I. The Indictment

The case against Iran, as articulated by Washington, is familiar. It has been repeated so often and for so long that it has acquired the texture of fact.

The United States designated Iran a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 1984 — forty-two years ago — and has renewed the designation every year since. In 1994, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake placed Iran on his list of “backlash states” in Foreign Affairs, describing it as a regime that “not only chose to remain outside the family of nations but also assaulted its basic values.” In 2002, George W. Bush upgraded the label to the “Axis of Evil.” The specific terminology has shifted over the decades — rogue state, backlash state, state of concern, axis member — but the core accusation has remained constant: Iran is a lawless regime that threatens the international order.

The bill of particulars is substantial. Iran funds and arms a network of proxy forces across the Middle East — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq and Syria — spending, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, over one billion dollars annually. Iran enriched uranium to 60 percent — a short technical step from the 90 percent needed for a weapon — and accumulated enough fissile material for approximately five warheads. Iran’s human rights record is grim: the suppression of the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests, the execution of political prisoners, the systematic repression of women, minorities, and dissidents. And the original wound, in American memory, remains the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and the 444 days of captivity that followed.

This is the prosecution’s case. It is not fabricated. These things happened. These policies exist.

But an indictment is not a conviction. And an indictment that omits the conduct of the prosecutor is not justice — it is theatre.

II. What the Indictment Omits: The 200-Year Record

There is a single fact that the American narrative about Iran systematically excludes, because to include it would collapse the entire framework: Iran has not invaded another country in over two hundred years.

The last Iranian war of territorial aggression was the Anglo-Persian War of 1856–1857, a conflict over Afghan territory that ended in British-imposed withdrawal. Since then — through two world wars, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the entirety of the American century — Iran has not sent its military across another nation’s border to conquer, occupy, or annex territory. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980–1988, the deadliest conflict in Iran’s modern history, was a defensive war: Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, not the other way around.

Now consider the record of the nation that applies the “rogue state” label.

Since 1945, the United States has conducted major military interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen — to name only the most prominent. The Brown University Costs of War Project, the most rigorous academic accounting of post-9/11 US military operations, estimates that these wars have killed at least 4.5 to 4.7 million people — including over 432,000 civilians killed directly and millions more from the indirect effects of displacement, infrastructure destruction, and health system collapse. The financial cost: $8 trillion. The human displacement: 38 million people forced from their homes, more than any event since World War II except the 1947 Partition of India.

The question is not complicated. When one nation has not invaded anyone in two centuries and another has been at war for most of its existence — leaving millions dead across dozens of countries — which one fits the definition of a state that pursues its interests “without regard to accepted standards of international behavior”?

III. 1953: The Original Sin

Everything the United States complains about in Iran — the theocracy, the anti-Americanism, the nuclear program, the hostage crisis — has a point of origin. That origin is not 1979. It is 1953.

In 1951, Iran’s parliament democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister. His central policy was the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry, which had been controlled and exploited by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP). Iran was receiving roughly 16 percent of the profits from its own oil. Mossadegh proposed an audit. The British refused. Iran nationalized.

The British response was an embargo and a covert plan to overthrow Mossadegh. When the Eisenhower administration entered office in 1953, the CIA was brought in. Operation AJAX — the CIA’s own declassified internal history confirms this in detail — was a covert operation to destabilize the Iranian government through bribery, propaganda, and the orchestration of street mobs. On August 19, 1953, the military, backed by CIA-funded protests, overthrew Mossadegh. He was arrested, tried in a military court, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

The US State Department’s own Office of the Historian has published over 1,000 pages of documentary evidence on the coup. In 2013, the CIA formally acknowledged that the operation was “carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy.”

In Mossadegh’s place, the US installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose 25-year authoritarian reign was sustained by SAVAK — a secret police apparatus trained by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad, notorious for torture, disappearance, and political murder. In 2000, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged: “The United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”

The causal chain is not ambiguous. The US overthrew a democracy. It installed a dictatorship. The dictatorship produced a revolution. The revolution produced the Islamic Republic. The US then labeled the result of its own intervention a “rogue state.”

The Logic of Blowback

The 1979 hostage crisis — always presented in American media as the beginning of US-Iran hostility, the unprovoked act that started it all — was in fact a response to 26 years of American-installed dictatorship. The students who seized the embassy were explicit about this: they feared the US would repeat the 1953 playbook and reinstall the Shah, who had been admitted to the United States for medical treatment.

This does not justify hostage-taking. But context is not justification. Context is the difference between an indictment and a history. And the American indictment of Iran begins in 1979 precisely because beginning in 1953 would indict the United States.

IV. The Iran-Iraq War: When America Helped Gas Iranians

On September 22, 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. The war that followed lasted eight years, killed between 500,000 and one million Iranians, and remains the defining trauma of modern Iranian national consciousness — their World War I, their Great Patriotic War.

The United States was not neutral.

The Reagan administration implemented what it called a “tilt” toward Iraq. The US provided Saddam with satellite imagery, battlefield intelligence, economic aid, and dual-use technology. The Commerce Department approved 771 export licenses for the sale of dual-use equipment to Iraq — technology that UN inspectors later confirmed was used to advance Iraq’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs.

But the most damning chapter is the chemical weapons. In August 2013, Foreign Policy magazine published a landmark investigation by Shane Harris and Matthew Aid: “Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran.” Based on declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials, the investigation revealed:

• The US had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons attacks beginning in 1983.

• US intelligence officials conveyed the location of Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Saddam’s military would attack those positions with chemical weapons, including sarin — a lethal nerve agent.

• In 1988, during the war’s final offensives, Iraq used mustard gas and sarin in attacks that relied on US satellite imagery, maps, and intelligence to identify targets.

As the Smithsonian Magazine summarized: “The Reagan administration applied a cold calculus to Hussein’s widespread use of chemical weapons, deciding that it was better to let the attacks continue if they might turn the tide of the war.”

And when Saddam turned his chemical weapons on his own people — gassing the Kurdish town of Halabja on March 16, 1988, killing approximately 5,000 civilians in a single day — the United States worked to prevent the UN Security Council from condemning Iraq, instead attempting to deflect partial blame onto Iran.

Today, tens of thousands of Iranian veterans still live with the effects of chemical weapons exposure — damaged lungs, destroyed skin, blindness. Iran’s chemical weapons dead and wounded constitute one of the largest populations of chemical warfare victims since World War I. The country that provided the targeting data for those attacks now designates Iran the world’s foremost “rogue state.”

V. Iran Air Flight 655: “I Will Never Apologize”

On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes — a US Navy guided-missile cruiser operating in the Persian Gulf — fired two SM-2 surface-to-air missiles at Iran Air Flight 655, a scheduled commercial flight from Tehran to Dubai via Bandar Abbas. All 290 people on board were killed, including 66 children.

The aircraft was in Iranian airspace. It was on a published commercial air route. It was climbing — ascending after takeoff, not descending in an attack profile. It was broadcasting a civilian transponder code. The US Navy’s own subsequent investigation confirmed all of this: the plane was in an “established air route” on a “normal commercial air flight plan profile.”

The crew of the Vincennes had misidentified the Airbus A300 — a wide-body commercial airliner — as an Iranian F-14 fighter jet. They fired anyway.

The United States never formally apologized. In 1996, the US agreed to pay $131.8 million in compensation to Iran at the International Court of Justice — but the settlement explicitly included no admission of wrongdoing or legal liability.

The commanding officer of the Vincennes, Captain William C. Rogers III, was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1990 for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” during his command — the period that included the destruction of a civilian airliner. The crew received Combat Action Ribbons.

One month after the shootdown, Vice President George H.W. Bush — then running for president — addressed a group of Republican supporters and declared:

“I will never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are.”

He won the election.

When Russia was implicated in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine (298 dead), the United States led the international campaign for accountability, sanctions, and criminal prosecution. When the United States itself shot down a civilian airliner and killed 290 people — it awarded medals to the crew and elected the man who said he didn’t care what the facts were.

VI. The JCPOA: A Deal Honored, Then Destroyed

If the historical record establishes a pattern, the JCPOA — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed in 2015 — provides its most legally precise expression. This is the episode that transforms the “rogue state” accusation from hypocrisy into something structurally worse: a demonstration that compliance with American demands provides no security whatsoever.

In 2015, Iran signed the JCPOA with the P5+1 (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and Germany). Under the agreement, Iran accepted the most intrusive nuclear verification regime in the history of the IAEA. It reduced its enriched uranium stockpile by 98 percent, capped enrichment at 3.67 percent, modified the Arak heavy-water reactor, removed centrifuges, and granted the IAEA continuous access to its nuclear facilities.

The IAEA — the world’s authoritative nuclear verification body — issued report after report confirming Iran’s compliance. As the Arms Control Association documented, every quarterly report through 2018 verified that Iran was meeting its obligations. Iran’s low-enriched uranium stockpile remained well below limits. Its heavy water stocks stayed under the cap. IAEA inspectors had full access.

Donald Trump himself certified Iran’s compliance twice — in 2017 — before withdrawing from the agreement on May 8, 2018. The IAEA’s final report before the withdrawal confirmed: Iran was in compliance. The United States was not.

