There is a recurring simplification in the way nations speak about war. Not childish in its consequences, which are monstrous, but childish in its imagination. The fantasy is always some version of the same thing: if one hits hard enough, long enough, with enough steel, enough fire, enough repetition, the problem will go away. America often behaves as though a dangerous regime can be managed through sanctions, covert pressure, targeted killing, and periodic strikes. Iran often behaves as though the ability to hold distant cities at risk can restore sovereignty and annul humiliation. Israel often behaves as though every surrounding threat can be neutralized before it matures, and that safety can therefore be manufactured through supremacy. Armed movements often believe that endurance itself is victory, that retaliation is dignity, and that resistance remains justified so long as it survives.

All of them, in different ways, mistake force for resolution.

Military force can delay, disrupt, and deter. It can destroy runways, missile sites, command structures, tunnels, laboratories, power stations, and homes. It can prevent an imminent massacre. It can buy time. Sometimes it is necessary. But force cannot resolve conflicts whose real engines are memory, humiliation, sovereignty, and the struggle for recognition. It can damage the visible machinery of war while leaving untouched the deeper reasons men and states return to it.

That is the central error of modern conflict. Nations keep treating political and historical crises as though they were only technical problems of capability. They ask bombs to do the work of legitimacy. They ask coercion to do the work of recognition. They ask military pressure to settle questions that are, at root, about who may stand upright in history and on what terms.

It is easier to bomb than to recognize. Easier to threaten than to remember. Easier to say the other side understands only force than to admit that what it wants may not be destroyable from the air.

This is why modern wars recur even after astonishing displays of military power. The bombs fall, the funerals end, the headlines move on, and yet the core of the conflict remains. The core was never located exactly where the bomb landed. It was located in older fears, inherited humiliations, unmet claims, and rival stories about dignity and survival. Nations return, again and again, to the same misunderstanding: they imagine that what is deepest in political life can be subdued by what is loudest in the machinery of death.

It cannot.

What Force Can Do — and What It Cannot

A serious argument must begin with a concession. Force has real uses. Armies can deter invasion, blunt offensives, intercept missiles, kill commanders, degrade weapons programs, and alter the tactical balance of war. Allied force helped destroy Nazi Germany. Military action has sometimes prevented or interrupted mass killing. A state facing an immediate attack cannot be expected to answer with seminars on mutual recognition.

The point is not that force is useless. The point is that its genuine usefulness tempts states to ask more of it than it can deliver.

Force can reduce capacity. It cannot create legitimacy. It can impose obedience under duress. It cannot produce consent. It can delay a nuclear program, destroy a rocket stockpile, or decapitate a militia leadership. It cannot settle the meaning of the conflict from which those capabilities emerged. It can kill a commander, but not the humiliation that made him persuasive. It can break an organization, but not the memory that recruits its successor.

States repeatedly confuse military success with political settlement. They see the enemy weakened and imagine the problem diminished. But weakness and resolution are not the same thing. A humiliated actor may be militarily weaker and politically more dangerous. A population may be too exhausted to fight and more certain than ever that peace, under current terms, is only another name for submission.

This is where military thinking becomes strategically blind. It tracks what it can count and neglects what it cannot. Destroyed launchers are visible. Inherited humiliation is not. Cratered runways are visible. A father explaining defeat to his son is not. A munitions report is visible. A people’s changing theory of history is not.

And yet it is often the latter that determines whether the conflict ends or regenerates.

Military logic is linear. It seeks targets and effects, means and ends. But conflicts rooted in history are not linear. The same strike that restores deterrence in one register may radicalize identity in another. The same campaign that weakens armed capacity may strengthen political myth. A tactic can succeed while the larger strategy fails.

This is the recurring category error of modern power: states keep trying to solve political problems with military tools.

The Memory Beneath the Battlefield

No serious conflict begins on the day the first missile is launched. That is only the day the cameras arrive. The real beginning lies elsewhere, often in some older act of domination that remains psychologically active long after diplomats have renamed it history.

In Iran’s case, the language of threat cannot be separated from the memory of subordination. The 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, after he moved to nationalize Iranian oil, remains more than an episode in a textbook. It forms part of a durable national memory that outside powers treated Iranian sovereignty as negotiable when strategic interests required it. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, with its mass casualties and chemical attacks, deepened the sense that survival could not be entrusted to an international order administered by others. None of this absolves the Iranian state of repression, corruption, or regional manipulation. But it helps explain why external coercion often confirms rather than dissolves the regime’s narrative. What outsiders call pressure, the regime can translate into evidence that humiliation remains the intended order of things.

