A Second War With Iran Will Probably End Us All

We are closer to the end than we have ever been. Not the end of a government or a system or an era—the end of everything.

I have spent my life observing the pathologies of Empire. Many of us did. Involuntarily. I have watched American power grind human beings into dust in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Syria. I have seen the rubble of Gaza, and what remains when a military force unbound by law or conscience exercises its full destructive capacity against a captive population. I have seen the survivors of drone strikes, the mothers who watched their children burn, the fathers who dug through concrete with bleeding hands searching for bodies that would never be found whole.

Nothing I have witnessed has prepared me for what I now believe is coming.

The war with Iran that the United States and Israel are methodically constructing will not be like the wars that came before. It will not be a war of occupation or regime change or counterinsurgency. It will be a war in which the imperial powers, for the first time in their modern history, face an adversary capable of inflicting existential damage. And when that damage comes—when Tel Aviv burns and American bases across the region are reduced to smoking craters—the men who rule in Washington and Jerusalem will reach for the weapons that end everything.

We are closer to nuclear winter than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Perhaps closer than we have ever been. And almost no one is willing to say it.

The Logic of the Death Cult

To understand why nuclear war has become not merely possible but probable, you must first understand the nature of the forces that are driving us toward it.

Zionism is not a political movement. It is a death cult. I do not use this term as rhetoric or provocation. I use it as clinical description.

A death cult is a system of belief and practice organized around destruction. It does not create. It does not build. It does not nurture. It consumes. It annihilates. It measures its success not in the flourishing of life but in the elimination of those it has designated as enemies.

Look at what Israel has done in Gaza over the past two years. It has probably killed over 680,000 people. It has destroyed every hospital, every university, every school, every mosque, every church. It has eliminated the basic infrastructure of human existence—water systems, sewage systems, electrical grids. It has created famine as policy. It has bombed tent encampments and called them command centers. It has shot children in the head with sniper rifles and called it self-defense.

This is not the behavior of a normal state pursuing normal security objectives. This is the behavior of an entity that has become addicted to death, that experiences killing as fulfillment, that cannot stop destroying because destruction has become its reason for being.

The same pathology afflicts the American empire, though it wears different masks. The United States has killed millions of human beings in the decades since World War II. It has overthrown dozens of governments. It has turned entire nations into failed states. It has created ISIS and then bombed ISIS and then allied with ISIS and then bombed ISIS again. It has armed death squads in Latin America and jihadists in Syria and Nazis in Ukraine. It has poisoned the groundwater of Iraq with depleted uranium and watched the birth defects multiply for a generation.

These are not mistakes. These are not policy failures. These are expressions of a system that has organized itself around violence, that has made violence its primary export, that has become so dependent on war that it cannot imagine any other way of being in the world.

When you understand this—when you truly grasp that the forces driving toward war with Iran are not rational actors pursuing rational interests but addicts pursuing their next fix of destruction—you begin to understand why nuclear war is not merely a risk to be managed but an outcome toward which the entire system is inexorably moving.

The Adversary They Cannot Defeat

Iran is different from every enemy the American-Israeli axis has faced since 1945.

Iraq was a broken country, devastated by a decade of sanctions, its military hollowed out, its air defenses obsolete. Libya was a small nation with no real capacity to project power beyond its borders. Syria was already in civil war when the intervention began. Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries on Earth, defended by men with rifles against a superpower with satellites and drones and stealth bombers.

Iran is none of these things.

Iran is a nation of 90 million people with a land area three times the size of France. Its terrain is mountainous, its population educated, its industrial base sophisticated. It has spent four decades preparing for exactly the war that is now being planned against it. It has built an air defense network that can detect and engage incoming aircraft and missiles. It has developed ballistic missiles capable of reaching any target in the region with precision guidance. It has constructed its nuclear facilities deep underground, in mountains, protected by layers of rock and concrete that no conventional weapon can penetrate.

More importantly, Iran has allies. It has built what was called the axis of resistance—a network of armed movements stretching from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq to Syria—precisely because it knew this day would come. Though that network has been degraded, it has not been destroyed. Ansar Allah still controls the Red Sea shipping lanes. The Iraqi militias still operate. Iran itself remains intact.

