As the war that the United States and Israel unleashed upon Iran enters its fourth week, the prospect of escalation seems all but certain. The principal protagonists appear to have locked themselves in a mental trap that compels them to go for the limit. That all this is happening during the holy seasons of Ramadan and Lent invites an examination of its moral dimensions—and the need for a different kind of intervention.
The US under President Donald Trump claims that the obliteration of Iran’s military capacity is nearly complete. “I don’t want to do a ceasefire,” he told reporters. “You don’t do a ceasefire when you’re literally obliterating the other side.” Having decimated Iran’s top leadership in targeted strikes, Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now training its missiles on the country’s oil and gas fields and its proxy armies in Lebanon. Both leaders believe they have cornered the enemy. They cannot stop now.
Unable to shield itself from strikes that have killed its key leaders and thousands of its people, Iran has vowed to retaliate, attacking not just Israel but American facilities across the region. More than this, it has tightened its grip on the strategic Strait of Hormuz in sheer defiance of US and Israeli military supremacy. The US is now moving forces into the Strait in what the New York Times foresees as “the war’s pivotal battlefield.”
The near-total halt of oil tanker and commercial shipping through that narrow waterway—affecting one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply—has thrown global energy markets into turmoil. The bombing and closure of major airports in Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi has compounded the devastation, producing economic consequences far beyond the reckoning of the war’s authors.
This is the scale of the tragedy now unfolding in Iran, across the Middle East, and in countries like the Philippines, dependent on Gulf oil and the earnings of millions of migrant workers. This war is neither proportionate nor just in any serious moral sense. It has equated an entire nation with the regime it wishes to punish.
Did Trump and Netanyahu expect the Iranian Islamic regime to simply fold after the killing of its supreme leader? Then they do not understand how the powerless translate their condition into a moral identity, or how weakness, over time, becomes sanctified as virtue, making ordinary political calculation nearly impossible. In such circumstances, resistance to the point of mass martyrdom often becomes the only available language of dignity.
This is what makes the quest for a face-saving exit so urgent and so complex. Wars of this kind often end only when someone quietly proposes a way for the losing party to leave the battlefield without being seen to have yielded everything they stand for. This requires genuine respect and imaginative sympathy for the dignity even of one’s enemy. It demands, at minimum, that the winning side retreat from the goal of total destruction.
Let us call this task “moral diplomacy.” It is perhaps best performed by someone of the moral standing of the late Pope Francis. Francis instinctively understood the language of sacrifice and martyrdom, and was hopeful that it could be met and symbolically redirected within a shared Abrahamic worldview. His gestures of humility toward the Muslim world, his refusal to speak of civilization as a weapon, his insistence that the poor and the victims of war have faces—all these gave him a voice that no United Nations mediator, regional broker, or American ambassador presently possesses.
We can imagine his successor stepping into that void. How striking that Pope Leo XIV happens to be an American—a fact that seems, for a moment, to disqualify him from the role Francis might have played. But Robert Prevost is not only American. He is, above all, an Augustinian missionary, formed in a tradition going back to Saint Augustine, who famously sought to clarify the difference between the peace of dominion and the peace of genuine reconciliation. Leo spent years as a priest among the poor of Peru—learning, from the inside, what it means to inhabit a world not your own. A pope shaped by that tradition and that life is intellectually and spiritually equipped to speak to what is happening in the Middle East with a credibility that no political commentary can match.
It is not a coincidence that this war has reached its present pitch during Ramadan and Lent—two traditions of self-emptying and renunciation enacting themselves against a backdrop of imperial conquest. This convergence points to something that Jürgen Habermas, who died recently, spent his final years articulating: that secular reason alone, for all its procedural power, cannot fully communicate certain forms of loss, solidarity, and hope. Those semantic resources belong to religion. They are precisely what this moment needs—and what Pope Leo XIV, by formation and by vocation, may be uniquely placed to offer.
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