They teach. Every government watching Washington learns the same lesson: The rules were always optional for those with sufficient power. The only question was whether you had accumulated enough power to exercise the option.

We have been at this precise point before, and we know how it ended. The League of Nations did not collapse suddenly. It eroded through a sequence of moments, each individually survivable, collectively fatal. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931. The League condemned the action. Nothing changed. Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935. The League imposed sanctions. They were inadequate, selectively applied, and quickly abandoned.

Germany remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, in direct violation of Versailles and Locarno. The League noted its concern. Hitler concluded, correctly, that the system would accommodate him further. Each failure normalized the next. Each accommodation lowered the threshold for the one that followed. By the time the pattern became undeniable, the machinery of the next catastrophe was already in motion.

The parallel is not precise. History does not photocopy itself. But the structure is unmistakably familiar: The paralysis of multilateral institutions, the erosion of shared norms, the selective application of international law, the normalization of military force as a routine instrument of statecraft, and the growing conviction among both aggressors and bystanders that the rules exist only for those too weak to break them.

We are, on this reading, somewhere between Manchuria and Abyssinia -- past the first failures, not yet at the final unravelling. The window in which course correction is possible remains open. It will not remain open indefinitely.

What makes the contemporary moment more dangerous than the 1930s is not the absence of institutions -- we have more of them -- but the amplifiers. Nuclear weapons mean that a great power conflict carries existential risk from its first moments. Climate breakdown means that the ecological foundations of civilization are already destabilized, removing the buffer that allowed previous crises to be survived and rebuilt from.

Artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure mean that the speed of both conflict and manipulation has outrun the speed of democratic deliberation. And global supply chain interdependence means that economic warfare -- sanctions, blockades, the weaponization of trade -- propagates suffering across populations that have no voice in the decisions causing it. The 1930s unfolded across a decade. The next systemic rupture, if it comes, may not allow a decade for recognition, let alone response.

The ‘never again’ covenant was not merely a legal commitment. It was a moral one, made by specific people who had witnessed specific horrors and staked the credibility of civilization on the claim that those horrors had changed something permanent in the human political order.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the establishment of the International Court of Justice -- these were not bureaucratic achievements. They were acts of collective witness, the institutionalization of grief into law.

To watch them fail over Gaza -- to watch the specific crime they were designed to prevent unfold in real time, documented, livestreamed, adjudicated, and continued regardless -- is not merely a political disappointment. It is a civilisational rupture.

The covenant is broken. And when a covenant of this weight breaks, the question is not only how to repair it. The question is whether the architecture that housed it was ever adequate to what it promised -- and if not, what must be built in its place.

That is what this essay attempts to answer. Not with nostalgia for an order that was always more unequal than its mythology admitted. Not with the paralysis of despair at the scale of what is failing. But with the conviction that diagnosis honestly made is the beginning of reconstruction, and that the three exiles, three threats, and three ideas that follow are not abstractions -- they are the map of where we are, and the earliest sketch of where we must go.

Prelude: An Honest Beginning

“The old order is not coming back. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

— Mark Carney, 2025

This essay begins with a confession. The economic order that is now fracturing did not only fail. For two hundred years, measured against the long sweep of human misery, it also succeeded.

The epidemiologist Hans Rosling spent his career documenting what the data actually show: Child mortality collapsed, literacy spread, absolute poverty fell dramatically, life expectancy doubled. The genie of industrial capitalism, released from its bottle, did extraordinary material work. To pretend otherwise is not radical honesty. It is a different kind of dishonesty.

But the genie, having done its work, refused to retire. And a tool that will not put itself down when the task changes becomes a weapon. The economic model that lifted billions from material poverty is now actively producing the conditions for a deeper and less reversible impoverishment: Of the social fabric, of democratic legitimacy, of the living systems on which all human life depends. The question is not whether the genie was useful. It was. The question is who is in charge now -- the human being, or the genie.

