America’s current war against Iran is not simply or merely a military contest.
The outcome will reflect more than comparative military forces and strategies. No matter how often Donald Trump may warn that “an entire civilization could die tonight,” Tehran will remain focused on its long-term goals. In the words of chief Iranian negotiator Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf on July 15, 2026: “We are in an essential and existential war with America.”
There are pertinent particulars. Iranian decision-makers should be expected to remain determinedly rational. At the same time, many of their operational calculations and calibrations will emerge from a broad assortment of abstract ideas. Though ignored by Washington, Tehran’s decision-making process will be shaped according to subjective interpretations of Death and Time. It follows that unless authoritative US decision-makers attempt to decipher these dense adversarial interpretations, any American plan for “winning” against Iran will fail. Such failure would have serious security implications for Israel.
Donald Trump’s seat-of-the-pants war ignores critical aspects of Iran’s strategic calculus. In essence, the president’s fluctuating deadlines and incoherent positions “miss the point.” Today, even Iran’s secular IRGC military decision-makers accept core religious ideals on death, time and immortality. And even “successful” US military strikes could effectively stiffen Iranian decisional resolve. To clarify, this assessment is a logic-based extrapolation from Islamic beliefs in “sacred time.”
In both Washington and Jerusalem, much still needs to be explained. At best, because Iranian leaders distinguish between “sacred time” and “profane time,” they will regard Trump’s time-centered threats of “obliteration” as insincere and irrelevant. At worst, these leaders will take Trump’s ungraduated threats as an incentive to undertake “martyrdom operations” or to accelerate war hostilities. To be sure, Iran’s “essential and existential” efforts will include a never-abandoned national search for nuclear weapons and supporting strategies.
There is more. Owing largely to religious doctrine, Iranian strategic decision-makers will never accept American threats that they find humiliating. In spite of this, President Trump continues his gratuitous onslaught of demeaning behaviors. Significantly, this means that while Iran is acting rationally in the current war, the United States is not.
Doctrine is important. Presumptively, Iran can enhance the promise of immortality only by staying faithful to “sacred time.” Correlatively, with such an incomparable promise in mind, Iran should be expected to display greater patience and commitment than the United States or Israel.
For Iranian decision-makers, the affirmation “I believe” demands rejection of military strategic calculations based on “profane time.” Never to be ignored is that Iran-backed jihadi terrorism represents a generalized form of religious sacrifice. Doctrinally, for Tehran, any proper response to the United States or Israel must be linked to immortality or “power over death.” By definition, there can be no greater kind of power.
Considered in isolation, immortality remains an unworthy and unseemly human goal, both because it is unscientific and because it can foster war, terrorism, and genocide. Ultimately, however, the dignified human task should not be to remove individual human hopes of soaring “above mortality,” but rather to “de-link” this search from intolerably destructive human behaviors.
It’s time for an intellectual synthesis. The underpinnings of war against Iran utterly ignore the Islamic Republic’s vision of death, time and immortality. It is only with a more determined understanding of this vision, therefore, that America and Israel could meaningfully protect themselves from relentless and ever-escalating military crises.
“Is it an end that draws near,” inquires Karl Jaspers in Man in the Modern Age (1951) “or a beginning.” The helpful answer, one which could sometimes lie beyond any measuring hands of clocks, is by no means apparent to political leaderships. Yet, for the world as a whole, not just the United States and Israel, no answer could possibly be more important.
To survive as a species, not just as belligerent states, humankind will need to rise above the defiling hazards of geopolitics. Inevitably, though at times unconsciously, residents of planet earth will continue to regard “power over death” as the most enviable form of power. If it is not suitably obstructed, the flesh-and-blood consequences of such ubiquitous anti-reason could spawn this planet’s final encounter with total war.
In his modern philosophical classic, Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls (in German) das Mann, or “The They.” Drawing fruitfully on earlier seminal insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heidegger’s “The They” represents the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an “untruth” (the term favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can all-too-quickly suffocate reason. For Heidegger’s always-threatening “The They,” the crowning human untruth lies in (1) “herd” acceptance of immortality at institutional and personal levels and (2) “herd” acceptance that “power over death” derives from membership in nation-states. But history reveals that this untruth can easily become insidious and intolerable.
“History,” we may learn from Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset, “is an illustrious war against death.” Though it is a war that can never be won, it is only through death that time can be understood. More succinctly, explains the 20th century philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, “It is through death that there is time.”
What does all this have to do with America’s current war against Iran? Above all, that adversary’s conjunction of death and time offers certain war-related opportunities for immortality. Allegedly, it is by jihad and assorted divine blessings (i.e., God) that these incomparable opportunities can be actualized. As long as US President Donald J. Trump fails to understand all this and remains fixated on narrowly military remedies, America’s war against Iran will assuredly fail.