The same is true, differently, for Palestinians. The conflict is not only about rockets, checkpoints, negotiations, or ceasefire lines. It is also about the memory of dispossession in 1948, the occupation that began in 1967, the expansion of settlement, the fragmentation of land and authority, the blockade of Gaza, and the lived experience of statelessness. For generations, Palestinians have been told that their deepest political claims must wait for a future that never fully arrives. Under those conditions, radicalization does not appear only as doctrine. It appears as proof that disappearance is not complete.

For Israelis, military doctrine rests atop another historical terror: the fear that weakness invites annihilation, that delay can be fatal, that hostile intent must be taken literally. This fear is not imaginary. It is shaped by centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, and by wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973 in which state survival was not theoretical. The October 7 attacks renewed this fear in an especially intimate form. But fear, when sacralized, becomes distorting. It can make every enemy feel like an echo of absolute catastrophe. It can collapse the difference between legitimate self-defense and the fantasy that no surrounding grievance can ever be politically real if it is experienced as threatening.

America also carries memory, though it prefers to imagine itself above such things. Its memory is one of successful intervention, of global reach, of industrial wars won and distant enemies punished. But it is also a memory others experience differently: coups renamed stability, sanctions renamed leverage, wars renamed order. Iraq in 2003 is the clearest example. The United States removed a regime with speed and overwhelming force, yet the military victory did not produce a legitimate political settlement. It destabilized a region, empowered militias, deepened sectarian conflict, and enlarged the very anti-American narratives it sought to suppress. Afghanistan told a related story in slower motion. A superpower could topple a government and occupy a country for twenty years without resolving the underlying political contradictions.

A bomb can destroy a radar installation. It cannot erase the story through which that installation is understood. A government can be overthrown. The memory of who overthrew it and why does not disappear with the palace gates.

Memory survives defeat. Often it deepens inside it.

Sovereignty: The Word Beneath the Rhetoric

Security is the word nations use when they want to sound reasonable. Sovereignty is often the word they mean.

Behind the technical language of deterrence, nonproliferation, escalation management, strategic depth, and regional stability lies an older claim: we do not wish our fate to be decided from elsewhere. We do not wish our vulnerability to become someone else’s instrument. We do not wish to live permanently inside another power’s account of reality.

This is why conflicts of this kind resist purely military solution. They are not simply disputes over weapons. They are disputes over who has the right to stand upright in history.

For Iran, sovereignty is not merely territorial. It is psychological and civilizational. It is the refusal to become pliable before foreign command once again. This helps explain why even Iranians who despise repression may still react with fury to external domination. Foreign coercion can strengthen the very state it claims to weaken by collapsing internal complexity into external confrontation. A nation is not a regime, but the humiliation of the nation can be politically captured by the regime.

For the United States, sovereignty is rarely felt in vulnerable terms. It is experienced as the authority to maintain order, protect interests, reassure allies, and shape the environment before threats mature. This is sovereignty at imperial scale, even when the country refuses the imperial name. It does not usually speak of itself as domination. It speaks of responsibility. But those on the receiving end often experience it as intrusion because it assumes that order is secure when arranged from above.

For Israel, sovereignty is entangled with legitimacy at the most intimate level. It is not only a matter of statehood but of the right to exist without permanent siege. This is why criticism framed in terms of legality or proportionality often fails to penetrate when fear is activated: the state hears in it a demand to become vulnerable again. But sovereignty pursued solely through force begins to hollow itself out. A state can be militarily formidable and politically insecure at the same time. It can win wars and still fail to become regionally legitimate so long as another people’s political existence is indefinitely deferred.

For Palestinians, sovereignty has become almost unbearable to name because its absence structures daily life so completely. It is promised, postponed, negotiated, diluted, and administratively simulated while the substance recedes. Under those conditions, sovereignty becomes less a policy detail than a protest against erasure.

Conflicts become durable when large populations believe they are being asked to accept organized humiliation as the price of someone else’s security or order.

People will endure astonishing hardship rather than accept subordination forever. This is not always noble. It can harden into fanaticism or chauvinism. But it is real. When a conflict is rooted there, force does not resolve it. Force clarifies it.

The Seduction of Hardness

If force fails so often to resolve such conflicts, why do states and movements keep returning to it? Because hardness is seductive.

It does not merely promise victory. It offers emotional relief. It transforms uncertainty into action, grief into posture, humiliation into retaliation, and fear into movement. After an attack, a bombing campaign can feel not only justified but psychologically necessary. After humiliation, missiles can feel like the only proof that dignity survives. Hardness restores narrative coherence. Something has been done. Someone has answered. The nation has not remained passive before insult.

This is why escalation so often feels sane from the inside.

