Bruno Latour and Trump's War on Iran
When the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour died in October 2022, he left behind a body of work that continues to inform critical thinking about modernity, science … and war. Latour didn’t write much about war, although he published a piece in 2014 on “War and Peace in an Age of Ecological Conflicts” discussing science, politics, and the Anthropocene; and he was, of course, a veteran of the “science wars” of the 1990s, notably his work on Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (1994). But in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, he published – and we translated — a short, fifty page prickly tract that extended his trenchant analysis of our deep confusion about modernity into a meditation about geopolitical struggle. Reading it again, in the midst of the fragile negotiations following the the Islamabad MoU brokered by Pakistan and the Geneva Cease Fire Agreement, signed (remotely) by Trump at the G7 summit at Versailles on June 17, Latour’s framework sheds new light on why Trump’s ostensible, contradictory efforts at “peace” are doomed to failure.
Latour’s 2002 pamphlet is best understood as an extension of his broader anthropological project — We Have Never Been Modern (1991, English translation in 1993) — applied to the problem of war and peace. He argues there and elsewhere that what we call "modernity" was never what it said it was. The modernist self-understanding holds that, beginning somewhere in the seventeenth century, the West achieved a decisive break from tradition, superstition, and parochialism by gaining access to Nature as it really is — through science, reason, and eventually democratic politics and markets. On this account, modernization is not the spread of a particular culture but the progressive revelation of universal truth, and the progressive decline of false prophets. Other peoples may have cultures, but the West has, on its side, nature itself, having alone escaped from the local and parochial into the one and only “real world.”
This was, of course, a mere fantasy, but one with enormous, devastating consequences. What Latour calls the “one nature/many cultures” equation — the idea that beneath all human diversity is a single nature (including a human one), known by Western reason alone — left the West as the universal arbiter of all geopolitical disputes. Others may have their religions, their customs, their different cosmologies, but these were “merely” cultural, subjective, without purchase on the “real” world. Multiculturalism, he wrote at the high point of its extension, was a profound condescension — your world should be respected as a cultural practice, but it’s not real the way ours is.
This “settlement “ of a modern West and a mistaken rest had immediate consequences for how the Western powers understood war. “Our” values — we moderns — are not really values but the laws of nature made explicit: democracy, the market, human rights, and Western science are not cultural preferences but the inevitable shape of any rational civilization. The result is that while you may spread them by force — police actions, he claimed — you are not really at war because you don’t have enemies — only untutored pupils who haven’t yet absorbed your lessons. The violence is pedagogical: since the seventeenth century, the modernizing West waged war across an entire planet without recognizing an enemy. Instead, it took on the imprimatur of an indisputable arbiter that dictated its will to all: Nature, Reason, Progress.
Latour’s pamphlet, like all good Prickly Paradigm pamphlets, is a provocation: he argues that modernists were simultaneously the most peaceful people in history — in their own self-understanding — and yet the most destructive. They were peaceful because disagreements could never be fundamental; they affected only "representations," never the substance of the one real world. No one needed to sit down and negotiate a different kind of world, because there was only one world, and it was already constituted.
What Latour sensed at the turn of the millennium was the collapse of this longstanding settlement. Nature, as it took shape in debates about climate science, about genetic technology, in the “Science Wars,” and in the global revolt against Western expertise – was turning truth into politics. At the same time, the "many cultures" that were supposed to accept their status (as having a culture but no purchase on nature) were beginning to make ontological claims of their own — claims about the legitimate reality of their own worlds. Latour calls this move from “mononaturalism” to “multinaturalism”: not just different perspectives on one world, but many worlds in genuine conflict, each with its own conception of nature, persons, and the good. This is what he means by "wars of the worlds" — not wars between cultures over representations of a shared reality, but wars over reality itself.
And here is where Trump’s Iran war becomes not just another instance of Western imperialism but something more philosophically specific. The US-Israeli strikes were justified in the language of civilizational necessity — nuclear weapons, existential threat, the ostensible defense of a rules-based order. Of course, as we knew at the time, Trump and his administration offered a continuously shifting set of rationales: protecting Iranian protesters, destroying Iran's missile arsenal, preventing a nuclear weapon, ending support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Sure, as The Nation, pointed out at the beginning, it was all “reckless, stupid militarism,” outdoing George Bush’s response to the 9/11. But what gave these claims unity was the grammar that Latour identified: not a declaration of war between parties with competing interests, but the enforcement of a “natural,” obvious necessity against those “too irrational” or evil to grasp it. Thus “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER,” Trump told Axios (March 6), would result in the installation of “acceptable” new leaders and policies. No negotiations were possible, just a correction.
