Hierarchy, Not Morality
How the West Turned Norms into Weapons — and Lost Control of Them
Western leaders like to speak of moral clarity. They invoke democracy, human rights, and the rule of law as if these were stable instruments — tools that can be lifted cleanly from one crisis and applied to another without consequence. But moral clarity, when it is real, does not behave this way. It demands consistency. It demands discipline. What we are witnessing now — calls for regime change in Iran, silence on Israel’s structural violence, and the criminalization of dissent across the United States and Europe — marks not clarity, but the collapse of diplomatic coherence.
This collapse is not subtle. It is visible in both language and practice. Iran is framed as inherently illegitimate, pathological, beyond reform. Israel is framed as flawed but familiar — violent, perhaps excessive, but ultimately understandable and exempt. Western governments position themselves as arbiters rather than participants, even as they deploy extraordinary police powers at home. One set of states is treated as disposable. Another as untouchable. A third claims neutrality while exercising coercion.
Defenders of this asymmetry often retreat to realism. Geopolitics, they say, has never been fair. Allies are treated differently than adversaries. Power is not a philosophy seminar. All of this is true — and beside the point. The issue here is not fairness. It is coherence. A system of norms applied selectively ceases to function as a system. It becomes an instrument. And instruments, once exposed as such, lose authority.
To understand why this matters, one must confront what regime change actually is. It is not criticism. It is not sanctions. It is not deterrence. Regime change is the most extreme form of political coercion short of war. It is a declaration that a state’s internal order is illegitimate and that its population must absorb the violence, instability, and rupture that follow. History is unambiguous on this point. Regime change is bloody. It is uncontrollable. It rarely installs the governments its architects imagine, and it almost always radicalizes the societies it tears apart.
Western leaders know this. They would never accept such a standard applied to themselves. No president or prime minister who speaks casually about regime change abroad would tolerate foreign officials calling for their removal, their arrest, or their replacement. That asymmetry — between what is demanded of others and what is unthinkable for oneself — is the quiet admission that the argument is not universal. It is positional.
This is where Israel becomes unavoidable, because the silence surrounding its conduct is not neutral. It is active. It does work.
For decades, Israeli governments have pursued a territorial and political project that extends well beyond defensive necessity. Settlement expansion in the West Bank is not demographic drift or security slippage; it is policy. Gaza’s enclosure is not a temporary emergency measure; it is a system. Palestinians live under a regime in which movement, water, electricity, medical access, and political life are controlled by an external power that does not grant them equal rights or sovereignty. One population lives under civil law. Another under military rule. One votes. The other is governed.
This is not a democracy.
A state that permanently governs millions of people who cannot vote for the government that controls their borders, airspace, resources, and legal status is not a democracy. Democracy is not an internal club restricted to a favored population. It is a relationship between a state and all those it governs. Israel’s system — civil law for one group, military rule for another; political rights for one, permanent disenfranchisement for another — is not a temporary deviation. It is the structure.
Call this occupation if one prefers the language of international law. Call it apartheid if one prefers the language of comparative governance. The terminology does not alter the reality. Israel functions as an apartheid state — not rhetorically, not symbolically, but structurally.
Gaza makes this impossible to evade. It is not merely a battlefield. It is a containment zone. A place where children grow up under siege, where infrastructure is destroyed, partially rebuilt, and destroyed again. Civilian death there is not exceptional; it is cyclical. Documented. Visible. Repeated. A missile strikes an apartment block. A child is pulled from the rubble. A press briefing follows. The language softens. The cycle continues.
And yet, despite the scale of harm, despite the clarity of the structure, despite the persistence of the violence, there is no talk of regime change. Not even as a thought experiment. The idea is treated as obscene — unthinkable, irresponsible, beyond the pale.
This is the contradiction that breaks the system.
If regime change is justified by civilian harm, Israel’s immunity is indefensible.
If regime change is justified by violations of international law, the immunity collapses again.
