By Sardar Khan Niazi

The United States and its Western allies, while no longer deploying the old colonial language of civilizing missions, have devised new and equally insidious means of maintaining global hegemony. Beneath their invocation of a rules-based international order lies a deeply hypocritical and self-serving project — one that cloaks naked power in the language of norms, law, and peacekeeping. Yet this carefully constructed ideological framework demands fundamental scrutiny. The obvious questions — what rules? Whose rules? — remain stubbornly unanswered. In addition, perhaps most glaring of all: how does the US-led West justify routinely violating these very rules when its strategic interests are at stake? Recent events underscore this contradiction. The recent Pakistan-India and Iran-Israel conflicts may have seen the guns fall silent, but they have reignited deeper concerns. Pakistan’s military response to Indian aggression across the international border offered momentary reassurance, yet Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s embarrassment may only lead to more covert forms of hostility — cyber warfare, sabotage, and proxy destabilization — rather than open warfare. More revealing, however, is the Iran-Israel-US triangle. Israel, long functioning as the West’s settler-colonial outpost in the Middle East, continues to act with a level of impunity afforded by unwavering American support. Washington, whether in Gaza, Lebanon, or now against Iran, consistently enables Israel’s actions, militarily, diplomatically, and rhetorically. If Israel sometimes acts in a way that contradicts US timing or tactics, these are dismissed as minor tiffs between strategic lovers. In targeting Iran, neither Israel nor the US has accomplished its stated objectives. Iran’s nuclear infrastructure remains intact. Regime change in Tehran — a long-cherished fantasy in certain Washington and Tel Aviv circles — has not materialized. Instead, Iran has consolidated domestic support, even among its political critics, in the face of what is widely seen as unprovoked aggression. And while Israel may have emerged physically unscathed compared to its neighbors, the psychological veil of its so-called invulnerability has been pierced. For the first time, it has experienced a taste of the very firepower it has long deployed with impunity against the Palestinians and their allies. This subtle but critical shift could shape the trajectory of emigration patterns, foreign investment, and internal morale in Israel. Meanwhile, the long-suffering Palestinians remain at the heart of this crisis. Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel was no doubt brutal, but it was also an act of desperation — a defiant rejection of the Abraham Accords and other efforts to normalize Israel’s occupation. These accords, floated by Donald Trump, promised Arab states economic largesse in exchange for abandoning the Palestinian cause and accepting Israel’s regional dominance. That Pakistan, according to Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar, is now being approached to consider some version of this ignoble compromise is both telling and alarming. It is a warning that even our principles are not immune from transactional diplomacy masquerading as realpolitik. Iran’s concerns about Israeli and American commitment to the ceasefire are hardly unfounded. Trump’s recent statement that he would not hesitate to bomb Iran again — if necessary — is chilling. However, more telling is the broader pattern: a systematic attempt to dismantle all forces of resistance in the Middle East. Hamas is cornered, Hezbollah is under pressure, and Iran remains the last obstacle to the West’s hegemonic design for the region. The truth is stark: in their pursuit of this vision, the US and its allies are willing to discard their own rules-based rhetoric. That makes the global enforcer of order increasingly indistinguishable from a rogue state. Moreover, as for Israel — long unbound by international norms, immune to censure, and protected from accountability — it has never truly qualified as anything else.