Consider this hypothetical:
Two apartment buildings share a single parking lot. Management from both Building A and Building B are engaged in negotiations over how the parking lot will be organized, painted, maintained, and paid for.
Across the street is a restaurant. The restaurant’s customers primarily come from Building A, and internal studies have shown that Building B’s tenants overwhelmingly patronize the restaurant’s competition. Therefore, the restaurant is seeking to sway the parking lot negotiations to make it easier for Building A’s tenants to get to their shop, and harder for Building B’s tenants to get to the competitor.
Through back-channel discussions, the restaurant learns that Building A may be conceding to many of Building B’s requests for how the parking lot should be organized. Worried that this will help their competition, the restaurant announces on social media that if Building A doesn’t get their act together and negotiate more aggressively, they will “bomb the sh*t out of them.”
Now, that’s quite a leap. How did we go from negotiations one day to threats of mass murder the next?
If this scenario were to occur in Anytown, USA, we would immediately see this as unhinged and immoral. No, you cannot use murder as your default method of settling disputes. The vast majority of us accept this in our day-to-day lives, and the proof of this is that the vast majority of us have never murdered anybody. We settle disputes verbally, or through contractual agreements, and if negotiations fail we tend to just walk away. But for some reason when it comes to the global stage, where the harm caused by these decisions is far greater in scale, many struggle to see the issue with this type of rhetoric.
The Hormuz negotiations
Iran and Oman have been engaged in negotiations over the future governance of the Strait of Hormuz for the past few weeks. We were told in the early stages of the talks that a deal was within reach, but it is yet to materialize. The fact that these talks are even happening seems to imply a quiet U.S. admission that Iran will control the waterway in some capacity going forward, which is a major diplomatic climb-down from Donald Trump. With this concession, the focus seems to have shifted. Whereas before the goal was to “liberate the Strait,” the objective now is to get a deal that Trump can spin into a victory.
To this end, Trump has sought to influence the Iranian-Omani negotiations. In an August 17 phone call with Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst, Donald Trump said “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them.”
This frustration seems to have been caused by the lack of progress towards opening the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians and Omanis said weeks ago that a deal was almost complete, only to have negotiations extend longer than anticipated. Trump, desperate for a deal that can help bring down oil prices and sooth the economic stress at home, chose to lash out at Oman, who he believes is being too favorable to Iran.
This sadly is not an unusual sentiment from Donald Trump, who has made a habit out of threatening to bomb countries as a negotiating tactic. The regularity with which Trump threatens mass murder does not make it civilized or moral, however. It makes it even more unsettling.
As a result of Trump’s loss at the hands of Iran, the American empire has been dealt a severe dent to its armor. The image of American bases scattered across the Middle East – once a symbol of military dominance – has been quite literally shattered. Trump can no longer rely on previously held assumptions about American power in order to get his way. Thus, he must lower himself rhetorically to the level of a brutal warlord.
The war on morality
In order to support this war, you must necessarily be morally inconsistent.
In fact, many of this war’s advocates seem to have outsourced their morality to the government, which has spoon-fed them with lies in order to justify their actions.
Return to the hypothetical I outlined at the beginning. Of course we would all see these actions as moral abominations if they were done by private individuals. You do not get to murder somebody because you are in a dispute over the layout of a parking lot, or the price of healthcare, or political disagreements. A civilized society does not put up with this level of brutality.
The hypocrisy becomes apparent once we look at the government. How can it be that the group we are told is supposed to bring murderers to justice (government) is also the group which commits the most murders? The U.S. military bombed an elementary school in Iran in the early days of this current war, killing over 175 innocent people, many of whom were young girls attending the school. Yet, nobody has been held accountable for this crime against humanity.
This, by any consistent standard of morality, is an outrage. However, because this crime was committed by the government and not a private actor, the media has largely moved on. Their refusal to admit fault has barely been scrutinized. Because we view the government in this false “collective” sense, many tend to forget the basic fact that the people who fill its ranks are individuals, just the same as the rest of us, and the immoral acts they commit are just as immoral as they would be if you or I had committed them.
This is the war on morality. To be supportive of this war is to not principally believe in the immorality of murder. If killing an innocent, non-aggressive person is wrong in a domestic, private context, then it must also be wrong when committed by people in the government. Just because somebody has a fancy title does not make them any less of a human, with a responsibility for their actions.
Nolan Denaro is an independent political analyst, writer, and host of “The Quest For Clarity” podcast, which can be found on YouTube and Spotify. His work has been published by Antiwar.com, Responsible Statecraft, the Libertarian Institute, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He writes on U.S. foreign policy, economics, and current events, with a particular focus on war and imperialism. He writes opinion pieces on his Substack, and you can follow him on X @nolandenaro. Nolan can be reached for correspondence at nolansdenaro@icloud.com.