Democracies reward visible strength because frightened populations want reassurance in concrete form. Authoritarian systems reward it because force helps disguise internal fragility as civilizational purpose. Media systems intensify the reflex. Images of retaliation travel faster than arguments for restraint. Hardness is televisable. De-escalation looks like hesitation.

Repeated insecurity also deforms moral judgment. People begin to admire hardness in itself. Cruelty becomes confused with seriousness. Callousness becomes realism. The inability to imagine the opponent’s inner life gets mistaken for strategic maturity. Nations teach citizens to numb themselves and call it strength.

The political temptation is obvious. Hardness protects innocence by assigning agency entirely to the other side. If we are harsh, it is because they forced us. If we escalate, it is because they understand nothing else. If they radicalize, it only proves we were right to hit harder. This moral asymmetry is one of the great narcotics of modern war.

And so systems select for those most fluent in hardness: politicians who can inhabit fear without questioning it, generals who speak in the clean grammar of targets and effects, militants who turn despair into liturgy, clerics who translate complexity into purity, media figures who reward simplification. The result is not just more violence. It is a culture in which the emotional rewards of hardness keep outrunning its strategic failures.

The Trap of Mutual Radicalization

Once hardness becomes the preferred answer to insecurity, the conflict acquires a mechanical quality. Each side acts in ways that appear defensive to itself and aggressive to the other. Each escalation confirms the world the opponent already thinks it inhabits.

America pressures Iran in the name of containment. Iran reads in that pressure not merely opposition to its conduct but the older pattern of domination returning in updated language. It arms more deeply, invests in proxy networks, and wraps repression in the language of resistance. Israel reads that regional expansion as encirclement and proof that delay is dangerous. It strikes earlier and harder. Palestinians and other regional actors read those strikes as confirmation that only force makes their suffering visible. Militancy grows or regenerates. Israeli politics then hardens further, citing precisely that militancy as proof that compromise is fantasy. The cycle closes and starts again.

Each side is partly wrong and partly responding to something real. That is what makes the trap durable. If one side were simply hallucinating, the system would be easier to break. But each side can point to actual injuries, actual dead, actual threats, actual humiliations. This is why moral simplification is so tempting and so useless. The structure is not sustained by one lie alone. It is sustained by the interaction of multiple truths interpreted through fear.

The weaker side often radicalizes morally. It sacralizes resistance, sanctifies refusal, and converts suffering into innocence. The stronger side often radicalizes militarily. It sacralizes security, sanctifies preemption, and converts power into moral exemption. Each form of radicalization feeds the other. The weak side’s violence confirms the strong side’s doctrine of perpetual threat. The strong side’s violence confirms the weak side’s doctrine that only violence preserves dignity.

Over time, enemies begin to resemble each other in structure of feeling. Each becomes less able to imagine life outside the conflict. Each educates children in selected memory. Each learns how not to hear the other’s grief. Each develops domestic classes who live, politically or economically, from recurrence.

That is how war stops being an episode and becomes a grammar.

Once that happens, peace no longer appears difficult. It appears unreal.

Why Recognition Is Harder Than War

War is easier than recognition because recognition asks more of the soul.

To recognize another people is not merely to acknowledge that they exist. It is to concede that their fears are not all inventions, that their historical memory cannot be dismissed as propaganda, that their demand for dignity is not reducible to inconvenience, and that one’s own innocence is partial. It is to admit that suffering does not erase responsibility and that power does not confer the right to define reality for everyone else.

This is nearly intolerable in conditions of trauma.

Recognition feels dangerous because it threatens identity. It asks nations to surrender the comfort of absolute self-justification. It asks the wounded to accept that grief is not a blank check. It asks the powerful to accept that security purchased through permanent humiliation is not security but delayed catastrophe. Most of all, it asks enemies to accept the humiliating fact that the other is real and cannot be wished out of history.

Recognition is not absolution. It is not forgetting. It is not moral equivalence. It is simply the refusal to build political order on the fantasy that only one side possesses history.

Without recognition, every negotiation remains tactical. Every ceasefire is merely a pause. Every agreement is fragile because beneath it lies the unaddressed conviction that the other side’s claim is ultimately illegitimate.

Recognition also requires limits. War allows each side to imagine total vindication, secretly or openly. Recognition says: you will not receive history in pure form. You will not erase the other’s claim. You will not secure a future in which your trauma alone governs the whole moral field. Something in you must remain unsatisfied if all of you are to survive.

This is offensive to ideologies built on maximal claims. It wounds pride. It interrupts the fantasy that contradiction can be cleansed by force. But contradiction is the actual condition of political life. Mature peace is not the triumph of one narrative over all others. It is the arrangement by which rival narratives cease seeking completion through blood.