The US reimposed crushing sanctions under a “maximum pressure” campaign that devastated Iran’s economy — hyperinflation, medicine shortages, civilian suffering. Iran waited a full year for the European signatories to fulfill their commitments and provide economic relief. They did not. Only then — in July 2019 — did Iran begin exceeding the deal’s enrichment limits.

The sequence matters. Iran did not break the deal. The US broke the deal. Iran tried to salvage it. The Europeans failed to deliver. Only after all avenues were exhausted did Iran begin enriching beyond the agreed limits. And by February 2026, Iran’s Foreign Minister was stating that a new nuclear agreement was “within reach” — three days before the United States and Israel launched airstrikes that killed the Supreme Leader.

The Message to the World

The destruction of the JCPOA did not occur in isolation. It sent a message — and the world heard it.

Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi voluntarily surrendered his nuclear weapons program in 2003, in a deal brokered with the United States and the United Kingdom. In 2011, NATO bombed Libya, overthrew Gaddafi, and he was killed by a mob. The country has not recovered.

Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal from the Soviet Union. In 1994, it signed the Budapest Memorandum, surrendering its nuclear weapons in exchange for security assurances from the US, the UK, and Russia. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. The guarantors did not intervene.

Iran complied with the JCPOA. It was bombed.

North Korea kept its nuclear weapons. It has not been bombed.

The lesson is not subtle. Every state considering disarmament now operates with the knowledge that American agreements are not binding, American assurances are not durable, and compliance with American demands provides no protection — only vulnerability.

VII. The Selective Label: Why Saudi Arabia and Israel Are Not “Rogue States”

The “rogue state” designation might be defensible if it were applied consistently — if every state that sponsored violence, defied international law, and destabilized its region received the label. It is not. The label’s application reveals that it correlates not with behavior but with alignment: states that serve American interests are allies; states that defy American interests are rogues.

Saudi Arabia

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the ideological cradle of modern Sunni jihadism. Wahhabism — the ultra-conservative religious doctrine that serves as the Saudi state’s theological foundation — is the ideological substrate of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the global jihadist movement. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers who carried out the September 11 attacks were Saudi nationals. Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen from a prominent Saudi family.

In 2015, Saudi Arabia launched a military intervention in Yemen that the United Nations designated “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” An estimated 377,000 people have died. The Saudi-led coalition conducted airstrikes on hospitals, school buses, wedding parties, and funeral halls. In 2018, Saudi agents murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, dismembering his body. US intelligence concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had personally ordered the operation.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy with no democratic institutions, no free press, no political parties, and public executions by beheading. It is the only country in the world that bans women from traveling without male guardian permission in certain circumstances.

The US designation: major strategic ally. In 2017, Trump’s first foreign trip was to Riyadh, where he signed a $110 billion arms deal. The United States provides Saudi Arabia with weapons, intelligence, training, and diplomatic cover at the United Nations.

Israel

Israel possesses an undeclared nuclear arsenal — estimated at 80 to 400 warheads — and has never signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. It is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, operating entirely outside the international non-proliferation framework that the US invokes to justify sanctions and military action against Iran.

On July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice — the UN’s highest judicial body — ruled that Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories is unlawful under international law. The court found, by a 14-1 majority, that Israel must cease all settlement activities, evacuate existing settlers, and pay full reparations. Amnesty International called it a “historic vindication.” Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israel’s own B’Tselem have all concluded that Israel’s system of governance in the occupied territories constitutes apartheid.

The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli officials. The ICJ has ordered provisional measures to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza.

The US designation: closest ally. The United States provides Israel with $3.8 billion in annual military aid, exercises its UN Security Council veto to shield Israel from accountability, and — as of February 28, 2026 — joined Israel in a war of aggression against Iran.

The pattern is visible without a microscope. The “rogue state” label is not a moral or legal category. It is a geopolitical sorting mechanism. This was documented three decades ago in the 1996 “Clean Break” strategy paper — authored by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — which explicitly called for the overthrow of any regional government that supported Palestinian resistance. Several of its authors went on to serve in the Bush administration and helped architect the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

VIII. “The Greatest Threat to World Peace”

In 2013, the WIN/Gallup International network conducted a global survey across 65 countries, polling over 66,000 people, asking a single question: Which country do you think is the greatest threat to peace in the world today?

The United States won — overwhelmingly. Twenty-four percent of global respondents named America. Pakistan came second at 8 percent. China received 6 percent. Iran — the country that American discourse treats as the supreme menace — tied for fourth place at 4 percent.

This is not a fringe result from a hostile source. Gallup is an American institution. The poll was conducted across every inhabited continent. The finding was unambiguous: the rest of the world does not share America’s assessment of who threatens peace. The rest of the world thinks the threat is America.

Noam Chomsky — the most cited living scholar in the humanities — has made this structural argument for decades. The US’s own definition of “rogue state” — a nation that pursues its interests without regard to international law — describes the United States more accurately than any country it has labeled. Consider:

• The US invaded Iraq in 2003 without UN authorization, based on fabricated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. The war killed hundreds of thousands of people.

• The US withdrew from the International Criminal Court and passed the “Hague Invasion Act” (2002), authorizing military force to free any American detained by the ICC.

• The US operated extrajudicial detention at Guantanamo Bay for over two decades, holding prisoners without trial, many of whom were tortured.

• The US conducted drone assassination programs across sovereign nations — Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia — killing thousands, including American citizens, without judicial process.

• The US conducted mass electronic surveillance of its own allies, as revealed by the Snowden disclosures — including tapping the personal phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The concept of the “rules-based international order” — invoked constantly by Washington — functions as a framework in which the United States writes the rules, enforces the rules on others, and exempts itself from the rules. This is not a radical critique. It is an observable structural feature of the international system as it actually operates.

IX. The Mirror

The question posed in the title of this essay has, by now, answered itself.

The “rogue state” label, as applied by the United States to Iran, requires a specific form of amnesia. It requires forgetting 1953 — the overthrow of a democracy for oil profits. It requires forgetting the eight years in which the US provided intelligence for chemical weapons attacks against Iranian soldiers. It requires forgetting the 290 passengers of Iran Air Flight 655 — and the medals awarded to the crew that killed them. It requires forgetting the JCPOA — a deal Iran honored and the United States destroyed. It requires forgetting that in February 2026, diplomacy was “within reach,” and the United States chose bombs instead.

It requires, in other words, exactly what George H.W. Bush prescribed: not caring what the facts are.

The moral argument is plain. A nation that overthrew Iran’s democracy, helped gas its soldiers, shot down its civilian airliner, broke its own nuclear agreement, and then bombed the country while diplomacy was within reach does not have the standing to designate Iran — or anyone — a rogue state. The label is not an analysis. It is a permission structure — one that transforms a complex nation of 88 million people into a target, that converts diplomacy into appeasement, and that makes war not just possible but inevitable.

The “rules-based order” is real. But it has two tiers: one for those who write the rules, and one for those the rules are written against. Iran’s crime is not that it violated the order. Iran’s crime is that it refused to accept a position within it that required permanent subordination to the states that destroyed its democracy, armed its enemies, and broke their own agreements.

The world is watching the United States bomb a country it has wronged for seventy years and call it justice. History will not be as forgetful as the news cycle.

Analysis current as of March 15, 2026. All claims are sourced from declassified US government documents, IAEA verification reports, International Court of Justice rulings, peer-reviewed academic research, and investigative journalism from established publications. The author does not endorse the Iranian government’s domestic human rights record; the argument of this piece concerns the legitimacy and moral standing of the “rogue state” designation as applied by the United States.

References

All sources accessed March 15, 2026.

Government Documents & Official Records

1. U.S. Department of State, “Country Reports on Terrorism.” https://www.state.gov/reports/country-reports-on-terrorism/

2. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Unclassified Assessment Regarding the Regional and Global Terrorism of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” November 2024. https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Unclassified-Assessment-Regarding-the-Regional-and-Global-Terrorism-of-the-Islamic-Republic-of-Iran-202411.pdf

3. National Security Archive, George Washington University, “CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup,” 2013. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/

4. National Security Archive, George Washington University, “The Secret CIA History of the Iran Coup, 1953.” https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/

5. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954.” https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54Iran/ch3

6. U.S. Department of State, “Remarks by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright on American-Iranian Relations,” March 17, 2000. https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/2000/000317.html

7. International Court of Justice, “Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024: Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176

8. Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” 1996. https://www.dougfeith.com/docs/Clean_Break.pdf

International Agencies & Verification Bodies

9. International Atomic Energy Agency, “IAEA and Iran — IAEA Board Reports.” https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/focus/iran/iaea-and-iran-iaea-board-reports

10. Arms Control Association, “IAEA Report Confirms Iran’s Compliance with the JCPOA,” June 8, 2018. https://www.armscontrol.org/blog/2018-06-08/iaea-report-confirms-irans-compliance-jcpoa

11. Amnesty International, “ICJ opinion declaring Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories unlawful is historic vindication of Palestinians’ rights,” July 2024. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/icj-opinion-declaring-israels-occupation-of-palestinian-territories-unlawful-is-historic-vindication-of-palestinians-rights/

Academic Research

12. Brown University, Watson Institute, “Costs of War Project: Findings.” https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/findings

