Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 48: Fabricating the war story – Iran ploy patched into plausibility

2026-03-20 - 18:50

War narratives are contrived into seeming reality – until their contradictions unravel them The battlefield determines who prevails. Yet long before that verdict is rendered, another contest unfolds: over how the war itself is to be understood. From a plurality of competing explanations, a single narrative, or at least a dominant theme, gradually crystallizes and comes to define the conflict. How wars acquire their story At the outset of many wars, governments advance a range of justificatory claims, from strategic interests to security threats and humanitarian concerns. Through narrative consolidation, these competing accounts are gradually subsumed into a single dominant story that comes to constitute the war’s moral identity. The process and its effects were described long ago by the American journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann. In Public Opinion (1922), he argued that citizens rarely encounter political reality directly. Instead, they apprehend the world through simplified “pictures in their heads,” fashioned by elite discourse and mediated through the press. In this sense, speeches by political leaders do more than announce policy: They begin to shape the narratives through which conflicts are rendered intelligible. The mechanics of this construction were later laid bare with unusual candor by Edward Bernays, a pioneer of modern public relations. He argued that democratic societies depend upon what he termed the “engineering of consent”: the deliberate formation of public opinion through the orchestration of carefully crafted persuasive narratives. More recently, critics such as the linguist Noam Chomsky have examined how such narratives circulate through institutional media systems that systematically privilege and amplify elite perspectives while marginalizing alternative voices. Different thinkers have variously described the mechanism in different ways. Yet the underlying insight remains the same: Wars seldom arise from a single story, but they are often explained – and sustained – by one. Once established, a war’s narrative can become as consequential as the conflict itself. Stitching the war message together War narratives typically evolve through a structured sequence. They propagate from inchoate beginnings through a discursive cascade, as successive actors repeat and adapt the message; they crystallize and come to cohere through narrative consolidation, as competing accounts are gradually subsumed into a dominant interpretation; and they acquire force through rhetorical intensification, as the resulting narrative eventually assumes the appearance of not merely plausibility, but inevitability. As the war message cascades from the decision center to the periphery, successive statements are iteratively refined and brought into mutual alignment around a common narrative core, which is progressively strengthened through accretion. Read more Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 45: The epoch of viral geopolitics – How the Kanzler sloganizes war Where such amplification rests on haphazard piecemeal construction, analytical fallacy, or rhetorical artifice, however, the emerging narrative, though authoritative in appearance, proves inherently vulnerable, with its internal contradictions poised to unravel it. In an official video message on 28 February 2026, US President Donald Trump announced that the US had commenced “major combat operations in Iran,” presenting the campaign as a preventive exigency in response to “imminent threats” posed by the Iranian “regime”. He justified the action by invoking Iran’s purported nuclear ambitions, its missile program, and its long-standing record of proxy violence. The commander-in-chief cast the operation as both defensive and stabilizing, directed at eliminating prospective danger and restoring deterrence – despite contested evidence concerning Iran’s actual intent and the immediacy of the purported threat. Through the layering of rhetorical devices, these contested premises were compressed into a seemingly plausible narrative of necessity, even as its internal tensions remained analytically exposed. This framing functioned both as a signaling device and conceptual umbrella, under which a wide range of drastic and far-reaching measures were purportedly rendered permissible, including the extrajudicial killing of the Shiʿa world’s foremost religious authority. As Trump’s adumbrated message diffused, what had been inchoate justificatory strands began to coalesce into dominant narrative leitmotifs. In early March 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed and amplified the nascent discursive pattern, depicting Iran as “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism” and casting the American campaign as an effort to dismantle its military capabilities so as to make the world safer. Rubio’s underlying formulation combines moral absolutism (presenting moral claims as universally valid and indisputable) and loaded designation (using value-laden labels that prejudge the subject: “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism”) with circular reasoning (treating the label as its own warrant) and teleological framing (justifying action by its intended end: “to make the world safer”). In so doing, Rubio recasts contested claims into a simplified, seemingly self-evident narrative in which eliminating Iran’s capabilities appears as a universal, teleological imperative. Ten days into the campaign, German Chancellor Merz entered the discursive cascade, assuming a prominent role in the message relay. He construed the Islamic Republic as the center of global terrorism that must be “shut down” and cast US and Israeli operations as a means to that objective. The war, he contended, would cease once Tehran’s clerical leadership desisted, framing the campaign as defensive – after earlier portraying Israel as performing the world’s “dirty work.” These remarks give rise to serious objections on logical, ethical, and rhetorical grounds. Later that same day, Britain’s defense secretary, John Healey, characterized the Iranian government as “a destructive force which has slaughtered protesters” and urged Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions and return to negotiations – even as US and Israeli strikes during the holy month of Ramadan had killed the country’s supreme religious leader and abruptly terminated talks reportedly nearing agreement. Well into the war’s third week, selectively passing over prior unprovoked Israeli strikes on Iran’s South Pars gas field – the world’s largest – Healey ascribed sole responsibility for regional destabilization to Tehran. He characterized Iran’s retaliatory actions against Gulf energy sites as a “serious escalation,” eliding the fact that these strikes were precipitated by prior Israeli belligerent action and directed specifically at American assets rather than indiscriminately at neighboring states more broadly. Read more Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 46: Dirty work by proxy – The ethics of the Kanzler’s outsourced war Healey invoked this framing to justify increased “defensive” support for Gulf states and to attribute rising living costs, especially gas prices, in the U.K. solely to Iran. This came despite the fact that it was the US and Israel that chose to initiate an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran and that Israel then seized the initiative in striking Iranian energy infrastructure, part of a broader pattern of relentless Israeli escalation. The distinctive confluence of messages is salient. In many cases, a war narrative crystallizes into a singular, sharply defined formulation as it propagates through aligned political discourse. In the Iran case, however, the relay yielded a composite of partially overlapping yet mutually reinforcing messages. In the course of narrative diffusion, a range of central propositions crystallized. At the highest level of abstraction stood the thesis that the world would be safer without an Iranian nuclear weapon, a claim that begs the question by presupposing an Iranian intention to develop one. The convergence of reinforcing leitmotifs serves to obscure the absence of any empirically substantiated war justification and admits of subsequent adjustment, while producing an effect akin to that of more precise and disciplined messaging. At the very least, it renders it materially difficult for other states to come to Iran’s defense or to penalize the US and Israel. Yet as the narrative percolated through the discursive chain, its internal flaws multiplied with each stage of articulation. With the proliferation of analytical fallacies and rhetorical artifices, the central postulates grew increasingly vulnerable to critique. The British defense secretary’s claims offer a case in point. The proliferation of narrative distortion Healey’s apologia effectively attributes sole responsibility for the breakdown of diplomacy to Iran, notwithstanding unilateral actions by the opposing side that were themselves solely responsible for bringing talks to a premature end. This narrative inversion exemplifies the twin persuasive devices of causal erasure and reversal of responsibility (a form of the false-cause fallacy). After excising initiating action from the causal account, victim and perpetrator are transposed, with the coerced party being recast as the initiator and hence constituted as the locus of moral culpability. By eliding prior Israeli strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure, Healey cast Tehran, the victim, as the sole agent of escalation. A related instance of causal inversion emerged within the broader logic of ex post facto reasoning, whereby subsequent reactions are invoked to justify the very actions that provoked them. Commentary recast Iran’s defensive response (