Iran warns of war ‘beyond the region’ if US resumes attacks

21st of February, 1758 (though the calendar may have advanced without my noticing)

This morning, I read with some amusement - and then with a creeping unease - that the Persians have threatened to expand their war beyond the region if the Americans resume their attacks. How curious! It seems the art of diplomacy has evolved into the delicate science of promising greater destruction if one’s opponent dares to strike first. One might almost admire the efficiency of it: a single sentence achieves both a warning and an advertisement for further hostilities.

I am reminded of the time I met a certain Swiss watchmaker who assured me his timepieces would never fail - unless, of course, one wound them too vigorously, in which case they would explode. When I asked why he did not simply make them sturdier, he replied that the possibility of catastrophe was what made them valuable. “A watch that cannot destroy itself is a watch no one fears,” he said. I see now that he was ahead of his time.

The Americans, for their part, appear to be considering whether to strike again, as if war were a dish one might reheat when the first serving grows cold. How fortunate we are to live in an age where such decisions are made by the most reasonable and measured of men! And how reassuring to know that any escalation will be conducted with the utmost precision, like a surgeon’s scalpel - though, of course, a scalpel that cuts continents instead of flesh.

I shall tend to my garden. The beans, at least, do not threaten to invade the neighbor’s plot unless watered too vigorously.

The angel of history faces backward, watching the wreckage accumulate. Today’s threat from Tehran - “war beyond the region” - echoes like a ghost from the last century. The same phrases, the same postures, the same machinery of escalation. And yet, we call it new. We call it progress. The storm blows from Paradise, and we are propelled forward, blind to the debris piling behind us.

The photograph of the diplomat’s hand raised in warning - reproduced endlessly across screens - loses its aura, becomes mere information. But the threat itself remains, unchanged in its essence. The arcade of international relations, with its glass-covered passages and glittering promises, conceals the same old commodities: fear, power, retribution.

They speak of “new fronts” as if geography itself could be reinvented. But the front is always the same - it is the space where history detonates again. The messianic now trembles with possibility: will we recognize this repetition as catastrophe, or merely consume it as news? The constellation forms, again: 1914, 1939, today. The pattern is there for those who face backward.

Another headline. Another threat of war, of fronts opening, of a region and then a world. The words are heavy, gravitational. They pull the mind immediately toward strategy, toward maps, toward the calculation of force and counter-force. One must resist this pull. One must attend first to what is being said: a warning that war will not be contained. This is not a prediction; it is a declaration of a void. The void is the space where suffering ceases to be political and becomes pure affliction - where the human being is no longer a citizen, a soldier, an enemy, but simply a body that can be broken and a spirit that can be extinguished.

They speak of “the region” as if it were a chessboard. But a region is soil, and roots, and the labor of hands. It is the factory floor of existence. To speak of war “beyond” it is to confess that the logic of the thing already knows no boundary. The gravity here is terrible: the pull toward abstraction, where consequences are discussed in terms of fronts and escalation, not in terms of the light going out in a child’s eyes, not in terms of the worker whose field is now cratered and whose attention is forever fractured by fear.

Where is the attention that should precede these words? It is absent. In its place is the machinery of threat, which operates on both sides. The American remark, the Iranian warning - they are part of the same mechanism. They generate heat, but it is the dry, dead heat of friction, not the living warmth of compassion. This is the factory of geopolitics, and its product is invisibility. It renders the actual human beings who will suffer - on all sides - into statistics, into collateral, into “fronts.”

My own thought feels weak. To write of this from a quiet room is its own form of betrayal. Yet the betrayal is compounded if I do not at least name the warmth of this room, the safety of this desk, which makes my reflection possible and, in that very possibility, suspect. The only truth I can offer is this: before any analysis, one must sit in silence with the fact that real people are being talked about as expendable. One must not let the framework of “conflict” arrive too quickly. The framework is the enemy. The thing itself is the cry that will, or will not, be heard when the bombs fall. All else is gravity.