13. Brown University, Watson Institute, “Civilians Killed & Displaced.” https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human/civilians-killed-displaced

14. Lake, Anthony, “Confronting Backlash States,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iran/1994-03-01/confronting-backlash-states

15. United States Institute of Peace, “Timeline: Iran’s Nuclear Challenges and the IAEA,” The Iran Primer. https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2024/may/30/timeline-irans-nuclear-challenges-and-iaea

16. OxJournal, “Revisiting Rogue States: Current Approaches and Critiques.” https://www.oxjournal.org/revisiting-rogue-states-current-approaches-and-critiques/

Investigative Journalism & News Reporting

17. Harris, Shane and Matthew M. Aid, “Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran,” Foreign Policy, August 26, 2013. https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/

18. NPR, “New Details On How U.S. ‘Helped Saddam As He Gassed Iran,’” August 26, 2013. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/26/215733981/new-details-on-how-u-s-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran

19. Smithsonian Magazine, “The U.S. Knew Iraq Was Using Chemical Weapons, Helped Out Anyway.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-us-knew-iraq-was-using-chemical-weapons-helped-out-anyway-1792375/

20. NPR, “How The CIA Overthrew Iran’s Democracy In 4 Days,” Throughline, January 31, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-in-four-days

21. CNN, “When the US Navy shot down Iran Air flight 655 in 1988,” January 10, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/10/middleeast/iran-air-flight-655-us-military-intl-hnk

22. The Washington Post, “2 Vincennes Officers Get Medals,” April 23, 1990. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/04/23/2-vincennes-officers-get-medals/cf383f02-05ce-435b-9086-5d61de569ed8/

23. Slate, “The Vincennes’ downing of Iran Air Flight 655: The United States tried to cover up its own destruction of a passenger plane,” July 2014. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/07/the-vincennes-downing-of-iran-air-flight-655-the-united-states-tried-to-cover-up-its-own-destruction-of-a-passenger-plane.html

24. Newsweek, “The U.S. Killed 300 Iranian Citizens. Iranians Remember — But Americans Don’t.” https://www.newsweek.com/iran-remembers-killed-americans-should-1445104

25. FactCheck.org, “Trump’s Claim About the Obama Nuclear Deal and Iran’s Nuclear Development,” March 2026. https://www.factcheck.org/2026/03/trumps-claim-about-the-obama-nuclear-deal-and-irans-nuclear-development/

26. Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, “A Worthless Withdrawal: Two Years Since President Trump Abandoned the JCPOA.” https://armscontrolcenter.org/a-worthless-withdrawal-two-years-since-president-trump-abandoned-the-jcpoa/

Surveys & Polls

27. WIN/Gallup International, “Global Survey: Which Country Is the Greatest Threat to World Peace?,” 2013. Reported by Brilliant Maps. https://brilliantmaps.com/threat-to-peace/

28. International Business Times, “In Gallup Poll, The Biggest Threat To World Peace Is … America?” https://www.ibtimes.com/gallup-poll-biggest-threat-world-peace-america-1525008

Analysis & Commentary

29. Chomsky, Noam, “US Is a Rogue State and Suleimani’s Assassination Confirms It,” Truthout, January 7, 2020. https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-us-is-a-rogue-state-and-suleimanis-assassination-confirms-it/

30. Democracy Now!, “Noam Chomsky: The United States, Not Iran, Poses Greatest Threat to World Peace,” September 22, 2015. https://www.democracynow.org/2015/9/22/noam_chomsky_the_united_states_not

Encyclopedic References

31. Wikipedia, “Iran Air Flight 655.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

32. Wikipedia, “United States support for Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

33. Wikipedia, “United States withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_withdrawal_from_the_Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Action

34. Wikipedia, “List of wars involving Iran.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Iran

35. Wikipedia, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_for_Securing_the_Realm

36. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Iran Air flight 655.” https://www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655

On March 11, 2026, Al Jazeera English published a YouTube Short titled “How much a day of war on Iran costs the US | By the Numbers.” In under three minutes, it broke down the financial cost of the first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury — the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran that began on February 28, 2026.

The numbers were staggering: $3.7 billion in four days. Less than 5% approved by Congress. A daily bill approaching $1 billion.

I want to be clear about something before I go further. Al Jazeera is headquartered in Doha, Qatar — one of the Gulf states that has been intercepting Iranian missiles and drones since this war began. Their journalists are not observing this conflict from a safe distance. They are reporting from inside it. When a newsroom that is literally under the flight path of incoming ballistic missiles takes three minutes to calmly walk you through a cost breakdown sourced from the Center for Strategic and International Studies — one of the most credible defence think tanks in Washington — the appropriate response is not to fact-check them. It is to listen. And then to think about what those numbers mean for the rest of us.

The data in the video is solid. The CSIS analysis it draws from was authored by Mark F. Cancian, a retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel, and Chris H. Park, and has been independently corroborated by CBS News, The Hill, Forbes, Fortune, The Washington Post, and the Pentagon’s own briefings to Congress.

So I am not here to verify the arithmetic. I am here to ask what the arithmetic is hiding.

$3.7 Billion in 100 Hours

The CSIS report breaks the first 100 hours of Operation Epic Fury into three cost categories: operations ($196 million), munitions ($3.1 billion), and equipment losses ($359 million). Total: $3.7 billion, or $891.4 million per day.

According to SIPRI, only about 25-30 nations on Earth spend more than $3.7 billion on their entire militaries in a year. Lebanon spent $635 million for all of 2024. The US burned through six times that in a long weekend.

By the end of the first week, the Pentagon told Congress the bill had already hit $11.3 billion. By day ten, it had crossed $10 billion by some estimates even before the Pentagon’s own figure was released. Fortune projected that a two-month conflict could add $65 billion in direct costs plus $1.4 billion in interest to the national debt.

I have lived long enough in both the United States and Germany to understand that the sheer speed at which a government can spend $3.7 billion on destruction, while agonising for months over a few hundred million for infrastructure or healthcare, is not an accident. It is a revelation of priorities. In Germany, a spending decision of this magnitude would require parliamentary debate, committee review, and public justification — not a presidential order delivered at 3:38 PM on a Thursday afternoon. The number itself is less shocking than the silence that surrounds it. Three-point-seven billion dollars, and the national conversation moved on within a news cycle.

Most countries on Earth — countries with functioning armies, navies, and air forces — cannot afford what the United States spent in four days. And those countries manage to defend themselves, maintain sovereignty, and sleep at night. When you outspend the annual military budgets of 165 countries in a long weekend, you are not projecting power. You are haemorrhaging it.

The Machine That Was Always Running

Of the $196 million in operational costs, $178 million was already in the Pentagon’s FY2026 budget — baseline costs for units that were deployed regardless. Two hundred and forty fighter jets. Two carrier strike groups. Fourteen destroyers. HIMARS batteries. THAAD and Patriot air defence systems. All of it positioned in the Middle East as a matter of routine.

Component Cost at H+100 Daily Increase Air operations (50 stealth, 110 non-stealth, 80 carrier-based) $125.2 million ~$30 million/day Naval operations (2 carriers, 14 destroyers, 3 LCS, submarines) $64.5 million ~$15.4 million/day Ground operations (HIMARS, THAAD/Patriot, National Guard) $7 million ~$1.6 million/day

Notice the sleight of hand buried in these numbers. The infrastructure of war is always running, always burning money, always waiting for a reason. The question worth asking is not “how much did this operation cost?” but “how much does it cost to maintain the permanent expectation of war?” That $178 million is the answer, and it recurs every four days, war or no war. The American taxpayer funds the largest standing military deployment in the Middle East whether or not a single shot is fired. The war did not create this expense. It merely gave it a name.

2,600 Weapons in 100 Hours

The real cost was not the operations. It was what the operations fired.

Approximately 2,600 guided munitions were expended in the first 100 hours. Replacing them costs $3.1 billion — none of it budgeted. The opening salvos relied on more than 160 Tomahawk cruise missiles at $3.6 million each, along with JASSM cruise missiles, ATACMS, and the Precision Strike Missile in its first-ever combat use. As Iranian air defenses were degraded by day four, the US transitioned to JDAM smart bombs at roughly $80,000 each.

That is roughly one guided weapon every two and a half minutes, continuously, for four days. Each one designed, manufactured, shipped, stored, and finally launched at a target thousands of kilometres from the country that built it.

When I lived in the US, I watched Congress debate for weeks over whether to fund school lunches. Here, $3.1 billion in munitions vanished into the sky in less time than it takes to process a passport renewal. The Precision Strike Missile saw its first combat use — a fact the Pentagon announced with the same pride a tech company reserves for a product launch. We have normalised the idea that the debut of a new weapon in a war zone is a milestone worth celebrating, rather than a failure of every institution that was supposed to prevent the war from happening in the first place.

The $50,000 Drone That Costs $5 Million to Kill

But the most expensive part of this war is not the bombing. It is stopping what Iran fires back.

A Shahed-136 drone costs Iran between $20,000 and $50,000 to build — fiberglass body, commercial GPS, a small jet engine, assembled under sanctions from parts available on the open market. CNBC called it “the poor man’s cruise missile.” Shooting one down with a Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptor costs $4-5.5 million. With a THAAD interceptor, it is $12-15 million. That is the 100x cost ratio the Al Jazeera video references — and in the worst case, it is real.