What a Real Solution Would Require

A real solution would not begin with sentiment. It would begin with disillusionment. Each side would have to surrender a fantasy it finds emotionally useful.

America would have to surrender the fantasy that coercive superiority can engineer durable political order in societies whose historical memory treats intervention as contamination. It would have to accept limits not as inconvenience but as fact. It would have to stop confusing the ability to impose costs with the authority to define the region’s future.

Iran would have to surrender the fantasy that regional influence built through proxy warfare, ideological manipulation, and permanent confrontation can coexist indefinitely with domestic legitimacy. It would have to stop speaking in the name of dignity while humiliating ordinary Iranians through repression and corruption. A state cannot defend sovereignty abroad while hollowing it out at home.

Israel would have to surrender the fantasy that military superiority can substitute for political legitimacy, and that the Palestinian question can be managed indefinitely rather than resolved. It would have to accept that force can interrupt threats but cannot stabilize a political order that permanently denies another people meaningful sovereignty and equal human standing.

Palestinian leadership and armed movements would have to surrender the fantasy that dignity can be restored solely through negation, martyrdom, or permanent militancy. They would have to accept that the sacralization of resistance can become its own prison when it ceases to serve life and instead serves only narrative continuity. Justice cannot be built entirely out of forms of struggle that consume the people in whose name they are waged.

These fantasies are not equal in power, consequence, or cost. But all of them make settlement harder. All of them offer emotional rewards that outlast their strategic usefulness. All of them promise a form of purity that history does not grant.

A durable peace would also require structures, not moods: enforceable guarantees, political institutions that outlast the passions of any single crisis, meaningful sovereignty where sovereignty is due, security arrangements that do not depend on perpetual domination, and a reduction of external manipulation by powers that treat the region as a chessboard for their own credibility.

But beneath those structures lies something harsher: no side gets innocence forever. No side gets total vindication. No side gets a future in which the other simply disappears as a moral claimant.

The future, if it comes, will be compromised, partial, morally untidy, and intolerable to those nourished on totality.

That is why real solutions are rare. They are blocked not only by hostility but by the private pleasures of fantasy: the fantasy of innocence, the fantasy of total security, the fantasy of redemptive violence, the fantasy that one’s own side could be safe and affirmed if only the other side were sufficiently weakened, frightened, or disappeared.

A peace worthy of the name would begin with a disciplined renunciation of domination.

Bombs Cannot Kill the Thing That Is Fighting

The deepest engine of these wars is not metal. It is memory. Not explosives, but humiliation. Not strategy alone, but the refusal to be erased, managed, subordinated, or made to live forever inside someone else’s account of reality.

This is why military superiority so often produces only theatrical forms of success. It can dominate the visible field while leaving untouched the invisible thing for which the war is actually being waged.

A state can bomb research sites, kill commanders, flatten neighborhoods, collapse tunnels, intercept rockets, occupy terrain, fortify borders, and threaten retaliation without limit. Some of this may be necessary in moments of immediate danger. But if what is being fought over is the right to exist without humiliation, then none of it reaches the core by itself. It reaches the shell. The shell matters; people die there. But history is not decided only in the visible zone of destruction. It is also decided in the meanings people carry away from it.

If a strike confirms domination, the conflict deepens. If a war confirms existential fear, the conflict deepens. If suffering is converted into sacred narrative rather than political maturity, the conflict deepens. If security is pursued through permanent denial of another people’s dignity, the conflict deepens.

The modern world is technically brilliant in violence and often primitive in politics. It knows how to destroy almost anything except the conditions that make destruction persuasive. It can assassinate a man and enlarge his myth. It can devastate a territory and purify the grievance of those who survive it. It can call this deterrence and be correct for six months or five years before the unresolved matter returns in altered form.

Force can interrupt history. It cannot conclude it.

What is required is not passivity. Not sentimentality. Not the refusal to acknowledge danger. What is required is the maturity to distinguish between what force is for and what it can never accomplish. Force may sometimes be necessary to stop an immediate threat. The worship of force begins when necessity hardens into worldview, when military tools are asked to answer metaphysical injuries, and when states seek in destruction the relief that can come only from legitimacy, limit, and recognition.

Bombs cannot kill memory. They cannot kill humiliation. They cannot kill the human need to stand before history and not be owned by it.

Until that truth becomes politically actionable, the wars will continue under changing names and familiar slogans. One side will call it deterrence. Another resistance. Another security. Another survival. But beneath the rhetoric, the same wound will remain.

And the untouched wound is what keeps fighting.

—Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.

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