At the end of the day, for many worldwide, the ongoing mutual attacks between Israel and Iran would seem a contest devoid of any moral high ground and only a bout between two ordinary adversaries, one that nevertheless risks spinning out of control into a larger conflagration, notes Shyam G Menon.
It is now roughly 23 years since Steven Spielberg's 2002 film, Minority Report.
We are less than 30 years from 2054, the year in which the movie's story is set.
Spielberg's film dealt with a fictitious police program called Precrime, which uses clairvoyant humans to determine the location and apprehend the perpetrator of a crime before it actually happens.
While the film brought home to its viewers the dystopian quality of a world that takes surveillance and forecasting to extreme levels, things it would seem, have been moving faster in real life.
'Preemptive' is a common word these days. The mother of all preemptive strikes for my generation was the specter of American action in Iraq, much of it in the name of searching for weapons of mass destruction.
Whether the conduct of that campaign or the outcome of it, proves there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- I leave it to you to decide. What I wish to say is something else.
In mid-June 2025 as Danny Danon, the ambassador of Israel, America's closest ally in West Asia, told the United Nations that his country had attacked Iranian nuclear sites as 'an act of national preservation' given its belief that Iran was mere days away from producing enough fissile material for multiple bombs, I was reminded of Minority Report.
Not that Danon is wrong. Since the 1990s, Iran's government has not held back on its dislike for Israel.
It does not recognise Israel's legitimacy as a State although back in time, when Iran was a monarchy under the Shah, it had been among countries extending official recognition to Israel.
Iran, a Shia Muslim majority country in a region also having a large population of Sunni Muslims, used to be Israel's leading supplier of oil.
The 1979 overthrow of the Shah and the installation of a new regime resembling a theocracy changed that. Even then, a covert relationship prevailed and Israel is known to have supplied arms to Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.
However, once the Cold War ended, a visibly hostile attitude towards each other took hold.
The mutual hostility has been reason for several flare-ups in the Middle East.
Thus, for all you know, Danon maybe right and Israel's preemptive strikes may seem justified to some quarters as an act of national preservation.
Still, overlooked in all this, is a simple fact. Although Iran is the aspirant for nuclear weapons and thereby made out to be the villain in the current developments, Israel has been spoken of longer as possessing nuclear weapons.
The country has never publicly confirmed it. A formal confirmation is unlikely because doing so risks exposing the failure of the world -- particularly the efforts of the Western world given Israel's close ties with the US -- to contain the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
So, Israel has stayed in the category of those countries suspected to have nuclear capability.
On the Web site of the Geneva-headquartered International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), Israel features in the list of nine countries owning nuclear weapons.
The Web site credits it with having 90 warheads. These nine countries -- Russia, US, China, France, UK, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea -- cumulatively have 12,331 warheads.
ICAN mentions that the total number of warheads for Israel and North Korea are unconfirmed.
Besides the above nuclear-armed nations, Belgium, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Turkiye and Belarus host weapons belonging to other countries, on their soil.
Additionally, according to ICAN, there are 34 countries that endorse the use of nuclear weapons.
As of June 15, 2025, the ICAN Web site did not have Iran in any of these categories.
ICAN had received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.
It brings us to perhaps the most important point in the Israel-Iran conflict and maybe, one that underlies contemporary global politics as a whole.
It is the question of what makes something believable. Why do more of us believe Israel and fewer of us believe Iran?
A major reason for this is the difference in how both sides are generally perceived.
Iran is a unitary Islamic republic. It has a presidential system with ultimate authority vested in the hands of a supreme leader, in Iran's case, a religious leader.
Ali Khamanei has been supreme leader of Iran since 1989. In the past few decades there have been several instances reported in the western media, of internal political stirs against the Iranian regime, all of it subsequently put down by the government using its authority.
Iran falls in a region often called the cradle of civilisation and is the site of one of the world's oldest empires.
In contemporary times, that historical significance is overshadowed by Iran's lack of genuine democracy and the theocratic nature of its government.
The resultant portrait makes Iran unpopular in the free world, which fancies itself as a stage where people are free and their freedoms are protected and upheld.
For over a century now, the poster boy of the free world has been the US. Israel was not worshipped in that league.
Sizable portions of the world empathised with its struggle to exist in a hostile environment in West Asia but they also noticed Israel's approach to the Palestinian issue.
Still, as the closest ally of the US, it basked in the same limelight of free society, as the US.
Further, its existence in West Asia encircled by Arab nations, was evocative of the David versus Goliath paradigm.
The underdog, which more than once proved its might in battle, became a hero in the eyes of many worldwide.
This is how things used to be. It is not exactly so, in 2025.
The change has as much to do with an excess of aggression and battle as it has to do with what happened to the free world.
Let's consider the latter point, first.
Barring the civil war of the nineteenth century and the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II, America's wars have been largely away from its shores (the Spanish-American war and the Mexican-American war happened in the neighborhood of the US).
The military of the world's most militarily powerful country, fought its battles since World War II almost always on foreign soil.
Tussles at home have been in the form of politics and they have been several.
On most occasions, the hard-earned outcome of these political battles served to strengthen American democracy.
For the past decade, America has been at yet another political battle with itself.
At its centre is Donald Trump and the perspective and steps his administration takes on a range of issues.
Although not directly impacting the American people, one of these steps related to Iran's nuclear programme.