Interceptor Cost Per Shot Ratio vs $50K Drone Patriot PAC-3 MSE $4-5.5 million 80-110x SM-6 Standard Missile $4-5 million 80-100x THAAD $12-15 million 240-300x AIM-120 AMRAAM $1-2 million 20-40x Coyote counter-UAS $80-100K ~2x

The problem is compounded by production capacity. Iran can manufacture 200-500 Shaheds per month. Lockheed Martin produced roughly 620 PAC-3 MSE missiles in all of 2025. As The Globe and Mail reported, this is an “attrition war nightmare.”

The cost pressure has already driven the US to deploy its own Shahed clone — the LUCAS — reverse-engineered from captured Iranian drones and launched from littoral combat ships.

This is the detail that should keep defence strategists awake at night — and taxpayers furious. A country under decades of international sanctions is building $50,000 drones out of commercial components, and it costs the world’s most technologically advanced military $5 million to shoot each one down. That is not a strategy problem. It is a structural absurdity baked into the economics of the Western defence industry, where every interceptor is a bespoke piece of engineering built by a contractor with a profit margin and a lobbying budget. Iran built a weapon so effective that its enemy copied it. That is not a sign of American superiority. It is an admission that the $4 million Patriot missile was the wrong tool for the job all along.

The Countries That Did Not Start This War

In four days, Iran launched 500 ballistic missiles and 2,000 drones, according to the CSIS analysis citing CENTCOM data. For scale: in April 2024, Iran’s retaliatory strike on Israel involved roughly 170 drones and 120 ballistic missiles in a single night. Operation Epic Fury represents a 3x escalation in ballistic missiles and a 12x escalation in drones — sustained over four days.

Gulf allies — Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE — intercepted more than 1,800 of those projectiles. The UAE’s Ministry of Defense reported intercepting 174 ballistic missiles and 689 drones, though 21 drones struck civilian targets. Kuwait intercepted 97 ballistic missiles and 283 drones.

Read that again. Gulf allies intercepted the missiles. Countries that did not start this war, did not vote for it, and had no say in the decision to launch it are absorbing Iranian retaliation on behalf of the country that did. Twenty-one drones hit civilian targets in the UAE. People in Dubai and Abu Dhabi are running to shelters because of a war launched from Washington.

This is the part of American military adventurism that rarely makes the American evening news: the cost is not borne only by the country that starts the war. It is distributed, involuntarily, across an entire region. The Gulf states are discovering what Europe learned during the Cold War — being America’s ally means being America’s shield.

And consider Al Jazeera’s own position. Their headquarters sits in Doha, Qatar — a city whose air defenses are actively intercepting Iranian missiles as their journalists file stories about the cost of the war. When they present these numbers, they are not performing an academic exercise. They are reporting from a country that is paying for someone else’s war in interceptor missiles, civilian anxiety, and the knowledge that the next drone swarm could overwhelm their defenses.

Diplomacy Was Still on the Table

On February 25 — three days before the first bombs fell — Iran’s Foreign Minister said a nuclear agreement was “within reach.” On February 6, the U.S. and Iran had held indirect nuclear talks in Muscat, Oman. On the night of February 27, the president issued the final go-order.

We were told for years that the military option existed to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed threat. Instead, it was deployed while diplomacy was still on the table. Iran expended roughly 15-17% of its estimated ballistic missile stockpile in the first four days. Which means 83% remains. If the objective was to neutralise the threat, the math does not support it. If the objective was something else entirely, the American public deserves to know what they are paying a billion dollars a day for.

$359 Million Lost to Your Own Side

On March 2, three U.S. F-15E Strike Eagles were shot down by Kuwaiti air defenses in a friendly-fire incident. All six aircrew ejected safely — a fact reported by Military Times, Air & Space Forces Magazine, CBS News, and Janes. The CSIS report priced the loss at $309 million for the aircraft ($103 million each) plus $50 million in infrastructure damage — totaling $359 million.

Three hundred and fifty-nine million dollars. Not lost to enemy action. Lost to your own side shooting at you. The pilots survived, and for that I am grateful — but the euphemism “friendly fire” does an extraordinary amount of work here. There is nothing friendly about Kuwaiti air defenses mistaking American jets for Iranian threats in a chaotic battlespace that was created by a war of choice. This is the kind of cost that never appears in pre-war planning, never features in the speeches, and is always dismissed as an unfortunate but inevitable byproduct of operations. Each of those F-15EX jets takes three years to replace. The pilots had seconds to eject. $359 million gone because the fog of war does not respect the plans of those who start wars from climate-controlled situation rooms.

Running a War on a Credit Card

Of the $3.7 billion total, only $178 million — 4.8% — fell within the existing Pentagon budget. The remaining $3.5 billion had no congressional authorisation. As the CSIS report concluded: “The DOD will need additional funds at some point because the level of budget cuts needed to fund this conflict internally would likely be politically and operationally difficult.”

Foreign Policy reported that Democrats were expected to form “a firm wall” of opposition to any supplemental funding request. More than 250 organisations urged Congress to vote against additional war spending. Senate Democrats remained split. Lawfare examined the constitutional implications.

Three options were being debated: a supplemental spending bill (the Iraq/Afghanistan model), redirecting money from the $150 billion Trump reconciliation bill, or rolling costs into a future spending bill that may never pass.

This should alarm every American, regardless of where they stand on Iran. The U.S. Constitution is unambiguous: Congress controls the purse. Article I, Section 8. The power to declare war and the power to fund it were deliberately placed in the legislative branch, not the executive, precisely because the Founders understood what happens when a single individual can spend a nation into war without constraint. Ninety-five percent of the spending — $3.5 billion — had no congressional authorisation. In Germany, this would be a constitutional crisis. The Bundestag must approve any deployment of the Bundeswehr abroad, and any significant expenditure requires a parliamentary vote. The fact that an American president can spend $3.5 billion on a war without Congress even seeing the bill is not a feature of American democracy. It is a failure of it.

The genius of the supplemental spending bill — Option 1 — is also its cruelty. George W. Bush used the same mechanism for Iraq and Afghanistan, and it worked because voting against “funding the troops” is political suicide, even if you opposed sending them there in the first place. It is not a funding mechanism. It is a political trap. Option 2 — raiding the reconciliation bill — is worse: that money was promised for domestic priorities. Option 3 — rolling it into a future bill that may never pass — is the most American option of all: put it on the national credit card and let the next generation figure it out. The $34 trillion national debt is, in no small part, the accumulated interest on wars that were never honestly paid for.

A Billion Dollars a Day, and What It Buys

Fortune, Forbes, and the CSIS analysis all converge on roughly the same daily figure: close to $1 billion per day. Kent Smetters, director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, told Al Jazeera the sustained rate is probably closer to $800 million. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill privately feared it was closer to $2 billion. The early days were certainly more expensive — the Washington Post reported $5.6 billion in munitions alone in the first 48 hours.

There is something darkly revealing about the fact that it is Republicans — members of the president’s own party — who are privately leaking the higher estimate. They are not doing it out of anti-war conviction. They are doing it because even fiscal hawks understand that $2 billion a day, sustained, will devour every domestic spending promise made in the last election cycle. The war is eating the agenda. Tax cuts, infrastructure, border security — all of it now competes with the daily burn rate of a conflict that has no defined endpoint. This is how wars consume republics: not through defeat on the battlefield, but through the slow starvation of everything else.

A billion dollars a day. I keep trying to make that number mean something beyond an abstraction. So here is what a billion dollars buys in the civilian world: roughly 20,000 affordable homes in the American Midwest. Or full four-year university scholarships for 40,000 students. Or salaries for 15,000 teachers for an entire year. Every single day, one of those alternatives evaporates into the sky over Iran. And every single day, someone in Washington describes this as “the cost of defending American interests.” I would very much like someone to explain, clearly and on the record, which American interest is being defended at a price of $1 billion per day, and why it was not defendable through the diplomatic channel that was open three days before the first Tomahawk launched.

$3.7 Billion to Destroy. $3.8 Billion to Rebuild.

The Al Jazeera video closes with a comparison that I cannot stop thinking about: four days of war cost about what it would take to rebuild every school destroyed in Gaza.

The numbers bear this out. According to the World Bank, UN, and EU Interim Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, the education sector in Gaza requires $3.8 billion for recovery and reconstruction over five years. UNRWA reported that 97% of schools sustained damage, with 91.8% needing full reconstruction or major rehabilitation. UNICEF counted 745,000 students out of school for over two years.

$3.7 billion for four days of war. $3.8 billion to rebuild an entire generation’s education. The comparison is not merely rhetorical — it is almost exact.

This is the comparison that broke something in me. 745,000 children have been out of school for two years. The world has known the price of rebuilding their classrooms for over a year — $3.8 billion, according to the World Bank, the UN, and the EU. Nobody found the money. It was too expensive. Too complicated. Too politically fraught. And then, in 100 hours, the United States spent almost exactly that amount destroying things in a different country. The money was always there. The will was not.

We have built a global order in which it is easier to find $3.7 billion to demolish air defenses than $3.8 billion to rebuild classrooms. That is not a policy failure. It is a moral one. And every person who reads these two numbers side by side and feels nothing has already accepted a world I refuse to live in quietly.

