[This conversation with Claude concerning the February 28 coordinated strike by the United States and Israel on Iran is the third in a series that will continue during the week. You can read Parts 1 and 2 here.]

Upon waking on Sunday morning, as a follow-up to the discussion I began on Saturday, I addressed the following prompt to Claude:

I’m looking for information about the deliberation of the United Nations Security Council following the February 28 attack on Iran.

Here is a summary of what unfolded at the UNSC today.

The Security Council convened in emergency session at 4 pm EST on February 28, on the last day of the UK’s rotating presidency — a timing detail not without irony, given that the US takes over the presidency on March 1. The meeting was requested by France first, then supported by China, Russia, Colombia, and Bahrain.

The fault lines were exactly as our earlier conversation would have predicted. Secretary-General Guterres warned that the action risks “igniting a chain of events that nobody can control in the most volatile region of the world” and called for everything to be done to prevent further escalation.

China and Russia framed their request for the meeting around “the unprovoked and reckless act of military aggression by the United States and Israel.” Iran invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter — the self-defense provision — and called for the Council to “take the necessary and immediate measures to halt this unlawful use of force and to ensure accountability.”

Critically for the moral narrative we discussed, the Security Council report notes that on February 27 — the day before the attack — Oman, which was mediating talks, claimed there was potential for a breakthrough, with the possibility that Iran would not stockpile uranium. Trump presented a more negative view, telling reporters he was “not happy” with negotiations. This will be the detail historians focus on.

The three European leaders — notably including France and the UK, both veto powers — strongly condemned Iranian retaliatory strikes but notably did not condemn the US-Israeli strikes, and urged Iran to seek a negotiated solution. That asymmetry is diplomatically significant and will not go unnoticed in the Global South.

The exchange between the US and Iranian ambassadors was openly hostile: Iranian Ambassador Iravani told US Ambassador Waltz to “be polite — it would be better for yourself and the country you represent,” to which Waltz responded by accusing Iran of killing tens of thousands of its own people.

And the development that transforms the entire situation: the attack killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had no designated successor, raising the prospects of a protracted conflict. Trump called his death “the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their country” — framing assassination as liberation, which is precisely the moral register we discussed earlier.

The UNSC will almost certainly be paralyzed by the US veto on any binding resolution, which means the Council itself becomes another exhibit in the case that the rules-based order functions selectively. The emergency session may go down as a moment of institutional theater rather than genuine deliberation — which is itself a data point in the longer story your article is telling.

We have often heard US politicians express the idea Trump used here: “take back their country.” Republicans in the US have often invoked it in the past about the US itself, particularly during the Obama years. What does this expression tell us about the political culture of people who use it?

It’s a remarkably revealing phrase, and the fact that it travels so effortlessly between domestic and foreign policy contexts is precisely what makes it worth examining carefully.

At its core, “take back your country” presupposes a prior condition of legitimate ownership that has been usurped. It’s a narrative of dispossession rather than a narrative of progress or construction. This is psychologically and politically significant because it locates the ideal in the past — there was a time when the country was yours, it was taken from you by illegitimate actors, and the goal is restoration rather than transformation. It’s a fundamentally reactionary grammar, in the precise sense of that word, not the pejorative one.

When Republicans used it during the Obama years, the subtext was layered but not especially subtle. “The country” had been taken by people who didn’t truly belong to it — culturally, racially, ideologically. Obama’s presidency was experienced by a significant portion of the white evangelical and rural working-class base not as a normal electoral defeat but as a kind of occupation. The phrase served as a coded way of expressing that the legitimate owners of America — implicitly white, Christian, traditionally patriotic — had been dispossessed by cosmopolitan, secular, and racially other forces. Trump’s entire 2016 campaign was essentially an extended elaboration of this grammar.

