Diagnosis of an imperial pathology, and the resistance that proves it wrong
The Pope's Intervention
On 11 April 2026, as American and Iranian delegations sat across from each other in Islamabad for the first direct high-level talks since 1979, Pope Leo XIV addressed the College of Cardinals. He did not name Donald Trump. He did not need to. His words were precise and their target unmistakable:
"A delusion of omnipotence is fueling the US–Israeli war on Iran. Too many people are suffering today, too many innocent people have been killed, and I believe someone must stand up and say that there is a better way."
The Vatican's phrasing drew on a vocabulary the Church has developed across centuries of observing temporal powers lose themselves in the exercise of force. Delusion of omnipotence is not a diplomatic euphemism. It is a clinical diagnosis. It describes a state in which a power mistakes its capacity for destruction for evidence of its moral superiority, in which the ability to bomb is confused with the right to rule, in which the performance of strength is substituted for its substance.
‘Unacceptable to Any Free Person’: Iran Condemns Trump’s ‘Insult’ to Pope Leo XIV | Image: Reuters, Social Media, Republic (IMAGE: Republic World)Trump's response, delivered on social media from Air Force One, confirmed the diagnosis more effectively than any Vatican communiqué could have done. He called the Pope "weak on crime" and "terrible for foreign policy," suggested Leo only held his office because he was an American appointed to deal with Trump personally, and posted an image of himself as a saint-like figure with light emanating from his fingers, eagles and American flags filling the sky above. The man who had threatened to end an entire civilisation on Truth Social — "A whole civilisation will die tonight" — now pictured himself as Christ. The delusion could not have illustrated itself more thoroughly.
The Theoretical Architecture: Fanon, Memmi, and Locke
The Pope's diagnosis did not emerge from a vacuum. The psychological architecture of colonial power has been described for over half a century by clinicians who watched it operate at close range.
Frantz Fanon, writing from his psychiatric practice in Algeria, identified projection as the central mechanism of the colonial mind. The coloniser attributes to the colonised the very violence he himself exercises. The colonised is described as dangerous, irrational, fanatical — precisely the characteristics the colonial enterprise most fully embodies. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is a structural requirement: the violence must be displaced onto the victim for the perpetrator to maintain a coherent self-image as a bearer of civilisation.
Albert Memmi, in The Colonizer and the Colonized, described the complementary mechanism: the coloniser's need to dehumanise. Exploitation on the scale colonialism requires cannot be sustained by a person who fully perceives the humanity of those being exploited. The colonial subject must be rendered, in the coloniser's imagination, as something less — less rational, less capable of self-governance, less deserving of the resources they happen to possess. The dehumanisation is not incidental. It is load-bearing.
These mechanisms are not historical curiosities. They are operational in 2026. When Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth declares that sovereign nations of the Western Hemisphere are components of an American security perimeter rather than members of a community of equals, he performs Memmi's dehumanisation in geopolitical register. When Trump describes Iran as having been "blasted back to the Stone Ages" and frames the assassination of its Supreme Leader as an operational achievement, he enacts Fanon's projection: attributing to Iran the barbarism the act itself embodies.
John Locke, writing in the seventeenth century, reserved a particular category for those who exercise force without right and without acknowledgment of the other's humanity: the wild beasts. Such actors, by their conduct, place themselves outside the moral community. They forfeit the protections of the civil order they have abandoned. When the United States and Israel launched their joint war of aggression against Iran on 28 February 2026 — without Security Council authorisation, without an armed attack triggering Article 51 of the UN Charter, without any legal pretext of any kind — they did not merely violate international law. In the analysis Norman Finkelstein would later provide, they ended it. The wild beasts acted. And the institution whose purpose was to constrain them sat in session and blamed the prey.