What the Common Man Feels

The spreadsheets track munitions expenditures and interceptor costs. They do not track what this war feels like for the people who have no say in it.

In Doha, a journalist files a story about the cost of American Tomahawk missiles while air-raid sirens sound in the background. In Dubai, a family that moved to the UAE for safety and opportunity finds itself running to a shelter because a war they had nothing to do with followed them there. In Tehran, ordinary Iranians — people who protested their own government in 2022, who wanted reform, who wanted openness — are now burying the dead and rallying behind the same regime they once marched against, because nothing unites a country like being bombed by a foreign power.

In Berlin, where I live, the price of petrol has risen sharply as oil prices surge on fears of disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. A cargo ship has already been struck. European households, still recovering from the energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine, now face the prospect of another price shock driven by another war they had no hand in starting.

In small-town America, a teacher who will never see a raise funded by the billion dollars spent today wonders why the government can find unlimited money for missiles but not for her classroom. A veteran who served in Iraq watches a new generation of weapons deployed in a new Middle Eastern war and wonders what, exactly, was achieved the last time.

These are not hypothetical people. They are the human texture that the defence analysts and budget models cannot capture. The cost of this war is not $891.4 million per day. It is also the anxiety of a mother in Kuwait City, the cynicism of a student in Tehran, the quiet fury of a teacher in Ohio, and the resignation of a European commuter watching the petrol price tick upward again.

The Numbers Are Right. The War Is Wrong.

I moved from the United States to Germany because I came to value something that is difficult to articulate until you have lived with it and without it: the feeling that the state is accountable to its citizens, not the other way around. Rechtsstaatlichkeit — the rule of law — is not a slogan in Germany. It is a practice. The Bundestag debates deployments. Courts constrain executives. The military budget is a matter of public, parliamentary record.

What I am watching unfold in the United States is the opposite of all of that. A war launched while diplomacy was still underway. $3.5 billion spent without congressional authorisation. A president who issued the “no aborts” order on a Thursday afternoon while Iran’s Foreign Minister was still talking about a deal that was “within reach.” Gulf nations dragged into a conflict they did not choose. And an American public that will be handed the bill — in debt, in diminished public services, in the slow erosion of the institutions that were supposed to prevent exactly this — without ever having been asked whether they wanted any of it.

Al Jazeera’s video did something valuable: it translated the incomprehensible into the concrete. It took the fog of war and gave it a price tag. But a price tag is not the same as understanding, and understanding is not the same as accountability.

The numbers are accurate. Every major figure traces back to CSIS, to Pentagon briefings, to defence procurement records. I have verified them. They hold up.

But accuracy is not enough. Knowing the price of something is not the same as understanding its cost.

This war, at any price, was a choice. And choices have consequences that no line item in a Pentagon budget will ever capture — for the people of Iran, for the Gulf states absorbing the retaliation, for the American families who will feel the absence of every dollar spent, and for the children in Gaza whose schools remain rubble while the money that could have rebuilt them was incinerated over Tehran.

The numbers are right. The war is wrong.

References

All links were accessed on March 14, 2026. URLs may become unavailable or change over time.

1. Cancian, M. F. & Park, C. H. (2026, March 5). “$3.7 Billion: Estimated Cost of Epic Fury’s First 100 Hours.” Center for Strategic and International Studies. https://www.csis.org/analysis/37-billion-estimated-cost-epic-furys-first-100-hours

2. U.S. Central Command. (2026, March 2). “Three US F-15s Involved in Friendly Fire Incident in Kuwait; Pilots Safe.” CENTCOM Press Release. https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-View/Article/4418568/three-us-f-15s-involved-in-friendly-fire-incident-in-kuwait-pilots-safe/

3. U.S. Central Command. (2026, February 28). “US Forces Launch Operation Epic Fury.” CENTCOM Press Release. https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-View/Article/4418396/us-forces-launch-operation-epic-fury/

4. U.S. Department of Defense. (2026, March 3). “Operation Epic Fury Fact Sheet: The First 72 Hours.” https://media.defense.gov/2026/Mar/03/2003882557/-1/-1/1/OPERATION-EPIC-FURY-FACT-SHEET-260303.PDF

5. U.S. Department of Defense. (2026, March 9). “Operation Epic Fury Fact Sheet: The First 10 Days.” https://media.defense.gov/2026/Mar/09/2003896756/-1/-1/1/OPERATION-EPIC-FURY-FACT-SHEET-THE-FIRST-10-DAYS.PDF

6. CBS News. (2026, March 11). “First week of Iran war cost U.S. over $11 billion, military told lawmakers.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-war-cost-first-week-military-congress/

7. The Hill. (2026, March 11). “Pentagon estimates first 6 days of Iran war cost $11.3B.” https://thehill.com/homenews/5780153-operation-epic-fury-cost/

8. Durkee, A. (2026, March 10). “Why Trump’s War With Iran Is Costing Nearly $1 Billion A Day—At Least.” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/03/10/why-trumps-war-with-iran-is-costing-nearly-1-billion-a-day-at-least/

9. Fortune. (2026, March 11). “Trump’s Iran war is costing American taxpayers $1 billion a day as the national debt spirals out of control.” https://fortune.com/2026/03/11/daily-tab-iran-war-debt-crisis/

10. Fortune. (2026, March 12). “Trump’s Iran war could hike national debt by $65 billion in 60 days, while tariffs add another crushing blow.” https://fortune.com/2026/03/12/trump-iran-war-could-hike-national-debt-by-65-billion-in-60-days/

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14. CGTN. (2026, March 11). “Iran war costs US taxpayers over $890 mln per day, think tank finds.” https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-03-11/Iran-war-costs-US-taxpayers-over-890-mln-per-day-think-tank-finds-1LqekdfuxXi/p.html

15. The Washington Times. (2026, March 6). “First 100 hours of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran cost about $3.7 billion, experts say.” https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/mar/6/first-100-hours-us-israeli-attack-iran-cost-37-billion-experts-say/

16. South China Morning Post. (2026, March 11). “American military bleeds US$11.3 billion in first week of Iran war: report.” https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3346376/american-military-bleeds-us113-billion-first-week-iran-war-report

17. Common Dreams. (2026, March 12). “Trump’s War of Choice in Iran Has Cost US Taxpayers Over $10 Billion in Just 10 Days.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-iran-war-cost

18. CNBC. (2026, March 5). “Iran’s Shahed-136 drone: How ‘the poor man’s cruise missile’ is shaping Tehran’s retaliation.” https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/05/iran-shahed-136-drone-cost-air-defense-gulf-war-us-israel-gulf-scorpion-strike-centcom.html

19. The Globe and Mail. (2026). “The high price of intercepting Iran’s low-cost drones.” https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-the-cost-of-interceptors-has-made-the-war-with-iran-one-of-economic/

20. Defence Security Asia. (2026). “Attrition War Nightmare: Iran’s $20,000 Shahed Drones vs America’s $15 Million THAAD.” https://defencesecurityasia.com/en/iran-drone-swarm-vs-us-missile-defence-cost-war-shahed-thaad-patriot-attrition-analysis/

21. Euronews. (2026, March 10). “LUCAS FLM 136: America’s cheap Iran-designed Shahed drone clone.” https://www.euronews.com/2026/03/10/flm-136-americas-cheap-iran-designed-shahed-drone-clone

22. NBC News. (2026). “Cheap, effective and battle-tested by Russia: Iran leans on Shahed drones to penetrate U.S. defenses.” https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/shahed-drones-iran-us-war-ukraine-russia-rcna261285

23. WION News. (2026). “$3.7 million vs $35,000: How cheap Iranian drones are costing millions to intercept.” https://www.wionews.com/photos/-3-7-million-vs-35-000-how-cheap-iranian-drones-are-costing-millions-to-uae-countries-to-intercept-1772706263522

24. Military Times. (2026, March 2). “3 F-15s shot down by Kuwait in friendly fire incident, pilots safe, US says.” https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/03/02/3-f-15s-shot-down-by-kuwait-in-friendly-fire-incident-pilots-safe-us-says/

25. Air & Space Forces Magazine. (2026, March 2). “Three US F-15Es Shot Down by Kuwaiti Friendly Fire; Crews Safe.” https://www.airandspaceforces.com/f-15e-fighters-downed-over-kuwait-iran/

26. Janes. (2026, March 2). “Update – Iran conflict 2026: US F-15Es shot down by Kuwaiti ‘friendly fire’, crews eject.” https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-news/defence/update-iran-conflict-2026-us-f-15es-shot-down-by-kuwaiti-friendly-fire-crews-eject

27. CBS News. (2026, March 2). “3 American F-15 jets ‘mistakenly shot down’ by Kuwait but all crew safe, U.S. military says.” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-f-15-jets-mistakenly-shot-down-kuwait-riendly-fire-crew-safe/

28. Fox News. (2026, March 2). “F-15E Strike Eagles shot down during Operation Epic Fury over Kuwait.” https://www.foxnews.com/politics/3-us-warplanes-shot-down-kuwaiti-air-defenses-pilots-bail-out-friendly-fire-incident-centcom-says