The twelve-day war of 2025 demonstrated something that the imperial powers have still not fully absorbed: Iran can hit back. Its missiles can penetrate Israeli air defenses. Its drones can reach their targets. Its military is not the hollow force that American propagandists have spent decades describing. It is real, and it is capable of inflicting real damage.

This is the nightmare that keeps the planners in Tel Aviv and Washington awake at night. Not that Iran will attack them, but that when they attack Iran, Iran will not simply absorb the blows and collapse. Iran will fight. Iran will cause casualties. Iran will destroy things that cannot be easily replaced.

And then what?

The Men Who Would Rather Burn the World

The men who rule Israel and the United States have never experienced defeat. They have never known what it feels like to lose a war. They have never had to accept that there are limits to their power, that there are places they cannot go, enemies they cannot destroy, outcomes they cannot dictate.

This is not a minor point. This is the central fact that makes nuclear war probable rather than merely possible.

Normal human beings, when they face defeat, adjust. They negotiate. They compromise. They find ways to preserve what can be preserved while accepting what has been lost. This is how most of human history has worked. Empires rise, empires fall, life goes on.

But the men who control the American and Israeli war machines are not normal human beings. They have been selected, over decades, for their willingness to inflict violence without remorse. They have been promoted for their enthusiasm for destruction. They have been rewarded for their inability to feel empathy, their contempt for human life, their capacity to order atrocities and sleep soundly afterward.

These are, in clinical terms, psychopaths. Not in the colloquial sense of the word, meaning merely cruel or dangerous, but in the precise psychological sense: individuals who lack the capacity for empathy, who experience no guilt or shame, who are motivated entirely by the pursuit of power and the pleasure of domination.

When such individuals face the prospect of defeat, they do not adjust. They do not negotiate. They escalate. They would rather burn the world than admit they have lost.

This is not speculation. This is observation. We have watched Benjamin Netanyahu for three decades. We have watched him destroy every peace process, sabotage every negotiation, assassinate every leader who might have made compromise possible. We have watched him choose war over peace, death over life, destruction over construction, again and again and again. This is who he is. This is what he does. He will not stop until something stops him.

And we have watched Donald Trump. We have watched him separate children from their families and cage them in detention centers. We have watched him pardon war criminals and threaten nuclear war over Twitter. We have watched him praise dictators and attack journalists and lie with a pathological compulsivity that suggests he no longer knows the difference between truth and falsehood. We have watched him kidnap a head of state and brag about it on television, announcing that America would “run” Venezuela until some unspecified transition could be arranged.

These are the men who will have their fingers on the nuclear button when Iran retaliates for the coming attack. These are the men who will decide, in the hours after Tel Aviv is struck by Iranian missiles, whether to respond with conventional weapons or something else.

Do you trust them to choose restraint? Do you trust them to accept defeat? Do you trust them to prioritize the survival of human civilization over their own egos?

I do not.

“But even two bombs would be enough. Not two hundred. Not fifty. Two.Two of them, detonated over a period of weeks, would be sufficient to alter the global climate in ways that would kill billions of people.”

What Nuclear Winter Means

Let me describe what nuclear winter actually means, because I do not think most people understand it.

A nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran would not remain limited. The United States would intervene. Russia might intervene. Pakistan, as a nuclear-armed US client state, could be drawn in to serve imperial objectives. China would have to decide how to respond — but most likely it won’t. The escalation dynamics of nuclear war are such that what begins as a “limited” exchange rapidly becomes unlimited.

But even two bombs would be enough. Not two hundred. Not fifty. Two. Today's thermonuclear weapons are a thousand times more powerful than those that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two of them, detonated over a period of weeks, would be sufficient to alter the global climate in ways that would kill billions of people.

The explosions themselves would kill millions. The firestorms would kill millions more. The radiation would poison the land and water for generations. But the worst would come afterward.

The soot and ash from burning cities would rise into the stratosphere and spread around the globe. It would block sunlight. Temperatures would drop. Crops would fail. The growing season in the Northern Hemisphere would shorten by months, perhaps disappear entirely. Food production would collapse.

