Last month, after two years of genocide against Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a brazen and unprovoked attack on Iran — while it was in the middle of negotiations with the United States.
Facing corruption charges at home, Netanyahu’s war of aggression across the Middle East has less to do with Israel’s security and more to do with ego and self-preservation. As former U.S. President Bill Clinton, a staunch ally of Israel, once noted, these wars are designed to keep Netanyahu in office. “Netanyahu has long wanted to fight Iran because that way he can stay in office forever and ever,” Clinton said. “I mean, he’s been there most of the last 20 years.”
To save his seat, Netanyahu is willing to plunge the world into a global war. Amid a global cost-of-living crisis, Western leaders are more concerned about enriching defense industries than meeting citizens’ basic needs like housing, food, employment and health care.
Ego over ethics
A generation of leaders driven by ego, corruption and political self-interest are steering humanity toward a catastrophic global war. Instead of learning from the horrors of past conflicts, they weaponize military power to hold onto office, sacrifice truth for propaganda and prioritize personal legacy above human life.
Germany this year took the unprecedented step of removing any debt limits on military spending. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is putting the country on a war footing by increasing military spending from 2.3% of GDP to 3%, even as he admits that he has no idea where the money will come from. French President Emmanuel Macron is considering bringing E.U. nations under the “protection” of France’s nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to increase America’s military spending by 12% to a whopping $1 trillion next year. At the start of his second term, Trump claimed that he would be a “peacemaker” and bring an end to wars. It’s now July and he’s started more wars than he’s ended. By simultaneously bombing Iranian nuclear sites while calling for “peace” and “negotiations” reveals a U.S. presidency steeped in deceit and hypocrisy.
Whether in the Middle East or Ukraine, Trump’s driving force has been ego, not ethics. “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do,” he complained on Truth Social, “including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be.” Rather than seeking to avert war, he’s focused on his image.
The Western response? Might makes right.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and EU leaders have called in Iran to “return to the negotiating table,” despite the fact that Iran was already in talks when it was bombed. Just a day after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi sat with European leaders for negotiations, the U.S. bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities — an unprovoked act of war that violated international law.
Negotiation is met with bombardment. Sovereignty is optional. International law doesn’t apply to some.
How can anyone trust these leaders after such brazen duplicity?
The collapse of moral authority
It’s no wonder former U.S. President Barack Obama once said many leaders aren’t as intelligent as assumed. “There’s some really smart amazing world leaders, and there’s some fools running countries,” he said on the Pivot Podcast.
American economist Jeffrey Sachs echoed the sentiment. “These are not very bright people,” he told a gathering at the European Parliament, explaining how Trump’s predecessor President Joe Biden’s administration was disturbingly nonchalant about the possibility of provoking a war with Russia with his policies. He described American leaders’ relentless pursuit of U.S. hegemony as “arrogant” and “stupid,” accusing EU leaders of “not thinking at all” with the policies of NATO enlargement and maximum pressure on Russia — a strategy that has proved totally fruitless.
Hypocrisy abounds. The U.K. officially lables Palestinian territories as “occupied” yet refuses to recognize Palestine as a state. It funds Israel’s massacres while pretending to care about Palestinian human rights. This rank moral duplicity reveals leaders who lack the courage to stand for the oppressed.
In 2024, the Middle East Eye revealed that the U.K. threatened International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan not to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. Then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron warned the U.K. would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute. Yet he supported ICC warrants for Putin.
These double standards shatter the credibility of global governance. Cameron’s threat was an attempt to shield a state accused of genocide, undermining the international legal order. This impunity enabled Israel and the U.S. to attack Iran.
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said today’s Western leaders lack the “foresight and subtlety of mind” of diplomats like Henry Kissinger, who used diplomacy to establish greater relations with the Soviet Union and China in the 1970s.
British leaders pushed Biden to let Ukraine use long-range missiles inside Russia — just as Zelensky signaled openness to a peace deal. Even after Putin warned it could trigger nuclear war, the push continued. Western leaders seem adept at sabotaging peace.
Early in the war, a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine was reportedly in the works. But then-U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv and urged Zelensky to abandon talks and escalate pressure. In the Daily Mail, Johnson made it clear: this isn’t about Ukraine — it’s about maintaining Western hegemony. “A defeat for Ukraine would be … a total humiliation for the West,” he wrote.
This is the mindset of ideologues — more invested in global dominance than in peace or human life. This belligerent, dogmatic leadership is pushing the world toward a third world war.
History offers another path.
The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war in 1962. But mutual diplomacy prevailed. The Soviets dismantled missile sites in Cuba; the U.S. removed nukes from Turkey and promised not to invade. Cooler heads, moral courage and foresight won the day.
We don’t see that today.
Pursuing peace over ego requires strength, not weakness. Political scientist John Mearsheimer put it bluntly. “The morally correct position … is to not give [Ukrainians] any more weapons and to push them very hard to reach a negotiated settlement with the Russians,” he told Piers Morgan Uncensored.
When historians look back at this moment, they’ll see leaders who repeated the mistakes of the 20th century. They will look back at the brazen, hypocritical and unprincipled decisions and rhetoric of our leaders who are rushing headlong into a global war less than 100 years after World War Two. The lesson they learned wasn’t that war is horrific, results in untold human suffering and must be avoided at all costs; it was that war is the only solution and only choice.
How have they missed the most basic lesson of all?
The world cannot afford leaders whose personal ambitions outweigh humanity’s survival. It is up to ordinary citizens to demand moral courage from those in power. The lessons of history are clear: seeking peace is not weakness, it’s wisdom. And it’s the only way to prevent another global catastrophe.
