On: Tuesday briefing: What it might take for lasting peace between the US and Iran

Diary Entry

They speak of peace as though it were a thing to be negotiated between governments, as though treaties and envoys could settle what habits have built. The Gulf is “stuck in limbo,” they say - but limbo between what? Between war and peace, I suppose, as if these were the only two states possible. Yet I wonder: what if the true limbo is between waking and sleeping?

The people of Iran and America go about their days - working, eating, loving - while their rulers posture and threaten. The rulers have no power but what the people grant them. No soldier marches without a soldier’s consent; no tax is paid without a taxpayer’s hand. And yet the machinery grinds on, as if by its own will.

They ask what it might take for “lasting peace.” But peace is not a gift bestowed by diplomats. It is the default condition of humanity, interrupted only when enough people agree to interrupt it. Why do they agree? That is the quieter, more unsettling question.

If a friend asked you to hate his enemy, would you? If a stranger demanded your money to build weapons, would you hand it over? You would refuse the friend and ignore the stranger. But when the stranger wears a crown or a title, the refusal vanishes. The habit of obedience is so deep it feels like nature.

I do not understand this arithmetic. One man’s ambition becomes a million men’s war. Why? The answer is not in the halls of power. It is in the unasked questions of the powerless.