29. Foreign Policy. (2026, March 10). “Trump Likely to Confront Democratic Wall on Iran War Funding.” https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/10/trump-iran-war-funding-congress-democrats-military-spending/

30. American Civil Liberties Union. (2026). “More Than 250 Groups Oppose Additional Spending on Trump’s Illegal Iran War.” https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/more-than-250-groups-oppose-additional-spending-on-trumps-illegal-iran-war

31. NOTUS. (2026). “Senate Democrats Are Split Over Supplemental Funding for the War in Iran.” https://www.notus.org/senate/senate-democrats-supplemental-funding-iran-war

32. NBC News. (2026). “First 6 days of Iran war cost $11.3 billion, Pentagon tells Congress.” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/first-6-days-iran-war-cost-11-billion-pentagon-tells-senators-rcna263060

33. Lawfare. (2026). “Operation Epic Fury Puts Congress and the Constitution to the Test.” https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/operation-epic-fury-puts-congress-and-the-constitution-to-the-test

34. Taxpayers for Common Sense. (2026). “Regarding Iran, Congress Should Use its Power of the Purse.” https://www.taxpayer.net/national-security/regarding-iran-congress-should-use-its-power-of-the-purse/

35. World Bank. (2025, February 18). “New Report Assesses Damages, Losses and Needs in Gaza and the West Bank.” https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2025/02/18/new-report-assesses-damages-losses-and-needs-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank

36. UNRWA. (2025, July). “Verification of damages to schools based on proximity to damaged sites – Gaza, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Update #10.” https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/verification-damages-schools-based-proximity-damaged-sites-gaza-occupied-palestinian-territory

37. UNICEF. (2025). “After Two Years of War: Gaza’s Education System on the Brink of Collapse.” https://www.unicef.org/sop/stories/after-two-years-war-gazas-education-system-brink-collapse

38. United Nations. (2025, October). “Gaza: $70 billion needed to rebuild shattered enclave, says UN.” https://www.un.org/unispal/document/unog-press-briefing-14oct25/

39. SIPRI. (2025). “Trends in World Military Expenditure, 2024.” SIPRI Fact Sheet. https://www.sipri.org/publications/2025/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2024

40. Britannica. (2026). “What is Operation Epic Fury?” https://www.britannica.com/question/What-is-Operation-Epic-Fury

41. Defense Update. (2026, March 3). “Operation Epic Fury / Roaring Lion.” https://defense-update.com/20260303_epic-fury.html

42. The New Republic. (2026). “Trump’s Iran War Cost Us More Than $11 Billion in One Week.” https://newrepublic.com/post/207686/donald-trump-iran-war-cost-one-week

43. Responsible Statecraft. (2026). “The cost of Trump’s Iran war: $5 billion and counting.” https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-war-costs/

44. Center for American Progress. (2026). “The Trump Administration’s Reckless War in Iran Has Already Cost More Than $5 Billion.” https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-trump-administrations-reckless-war-in-iran-has-already-cost-more-than-5-billion/

45. The War Zone. (2026, March 2). “Three USAF F-15E Strike Eagles Shot Down By Friendly Fire.” https://www.twz.com/air/f-15-spins-into-the-ground-while-on-fire-in-middle-east

46. The War Zone. (2026). “What The Navy’s Ship-Launched Missiles Actually Cost.” https://www.twz.com/sea/what-the-navys-ship-launched-missiles-actually-cost

47. Military.com. (2026, March 2). “US F-15 Friendly Fire Incident in Kuwait, All Pilots Safe.” https://www.military.com/daily-news/2026/03/02/us-f-15-friendly-fire-incident-kuwait-all-pilots-safe.html

48. Al Jazeera. (2026, March 11). “How much a day of war on Iran costs the US | By the Numbers.” YouTube Shorts.

1. Al Jazeera. (2026, February 19). “The cost of genocide: Israel’s war on Gaza by the numbers.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/19/the-cost-of-genocide-israels-war-on-gaza-by-the-numbers

2. Wikipedia. (2026). “2026 Iran war.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war

3. Wikipedia. (2026). “2026 Iranian strikes on the United Arab Emirates.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iranian_strikes_on_the_United_Arab_Emirates

4. Al Jazeera. (2026, March 12). “Iran targets Gulf nations with missiles, drones as oil prices soar.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/12/iran-targets-gulf-nations-with-missiles-drones-as-oil-prices-soar

5. Fox News. (2026, March 11). “LIVE UPDATES: Cargo ship struck in Strait of Hormuz as Iran launches drone, missile attacks.” https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/us-iran-israel-war-latest-march-11-live-updates

6. Al Jazeera. (2026, March 7). “Iranian missiles intercepted over Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain sirens.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/7/iranian-missiles-intercepted-over-saudi-jordan-drones-launched-at-qatar

8.27B People in 2026 | 0.84% Growth Rate | 10.3B Projected Peak | 28% Nations Pro-Natalist

For roughly 300,000 years, our species existed on the margins of the planet. Small bands of humans hunted, gathered, and wandered across landscapes, their numbers barely registering on any global scale. By the dawn of agriculture around 8000 B.C., only about five million people walked the Earth — fewer than the current population of Singapore[1].

Then came a series of revolutions — agricultural, industrial, medical, and technological — that didn’t just change how we lived. They changed how many of us could live. Today, we number over 8.27 billion[2]. The question that hangs over this staggering trajectory is not merely academic: Is this population surge a natural phenomenon, or the result of deliberate human intervention? And does the answer matter for the future of civilisation itself?

From Scarcity to Billions: A Brief History of Human Numbers

For most of recorded history, population growth was so glacial it would have been imperceptible to anyone living through it. From 1 A.D. to 1800, the global growth rate hovered at under 0.05 per cent per year. It took all of human history — every war, every famine, every empire — to reach the first billion around the year 1800[1].

Then the curve bent sharply upward. The second billion arrived in just 130 years, by 1930. The third took only 30 years. By the time the world’s population doubled from three billion in 1959 to six billion in 1999, the pattern was unmistakable: something extraordinary had changed in the relationship between human beings and the planet that sustained them[2].

The 20th century alone saw the global population leap from 1.6 billion to over six billion — roughly a fourfold increase in a single century[5]. Today, we add approximately 69 million people to the planet each year, equivalent to adding the entire population of the United Kingdom annually[2].

The Engines of Growth: Nature, or Human Engineering?

Here is where the debate becomes fascinating — and consequential. The explosion of human population was not the result of any single natural process. It was, in large part, manufactured by a series of cascading human innovations.

The Agricultural Revolutions

The First Agricultural Revolution, roughly 10,000 years ago, fundamentally rewired the human relationship with food. By domesticating plants and animals, early farmers created surplus calories for the first time, enabling settled communities, specialisation of labour, and — crucially — larger populations[10]. But the growth this enabled was still slow, punctuated by famines, plagues, and wars that would periodically flatten the curve.

The Second Agricultural Revolution in the 1700s and 1800s, tightly intertwined with the Industrial Revolution in Britain, introduced chemical fertilisers, mechanised farming, and selective breeding. Crop yields soared, and the food supply expanded fast enough to sustain the populations flooding into newly industrialised cities[9]. This revolution did not merely feed more mouths; it freed millions of hands from the fields and pushed them into factories, catalysing urbanisation on a scale the world had never seen. It also lit a fuse. The coal that powered the factories, the deforestation that cleared land for farms, and the waste that choked newly swollen rivers — these were the first entries in an environmental debt that humanity would spend centuries accumulating[9].

Then came the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century, arguably the most consequential intervention of all. Beginning in Mexico and spreading across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, scientists developed high-yielding crop varieties, synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, modern irrigation, and chemical pesticides[7]. The results were staggering. India’s wheat production jumped from 10 million tonnes in the 1960s to 73 million by 2006. Global grain production surged by 160 per cent between 1950 and 1984[7]. Today, it is estimated that nearly half the people alive on Earth are fed as a direct result of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser — a product entirely of human invention[7].

“Without the Green Revolution, global caloric availability would have declined by 11–13%. Billions of people owe their existence to technologies barely a century old.”

Yet the triumph was not without its shadow. The pesticides that shielded harvests seeped into freshwater; the fertilisers that enriched soil simultaneously depleted it; the monoculture crops that maximised yield eroded biodiversity and accelerated water scarcity[7]. The ecological ledger of feeding eight billion mouths is a story that demands its own reckoning — and one we will return to.

The Medical and Sanitary Revolutions

Agriculture created the food; medicine and public health kept people alive to eat it. The dramatic decline in mortality rates since the 18th century is another unmistakably human-driven shift. Clean water systems, vaccination, antibiotics, modern surgery, and improved sanitation slashed infant mortality and extended life expectancy from roughly 30 years in pre-industrial times to over 73 years globally today[5].

The demographic transition model captures this dynamic cleanly. In pre-industrial societies, both birth rates and death rates were high, and population remained relatively stable. As medical and sanitary advances reduced death rates — particularly infant and child mortality — populations surged, because birth rates took decades to adjust downward. This gap between falling deaths and still-high births is the engine that drove the 20th-century population explosion[4].

So, Is the Surge Natural or Man-Made?

