The US-Israel war on Iran not only severely impacted regional insecurity, geopolitics, diplomacy, energy and trade, but it also signified a breakdown of the traditional international relations (IR) vocabulary used to interpret it.
Words like war, deterrence, self-help, national security, and existential threat belong to an earlier era of interstate conflict. Once a Bush legacy, the concept of preemptive war is now among the most popular to legitimise acts of interventionism and expansionism. Today’s conflicts, particularly those involving Israel as the belligerent, operate through such strategic ambiguity warfare, permanent preemption, and narrative deterrence. And mainstream media continues to rely on outdated terminology, creating a semantic battlefield in which language itself becomes a tool of deception.
An old-fashioned playbook
The IR playbook was designed for a Westphalian world of clearly defined borders and state-on-state friction, where "deterrence" meant preventing an attack through the threat of certain retaliation. In the current 2026 landscape, this framework has been hollowed out. The UN Charter concept of "self-help," once a neutral description of states seeking security in an anarchic system, has been weaponized into a mandate for "permanent pre-emption."
In this new paradigm, security is no longer about maintaining a balance of power but about achieving total narrative dominance. By using Cold War-era logic to analyse asymmetric, multi-domain warfare, analysts fail to account for how strategic ambiguity allows a state to act as a perpetual aggressor while maintaining the legal and moral status of a defender.
Mainstream media outlets like the BBC , Reuters , and CNN act as the primary architects of this semantic battlefield. One of the most pervasive techniques is the use of the passive voice to describe Israeli-led violence, effectively removing the "agent" from the action. In this way, war reporting, when it comes to Israeli-led war crimes, turns into a bunch of catchy titles written in passive voice grammar.
When reporting on the March 2026 strikes in Tehran or the tragic bombing of a girls' school in Minab, initial headlines often read along the lines of ‘Explosions were heard’ or ‘At least 153 dead after reported strike on school’, framing the events as unfortunate natural disasters or putting the blame on Tehran due to limited internet freedom.
Conversely, when Iran retaliates, the language shifts immediately to the active voice. The same goes for this form of reporting , as Israeli soldiers “were killed” but the Lebanese are “dead” in times of conflict. This linguistic asymmetry ensures that the initial strike is seen as a clinical, almost invisible necessity, while the response is branded as a distinct and unprovoked act of aggression. Such partisan framing serves as the most fundamental mechanism for legitimising pre-emptive war within social psychology.
In a depoliticized IR vocabulary, conventional terms like “war” or “conflict” lose their contextual weight, and what actually unfolds is a pre-emptive campaign: some are killed by deliberate action, while others simply die, as if spontaneously, to illustrate the execution of a strategically justified initiative.
Furthermore, the media’s reliance on Orwellian euphemisms also sanitises the reality of modern expansionism. Terms like "decapitation strikes" and "degrading capabilities" have replaced the legal and moral weight of "assassination" and "infrastructure destruction." By using this clinical vocabulary, outlets like CNN and The New York Times frame the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials as a surgical administrative task rather than a violation of national sovereignty.
This deterrence allows the media to present a full-scale war as a series of targeted "security operations," shielding the public from the human cost—such as the hundreds of civilian deaths in residential blocks near Resalat Square—while reinforcing the image of Israel as a high-tech victim forced into "surgical" self-defence.
The need for new voices
Today’s crisis is hardly new. It reflects a continuation of discursive patterns that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 and intensified in the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. During that period, a group of so-called “rogue states” were singled out as legitimate targets for coercive transformation, framed within a broader narrative that cast intervention as a quasi-liberal crusade for global order, where the distinction between regime and civilian population was often blurred.
Similar justificatory logic now appears in the rhetoric surrounding Israel’s military campaign following the Israeli war crimes against Palestinian after October 7, with repeated bombardments of schools and civilian areas illustrating how the language of security can obscure the human realities of warfare.
The discursive parallels extend further. Just as the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction once served as the central pretext for the Iraq war, contemporary debates surrounding uranium enrichment have increasingly taken on a similar evidentiary elasticity. The contrast in rhetorical performance is striking. Whereas the proactive logic of the Bush Doctrine once relied on the carefully staged spectacle of Colin Powell presenting supposed proof before the United Nations, today’s justifications appear far less elaborate.
Remarks by White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, invoking the president’s “strong insights” and intuition to defend military action against Iran, illustrate how the rhetorical threshold for legitimising intervention has drifted even further from the earlier pretence of evidentiary rigour.
This chronic problem within the IR vocabulary has, in turn, become a convenient instrument for the selective framing practices of conventional media. Drawing from an increasingly shallow theoretical reservoir, news language often channels complex geopolitical developments into simplified narratives that guide public perception toward predetermined conclusions. Such a process of distortion can only be countered through the diversification of media, which American scholar Robert Dahl identified as "alternative sources of information" and a fundamental prerequisite for any functioning democracy.
This transparency is currently being forged by the courage of countless journalists on the ground who pay for the truth with their lives. Figures like Wael al-Dahdouh from Al Jazeera , who continued to report while losing his entire family, or the late Shireen Abu Akleh and others documenting the erasure of civil life in Gaza and beyond, are the ones making the narrative more transparent. Their work challenges the sanitised "decapitation" rhetoric of the West, forcing a confrontation with the visceral reality of the semantic battlefield.
Yet the responsibility does not rest solely with journalism. The field of IR itself must also confront the limitations of an analytical vocabulary that remains largely confined within the conceptual boundaries inherited from the Cold War.
Understanding contemporary conflicts increasingly requires theoretical frameworks capable of grappling with actors like Israel whose regional expansionism is often sustained by mythologised security narratives and deeply irrational obsessions. Developing such paradigms is an urgent task for social scientists. Without them, both academic analysis and public debate risk remaining trapped within a conceptual lexicon that is increasingly ill-equipped to interpret the realities of modern conflict. Burak Elmali is a Researcher at TRT World Research Centre in Istanbul. He holds an MA degree in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University. His research areas include the geopolitics of interconnectivity, the concept of great power competition between the U.S. and China and its manifestation in the Gulf. His works were published in various media outlets, and he appears on TV as a guest interviewee. Follow Burak on Twitter: @Burak_elmalii Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@alaraby.co.uk . Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.