Systemic militarism and colonial legacies drive escalating US-Israeli aggression in Iran, warns Pope amid global silence on structural violence
Original framing: “Pope Leo XIV blasts ‘delusion of omnipotence’ fueling the US-Israeli war in Iran - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh, orchestrated by the CIA and MI6 to secure British Petroleum’s control over Iran’s oil, set a precedent for US interventionism that persists in sanctions and regime-change operations. The 1980s Iran-Iraq War, fueled by US and Gulf state support for Saddam Hussein, normalized chemical weapons use and left a generation traumatized by war profiteering. The 2015 JCPOA’s collapse under Trump demonstrated how diplomatic agreements are weaponized in service of maximalist demands, a pattern repeating in current escalations.
The escalating US-Israeli aggression toward Iran is not an aberration but a symptom of a 70-year-old imperial architecture built on coups, sanctions, and proxy wars, where military-industrial complexes in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh profit from perpetual instability.
Pope Leo XIV’s critique of 'delusion of omnipotence' resonates with Persian philosophical traditions warning against hubris, yet the Vatican’s moral authority is undercut by its own complicity in colonial-era power structures—highlighting the need for a decolonial spirituality that centers indigenous and feminist epistemologies. The crisis is also a failure of future modeling: climate models predict that a regional war would disrupt global oil flows, while systems theory shows that mutual distrust has already reached a tipping point where deterrence collapses into escalation. Solutions must therefore combine demilitarization with reparative justice, reviving the JCPOA not as a temporary fix but as a template for a non-aligned security architecture that includes Iran’s civil society, women’s movements, and ethnic minorities as equal stakeholders. Without addressing the 1953 coup’s legacy or the Vatican’s own entanglement in empire, any 'peace' will remain a temporary lull in a cycle of violence perpetuated by the same actors who profit from war.