The honest answer is both, but the balance tips heavily toward human agency. The biological capacity to reproduce is, of course, natural. Humans, like all organisms, are wired to multiply. But the specific conditions that enabled population to grow from one billion to over eight billion in just two centuries were overwhelmingly the product of deliberate human innovation: industrial agriculture, modern medicine, public sanitation, and fossil-fuel-powered economic development[5].

The world population has grown by about five billion since the Green Revolution began. The development of the Haber-Bosch process for synthesising ammonia — a single chemical innovation — is estimated to support the food supply for roughly half of humanity alive today[7]. This is not the gradual tick of natural selection; it is the rapid, sometimes reckless, deployment of human ingenuity.

At the same time, natural forces remain at play. Evolutionary pressures continue to shape fertility patterns, and some scholars argue that a form of “cultural selection” may be occurring, with communities that favour higher birth rates gradually growing in share relative to those that do not[5]. But the dominant story is clear: the population surge of the past two centuries was engineered — not by a single plan or planner, but by the cumulative, often uncoordinated advance of human knowledge and technology.

The Modern Paradox: From Growth Crisis to Decline Anxiety

If the 20th century’s demographic challenge was explosive growth, the 21st century’s may be the opposite: declining fertility and ageing societies. The very same forces that once drove population upward — education, urbanisation, economic development, and women’s empowerment — are now pulling birth rates down across much of the world[4].

Global population growth has slowed to about 0.84 per cent per year in 2026, down from its peak of roughly 2.3 per cent in the mid-1960s[2]. The United Nations projects global population will peak around 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s and then begin a slow decline[3]. In 2020, the global growth rate fell below one per cent for the first time since 1950[6].

The fertility picture is stark. The global total fertility rate has fallen from roughly five children per woman in the 1950s to about 2.3 today — and it continues to drop[4]. In East Asia, the average is just 1.3 children per woman. South Korea now holds the world’s lowest fertility rate, at fewer than one child per woman[8]. China’s population has already begun to contract — the UN projects it could shrink to roughly 633 million by 2100[3].

What Modern States Are Doing: The Pro-Natalist Turn

Governments around the world are now scrambling to address what many see as an emerging population crisis. The share of countries with explicitly pro-natalist policies has risen from about 10 per cent in 1976 to 28 per cent by 2019, and the number continues to climb[11].

Japan — Children’s Future Strategy (2023) Committed ¥3.6 trillion (~$24B) to child allowances, tuition-free university, enhanced paternity leave. Population peaked at 128M in 2008; projected to fall to 87M by 2070[12].

South Korea — Low Fertility Countermeasures (2006–) Spent over $200B since 2006 on childcare, housing subsidies, and incentives. Holds the world’s lowest fertility rate (<1 child/woman). Birth rates continue to fall[8].

Hungary — Family Protection Action Plan (2019) Offers lifetime income tax exemptions for mothers with 4+ children, subsidised housing loans. Evidence is mixed — third-or-higher parity births have actually declined[11].

Poland — 500+ Programme (2016) Generous, nearly universal monthly cash benefit. Birth rates rose measurably after launch, with gains concentrated in higher-parity births[11].

France & Sweden — Decades of Family Support Generous parental leave, universal childcare, and direct financial support. Birth rates are higher than European neighbours, but still below replacement level of 2.1[13].

Russia — Maternity Capital Programme (2007) Substantial financial benefits for families with multiple children. “Mother Heroine” title restored in 2022 for mothers raising 10+ children[14].

A striking statistic illustrates the difficulty: of the 84 countries or territories that had total fertility rates below 2.1 in 2011, not a single one had climbed back above replacement level by 2021. Not one[13]. Despite billions spent on pro-natalist incentives, no country has yet found a reliable formula for sustainably reversing fertility decline once the forces of modernity — education, urbanisation, contraceptive access, women’s economic independence — take hold.

Historical Contrast: From Anti-Natalism to Baby Bonuses

The irony of the current pro-natalist push is that many of today’s low-fertility countries were, within living memory, actively trying to reduce their birth rates. China’s one-child policy, introduced in 1979 and maintained for decades, is the most dramatic example — a coercive state intervention that fundamentally altered the nation’s demographic trajectory[3]. India pursued aggressive family planning campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s. Iran, which ran one of the world’s most aggressive family-planning programmes in the 1980s and 1990s, reversed course in 2013 and adopted pro-natalist policies as its growth rate fell toward zero[15].

The demographic transition model predicted that as societies industrialise and modernise, fertility would naturally fall to replacement levels and stabilise. What it did not fully anticipate was how far below replacement many societies would fall, or how difficult it would prove to reverse the decline once it set in[4].

Why Population Dynamics Matter for Civilisation

Population is not merely a number. It is the foundation on which economies, social systems, militaries, and cultures are built. A young, growing population provides the labour force that powers economic expansion, the tax base that funds public services, and the dynamism that drives innovation.

An ageing, shrinking population faces a different calculus. Fewer workers must support more retirees. Healthcare costs rise. Innovation may slow. Political power shifts — both within countries and between them[8].

The geopolitical implications are already visible. By 2100, the UN projects that five countries — the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tanzania — will account for more than 60 per cent of all global population growth[3]. Africa, currently the world’s youngest continent with a median age of just 19, will remain the most youthful region by a wide margin. Meanwhile, Europe’s median age is already 43, and East Asia stands at 41[3].

“The world’s demographic centre of gravity is shifting — from the ageing economies of the Global North to the youthful nations of Africa and South Asia.”

Looking Ahead: A Species at a Crossroads

We stand at a remarkable inflection point. For the first time in human history, global population growth is decelerating meaningfully. The UN projects a peak around 2084 at roughly 10.3 billion, followed by gradual decline[3]. If current fertility trends continue — and some demographers believe they will steepen — the decline could begin sooner and be sharper than official projections suggest[5].

This is, in a sense, the natural consequence of the same human ingenuity that created the population surge in the first place. The technologies and social transformations that allowed eight billion people to inhabit the Earth — modern medicine, industrial agriculture, urbanisation, women’s education — also gave individuals the means and motivation to have fewer children.

The challenge for civilisation is not simply to produce more people, or fewer. It is to build societies resilient enough to thrive across a range of demographic futures — whether that means absorbing rapid growth in sub-Saharan Africa, managing graceful decline in East Asia, or navigating the complex politics of immigration as a tool for demographic balance[16].

Population has always been the silent engine of history. The question now is whether we can steer it as wisely as we once accelerated it.

But there is a question we have not yet asked — one that shadows every statistic in this essay. The same innovations that fed, healed, and multiplied our species also extracted a price from the planet that sustained us. Coal powered the Industrial Revolution; synthetic fertilisers fed the Green Revolution; fossil fuels drove the economic growth that lifted billions from poverty. Carbon dioxide levels have risen more than 40 per cent above pre-industrial norms. Humanity now releases over 30 billion tonnes of CO2 annually. We have cleared forests, drained aquifers, acidified oceans, and pushed species toward extinction at rates unseen since the dinosaurs vanished. The ledger of human triumph has a second column — and it is written in the language of ecological debt.

40%+ CO2 rise since 1750 | 30B Tonnes CO2/year | 1M+ Species at risk | 70% Wildlife lost since 1970

If Part I of this story was about the triumph of numbers — how humanity engineered its own explosion — then the next chapter must reckon with the cost. For every billion people added, ecosystems buckled under new demands for land, water, energy, and food. The very Green Revolution that banished famine also leached pesticides into freshwater, depleted soil nutrients, and accelerated water scarcity. The industrial engine that powered urbanisation also filled the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that are now rewriting the planet’s climate.

The uncomfortable truth is this: civilisation’s greatest demographic achievement may also be its most consequential environmental mistake. And the bill is coming due.

Coming Next · Part II

At What Cost to Nature? The Price of 8 Billion

The same revolutions that multiplied humanity have pushed the planet to its ecological limits. In Part II, we trace the environmental ledger of population growth — from deforestation and mass extinction to climate breakdown — and ask whether civilisation can reconcile its numbers with the biosphere that sustains them.

Climate Change · Deforestation · Mass Extinction · Water Scarcity · Ecological Overshoot

References

1. Worldometer. “World Population Clock: 8.3 Billion People (2026).” worldometers.info/world-population

2. DataReportal. “Digital 2026: Global Population Trends.” October 2025. datareportal.com

3. Pew Research Center. “5 Facts About How the World’s Population Is Expected to Change by 2100.” July 2025. Based on UN World Population Prospects 2024. pewresearch.org

4. World Bank. “World Population Day: Trends and Demographic Changes.” July 2025. blogs.worldbank.org

5. Wikipedia. “World Population.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

6. World Population Review. “Current World Population.” March 2026. worldpopulationreview.com

7. Wikipedia. “Green Revolution.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

8. Academic Block. “Top 10 Countries with Declining Population.” May 2025. academicblock.com

9. Ecology Prime. “The Ecological Impact of the Industrial Revolution.” March 2025. ecologyprime.com

10. Population Education. “Timeline of Major Agricultural Revolutions.” July 2025. populationeducation.org

11. Institute for Family Studies. “Pro-Natal Policies Work, But They Come With a Hefty Price Tag.” ifstudies.org

12. PMC / National Institutes of Health. “Reversing Fertility Decline in Japan with Foreign Pro-Natalist Policies, 1990–2035.” June 2025. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

13. The Hill. “Pro-Natalist Policies Are Great, but Declining Birth Rates Are Here to Stay.” August 2023. thehill.com

14. Wikipedia. “Natalism.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalism

15. PMC / National Institutes of Health. “Explaining the Framework of the Pro-Natalist Policy Implementation Process in Iran.” pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

16. Socio.Health. “Population Policies in Developed Countries: Pro-Natalist Strategies and Immigration Trends.” November 2025. socio.health

© 2026 · Part I of II · Research compiled from UN, Pew Research, World Bank, and peer-reviewed sources

I write this from Germany, where I now live and work after spending several years in the United States as a highly qualified immigrant. I know what it is to carry a visa, to renew a work permit, to calculate every word you say in a bureaucratic office because your right to remain in a country rests on paperwork and goodwill. I was one of the lucky ones — educated, employed, welcomed. But I never forgot that my status was conditional. That a policy change, a denied renewal, a shift in political winds could upend everything.

