The US, Israel, and the new nuclear order

Nuclear redlines have not just been crossed—they’ve been obliterated. In a world already staggering under war fatigue and geopolitical disarray, the airstrikes launched by Israel against Iran, followed by US B-2 bomber raids on three of Iran’s nuclear sites—Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow—signal not a surgical intervention, but a strategic unravelling. These weren’t empty bunkers; they were core facilities, tied to Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure and monitored under international frameworks.

To strike them is to strike the very architecture of postwar nuclear restraint. It is to play with radioactive fire under the illusion of moral superiority.

What started with years of covert sabotage has burst into the open. On June 13, Israel bombed deep inside Iranian territory, killing top military officials and scientists. Days later, President Trump confirmed direct US involvement. What had been disavowed is now declared. The US dropped its mask and its payload.

There is no international mandate, no UN resolution, no Congressional authorisation. Only an old playbook: one nation deciding who may enrich uranium and who must disarm under fire. One rule for allies. Another for adversaries.

Iran has stood at this precipice before. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—a diplomatic milestone—reined in its nuclear capacity in exchange for sanctions relief. Iran complied. The world applauded. But Trump tore it up in 2018, citing “national security” and snapping sanctions back into place. Since then, the road to escalation has been paved by unilateralism.

If Iran is punished for pursuing civilian nuclear power, who punishes the countries that stockpile and threaten to use it?

Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United States remains the only nation to have unleashed nuclear weapons on civilian populations. Together, they now claim the right to bomb what others are only suspected of building. This isn’t non-proliferation. This is nuclear apartheid.

And it raises foundational questions:

Who decides which nations must live under bombs—and which get to drop them?

When does “prevention” become the pretext for permanent war?

How many more cities must be reduced to ash before the world finally says: enough?

If this operation “succeeds” in breaking Iran’s sovereignty, it will not be the end of conflict. It will signal the ascendancy of a new order—where military might overrides international law, and every oil-rich or resistant state becomes a target-in-waiting.

Yet resistance grows. In Tel Aviv, anti-war Israelis protest Netanyahu’s military adventurism. In US cities, activists march under banners of “Hands off Iran.” Inside Congress, lawmakers like Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders question the president’s authority to plunge the country into another war. Even the IAEA’s Director General warned that bombing active nuclear reactors like Bushehr risks an environmental Chernobyl.

A single missile could unleash radioactive fallout over millions. This isn’t containment. It’s a calculated catastrophe.

And still, the silence holds. India—once a principal oil partner to Iran and now a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—offered no condemnation. New Delhi, now strategically tethered to US and Israeli interests, responded with little more than diplomatic formalities: a phone call, a carefully measured statement. The world’s largest democracy has receded into the shadows of economic calculation, choosing expediency over principle.

This is complicity by another name.

Let us not forget: The US didn’t just bomb Iran in June 2025. It also once claimed Saddam Hussein had WMDs, then invaded Iraq under that lie, killing half a million civilians. It invaded Afghanistan, bombed Libya, destabilised Syria, and continues to arm Israel’s siege of Gaza. All under banners of peace and democracy.

Modern imperialism wears the uniform of peacekeeping, but its bullets are marked for resource control.

Behind these “security operations” lies a militarised economy. Arms manufacturers need new buyers. Defence budgets need new enemies. As long as war fuels profit, peace will be postponed. In 1960s parlance, the “military-industrial complex” is no longer theory—it is governance.

Marxist thinker Shibdas Ghosh diagnosed this decades ago: when capitalist markets collapse under their contradictions, war becomes the economic stimulant of choice. Governments become buyers, bombs become inventory, and global conflicts become spreadsheets.

When bombs are good for business, the world becomes the battlefield.

What we are witnessing is not another border conflict. It is a crime against peace—and against the fragile remnants of the postwar global order. Gone is the balancing act of diplomacy. What remains is an imperial script that begins with sanctions and ends with rubble.

But history is not made only in war rooms. It is written in resistance.

From Tehran to Tel Aviv, from Brooklyn to Bangalore, students, writers, and citizens must rise. Not with missiles, but with memory. Not with silence, but with voice. Let this OpEd be pinned to dorm walls and café counters. Let it be dissected in lectures and argued on street corners. Let the next generation ask: What did you do when the redlines disappeared?

For if this war persists, it won’t end with Iran—it will engulf the very idea of justice. And when that falls, there will be no treaties left to sign—only the dust of what we failed to defend.

Let this be the final line we draw—before the very notion of lines, laws, and limits is lost to ash.

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