This essay proposes that we are living through three simultaneous exiles, facing three converging threats, and that three interlocking ideas --  the Social Man, the Just Nation, and the Living Planet -- offer the only architecture adequate to what is coming. It sounds utopian. Social democracy once sounded utopian. Universal suffrage once sounded utopian. The abolition of slavery once sounded utopian.

The question was never whether transformation was possible. The question was always whether the cost of not attempting it eventually exceeded the cost of trying. We are arriving at that moment.

Part One: The Three Exiles

Exile is not always geographical. The three great exiles of our time are structural: The exile of societies from the states that nominally represent them; the exile of nations from the self-determination that was promised and withheld; and the exile of the living environment from the moral and legal universe of human decision-making. Each exile has the same root. Each is maintained by the same system. And each is paying an increasingly catastrophic price.

I. The Exile of Societies

Citizens of functioning democracies find themselves formally included and substantively absent. The state endures, elections continue, institutions persist -- yet society no longer recognizes itself within them. Power has become abstract, procedural, and unanswerable. Citizens’ voices do not travel upward; they dissipate into metrics, platforms, and managed outrage. The state governs. It does not relate.

This estrangement has a structural cause. Long before the modern nation-state took its familiar form, power had already detached itself from land and embedded itself in capital. The British East India Company -- a commercial enterprise that became a sovereign power, commanding armies and administering justice across a subcontinent -- was the prototype.

The modern state inherited this logic even as it wrapped itself in the language of people and territory. While sovereignty was rhetorically nationalized, the deeper operating system remained economic. States learned to discipline societies in order to remain attractive to capital, rather than disciplining capital in service of society.

The result is governance that is procedurally democratic and substantively oligarchic. Elections decide personnel, not direction. Parliaments debate, but markets decide. Democratic majorities consistently favour stronger environmental protections, fairer taxation, reduced inequality.

Consistently, across decades and jurisdictions, these preferences lose to the organized interests of accumulated wealth. The subjugation is not violent. It is administrative, legal, incremental -- which makes it harder to name and harder to resist. Society is not suppressed. It is quietly displaced.

II. The Exile of Nations

The nation-state system, presented as the natural expression of human self-determination, was in most of the world a colonial imposition. The borders of the Middle East were drawn by two European officials  -- Sykes and Picot -- in London in 1916, dividing peoples and resources according to imperial convenience.

The borders of Africa were drawn at the Berlin Conference of 1884, with no African in the room. Pakistan was conjured into existence in 1947 in a catastrophic partition designed in weeks, killing a million people and displacing fifteen million more. These are not ancient arrangements that history gradually sanctified. They are recent wounds, still open.

The Kurds are perhaps the clearest living proof. Thirty to forty million people -- one of the largest nations on earth without a state -- distributed across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, each of which has strategic reasons to suppress Kurdish identity and political organization.

Their statelessness is not an oversight of history. It is a maintained condition, because a Kurdish state would destabilize arrangements that more powerful actors depend upon. The Kurd is in exile not from a place but from the right to exist politically.

The Palestinian condition is the most visible wound in the international legal order -- precisely because it unfolded in full view, was documented from the beginning, and produced an elaborate architecture of international law and institutional concern that then failed, completely and repeatedly, to protect a people from dispossession, occupation, and slaughter.

If universalism means anything, it must mean something here. That it does not is not incidental to the system. It is the system’s confession.

The Gulf states present the economic man as sovereign: Extraordinary material wealth, zero democratic accountability, labour regimes built on the systematic exploitation of migrant workers, societies structured around consumption and surveillance. Their autocracy is not a cultural fact. It is a geopolitical arrangement, sustained by western arms, oil dependency, and the convenient stability of unaccountable power.

