Pete Hegseth stands at the Pentagon podium and likens the decapitation of a sovereign state to a football game where the opponent has lost the script. He speaks of blitzes and drives while the White House releases SpongeBob and Nintendo Wii memes to explain Operation Epic Fury to a bewildered public. There is no strategic gravity in the room; there is only the rehearsed subservience of a middle manager desperate to please a demanding principal. Hegseth credits his boss for every tactical shift and told reporters at the Pentagon — addressing Trump directly —'They no longer have a navy, Mr. President,’ he said. ‘Their naval commander was killed overnight in operations.’ Washington is now governed by men who have traded the heavy lifting of statecraft for the easier work of applause.
This shift is more than a matter of style; it is a collapse of institutional integrity. Earlier American administrations were staffed by secretaries who carried the weight of their office independently. James Mattis resigned rather than execute an order he considered strategically indefensible. Colin Powell presented intelligence he privately doubted because he believed in the institution he represented. That era is over. A government of sycophants cannot conduct serious foreign policy because serious foreign policy requires the ability to say things the principal does not want to hear. Washington is now blinded by its own momentum and genuinely surprised to find that the world is not following its lead.
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This internal rot has produced a momentous miscalculation in the Middle East. The Trump administration assumes the old rules of diplomatic cover will hold forever regardless of the cost in blood. It is wrong. On February 28, 2026, a US strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab, killing at least 168 people. By conducting this war with such casual disregard for civilian life, Washington has inadvertently liberated its oldest allies from their historical obligations.
That liberation did not begin with Iran. It began in Gaza. Seventy thousand Palestinians killed, an entire civilian infrastructure destroyed, famine used as a weapon of war — and through all of it, European governments provided diplomatic cover, abstained from votes, and looked away. The Iran war simply made looking away impossible. The Minab girls' school was one atrocity too many, in a war too obviously illegal, for governments that had already exhausted their capacity for silence.
For decades, European capitals have operated under the heavy moral weight of the Holocaust. This historical guilt functioned as a yoke; it compelled them to provide unconditional diplomatic cover for Israeli actions. That yoke is being discarded in the face of the reality of 2026. Spain has closed its airspace and its bases; Italy has refused to allow its territory to be used for offensive strikes. The memory of the 20th century is no longer sufficient to justify the horrors of the 21st.
The isolation is not theoretical; it is operational. Australia pointedly noted it had not been consulted before the conflict began, and NATO allies have refused to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump's response has been to call them cowards and tell them to get their own oil via Truth Social.
The transactional nature of this administration has stripped away the last veneers of the rules-based order. European governments now recognise that the diplomatic cover they provided to Israel no longer buys them any leverage in Washington. They are watching a superpower stumble under the burden of its own ego and are finding no reason to remain in its shadow.
Nowhere is the irony sharper than in the sudden rehabilitation of Pakistan. Donald Trump, who once accused Pakistan of nothing but lies and deceit, now publicly refers to Army Chief Asim Munir as his 'favourite Field Marshal'. With the region's traditional mediators Qatar and Oman incapacitated by Iranian strikes, Islamabad is the only bridge left for the 15-point peace plan Washington is desperate to deliver to Tehran. The state Washington spent a decade shunning is now the only one it trusts to pass its notes.
While the United States might eventually recover its senses under a future leader, Israel's situation is different in kind. Its standing was built on a unique moral foundation that is now dismantling itself. The diplomatic immunity that Israel enjoyed for decades relied on European memory of the Holocaust and American authority. Both have been destroyed.
The Iran war has not just cost Washington its allies; it has cost Israel the cover that made its conduct possible. Neither Washington nor Jerusalem has yet understood what they have lost. Washington has lost its moral authority. Jerusalem has lost the only thing that made its survival a global consensus; it has lost the world's willingness to look away.
That willingness, once gone, does not return on request.