That awareness never fully leaves you. And it is that awareness that makes the following story not just politically troubling to me, but viscerally, personally alarming.

There’s a photo making the rounds — published officially by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, America’s federal ministry responsible for border security and immigration. A senior U.S. government official stands in front of iron bars, hair perfectly styled, cap smartly angled, smiling for the camera. Behind her, dozens of shaved-head men in boxer shorts are packed like cattle into a cell. She’s posing. They’re props.

Welcome to CECOT — the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador — where inhumanity has been repackaged as a deterrent, suffering sold as strength, and a fundamental contempt for human dignity dressed up as tough governance.

Let’s not mince words: what is happening inside CECOT is a moral catastrophe. And the fact that American officials are not just tolerating it, but celebrating it, should alarm every person — wherever they live — who believes in the rule of law.

Background: What Is CECOT, and Why Does It Matter?

For readers outside the United States, some context is essential.

El Salvador is a small Central American nation that has long struggled with violent street gangs — most notoriously MS-13 and Barrio 18 — which terrorised communities for decades. In 2022, the Salvadoran government declared a sweeping “state of emergency,” suspending key constitutional rights and arresting tens of thousands of suspected gang members. To house them, it built CECOT.

Separately, the United States under President Donald Trump has been conducting an aggressive immigration crackdown, deporting people it claims are criminals or gang members — including Venezuelan nationals accused of belonging to a gang called Tren de Aragua. Rather than keep them in U.S. detention facilities, the Trump administration struck a deal with El Salvador: the U.S. pays El Salvador around $6 million to imprison these deportees at CECOT. The legal authority used to deport them was the Alien Enemies Act — a wartime law from 1798, last invoked during World War II, which grants the U.S. president extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreign nationals during a declared national threat.

The result: people removed from the United States, with little or no judicial review, and delivered into one of the most brutal prison environments on the planet.

A Warehouse for Human Beings

CECOT was built in 2022 and can hold up to 40,000 inmates — making it one of the largest prisons in the world by capacity. Each cell holds an average of 156 people. Every prisoner is allocated roughly 0.6 square metres of personal space — less than the footprint of a single floor tile. To put that in perspective: EU minimum standards for prison cells are around 4 square metres per person. CECOT offers one-seventh of that.

There are no mattresses. No pillows. Metal bunks, stacked four levels high. Two toilets. Two washbasins. For over a hundred people.

Prisoners are confined to their cells for 23.5 hours a day. There are no family visits. No outdoor recreation. No educational programmes. No rehabilitation of any kind. Salvadoran officials have stated, openly and without shame, that those imprisoned at CECOT will never be released.

Let that sink in. Not “rarely.” Not “unlikely.” Never.

This is not a prison. It is a tomb for the living.

The Due Process That Wasn’t

Germany, like most European democracies, operates on a foundational legal principle: Rechtsstaatlichkeit — the rule of law. You cannot be imprisoned without charge. You cannot be held indefinitely without trial. You have the right to legal representation, to know the evidence against you, to appeal. These are not privileges. They are the bedrock of a civilised society.

What happened at CECOT is the deliberate demolition of every one of those principles.

The Salvadoran government’s crackdown has swept up tens of thousands of people under a state of emergency that suspended basic constitutional rights. By the government’s own admission, some of those imprisoned were detained by mistake. Several thousand have since been released — but how many remain who shouldn’t be there? Nobody knows, because nobody is allowed to find out.

Human rights organisations have been denied access to CECOT. The government only allows in journalists and social media influencers under tightly controlled, choreographed conditions — the kind of access designed to produce propaganda, not accountability.

Among the deportees sent by the U.S. were people with no criminal records whatsoever. The U.S. government has acknowledged this itself. Families have categorically denied gang affiliation. One deported man was a college student awaiting a decision on his asylum application. He described the prison director greeting new arrivals with: “Welcome to hell. I’ll make sure you never leave.”

He was eventually released. Many others were not.

As someone who once navigated the American immigration system — filing forms, attending appointments, hoping that the machinery of the state would treat me fairly — I find this story not abstract. This is what happens when the state decides that certain categories of people do not deserve the protections it extends to others. First it is “illegal immigrants.” Then it is “the wrong kind of immigrant.” History tells us where that logic ends.

Power as Performance

What makes all of this uniquely grotesque is the eagerness with which officials have turned CECOT into political theatre.

The U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security — the minister responsible for immigration and border security — visited CECOT in March 2025 and filmed a video standing in front of a packed cell of shirtless inmates. “If you come to our country illegally,” she said to the camera, “this is one of the consequences you could face.”

She was not warning gang members. She was warning everyone. Asylum seekers. Economic migrants. Frightened families. Engineers, doctors, and teachers who lack the right paperwork. Anyone who might consider crossing a border without authorisation now knows they could be warehoused indefinitely in a foreign prison, without trial, without contact with their families, without any realistic prospect of release.

The inmates behind her were not convictions — they were a backdrop. Human suffering, carefully lit, for a social media post.

From Germany, watching this unfold, I am reminded of something: the language of deterrence through spectacle is not new on this continent. Europe has seen what happens when governments begin to treat human beings as messages to be sent. The photo from CECOT belongs in a category of images that should make the blood run cold — not because it is extreme, but because it is presented as normal.

The Silence That Damns Us

A “60 Minutes” segment — “60 Minutes” is one of America’s most prestigious and long-running investigative news programmes — featured interviews with deported men describing torture, beatings, and sexual abuse at CECOT. It was pulled from broadcast in the United States hours before it was set to air. It eventually streamed in Canada. American viewers, the taxpayers funding the arrangement with El Salvador, were denied the chance to see it. The journalist who reported the segment accused her own network of pulling it for political reasons — calling it, in effect, a government veto over a news story.

Human rights organisations including Human Rights Watch and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights — both internationally recognised bodies — have documented conditions inside El Salvador’s prisons including a lack of food, hygiene, sanitation, and healthcare. Some inmates are held in solitary confinement cells that are kept completely dark.

These are not rumours. These are documented findings from credible international bodies. And they are being systematically ignored by the governments that have the most power to act.

A View From Europe

Living in Germany sharpens certain instincts. This is a country that built its entire postwar identity on the rejection of state-sanctioned dehumanisation — that enshrined Menschenwürde, human dignity, as the very first and inviolable article of its constitution. Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. The dignity of human beings is untouchable.

It is not a perfect country. No country is. But that foundational commitment — that the state exists to protect human dignity, not to weaponise the erosion of it — is something I came to appreciate deeply after years in the United States, where I watched that commitment slowly being hollowed out.

There is a reason civilised societies developed due process, habeas corpus (the right not to be imprisoned without legal justification), and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Not to protect the guilty — but because without those protections, anyone can become guilty. History has shown us, over and over, that when governments are given unchecked power to imprison people without trial, they will eventually imprison the wrong people. Critics. Journalists. Teachers. Students.

In May 2025, one of the Salvadoran government’s most prominent critics — an anti-corruption attorney who had spent years exposing government abuses — was arrested. She had done nothing but speak the truth.

The machine does not stay pointed in one direction forever.

A Final Word

I am writing this as someone who has lived the immigrant experience in America — the paperwork, the uncertainty, the gratitude, and yes, the quiet anxiety that comes with knowing your presence is conditional. I left not because America failed me, but because I found something in Europe I had not expected to value so highly: the sense that the state, however imperfect, is at least nominally committed to your dignity as a human being.

CECOT is not a symbol of strength. It is a monument to the ease with which the powerful can dehumanise the powerless when there are no consequences for doing so.

The men in that photo — behind the bars, shaved and stripped, packed into a cell for a politician’s photo op — are human beings. They have mothers and children and names. Some of them may well be dangerous criminals who belong behind bars. But in a just society, that is determined by evidence and law, not by a minister’s accusation and a wartime statute written in the 18th century.

From Germany, from Europe, from anywhere in the world where people still believe that the law exists to protect the individual from the state — not the other way around — this must be said plainly:

This is wrong. Not complicated. Not a “both sides” debate. Wrong.

And until more of us are willing to say so, we are complicit in every moment those men spend in the dark.

Sources: CNN · NPR · NBC News · CBC News · CBS News · Human Rights Watch · The Intercept · Democracy Docket · Wikipedia

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