What’s psychologically interesting is that the phrase requires an enemy — a usurper — who is never quite named directly. This vagueness is a feature, not a bug. It allows each listener to populate the category with their own specific anxiety: immigrants, elites, globalists, socialists, the deep state. The phrase does the emotional work of unifying a coalition around a shared sense of grievance without requiring agreement on who exactly the villain is.

When Trump applies the same phrase to Iran, he’s doing something structurally identical but geopolitically consequential. He’s telling Iranians — and more importantly, his domestic audience — that the Iranian people are the true owners of their country and the Islamic Republic is the usurper. This frames assassination and military attack not as aggression but as liberation, casting the US in the role of the restorer of legitimate ownership. It’s the same narrative logic as Iraq 2003: we’re not invading, we’re freeing. The population will greet us as liberators because they’ve been dispossessed of their own country.

What this reveals about the political culture that generates it is several things simultaneously. First, a profound ahistoricism — the “original” ownership being reclaimed is always mythologized and never examined. Second, a zero-sum conception of political belonging: the country belongs to us, which means it cannot fully belong to them. Third, and perhaps most importantly, it reveals a culture that is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of legitimate contestation — the notion that political opponents might have an equally valid claim to the country or to power. If they have taken something from you, they are not legitimate rivals; they are criminals or occupiers, and the appropriate response is not political competition but reclamation.

This last point connects directly to the authoritarian tendencies we’ve seen expressed more openly in recent years. A political culture organized around the grammar of dispossession and restoration has very little room for the idea that losing an election is a normal and acceptable outcome. It tends, instead, toward the view that any transfer of power to the wrong people is by definition illegitimate — which is a very short psychological distance from January 6th, or from bombing a country to liberate it from its own government.

The phrase is, in short, a small but precise window into a political imagination that is tribal, restorationist, and structurally hostile to pluralism — whether applied at home or abroad.

My thoughts as the war moves into its fifth day

The various informed pundits who are now commenting on a war that began with a successful decapitation operation now appear to agree that eliminating the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, has not accomplished what US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have hoped for. All serious strategists understand that to achieve Trump’s stated aim of regime change, aerial attacks, whether with planes or missiles, are insufficient. One of two conditions is required: boots on the ground or an organization inside the country ready to take over critical command points.

Operation Epic Fury included no plans for either of those possibilities. Instead, Trump “invited” Iranians to rise up and replace the fallen leaders in these terms: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

No one knows how things are likely to develop. What Trump appears to have accomplished is to have broken open a hornet’s nest, unleashing a host of unintended consequences. By assassinating a man whose role was both political and spiritual not only for the majority of the population in Iran but also for Shiites elsewhere in the Muslim world, the stakes of the conflict as it will develop in the coming days and weeks have become literally existential, and on a level greater than that of national sovereignty. Depending on how events play out, the perception of existential threat is likely to increase and to affect not just Iran, but Israel as well. And Israel possesses nuclear weapons.

Already the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz appears to threaten the global economy, eventually provoking unpredictable reactions everywhere, including among US taxpayers when they discover the effect on gas prices. In the light of the wide range of uncalculated risks this war has provoked, Trump’s justification of it in his speech on Saturday sounds comically absurd:

“Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” The journalists of Fox News may swallow this logic to the point of repeating it uncritically (but not because they believe it). But can any US citizen living inside the nation’s boundaries comprehend what those “imminent threats” might look like?

To prove the urgency, Trump added this explanation of the campaign, which he insists was undertaken “to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.” Apart from contradicting his formerly declared position of avoiding the folly of getting involved in eliminating other nations’ wickedness, is Trump ready to explain to the American people what those “core national security interests” are?

Perhaps he could ask any one of his friends with dual citizenship, such as billionaire physician Miriam Adelson, to step up to the podium and do that explaining for him. Of course, Adelson, just like Netanyahu, is more concerned with a struggle against an annoying population in the banks of the eastern Mediterranean who have been trying for decades to follow Trump’s advice to the Iranians and “take back their country.”

Your thoughts

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[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.