The ironies, in retrospect, abound – especially, as we’ll see shortly, in the Geneva accord. But first it’s important to see how Trump's version of the “police action” differs in crucial ways from the far more earnest modernist original. The classical modernists — including George Bush and Barack Obama — genuinely believed in the universal Nature they were enforcing. They had faith in the arbiter. Bush especially thought peace was achievable because reason, applied with due force, would eventually bring even the most recalcitrant into the one world. But Trump has no such faith. He is a post-modernist arbiter, who invokes the language of civilization and order without any underlying commitment to universalism. After all, he walked away from Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA of 2015, in which Iran agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear program and to open its facilities to extensive international inspections. Trump’s foreign policy, in Iran and elsewhere, recognizes no multilateral institutions as authoritative, and he has no idea of what a settled outcome would look like, whether in Iran or in his earlier “wars of aggression” against Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, and Nigeria. These were hardly part of a coherent civilizational project; they were transactional expressions of power untethered from any vision of the world they were supposed to produce. Trump’s foreign policy is but a shell of the modernist police action: without the modernist fath, it’s nakedly coercive but also, ultimately, far less capable of producing even that hypocritical peace that classical modernism — Obama’s more than Bush’s — occasionally achieved.
Nothing could be more evident in the talks leading up to and following the initial Islamabad talks. In the April discussions, Trump’s amateur diplomats — Vance and the real estate moguls Witkoff and Kushner, Trump’s son in law — were negotiating with professionals, parliamentary speakers and deputy ministers informed by an army of PhDs and nuclear scientists. On the last day of the meeting, Trump announced it “made no difference” whether an agreement would result because “we’ve defeated them militarily,” a claim made nonsensical by the immediate return of hostilities including the continued attacks on Middle Eastern targets by Iranian drones. Trump and his minions were demanding that Iran stop all fuel-cycle nuclear activity, disarm the Revolutionary Guard, cease supporting its regional allies, surrender its ballistic missles – all without benefits except the possible ends of attacks.
What would Latour have said? He was arguing, almost a quarter century ago, that the precondition for a lasting peace was the genuine acknowledgement of war – and the recognition that you have genuine enemies, with legitimate interests of their own, not simply an archaic culture that was to be “bombed back to the stone ages” announced Trump, paraphrasing US General Curtis Lemay’s 1964 ambitions in Vietnam. To achieve that recognition is to be “constructivist,” in Latour’s usage: to assemble facts, institutions, agreements that are held together by the consent and labor of all those involved. A nuclear deal, a regional security framework, a nonaggression pact: these are constructions that don’t simply reflect a pre-existing natural order; they create a working political one. In the April 3 issue of Foreign Affairs, former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zrif had outlined such a framework, one based on mutual economic engagement, US financing of reconstruction, a permanent nonaggression pact, all designed so that the US wouldn’t have to endore the Islamic Republic, only to acknowledge its interests.
And here lies the final, bitter irony: because Trump lacks the modernist faith in universalism, he’s actually better positioned for this kind of deal than a more principled democratic leader – except that it would require him in this case to admit defeat. He has no ideological investment in Iran's internal governance, or even in Iran’s identity as an “evil empire” — witness the softening of the Trump-led right’s view on Iran from “Terrible People” to “Smart People,” as reported by the New York Times (June 24). Trump’s transactionalism might have pointed to a resolution, but what’s clear is that, without any conception of what a durable peace requires, it’s highly unlikely that any deal will hold. For as the midterms approach, as inflation reaches ever higher, and as the details of the US settlement — currently obscured by the green water of the Reflecting Pool — come to light, so too will the symbolism of Emmanuel Macron’s canny move to have Trump sign the Geneva cease-fire treaty in the Versailles Hall of Mirrors, where Germany admitted defeat in 1919. Trump has lost the war, and he has lost the peace.
Latour ends the pamphlet with a statement that reads now as both warning and challenge: "The common world is not behind us and ready made. It is ahead of us, an immense task." That project — the slow, diplomatic, genuinely bilateral construction of a regional order that Iran can live in and that others can rely on — is what the ruins of the Geneva agreement now demand. It will likely not take place until the Trump regime is but a bitter if enduring memory.
You can download Bruno Latour’s War of the Worlds on our Prickly Paradigm Press website — and check out our other, still urgently relevant titles on our backlist.