The Lunatic Society
Finkelstein, whose legal and historical scholarship has tracked the conduct of Israel and the United States across decades, offered a clinical assessment of his own in an interview published 10 April 2026:
"Israel is a lunatic state. It's a lunatic society. It's a completely lunatic society. It's a nation of homicidal maniacs. They're all homicidal maniacs. Look at the levels of support they gave to the Israeli government during the genocide in Gaza. Only five per cent of Israeli Jewish society thought the government was using too much force. Forty per cent thought they weren't using enough force. The German population under the Nazi regime had the alibi of claimed ignorance — the final solution conducted behind walls. Israeli society has no such alibi. They post their conduct on social media. There are no walls."
— Norman Finkelstein, Middle East Eye, Unapologetic, 10 April 2026
The question posed by this article is whether the United States has become, or is rapidly becoming, a lunatic society of the same order. The evidence accumulating across the first weeks of April 2026 suggests the answer is yes. Consider the Washington Post column published 10 April 2026 by Mark Thiessen, which laid out a four-step plan for the Trump administration — the fourth step being the assassination of Iranian negotiators if talks failed. Consider Senator Lindsey Graham's suggestion on Fox News that Iranian negotiators should not be allowed to "return alive." Consider the Trump administration's public threat to end Iranian civilisation, posted on social media with a deadline attached. Consider the American media's response: not widespread condemnation, but a debate about whether such threats were strategically effective. A society that produces, consumes, and normalises such discourse has lost its mooring in reality.
— Pope Leo XIV, 11 April 2026
The Islamabad Negotiations: A Cover
On 10 April 2026, Iranian and American delegations met in Islamabad for the first direct high-level talks since 1979. The negotiations had been brokered by Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir, following a ceasefire agreed ninety minutes before Trump's own deadline. Iran came with ten points, including a comprehensive ceasefire on all fronts — Lebanon, Gaza, and the broader region — the release of frozen assets, and Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. By 12 April, the talks had collapsed. Vice President JD Vance, who had led the American delegation, claimed Iran had failed to meet American demands. This is not the grammar of negotiation. It is the grammar of an ultimatum delivered to a subordinate.
But the collapse of the talks was not the most revealing event of those forty-eight hours.
The Deception Operation
On 11–12 April 2026, while American and Iranian negotiators sat in the same city, the US Navy attempted to penetrate the Strait of Hormuz under cover of darkness and electronic deception. According to reporting by The Cradle, confirmed by multiple sources including Iranian military communications and independent journalists, two US destroyers — the USS Frank E. Petersen (DDG-121) and USS Michael Murphy (DDG-112) — disabled their AIS transponders, the electronic identification system required by international maritime law for the safety of navigation; disguised themselves electronically to appear as Omani merchant vessels; took shallow, dangerous routes close to the coast to avoid Iranian radar; and attempted to slip through the strait during the ceasefire while negotiations were underway.
The IRGC Navy detected them. An Iranian naval officer broadcast a warning:
"Heavy Warship 121. This is Sepah Navy station. You must alter course and go back to the Indian Ocean immediately. If you don't obey my order, you will be targeted. Out."
The US destroyers continued. The Iranians issued a final warning and announced they were ready to open fire without warning. The destroyers turned around and retreated. The story was broken by Esteban Carrillo Lopez, news desk editor for The Cradle, Mohamad Hasan Sweidan, a strategic studies researcher, and Sharmine Narwani, a Beirut-based analyst of West Asian geopolitics. Their reporting revealed that the United States had attempted a covert military penetration of Iranian territorial waters during a ceasefire it had ostensibly agreed to, while its negotiators sat across a table from Iranian diplomats. This is not the conduct of a rules-based order. It is the conduct of an actor that believes rules apply only to others.
Trump's Blockade: Piracy Announced
Hours after the failed deception operation, President Trump announced on social media:
"Effective immediately, the United States Navy will begin the process of blockading any and all ships trying to enter or leave the Strait of Hormuz. I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in international waters that has paid a toll to Iran. No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas."