If regime change is justified by moral urgency, the contradiction becomes grotesque.
And if regime change is not justified by these things — if it is understood, correctly, as reckless and destructive — then advocating it in Iran becomes incoherent.
At this point, defenders retreat to a subtler claim: that regime-change rhetoric is merely deterrence. A bluff. A way to destabilize adversaries without intent to act. This, too, fails scrutiny. In statecraft, language is not metaphor. It is policy. Threats shape expectations. They harden resistance. They legitimize retaliation. A bluff repeated often enough becomes indistinguishable from intent — and is treated as such by those on the receiving end. Deterrence that corrodes legitimacy is not deterrence. It is escalation by other means.
Some fall back on the democracy argument. That too collapses under scrutiny. Iran, we are told, is not democratic. The claim is made absolutely, without engagement with structure. Iran has elections. They are constrained, filtered, and bounded by religious authority — but they are real. Power is contested. Factions exist. Governments clash with clerical institutions. This is not a liberal parliamentary system, but democracy is not a single architectural blueprint. It is a spectrum of arrangements shaped by history, culture, and constitutional compromise.
The comparison matters because it exposes the lie at the heart of the discourse. The West does not defend democracy as equal political participation. It defends alignment. States that align are described generously. States that do not are described absolutely.
The incoherence deepens when one looks inward.
Across the United States and Europe, protest is increasingly treated not as democratic expression but as a security threat. Demonstrations are kettled, dispersed, and criminalized. Journalists are detained. Protesters are charged under expansive public-order and anti-extremism laws. People lose jobs, licenses, and freedom for speech deemed disruptive or insufficiently aligned. A baton cracks a skull. A reporter is dragged across asphalt. A statement is issued. The same act is laundered through narrative and emerges as policy, not violence.
This is not an aberration. It is governance. It is justified with the same vocabulary used elsewhere: public safety, national security, social cohesion. The West does not lack coercive capacity; it lacks the honesty to acknowledge it. When Western states describe their own crackdowns as law enforcement and identical actions elsewhere as repression, they are not making an analytical distinction. They are asserting privilege.
This is why condemnation of Iran rings hollow to so much of the world. Not because Iran is innocent, but because the West is not exceptional. The difference is not behavior. It is alignment. When Western states jail critics, it is governance. When Iran does so, it is tyranny. When Western police beat protesters, it is order. When others do it, it is brutality. The same act, framed differently, becomes morally transformed.
What emerges is not a moral hierarchy grounded in conduct, but a civilizational hierarchy grounded in power. Certain states are treated as reformable; others as disposable. Certain populations are grievable; others are background noise. Certain forms of violence are contextualized; others pathologized. This is why accusations of prejudice persist — not because Western leaders consciously harbor animus, but because their framework consistently places non-Western suffering outside the zone of political consequence.
Nowhere is the cost of this clearer than in Europe.
The United States can survive moral isolation longer than Europe can. It has geography, military primacy, and monetary leverage. Europe has none of these in sufficient measure. Its influence rested on mediation, restraint, and the credibility of its norms. Today it has little leverage in Ukraine, none in Gaza, no independent energy security, and no unified political authority. France postures. Germany hesitates. Britain shouts from the sidelines. Europe cannot mediate conflicts on its own periphery, cannot enforce its red lines, and increasingly cannot protect dissent within its own borders — yet it echoes regime-change rhetoric as if it were a sovereign equal rather than a dependent ally.
This is not strength. It is exposure.
Hypocrisy alone is survivable. Strategic hypocrisy is not.
When moral standards become instruments of convenience, they do not simply lose legitimacy. They boomerang. They return sharpened, repurposed, and aimed back at those who wielded them first. The next time Western leaders demand accountability
real accountability, in a moment of genuine danger
they may find that the language they rely on no longer carries weight.
This is not a failure of messaging.
It is not a failure of values.
It is the failure that ends systems of power:
a political order that no longer believes its own words — and is no longer believed by anyone else.
