The Existential Threat
The Misdiagnosis That Perpetuates War
Few expressions carry greater persuasive force than “existential threat.” Once invoked, diplomacy becomes hesitation, skepticism becomes appeasement, and military action becomes self-defense.
But what does the phrase really mean?
An existential threat is a danger to the very existence, survival, or core identity of a nation or a people. It is not a temporary danger, nor simply a serious security challenge. It is a threat so fundamental that it could erase a country’s sovereignty, destroy its institutions, or extinguish its identity.
Today, those two words are heard repeatedly across our airwaves and throughout the Western press in reference to Iran and its “proxies.” The rationale rests largely upon Iran’s perceived ambition to acquire a nuclear weapon.
That portrayal has become the principal justification for war. Yet it also illustrates how the concept of an existential threat can be employed to justify extraordinary action while diverting attention from deeper realities.
Those realities are the unresolved Palestinian question as the enduring source of regional instability, the danger that the present conflict could escalate into a far broader regional—or even global—war, and the double standard embedded in an international nuclear order that permits some nations what it categorically denies to others.
To understand how we arrived here, we must briefly revisit the origins of the conflict.
The establishment of Israel in 1948—known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe—displaced approximately 700,000 to 750,000 Palestinians, representing nearly eighty percent of the Arab population living in the territory that became the State of Israel. Most of the initial Jewish settlers had arrived from various European countries.
The commonly accepted justification for Jewish statehood rested upon the persecution and extermination of European Jews under Nazi Germany. Yet religion, by itself, has never constituted either the cause or the criterion for statehood. More than two billion Christians and nearly two billion Muslims are dispersed among sovereign nations throughout the world without religion serving as the defining basis for their national existence.
The displacement of Palestinians extended far beyond the loss of homes. More than five hundred villages and towns were depopulated or systematically destroyed to prevent their inhabitants from returning.
Hundreds of thousands fled to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza, creating a refugee crisis that persists to this day. Between 5.9 and 6.6 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants remain registered with the United Nations. Approximately 150,000 Palestinians remained within Israel’s borders after 1948, yet many of them became internally displaced persons, prevented from returning to their own communities.
Following the cessation of hostilities, Israel barred the overwhelming majority of displaced Palestinians from returning to their homes.
The 1967 Six-Day War produced a second major wave of displacement involving an additional 300,000 to 400,000 Palestinians. Roughly half had already been refugees from the 1948 war. Following both conflicts, Israel established legal mechanisms that permanently transferred large quantities of Palestinian-owned land and property into state or Jewish ownership.
No society can flourish while living under constant fear or insecurity. Israel’s security concerns are genuine, but they do not tell the entire story.
Israel emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War through the decisive involvement of the United Kingdom and the United States. Britain initiated the political process through the Balfour Declaration of 1917, while the United States led the diplomatic effort that culminated in partition and international recognition between 1947 and 1948.
It is historically accurate to conclude that both governments played central roles in creating the conditions that resulted in the displacement of much of Palestine’s Arab population and the establishment of the State of Israel.
For more than seven decades, Palestinians have struggled to preserve both their land and their national identity. Their efforts began through recognized diplomatic channels but gradually evolved into armed resistance after repeated failures to achieve meaningful political resolution. Most Arab governments eventually accommodated themselves to the geopolitical realities imposed by the major powers. A smaller number of Muslim states—most notably Iran following the Islamic Revolution of 1979—identified themselves with the Palestinian cause and extended varying degrees of political, financial, and military support to groups engaged in that struggle.
The war was launched under the pretext of Iran’s impending nuclear threat to Israel—a war that Israel had urged successive American administrations to undertake for decades. The current administration, through its publicly displayed hubris and uneven grasp of geopolitical realities, presented Israel with an opportunity to harness that confidence and draw the United States into yet another war of choice.
Weakening the major regional powers has long formed a central element of Israel’s geopolitical strategy for maintaining regional superiority. Following the dismantling of Iraq and the devastation of Syria, Iran remained the principal non-Arab regional power capable of challenging that balance. The prevailing assumption that the Iranian regime was politically fragile and internally vulnerable further strengthened the belief that a decisive military strike could finally accomplish what years of sanctions and isolation had not.
Israel has consistently rejected the assertion that regional expansion, dominance, and strategic superiority constitute its long-term objectives. Its critics, however, point to its actions rather than its declarations.
It is arguable that the creation of Israel by the British functioned metaphorically as the introduction of a pathogen into the body of the Arab world—a geopolitical insertion that would inhibit regional cohesion while preserving Western strategic interests, including access to the Suez Canal and the uninterrupted flow of energy resources.
That interpretation occupies an important place within post-colonial scholarship and modern Arab political thought. Historians continue to debate the relative importance of imperial strategy, humanitarian considerations following the Holocaust, Zionist aspirations. Whatever those motivations may have been, the long-term effect has been unmistakable. Israel has become a permanent geopolitical fault line that has repeatedly redirected the political, military, and economic energies of the region.
Israel’s prosecution of successive wars, its reluctance to bring them to a durable conclusion, and the broader economic consequences that now extend far beyond the Middle East have significantly weakened its standing as a responsible member of the international community while inviting renewed scrutiny of the longstanding narrative of perpetual victimhood.