Under international law, this announcement constitutes multiple violations. The San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea (1994), which codifies customary international law on naval warfare, provides that a blockade is legal only if declared and enforced impartially, does not bar access to the ports of neutral states, and is limited to the territory of the enemy. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Part III, guarantees transit passage through international straits. No state may unilaterally suspend this right.
Moreover, Trump's order to interdict vessels on the high seas — outside Iranian territorial waters — on the sole basis that they have paid a toll to Iran constitutes piracy under customary international law. The 1982 UNCLOS defines piracy as any illegal act of violence, detention, or depredation committed against vessels on the high seas without legal authorisation. A state that orders its navy to board neutral vessels on the high seas outside any recognised legal framework has crossed into that category. The term is not hyperbolic. It is the accurate legal description of what was proposed.
The Selective Application of Maritime Law
In March 2026, the International Maritime Organization held an emergency session and adopted a 17-point declaration condemning Iran's announced toll on the Strait of Hormuz. The declaration, co-sponsored by over 115 member states, described Iran's action as a "dangerous precedent" threatening the global system of freedom of navigation. The legal analysis was accurate as far as it went. Under UNCLOS, states bordering international straits cannot impose tolls on vessels exercising the right of transit passage. What the declaration did not — and within its mandate could not — do was name the context that produced Iran's action.
The Table That Cannot Be Ignored
| Situation | Legal Framework | International Findings | IMO Response |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gaza blockade (2007–present) | Geneva Conventions, IHL, ICJ jurisdiction | ICJ: violates prohibition on starvation; UNGA 149–12: demands immediate end; ICC arrest warrants issued | None — outside mandate |
| Hormuz toll (2026) | UNCLOS, transit passage | IMO emergency session; 115-state co-sponsored condemnation; "dangerous precedent" declared | Immediate and formal |
This table, first published in this author's After the Pretense (11 April 2026), is not a legal argument. It is a record of institutional behaviour. The International Maritime Organization acted swiftly and decisively when Iran asserted control over a waterway. It has never acted on the Gaza blockade, despite the International Court of Justice finding that blockade violates the prohibition on starvation as a method of warfare, despite the UN General Assembly voting 149 to 12 to demand its immediate end, despite the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for the political and military leadership of the regime in East Jerusalem on charges including the war crime of starvation.
The lesson received by every state watching was not subtle: international law is enforced when it inconveniences those without protection from enforcement. It is not enforced when it inconveniences those with it. The Hormuz toll is not the dangerous precedent. It is the downstream consequence of one — a precedent set when the Gaza blockade was permitted to stand, confirmed when the ICJ's findings were met with institutional silence, and completed when the UN Security Council was used to legitimise a war of aggression against the state that drew the appropriate conclusions.
The Cage and Its Bars
Alastair Crooke, the former British diplomat and EU security adviser, offered a formulation in an interview published 12 April 2026 that captures Iran's strategic objective with precision:
"Iran's objective is to blow up the existing paradigm — completely — in order to escape from the cage in which they've been held for 48 years. Surrounded by US military forces, besieged by sanctions, UN resolutions weaponised against it, political isolation, economic boycott, cultural exclusion."
— Alastair Crooke, The Chris Hedges Report, 12 April 2026
The cage is what the rules-based order looks like from the inside. The sanctions, the vetoed resolutions, the JCPOA withdrawal, the assassination of General Soleimani on Iraqi soil, the 2026 war of aggression — these are not separate events. They are the successive reinforcement of the cage's bars. Iran has now demonstrated that the cage can be broken. Not through conventional military victory — its infrastructure has been damaged, its civilians killed — but through strategic patience, legal adherence, and asymmetric capacity built over two decades.
The missile cities illustrate this. Iran's primary missile capability is buried 800 metres under granite mountains, accessed by internal railway. A door opens. The missile fires. The door closes. Sixteen thousand air strikes have not stopped it. Half an hour after each strike, the next missile comes out. The command structure is decentralised on a mosaic model, designed after Iran observed the American decapitation of Baghdad's command structure in 2003. It cannot be stopped by killing leaders — as the assassination of the Supreme Leader demonstrated. The new leadership is more defiant, not less.
