US and Israel war against Iran marks 100 days

The permanent things are not permanent by accident. What is being proposed here violates the first canon of conservative thought: that there exists an enduring moral order, not made by man, which governs human society and transcends all political schemes. To speak of a “war” waged by the United States and Israel against Iran for one hundred days is to engage in a linguistic and moral confusion that betrays a profound ignorance of both history and the nature of conflict. There is no such war. There is only the chaotic friction of competing ambitions, the bluster of statesmen who mistake noise for strategy, and the dangerous illusion that force can substitute for wisdom.

We must first correct the record, not merely as a matter of factual precision, but as a matter of intellectual honesty. The premise that a formal, declared war exists between these powers is a fabrication of the moment, a phantom conjured by the anxiety of the present. the attribution of this stance to a German Chancellor named Friedrich Merz is a further error; the Chancellor is Olaf Scholz, and the shifting sands of European diplomacy are not best understood by inventing actors who do not hold office. To build an argument on such shifting foundations is to build a house on sand. The conservative mind demands that we look at the world as it is, not as we fear it might be, nor as the hysterical press would have us believe it to be.

The true danger here is not the missile, but the ideology of interventionism that seeks to impose order through destruction. This is the second canon: that custom and tradition are not mere prejudices, but the accumulated wisdom of ages. When a nation abandons the prudence of its ancestors for the hubris of immediate action, it severs itself from the continuity that gives its actions meaning. The United States, once a republic of limited aims and profound caution, has become an empire of endless engagement, driven by a belief that its power is a substitute for its virtue. This is not conservatism; it is the radicalism of the moment, dressed in the uniform of national security.

Consider the third canon: that society requires order, and that order is not the same as uniformity. The current situation in the Middle East is not a war, but a disorder - a vacuum of authority filled by the posturing of great powers who have lost the capacity for nuanced statecraft. The “changing stance” of European leaders is not a sign of diplomatic agility, but of moral drift. When a leader shifts his position not because of new evidence, but because of the pressure of public opinion or the whims of the news cycle, he has abandoned the duty of leadership. Leadership is the steady hand that guides the ship through the storm, not the rudder that spins with every wave.

The fourth canon reminds us that liberty and order are inseparable. The destruction of order does not produce freedom; it produces chaos, from which new and worse tyrannies grow. The rhetoric of “freedom” used to justify military posturing is a hollow shell. True freedom is found in the local community, in the parish, in the family, and in the institutions that bind men together in mutual obligation. It is not found in the skies over Tehran, nor in the corridors of power in Washington or Jerusalem. To confuse the projection of power with the preservation of liberty is to misunderstand the very nature of the human condition.

We must also attend to the fifth canon: that man is not perfectible, and that the attempt to remake society according to a rationalist blueprint is doomed to failure. The belief that a hundred days of conflict can resolve the deep historical, religious, and cultural tensions of the Middle East is a form of utopianism. It assumes that the complexities of human history can be simplified into a binary of good and evil, and that force can erase the grievances of centuries. This is the arrogance of the engineer, who sees the world as a machine to be fixed, rather than a garden to be tended.

And finally, the sixth canon: that the variety of human experience is vast, and that no single principle can account for it. The reduction of the Middle East to a chessboard, where pawns are moved by distant hands, ignores the reality of the people who live there. It ignores the sacred, the particular, and the local. It treats human lives as statistics in a geopolitical equation. This is not only immoral; it is intellectually bankrupt.

The role of the conservative is not to cheer for one side or the other in this manufactured conflict, but to question the premise of the conflict itself. Why must there be war? Why must there be posturing? Why must the world be held hostage to the anxieties of the powerful? The answer lies in the failure of our leaders to understand the permanent things. They have forgotten that peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice. They have forgotten that strength is not the ability to destroy, but the capacity to restrain.

In the end, the “war” that has lasted one hundred days is a mirage. It is a reflection of our own collective anxiety, our own loss of moral compass. The true battle is not in the Middle East, but in the minds of those who govern us. It is a battle for the soul of the West, for the understanding that we are part of a long tradition, not the masters of a new world. To forget this is to invite disaster. To remember it is to find our way home.

The German Chancellor, whether Scholz or any other, must understand that his role is not to follow the lead of Washington, but to uphold the dignity of his own nation and the stability of Europe. This requires independence of mind, a quality that is increasingly rare in our age of conformity. It requires the courage to say no, to stand firm, to resist the pull of the moment. This is the essence of conservatism: not the defense of the status quo, but the defense of the permanent things against the encroachments of the temporary.

Let us not be deceived by the noise. Let us not be frightened by the shadows. Let us look to the light of tradition, and find in it the wisdom to navigate the darkness. The permanent things do not require our defense; they require our attention. And what we call crisis is usually the consequence of our having ceased to attend.