Within a year, there would be no functioning agriculture anywhere on Earth. Within two years, there would be no functioning governments. Within five years, the human population would be reduced by 90 percent or more.

Those who survived the initial exchange—the people in remote areas, the people with stockpiles of food, the people with weapons to defend themselves—would find themselves in a world without electricity, without medicine, without law, without any of the systems that make organized human life possible. They would find themselves in a world of roving bands, of rape and murder and starvation, of the complete collapse of everything we call civilization.

This is not science fiction. This is the scientific consensus on what a major nuclear exchange would produce. This is what the men in Tel Aviv and Washington are risking every time they escalate toward war with Iran.

The Choice Before Us

I am often asked what can be done. I am asked for hope, for action items, for a path forward.

I do not have easy answers. The forces driving us toward nuclear war are immense, and the forces opposing them are weak. The anti-war movement in the United States is a shadow of what it was during Vietnam. The international institutions that might constrain American and Israeli aggression have been systematically defunded and delegitimized. The alternative power centers—Russia, China—have shown no willingness to risk confrontation with the empire to defend its victims.

And yet I cannot counsel despair, because despair is surrender, and surrender is complicity in what is coming.

What I can say is this: The only thing that has ever constrained the imperial powers is the threat of real consequences. Not moral arguments—they have no morals. Not legal arguments—they have made themselves immune to law. Not protest—they have learned to ignore protest. Only consequences.

This is the only language the empire seems to understand. This is the only thing that gives it pause. Not our words, not our marches, not our votes—but the prospect of real, material, painful consequences for its actions.

For those of us in the West, the question is what consequences we can impose. The answer is not simple, and it is not legal in many jurisdictions to discuss frankly. But I will say this: A population that allows its government to march toward nuclear war without resistance of any kind is a population that has chosen its own destruction.

The “leftovers” in the West, as Laith Marouf recently called them, spend their time crafting careful criticisms of the Iranian government, adding disclaimers and caveats to every statement of solidarity, performing their sophistication for audiences that do not exist. They do not understand that they are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. They do not understand that the ship is sinking, that the water is rising, that their careful distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable forms of resistance will mean nothing when the bombs begin to fall.

We are ruled by a death cult. The death cult is preparing its final sacrifice. And we are all—every one of us, in every country, on every continent—potential victims of that sacrifice.

The only question is whether we will go quietly.

The Darkness Ahead

I end where I began: with the recognition that what I am describing may be inevitable.

The logic of empire points toward destruction. The logic of Zionism points toward destruction. The psychology of the men in power points toward destruction. The dynamics of escalation, once a war with Iran begins, point toward destruction.

I have spent my life believing that human beings can change, that systems can be reformed, that the arc of history bends toward justice. I have watched that belief erode, year by year, atrocity by atrocity, until what remains is something closer to witness than to hope.

Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps the only thing left to do is to see clearly, to name what is happening, to refuse the comfortable lies that make complicity possible. Perhaps the only dignity available to us now is the dignity of truth-telling in a time of universal deceit.

The men who rule us are not like us. They do not love what we love. They do not fear what we fear. They do not value what we value. They have organized their lives around power and domination, and they will not stop until they are stopped.

If they are not stopped, they will take us all with them into the darkness.

The lights they turned off over Caracas—those lights can be turned off everywhere. The darkness they created there can spread. It is spreading already, through the halls of power, through the war rooms, through the bunkers where men with dead eyes contemplate the unthinkable and find it acceptable.

We are closer to the end than we have ever been. Not the end of a government or a system or an era—the end of everything. The end of cities and farms and hospitals and schools. The end of music and literature and art. The end of children playing in parks, of old couples walking hand in hand, of all the small and ordinary things that make human life human.

The death cult is preparing its final ceremony. The priests of destruction are donning their vestments. The altar is being prepared.

And most of us are still pretending that everything is normal, that the news will be different tomorrow, that surely, surely, someone will stop this before it goes too far.

No one is coming to save us. The only ones who can stop this are us. And the hour is very, very late.

- Karim