When Trump threatened to end Iranian civilisation, Iranians streamed onto bridges and nuclear facilities and said: here we are. If you are going to kill us, kill us. Crooke calls this a deep Shia readiness to accept personal sacrifice in the interests of the community — a civilisational response, not a military one. It had a particular resonance in China and Russia. The Chinese were surprised by the extent of Iran's strategic preparation. So were the Russians. The success is being noted.
The Peasant Class and the Resistance
There is a lesson here that extends far beyond Iran. The Yemeni Ansarallah have held the Red Sea against a coalition of naval powers. Hezbollah has absorbed devastating blows and continued to strike Tel Aviv. Hamas, despite the genocide in Gaza, is still running the strip and re-equipping for the next conflict. The United States and the regime in East Jerusalem have launched war after war, assassination after assassination, blockade after blockade. They have not achieved their stated objectives in any of them. What they have done is exhaust their own legitimacy, alienate their allies, deplete their military stockpiles, and reveal the limits of their power to a watching world.
The delusion of omnipotence is not merely morally repugnant. It is strategically self-defeating. A power that believes itself above the law acts in ways that systematically erode the legal frameworks that once constrained its rivals. A power that substitutes spectacle for strategy finds itself unable to distinguish between performance and substance. A power that threatens to end civilisations discovers that such threats unite the intended victims against it.
— Alastair Crooke, 12 April 2026
A War of Narrative
The conflict described in this article is not only military. It is a war of narrative. The United States and its allies have spent decades constructing a story in which their violence is defence, their interventions are humanitarian, their dominance is order, and the resistance of the colonised is terror. That story is now collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The Washington Post column calling for the assassination of Iranian negotiators. The social media threats to end a civilisation. The covert naval operation during ceasefire talks. The blockade announced as piracy. These are not the acts of a rules-based order. They are the acts of a power that has run out of arguments and substituted force.
The task of those who oppose this delusion is to name it. Consistently. Publicly. Without euphemism. When a US official threatens to kill negotiators, call it what it is: a war crime. When the US Navy attempts a covert penetration of sovereign waters during ceasefire talks, call it what it is: an act of bad faith and a violation of international law. When a blockade is announced on the high seas, call it what it is: piracy. When a society produces and normalises such conduct, call it what it is: a delusion of omnipotence.
Identifying the Epstein Class
If our local representatives do not act — if they remain silent while their government threatens genocide, imposes illegal blockades, and assassinates heads of state — then we should identify them as part of the Epstein class: a network of power that treats the vulnerable as objects of use, that derives profit from access to those who cannot refuse, that protects its own and rationalises exploitation as civilisation. No lip service should suffice to slow us down from drawing these connections. It is far better to identify them early than to be lulled into their media bubbles of distraction and to suffer the long-term consequences of a neocolonial world order should humanity lose this war.
What We Can Do
The resistance shall prevail. But prevailing requires participation. This is a war of narrative: every article written, every truth spoken, every lie named contributes to the dismantling of the delusion. This is a war of protest: every demonstration, every letter, every call to elected representatives, every refusal to be silent in the face of atrocity. This is a war of labelling: call the enemy the enemy. Call the war crime a war crime. Call the piracy piracy. Call the delusion a delusion.
This is a war of demanding that our nation states pitch us into the battle — economically if necessary, militarily if called — because the threat we face is not to distant shores but to our beliefs, our culture, our very humanity, and most of all our rational senses. The enemy calls on us to buy into lunacy, delusion, and destruction. A world turned upside down. Up is down. Down is up. We are all, to varying degrees, inside cages of our own — distracted by our affairs, anaesthetised by propaganda, persuaded of our helplessness. Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen have reminded us that the peasant class can and must oppose, and shall win. If we do not realise this and act, we may all be doomed to observe as others fight our battles for us.