Pakistan exists as a garrison state, a pawn in the strategic calculations of both Washington and Beijing, its democratic institutions perpetually destabilized by the weight of external interests and internal militarism. And the African condition -- fifty-four countries, most with borders that cut across every ecological, ethnic, and linguistic reality -- remains the largest single catalogue of the colonial state’s ongoing damage.

Yet even here, Rosling’s data insists on complexity: Extraordinary human resilience, genuine improvements in health and education, political creativity in conditions of structural obstruction. The African condition is not hopeless. It is deliberately obstructed. The difference matters enormously.

III. The Exile of the Environment

Of the three exiles, the third is the most philosophically radical and the most consequential. The living environment  -- the biosphere, the climate system, the web of species and ecosystems on which all human life depends -- has been exiled from the moral and legal universe of human decision-making. It appears in economic calculation only as resource or externality: Something to be extracted from, or a cost to be deferred onto future generations who have no vote.

This is not merely an ethical failure. It is a logical one. You cannot have an economy without a society. You cannot have a society without a biosphere. The hierarchy was always there -- the living planet at the foundation, human society in the middle, the economy at the top as the most derivative and dependent layer.

We inverted this hierarchy, placed the most derivative layer at the summit, and called it progress. The consequences are now arriving at a speed that is beginning to exceed the system’s capacity to deny them.

The environment’s exile is maintained by the same compartmentalization that maintains the other exiles. Economists are not required to answer for ecosystems. CEOs are not required to answer for the communities their supply chains destroy. Generals are not required to account for the carbon cost of permanent war.

Each actor optimizes within their domain and is accountable only to its metrics. The damage travels across the borders that accountability does not. The compartment is the alibi.

Part Two: The Three Threats

Against these three exiles, three threats are now converging -- not as separate crises to be managed sequentially, but as interlocking expressions of the same systemic failure. They cannot be addressed one at a time. They share a single root, and they will require a response that is, for the first time in modern history, genuinely holistic.

I. Systemic Inequality

The post-war era produced a brief, historically unusual period of declining inequality within wealthy nations. That period ended in the 1980s. Since then, inequality within and between nations has deepened with gathering speed.

The three wealthiest individuals on earth now possess more combined wealth than the bottom half of humanity. This is not a side effect of an otherwise functional system. It is a structural feature of the system’s own logic: Capital accumulates, labour does not; the returns to ownership consistently exceed the returns to work; and the political power that flows from concentrated wealth is used, rationally, to protect and extend the conditions of its own accumulation.

The social contract -- the implicit agreement between individuals, society, and state -- presumed a human being capable of obligations beyond self-interest: A citizen, not merely a consumer. When the economic man becomes the default citizen, that contract loses its foundations. It becomes a transaction rather than a covenant. And transactions, unlike covenants, dissolve the moment they cease to be profitable.

II. Planetary-Scale Ecocide

Climate breakdown is not one problem among many to be balanced against quarterly growth and electoral cycles. It is the alteration of the conditions that make complex civilization possible. The living systems of the earth -- atmosphere, ocean, forest, soil, freshwater -- are not resources that the economy uses.

They are the substrate on which the economy, society, and the state all rest. Their degradation is not an externality. It is the calling in of a debt that was never supposed to come due.

No multilateral framework has yet produced action commensurate with the scale of the emergency, because no multilateral framework has yet been willing to subordinate the interests of the economic man to the requirements of the living planet.

The market has no instrument for pricing the destruction of the biosphere on which all markets depend. This is not a market failure in the technical sense. It is a failure of the model’s most basic premise: that all values can be expressed as prices and all problems solved by getting the prices right. Some things are not prices. They are conditions of existence.

III. Unregulated Digital Power

The digital revolution has concentrated communicative, financial, and cognitive power in the hands of a small number of corporations operating largely beyond democratic accountability. This is the newest of the three threats and the least understood, partly because it moves faster than any previous concentration of power, and partly because its mechanisms are deliberately obscured.

