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

Earlier in our conversation, Claude responded to my request to sum up what took place at the United Nations Security Council meeting on Saturday. In the final paragraph, the chatbot drew a broader conclusion regarding the state of the vaunted “rules-based order” the Council’s job, at least theoretically, is to manage:

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.

I responded with this message:

I fully agree that the Security Council could be cited as exhibit A when arguing the case that the post-World War II order has been definitively buried six feet under. The reaction of Europe, France, the UK and Germany is hardly astonishing given their apparent belief that NATO trumps the UN as the framework for military decision-making. They must, however, realize that Trump’s commitment to war violates international law. The fact that within the Council itself, they refuse to acknowledge an unequivocal act of massive military aggression is the height of absurdity. So far, the media pay attention only to the official statements of leaders. I’m curious to see how the populations of Europe will perceive not just the attack but the contradiction with fundamental principles of law and justice this represents. Are we likely to hear from “the people” or will our political-military-media complex simply ignore them?

This is one of the most important questions your article raises, and it connects directly to a structural problem that predates this crisis but will be severely tested by it.

Let’s start with what we know about European public opinion as a baseline. Even before February 28, polling across France, Germany, Italy and Spain consistently showed populations that were significantly more skeptical of military interventionism, more sympathetic to Palestinian rights, and more concerned about American unilateralism than their governments’ official positions reflected. The gap between governed and governing on these questions was already wide. What today’s events do is not create that gap but stress-test whether it can continue to be managed.

The mechanisms by which European populations are typically kept from translating sentiment into policy pressure are well established. Media framing is the first and most powerful — if the attack is consistently presented as a response to Iranian nuclear threats rather than as an act of aggression during negotiations, the moral complexity you’re identifying simply doesn’t enter the public conversation at the level of emotional reality. Most Europeans will form their views through the same media ecosystem that is already defaulting to the official Western framing. The negotiation context — the Omani mediation, the potential breakthrough the day before — is the detail that would crack that framing open, but it requires sustained journalistic attention to land with the public, and that attention is not guaranteed.

The second mechanism is the absence of personal stakes. Vietnam radicalized American public opinion in part because American families had sons coming home in body bags. European populations have no such direct stake in an American-Israeli operation against Iran, which means the psychological distance is large enough to permit passive acceptance of official narratives. Outrage without personal cost tends to dissipate.

That said, there are reasons to think this time might be somewhat different. Social media has genuinely altered the information ecology in ways that matter here. The images from Gaza over the past two years have done something to European public consciousness that didn’t happen with Iraq in 2003 — they’ve created a visceral, emotionally immediate experience of what American-backed military action looks like at the receiving end, for a population that had previously been able to maintain more distance. The moral infrastructure for outrage is already primed in a way it wasn’t twenty years ago. What happened in Iran on February 28 will be interpreted by a significant portion of European youth through that lens, not through the lens of Iranian nuclear threats.

The street protest tradition also differs significantly across Europe. France in particular has a culture of popular political expression that governments cannot simply ignore indefinitely. If the economic consequences of this conflict are felt by ordinary Europeans — through energy prices, which is entirely plausible given Iranian control over Strait of Hormuz transit — then the abstraction becomes concrete very quickly, and concrete grievances have a way of generating political pressure that official narratives struggle to contain.

But here is the harder structural truth that your question is really probing. The political-military-media complex you describe is not simply ignoring populations — it is, more precisely, operating on the assumption that populations can be managed through the cycle of initial alarm, official reassurance, and gradual normalization that has worked repeatedly since 2001. The playbook is well rehearsed. And it will probably work again in the short term, particularly if the conflict doesn’t escalate into something that touches European daily life directly.

What’s different, and what I think gives your question its real weight, is that the cumulative credibility deficit is now very large. European populations have lived through the WMD deception in Iraq, the failed state in Libya, the Afghanistan withdrawal, Gaza, and now this. Each individual episode of official mendacity or selective morality could be absorbed. The accumulation is harder to metabolize, particularly for younger generations who have no memory of a period when Western institutions felt genuinely trustworthy. The political energy that finds no outlet through official channels has a tendency to migrate — toward populist movements on both left and right that explicitly campaign on the illegitimacy of the existing order. In that sense, the populations of Europe will be heard, but perhaps not in the form of coherent anti-war movements so much as a further erosion of faith in liberal democratic institutions themselves, which is the most dangerous long-term consequence of all.

Perhaps, instead of “rules-based order,” we should be calling the period of history we are now living in the “mendacity-based order.” In certain fields — US President Donald Trump’s earlier domain of real estate, for example — mendacity may well be one of the principal tools of the trade. Once contracts are signed and checks are cashed, there’s usually no going back, even if one discovers that an entire operation was based on fraudulent claims. Caveat emptor.

Anton Troianovski writing for The New York Times reflects on the possible cost:

“It was at least the third time — after his Iran bombings in June and his attack on Venezuela in January — that Mr. Trump deployed heavy force against a country with which he had been negotiating.

In so doing, experts say, Mr. Trump may be gaining leverage in the short term but sapping his, and America’s, credibility in ways that could resonate for years to come.”

Troianovski is predictably too kind. Never fearful of sounding absurd as well as untrustworthy, here’s what Trump had to say on Sunday:

“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long.”

Only a champion in the art of mendacity and the betrayal of trust could expect his audience to listen to this without falling over in either laughter or despair. The man who surreptitiously mounted an attack to decapitate the decision-makers with whom he was officially negotiating now tells us, with an optimistic smile, that he has “agreed to talk.” To increase the comic effect, he adds that they “should have done it sooner.” The comedy continues with Donald’s next observation:

“Most of those people are gone. Some of the people we were dealing with are gone, because that was a big — that was a big hit.” 

I can’t escape the feeling of having heard this story before, precisely in the final stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” This “children’s poem” recounts an afternoon on the beach that ends with dinner. In their peregrinations, the eponymous heroes encounter a group of oysters whom they invite to join them for “a pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, along the briny beach.”

With the meal about to conclude, the two English gentlemen, like Trump on Sunday, express their wish to pick up the conversation.

“‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,

      ‘You’ve had a pleasant run!

Shall we be trotting home again?’

      But answer came there none —

And this was scarcely odd, because

      They’d eaten every one.”

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, Carroll may have written a poem children could enjoy. But what he really had in mind was a commentary on an earlier “mendacity-based order,” one expertly managed from London during his lifetime: the empire on which the sun never set.

Perhaps all empires are destined to devolve into absurdity… and, alas, typically with a serious cost in human (or oysters’) lives.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue. 

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[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.