The First Lesson of the Century
In After the Pretense, this author argued that the first major lesson of the twenty-first century was being written in the rubble of Isfahan's bridges and the negotiating rooms of Islamabad. That lesson can now be stated plainly: a hegemon that mistakes the performance of strength for its substance, that launches a war on the advice of a Netanyahu who promised a weekend operation and delivered a strategic defeat, that threatens to end a civilisation on social media and accepts a brokered ceasefire ninety minutes before its own deadline — such a power is not demonstrating its dominance. It is demonstrating its limits.
The Persian civilisation is 7,000 years old. The rules-based order is seventy-nine years old and dying. The resistance — Iranian, Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni — has shown the world that the cage can be broken. The only remaining question is how much will be destroyed before the delusion is finally named for what it is.
References
Primary Sources
Pope Leo XIV, address to the College of Cardinals, 11 April 2026. Reported in Los Angeles Times, 13 April 2026.
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2026-04-13/pope-leo-trump-squabble
Pope Leo XIV, remarks to reporters, papal flight Rome to Algeria, 13 April 2026. Reported in Catholic Standard, 13 April 2026.
https://www.cathstan.org/us-world/pope-leo-responds-to-trump-blessed-are-the-peacemakers
Finkelstein, N. (10 April 2026). Interview, Middle East Eye, Unapologetic series.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4eg3yiYeQxc
Crooke, A. (12 April 2026). Breaking the Paradigm: America's Suez Crisis. The Chris Hedges Report.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RKEjfIDEys
Lopez, E.C., Sweidan, M.H., Narwani, S. (13 April 2026). "Under cover of talks, Washington launches Deception Op in Hormuz." The Cradle, News Round Up Ep. 202.
https://www.youtube.com/live/nmrQOFNe0qY?si=bwmU-i3osiUNY7cg
Thiessen, M.A. (10 April 2026). "Iran thinks it has leverage. Here's how Trump can prove it wrong." Washington Post.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/04/08/ceasefire-deal-iran-us-israel-war-trump/
Legal Instruments
Charter of the United Nations, 1945. Articles 2(1), 2(4), 2(7), 51.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter
UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), 1982. Part III — transit passage through international straits.
https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf
San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea, 1994.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/san-remo-manual-1994
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998. Article 8(2)(b).
https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions (Protocol I), 1977. Articles 54, 56.
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/api-1977
International Findings
IMO Council emergency session declaration, March 2026. Co-sponsored by over 115 states.
https://docs.un.org/en/S/2026/243
ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2025.
https://www.icj-cij.org/case/192
UN General Assembly Resolution, June 2025 (149–12). Demanded end to Gaza blockade.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164346
Preceding Articles in This Series
Clothier, Y. (3 April 2026). The Prince's Rules: North America, Western Asia, and the Unmaking of International Law.
https://bushgrad.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-princes-rules-north-america-western.html
Clothier, Y. (5 April 2026). The Epstein Doctrine: Domination, Projection, and the Colonial Mind.
https://bushgrad.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-epstein-doctrine-domination.html
Clothier, Y. (11 April 2026). "A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight": After the Pretense of International Law.
https://bushgrad.blogspot.com/2026/04/a-whole-civilization-will-die-tonight.html
Clothier, Y. (12 April 2026). Breaking the Paradigm: A Response to Alastair Crooke on Iran, Hormuz, and the End of the American Century.
https://bushgrad.blogspot.com/2026/04/breaking-paradigm-hormuz-strait.html
Secondary Sources
Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth.
Memmi, A. (1957). The Colonizer and the Colonized.
Locke, J. (1689). Two Treatises of Government. Second Treatise, Chapter III: Of the State of War.
Fromm, E. (1973). The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
Published on bushgrad.blogspot.com — 14 April 2026. This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. It may be shared freely with attribution.
