AWar Without a Name

In other terms, the project of liberalism is to contract the responsibilities of the state and its ability to determine the ends of life; it does so by expanding the citizen’s control over the means of self-preservation: land in the Lockean formation, money in the Smithean. [...] Khomeini’s novel argument was that in the absence of the Imam—who, following in the line of Mohammed, is the legitimate representative of divine sovereignty on earth—it is the clergy that should act as the custodian of this sovereignty for the duration of the theological state of emergency.31 This is strikingly similar to medieval Catholic claims that the Pope—a figure then outfitted with massive. [...] 5 It is worth quoting Khamenei in full: “In the statements of Imam [Khomeini] and in the statements of the officials of the Islamic Republic, the elimination of the State of Israel has been mentioned repeatedly. [...] Iran’s most consequential antagonists—Saudi Arabia and the UAE—bowed out of the conflict—in part a consequence of a second trend, namely the return of the Biden administration to the conciliatory approach of the second Obama administration.55 Since March 2023, Israel has fought Iran more or less alone and has, in turn, absorbed the majority of the shock from the Iranian alliance. [...] Would the United States or any other country feel able to act so bold towards a nuclear-armed Iran? Perhaps the only true parallel with the ‘original’ cold war resides in the fact that the antagonism between the two protagonists will only end—along with the attendant possibility of war—with the collapse of one of the two state forms, or in the words of 33 the great Italian military thinker Giulio.