Algorithmic systems shape what billions of people see, believe, feel, and decide -- without transparency, without democratic mandate, and without meaningful accountability to the societies they reshape.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this concentration beyond any historical parallel, not through malice but through the logic of competitive advantage in an ungoverned space. Democratic institutions were designed for a world of print, borders, and information scarcity. They are structurally ill-equipped for a world of synthetic reality, computational surveillance, and cognitive infrastructure owned by private actors answerable only to their shareholders.

The compartment here is perhaps the most dangerous of all: The technologist is not required to answer for democracy, the platform is not required to answer for truth, and the algorithm is not required to answer for the society it is quietly reconstructing.

Part Three: The Three Ideas

“What is not utopian today? Social democracy was utopia once.”

— The author

Diagnosis without proposal is despair dressed as analysis. The three ideas that follow are not a programme -- they are an architecture. They do not specify every policy or resolve every tension. They propose the correct hierarchy of values within which policies must be designed: The living planet first, the just society second, the economy last  -- as the servant of the two above it, not their master.

This is not anti-economic. It is the restoration of the correct order of things.

I. The Social Man

The economic man did his job. He drove the material transformation of human life across two centuries. He is not a villain -- he is a tool that outlived its mandate and colonized domains it was never designed to govern.

The task now is not to destroy him but to contain him: To identify the domains where competitive market logic is genuinely appropriate -- material production, technological innovation, the allocation of goods and services -- and to identify, with equal clarity, the domains where it is catastrophically inappropriate: The climate, the digital commons, public health, education, democratic governance, the social fabric.

In the domains from which the economic man must be displaced, a different model of the human being is required. The Social Man -- and the term is shorthand for something that includes women, children, communities, and future generations equally -- is not the enemy of prosperity. He is its precondition.

A human being who is educated, healthy, belonging to a functioning community, living within a stable ecological system, and participating in genuine democratic self-governance is not less productive than the economic man. He is more productive, more creative, more resilient, and incomparably less destructive.

The philosophical shift required is from a reductive model -- which collapses all questions to a single metric, usually price -- to an integrative one, in which every significant decision is evaluated against simultaneous obligations: To present society, to future generations, and to the living systems on which all life depends.

This is not inefficiency. It is accuracy. The current system is not efficient -- it is fast. It is fast because it ignores most of its costs. A system that internalizes those costs will be slower and incomparably more honest.

The great candle-bearers of history demonstrate that this shift is not merely theoretical. Jane Jacobs -- a journalist with no institutional power -- defeated Robert Moses, the most powerful urban administrator in American history, by insisting that a street is not an obstacle to movement but a living system of human connection.

Rachel Carson -- a government biologist -- broke open the chemical industry’s alibi by insisting that the compartment between commerce and ecology was a lie, and that the death of the songbird and the poisoning of the child were the same event. Neither had power. Both had clarity. Both won.

The social man is not a utopian fantasy. He has already appeared, repeatedly, in history’s most important turning points. He simply has not yet been given a system adequate to what he already is.

II. The Just Nation

The nation-state, as currently constituted, is the primary vehicle of the economic man’s global dominance. States compete against each other to attract capital, which means they compete to weaken the protections -- labour, environmental, social -- that capital finds inconvenient.

This race to the bottom is not a policy choice that can be reversed by electing better governments. It is built into the architecture of the system. As long as capital is mobile and states are competitive, the pressure will always be downward.

The Just Nation is not a different kind of state. It is a state with a different purpose: From extraction and competition, to protection and flourishing. From serving the interests of mobile capital, to serving the society that actually lives within its borders.

This reorientation is modest in description and revolutionary in implication. It would mean that trade agreements protect workers and ecosystems as robustly as they protect investors. That digital platforms operating within a jurisdiction are accountable to its democratic processes. That the revenues generated within a society are available to that society, not to offshore arrangements designed to ensure they are not.