Much of the contemporary Western debate continues to revolve around Iran’s alleged existential threat to Israel. That assertion deserves closer examination because it increasingly exhibits the familiar characteristics of projection and deflection.
No nation possesses intellectual property rights over nuclear knowledge. Today, thirty-one countries operate civilian nuclear power programs, while nine possess nuclear weapons. Within Iran’s own neighborhood, India, Pakistan, and Israel all possess nuclear arsenals. Israel remains officially undeclared, maintaining its long-standing policy of deliberate ambiguity despite widespread international recognition of its nuclear capability.
If nuclear deterrence is inherently unacceptable, then that principle must apply universally. If it is acceptable for some states but categorically forbidden to others, the burden shifts to explaining the distinction.
The asymmetry extends beyond the possession of nuclear weapons.
The nation that remains the only state ever to have employed nuclear weapons against another has positioned itself as the authority to define which nations may legitimately acquire them and which may not. Whether one accepts that authority is not the central question. The more fundamental question is why that authority itself is so seldom examined.
The international community has largely accepted the diagnostician while rarely diagnosing the diagnostician.
That omission matters because a diagnosis carries extraordinary power. It determines who becomes the threat, what actions become justified, and which principles may be temporarily suspended. If the diagnosis itself escapes scrutiny, the greatest danger may lie not merely in misidentifying the patient, but in never questioning the physician.
The present war with Iran carries the genuine risk of expanding into a broader regional conflict and potentially beyond. That possibility constitutes a far more credible existential threat than the one dominating current political discourse.
At this point in history, portraying Iran as an existential danger diverts attention from a far more dangerous reality: the possibility that escalating military confrontation among regional and global powers could produce consequences extending well beyond the Middle East. Framing Iran as the singular existential threat therefore serves not only as a justification for military action but also as a distraction from the far greater risks now confronting the international community.
We are witnessing the persistent misidentification of cause and consequence.
The West has spent decades treating fever while ignoring the infection.
The unresolved Palestinian question remains the underlying condition from which successive conflicts continue to emerge.
The colonial powers introduced into the region an enduring geopolitical arrangement that has functioned much like a pathogen within a living organism, preventing equilibrium while simultaneously serving broader strategic interests.
What followed has become one of history’s most expensive examples of hegemonic nation-building.
A people should not bear the consequences of crimes committed by others.
The essential questions therefore become these:
Who possesses the authority to define what constitutes an “existential threat”?
How does that definition shape what the international community ultimately accepts as legitimate?
The Middle East did not arrive at its present condition overnight, nor can its instability be understood by isolating each conflict from the one that preceded it. For more than seven decades, the world has repeatedly treated the symptoms while leaving the underlying condition untouched. Every war, every ceasefire, every diplomatic initiative, and every military intervention has postponed rather than resolved the central question of Palestinian statehood and national identity.
History repeatedly demonstrates that great powers rarely achieve lasting stability by managing consequences while refusing to confront causes. The greater the effort devoted to suppressing symptoms, the more deeply rooted the underlying condition becomes.
Viewed through that broader historical lens, Israel represents perhaps the most expensive example of hegemonic nation-building in modern history. A geopolitical project intended to secure strategic interests has instead generated recurring wars, regional fragmentation, immense human suffering, and the continual possibility of wider conflict. Whether by design or by consequence, the political architecture that emerged has repeatedly frustrated regional cohesion while preserving the strategic interests of outside powers.
The medical metaphor is difficult to escape.
A pathogen introduced into a living organism rarely remains confined to its original site. It provokes recurring inflammation, continuous defensive responses, and gradual deterioration of the entire system. The pathogen may survive—even flourish—while the body itself slowly weakens.
So too has the Middle East become trapped within recurring cycles of conflict whose cumulative costs now extend far beyond the region itself.
The language of “existential threat” obscures this larger reality. Once invoked, it transforms wars of choice into wars of necessity, discourages diplomacy, narrows public debate, and reduces complex geopolitical realities to a false choice between survival and surrender.
The true existential danger confronting the world today is therefore not merely the military capability of any single nation. It is the growing possibility that an expanding regional conflict, sustained by historical misdiagnosis and competing hegemonic interests, could engulf far larger powers with consequences extending well beyond the Middle East.
Civilizations seldom decline because they fail to identify their enemies.
More often, they decline because they misidentify the causes of their conflicts.
When political narratives replace historical diagnosis, each successive generation inherits not solutions but increasingly expensive consequences.
The lesson extends well beyond the Middle East.
Durable peace cannot be constructed upon unresolved injustice, nor can military superiority indefinitely substitute for political legitimacy. History ultimately renders its own verdict on hegemonies that mistake power for permanence and force for resolution.
The real existential threat is therefore not simply the nation identified by prevailing political narratives.
It is the persistent failure to confront the origins of conflict while repeatedly choosing to manage its consequences.
Until causes replace narratives and justice replaces expediency, every ceasefire will remain little more than an intermission before the next war. Civilizations rarely fail because they misidentify their enemies. They fail because they misidentify the causes of their conflicts.