What defines a war in the modern age is in principle simple – exchange of violence in a state of declared conflict – and yet highly complicated in its applications and contemporary interpretations. Is a preemptive war a justified, defensive war? Can an asymmetric and undeclared armed conflict ever be justified?
Can violence by non-state groups that tolerates civilian casualties or targets non-combatants, including off-duty combatants, ever be justified as a fight for self-determination, or is it always terrorism? Is declaring “wars” on terror, on crime (organized or otherwise), on drugs, or a war on guns and hate a justified usage of the term “war” or deceptive marketing of some state’s, group’s or powerful leader’s ideological or even utilitarian agenda?
These are tremendously vexing questions that demand honest answers. They cannot be helped by deflection, denial, and declarations of propaganda. Armed conflict and propaganda are two sides of the same coin: struggle for systemic dominance and aggressive assertion of one’s own social constructs over all others. In the 19th and 20th centuries, this was visible in the prevalence of propaganda wars on ideologies and identities (be it communism, capitalism, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, National-socialism, totalitarianism, Aryan racism, male chauvinism, or any other -ism).
As the anti-art of one-sided high-tech wars has entered the information age and taken steps into digital reality, however, propaganda has an increasing impact to the point of having universal and instantaneous effects. But little is yet understood about the cost-benefit ratio of propaganda on the macro-social scale. How enormous is the price tag of producing such propaganda and spinning global opinion into a “tail wags dog” perception? How immense are the long-term and short-term costs to the social fabric of human restraint? What is the infinite cost of mental destruction of war and propaganda to individuals and families that are either perpetrators or victims of warfare, or even both at the same time?
In the current era, the distance between propaganda, militant activism and armed conflict appears to be shrinking precipitously. Wars in the first half of the 20th century were waged on battlegrounds of large-scale destruction with addition of rather primitive propaganda machines churning out pamphlets that targeted the lowest common denominators in their own and the opponent citizenry or were engaging in subversive influencing of opinion leaders and public opinion in enemy countries. Additionally, wannabe ideological conqueror states from the Third Reich to the USSR were making strong use of secret police apparatuses and their terror methods in oppressing dissidents.
The second half of the last century saw the battlefields of propaganda move from the public stages and cinema to the private living room, and the frequency accelerate from weekly news reels. Mere years later, in the American-led war on Saddam Hussein, the internet and embedded journalism were added to the information warfare matrix.
Today, with cyber warfare and machine learning pushing into the fray, words are weaponized in an unprecedented way and redefined from their historic meaning or newly defined. Violence in doses from micro to mega is delivered as news to our pockets and harms our minds. Spin doctoring and propaganda are heading towards new peaks. Hate speech and fake images are being streamed; propaganda wars are fought on our personal devices.
All of this natural – or unnatural – evolution of human violence has played out in the Middle East more and with more immediacy of impact than in many other, less conflicted geostrategic zones of planet earth. The seven Arab Israeli conflicts between 1948 and 2025 were the most notorious but by far not all of the components that made the region into the global conflagration hotspot and byword for conflict: proxy warfare during the Cold War, internal unrest and civil wars, interstate wars broken off by autocrats like Saddam Hussein, Iranian aggressions and oppression of unrest on one end and the West Sahara conflict on the other end of the MENA region, ISIL and quasi-state organizations with more weaponry than some states in the region, quarrels between and within Arab dynasties, have all been woven into an overpowering tapestry of skirmishes, assaults, unrest, intrusions, battles, economic conflicts, and open war.
Most recently, after a one or two decade-long global buildup of self-righteous mindsets on all sides of popular divides along civilizational fault lines, a century-old mentality has erupted internationally in the course of this year. Spectators of global affairs are confronted with unholy mixtures of grandstanding and down-talking; of MAGA-ism and other populism; of fears to the point of paranoia. We witness the demise of win-win or win-win-win non-zero thinking and the rise of win-lose mindsets amidst resurgences of determinism and Spenglerian thought.
The latter term refers to the impression that this geo-historical moment at the late 2025 inflection point is rife with vibes reminiscent of German writer Oswald Spengler. Owing to whatever forces of pure coincidence, the anglophone intellectual world was confronted exactly one century ago with what Spengler, last century’s German philosopher-dilletante of world history, cast as inevitable rise and demise of cultures.
His book on “the decline of the West” (titled more dramatically in the German original) attributed existential fatigue to the Western hemispheric culture and called the impending terminal stage of this culture out as “Faustian civilization” that would be marked by emergence of Caesarism, meaning a supreme authoritarian figure at the top of the state.
A near perfect specimen of Spenglerian thought was delivered in early December of 2025 in a White House declaration of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS). While perhaps less of a strategy document than an anthology of impulsive policy making, the NSS argues with economic, albeit rather weak, economic reasoning that Europe saw a decline in its percentage share of global GDP over the last 35 years because of, among other unnamed factors, regulations that “undermine creativity and industriousness”. What reminds of Spengler is that the next sentence in the NSS preaches even more ominously that Europe’s “economic decline is eclipsed by the real and starker prospect of civilizational erasure”.
The twist in the perspective is a claim to pseudo-enlightened infinity for the American side of the same Faustian civilization. America is cast as “the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country” with total Hemispheric primacy and, indeed, point-by-point superiority.
This is reinforced by exclusionary ideas that frame it as natural and just for nations to prioritize their own interests, suggesting that zero-sum competition is superior to cooperation, reciprocal altruism, and win-win outcomes. Thus, these notions deny a shared planetary fate, dismissing the need for global economic equilibrium and Pareto improvements that are essential to the survival of our planetary ecosystem and civilization.
This picture of the American administration’s mindset is important to comprehend when drawing up response strategies, and thus crucial for the Middle East, although the region makes only a smallish appearance in the NSS – with a blatantly incomplete economic reasoning that is centered on the receding importance of fossil fuels production.
While the main novelty approach (reminiscent of the oft cited our sons of bitches myth as American presidential bon mot) vis-à-vis the region is an assurance that this US administration wants to “work with Middle East partners” on common economic interests and does in no way want to meddle in the exercise of power in Gulf monarchies or nudge them to abandon “traditions and historic forms of government”, it is to be noted that the NSS uses the term “investment” twice in its short Middle East chapter – but without any specificity, nor by giving any hint that this glorious investment might be American.
When viewed against unresolved questions surrounding UN Resolution 2803, the immense and arguably utopian capital and social investment requirements—running into the trillions—for achieving economic, social, and environmental sustainability in Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, the triumphalist win-lose rhetoric of the American president and the Israeli prime minister in October 2025, together with the implications of the new National Security Strategy, point to a sobering conclusion. The Middle Eastern charade—where dominant global powers and their regional proxies profess commitment to peace and development while perpetuating structural imbalance—continues unabated. As the adapted lyrics of a Queen song might suggest: the show must go on.
Empty spaces—what are we living for?
Abandoned places—we know the score.
Does anybody know what the Middle East is really looking for?