In July 2015, during then US president Barack Obama's tenure, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council along with Germany and the European Union had signed an agreement with Iran to limit the latter's nuclear programme in return for relief from sanctions and other provisions.
In 2018, when Trump was president for the first time, the US withdrew from this deal.
It has been reported that Israel and Saudi Arabia were unhappy with the agreement as were select political groups in Iran.
One year after the US withdrawal, Iran took countermeasures.
In 2021, then US president Joe Biden announced his intent to restart the deal.
The move became even more important after hostilities between Russia and Ukraine impacted oil prices.
Since then, a host of factors including the outbreak of conflict in The Levant (the side fighting Israel featured Hamas, Hezbollah and the Yemen-based Houthi militia, all of them connected to Iranian patronage), has denied progress in reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear programme.
In January 2025, Trump returned as president of the US for a second time.
Within a short while, his administration had to its credit several controversial decisions, including some related to trade that caused discomfort to nations worldwide.
In April 2025, the US and Iran commenced a series of talks aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement; the discussions were held in Oman and a two-month timeframe was assigned to achieve results.
On May 31, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) informed that Iran had amassed a large quantity of military grade enriched uranium.
Close to the expiry of the earlier said timeframe for the talks, Israel, which had been threatening action, attacked Iran.
Following the attacks, Iran pulled out of the discussions.
Meanwhile, back in the US, the steps Trump took in the realm of immigration policy, had triggered controversy.
The first few months of Trump's second term had also seen the sometimes cozy and sometimes prickly relationship between the president and the world's richest man, Elon Musk.
As Musk led a panel to reduce government spending, there were accusations of America drifting towards the Russian model of proximity between government and business oligarchs.
There were crackdowns on academic freedom and funding; there were instances when the press was mocked.
Same time as Israel and Iran were attacking each other in June 2025, there were rallies titled 'No Kings' being held in the US, as a show of opposition to some of the policies and practices of the Trump administration.
The free world admires the US constitution and American democracy as a guiding light.
But that old impulsive recognition, the world assigned the US as an ambassador at large of the free world or its first representative, appears leashed in.
Uniquely, it isn't just the US, the world's oldest democracy, that is faced with such scrutiny of late.
The world's biggest democracy, India, has also had to confront similar questions periodically.
In between lay a host of other nations, originally having addresses in the free world but now either flirting with authoritative rule, majoritarianism or embracing values that provide room for pragmatism (strategic self-interest, as some call it).
It is a free world of progressively selfish members and a diminished sense of global community.
Within each country, politicians are increasingly tapping into insular themes.
And in many, a critical, professional media -- one that holds power accountable, one that holds a mirror to what's going on - has become a villain in the eyes of the ruling class.
Consequently, the borders of the free world and the world of restrictive undemocratic regimes, is getting blurred.
Many years ago, the US search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq stayed popularly unquestioned because the script marketed worldwide was of the responsible free world making sure that dangerous weapons didn't fall into the hands of irresponsible autocrats and despots.
That capacity to market a moral high ground has since diluted courtesy the West's own conduct.
In 2025, the moral high ground Israel adopts to justify its preemptive action against Iran, lacks believability because Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu had been facing a lot of criticism internationally and from within the country over its handling of Gaza and the Palestinian issue, even before the attacks launched on Iran.
For the first time, Israel, thanks to its excesses in Gaza, appears devoid of the underdog-David-halo in its posturing towards the Muslim world.
Not just that -- war rarely ends anything. A game of inflicting scars is usually an investment in perpetuating the cycle of violence.
It feels unconvincing to argue that nuclear weapons in the hands of Israel would be more responsibly managed than in the hands of Iran.
This is despite Iran having avoided all these years a genuinely democratic government with no religious supreme leader interfering from above and thus contributing little to be popular with the free world.
Modern minds, weaned on freedom, rarely like theocracy.
At the same time, which modern mind will support contemporary Israel and US without mentioning their flaws? Without noticing the questions raised against Netanyahu? Without noticing how unpopular Trump is with sections of the US electorate?
Indeed, one of the dilemmas we wrestle with nowadays is whether the actions taken by governments represent the demand of the countries/people they represent or the egos of those in power.
Thus, at the end of the day, for many worldwide, the ongoing mutual attacks between Israel and Iran would seem a contest devoid of any moral high ground and only a bout between two ordinary adversaries, one that nevertheless risks spinning out of control into a larger conflagration.
If a moral high ground is to gain traction, then it shouldn't be a case of one side deeming itself more responsible than the other in a self-anointed fashion.
As the current state of the free world shows, mercurial leaders and sometimes incompetent leaders can do significant damage to democracy, freedom and national reputations. And still embellish themselves and their administration with many self-conferred virtues.
It is an intelligent subversion of democracy. Sadly, with sections of the electorate complicit in it.
For the free, democratic world, these are times of questionable inheritors of its leadership and legacy.
In other words, the sanctity automatically awarded the free world previously to settle conflicts, stands compromised.
To me, this is the real issue highlighted by the Israel-Iran conflict.
That even if Iran is at fault, the free world/West finds itself short of the moral stature and quality of leadership that is required to recommend corrective steps.
One way out is for everyone to bid goodbye to their nuclear weapons and for the world as a whole to adopt the moral high ground of forgoing aggression as much as it can.
That, as we know so well, is easier said than done.
So, till superior wisdom dawns on us, we will have preemptive strikes and I will frequently remember Minority Report and its idea of Precrime.
Shyam G Menon is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
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