The deepest structural problem is the mismatch between the borders of states and the realities of the peoples within them. The Kurd, the Palestinian, the stateless, the structurally excluded -- these are not edge cases. They are the proof that the system was never designed for self-determination. It was designed for extraction and management.

Redrawing every border is not possible and not necessarily desirable. But changing what a border is for -- from a line that contains a population for the convenience of power, to a framework within which a society governs itself in genuine relationship with the state that represents it -- is both possible and necessary.

The strongest societies in the world share one feature: A dense, mutually accountable relationship between state and society, where civil society is genuinely powerful rather than decorative, where the state is genuinely responsive rather than merely procedural, and where the gap between political decision and social consequence is narrow enough to be felt and corrected.

Scandinavia is the obvious example, but Kerala demonstrates it in conditions of poverty, and Costa Rica demonstrates it without military expenditure. These are not accidents of culture. They are achievements of politics. They can be replicated, adapted, and built upon.

III. The Living Planet

Of the three ideas, this is the most radical and the most necessary. The environment must become a living entity to which all systems, all societies, and all states are accountable. Not a resource. Not an externality. Not a concern to be balanced against growth. A subject with legal standing, moral priority, and the power to call human arrangements to account when they threaten the conditions of life itself.

This is already beginning. The Rights of Nature movement has granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River in New Zealand, to forests in Colombia, to the entire ecosystem in Ecuador’s constitution. These are small, contested, and fragile achievements. But they are the legal and philosophical seeds of the correct hierarchy: the living planet at the foundation of all human arrangements, not as backdrop but as sovereign condition.

A system that places the planet first is not anti-human. It is the only system that is genuinely pro-human, because it is the only system that acknowledges what human beings actually are: Not sovereign individuals who happen to inhabit a planet, but expressions of a living system, dependent on it at every moment, incapable of flourishing when it degrades. The economic man treated nature as a storehouse. The social man must learn to treat it as a home -- and eventually, as an authority.

The decompartmentalization that the Living Planet requires is total. Every economic decision is simultaneously an ecological decision. Every trade agreement is simultaneously an environmental agreement. Every digital system is simultaneously an energy system with a carbon cost. Every military budget is simultaneously a calculation about what is not being spent on the stabilisation of the climate.

Once the compartments are removed, the true costs become visible. And once the true costs are visible, the current system becomes not merely unjust but obviously, demonstrably, indefensible.

Coda: The Candle

It sounds utopian. It is utopian, in the precise sense that Thomas More intended: A place that does not yet exist, but whose existence is imaginable, and whose imagination changes what is possible. Social democracy was utopian. Universal suffrage was utopian. The abolition of slavery was utopian. Each transformation was achieved not by the powerful conceding gracefully but by the stubborn clarity of people who saw what was actually happening and refused, at considerable personal cost, to pretend otherwise.

The forces arrayed against these three ideas are immense. The economic man is not an abstraction -- he has names, addresses, lobbyists, and governments. The imperial borders are not accidents -- they are maintained by states and alliances with powerful interests in their continuance. And the living planet has no army, no vote, and no voice except through the human beings who choose to speak for it.

But the system is not omnipotent. Its compartments can be named. Its alibis can be dismantled. Its logic can be interrupted by people who refuse to stay within the boundaries it has drawn for them. Jane Jacobs had neighbours and notebooks. Rachel Carson had data and moral clarity. Neither had power in any conventional sense. Both changed what was thinkable. And changing what is thinkable is, in the long run, the only change that matters.

We are settled, nested, watching a world in peril from the vantage point of lives that have seen enough to know that the peril is real, and enough to know that it is not inevitable.

The candle does not illuminate everything. It does not defeat the darkness. But it proves, stubbornly and repeatedly, that the darkness is not the final word.

Nature first. Society second. Economy last.

As servant, not master. As tool, not sovereign.

This is not the end of prosperity.

It is the beginning of its justification.

Sujaul Khan is an Assistant Professor at North South University.