The World That No Longer Wants Peace

In this powerful essay, Amandeep Midha writes about the silence of global institutions, the broken promises of powerful nations, and the suffering of ordinary people caught in wars they did not choose. With sharp words and clear arguments, he asks whether the world still has the will to rebuild trust and prevent catastrophe, or if we are entering a darker age where peace is no longer desired. The most chilling part comes when Amandeep Midha invokes the three Abrahamic traditions. Is it a warning—or just a reminder? You will have to read the essay.

The World That No Longer Wants Peace

Amandeep Midha 

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in 2022, the world's self-appointed peacemakers could barely contain themselves. India offered its strategic ambiguity. Switzerland dusted off its neutrality. Turkey's Erdoğan flew between Kyiv and Moscow with theatrical urgency. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, even the Vatican raised their hands. Peace was good for the image when the cost was someone else's war.

Now the United States has struck Iran, not a military installation, but a school with over 160 children attending, reduced to rubble by Tomahawk missiles. And now, Iranian ballistic missiles are arcing over Israeli cities. The region is burning. And the would-be peacemakers? Silent. Absent. Looking away.

The contrast is not subtle. It is a confession.

The Problem Is the Guarantor

Every mediator is only as credible as the belief that agreements will hold. On that measure, the United States is now, by its own repeated actions, an uninvestable counterparty.

The Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA*, was a multilateral architecture built over years, verified by IAEA inspectors, celebrated as a triumph of coercive diplomacy. Iran had frozen its enrichment programme. The deal was holding. Then in 2018, without Iranian provocation or material breach, Washington simply walked away. The message to every future negotiating partner was written in neon: American signatures are contingent on American domestic politics. A deal with Washington is a deal with whoever happens to occupy it at any given moment.

No serious diplomat in New Delhi, Ankara, or Geneva has forgotten this. Which is why nobody is rushing to broker a ceasefire that requires American commitment as its guarantor. To step in now is to stake your credibility on a foundation of sand.

The Invisible Victims Nobody Mentions

Inside Israel today, hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them opponents of Netanyahu, people who marched against the Gaza operation, who carry no personal responsibility for their government's decisions, are sheltering from Iranian missiles. They did not vote for this war. Many actively opposed the policies that led to it.

And yet the global community has almost nothing to say about them.

The reason is not hard to find. Israel's government prosecuted what much of the world has called a genocide in Gaza. That original sin has contaminated the moral account of every Israeli civilian in the eyes of a furious global audience. Collective punishment, the very principle international law was designed to prohibit, is now being applied in reverse, emotionally if not legally.

This is not an argument for equivalence. The asymmetry of suffering between Gaza and Israel remains vast. But a moral framework that recognises civilian pain selectively, based on the identity of the perpetrating government, is not a moral framework. It is politics in humanitarian clothing. And it corrodes the credibility of every institution that practises it.

The Peace Clubs and Their Complicit Silence

Where is the Nobel Peace Prize? Where are the Geneva-based agencies? Where is the postwar architecture that seventy years of multilateralism built?

The UN Security Council is paralysed by a veto structure designed for a world that no longer exists. The ICJ moves at geological pace. The Arab League has the moral authority of a trade association. As Iranian cities absorb American strikes and Israeli cities absorb Iranian missiles, the institutions built precisely for this moment are producing position papers.

The Nobel Peace Prize has become a monument to its own irrelevance, awarded to warmongers, to organisations that dissolve in actual crises, to leaders who subsequently escalated the very conflicts they were celebrated for managing. Its silence now is not surprising. It is consistent.

The Imminent Nuclear Shadow

There are only 16 E6-B planes ever built, only for the purpose of surviving in a Nuclear war, and West Asia is going to get their deployment now from Trump Administration. Here is the question that must eventually be asked: if conventional operations cannot decisively alter Iran's nuclear trajectory, will Washington and Jerusalem begin reaching for options kept in the back drawer?

Iran is not a small state. It is a civilisation of ninety million people that produced algebra, poetry, and astronomical tables when Europe was still organising itself around feudal manors. Its nuclear programme has survived decades of sanctions, sabotage, and targeted assassination. It is dispersed, hardened, and embedded in national identity. Airstrikes can delay it. They cannot end it.

The vision of a Greater Israel, a geopolitical project running from the Nile to the Euphrates in its most maximalist form, cannot coexist indefinitely with a near-nuclear Iran. The logic of this confrontation, left to its own gravity, points somewhere no sane strategist should want to go. A radiation zone built on the ruins of Persepolis and  Zagros mountains made uninhabitable by such a nuclear attack US seems to be going for. This is not a strategy. It is an apocalypse with a flag planted in it.

When the Prophets Take Over

The three Abrahamic traditions each carry an eschatological framework: a final, catastrophic reckoning in which civilisational forces collide and the world is remade or ended. The specifics differ. The geography varies. But the architecture is similar.

Certain strands of American evangelicalism have welcomed Middle Eastern escalation as prophetically necessary. Elements of the Iranian clerical establishment have framed the confrontation with America and Israel in explicitly end-times terms. Within extreme wings of Israeli settler theology, the current moment carries divine weight.

When rational actors are replaced by prophetically motivated ones, deterrence theory stops working. You cannot deter someone who believes they are fulfilling God's design. You cannot negotiate with someone who thinks negotiation itself is a test of faith to be refused.

This is the deepest danger, not the missiles, nor the Tomahawks. The deepest danger is that multiple parties have privately made peace with catastrophic outcomes because they have placed those outcomes inside a sacred narrative. The rest of us, the uninvited audience, have not.

The postwar rules-based order required, as its central assumption, that the United States would occasionally accept constraints on its own behaviour. That chain has been broken, link by link. We are now living in the world that breaking it produces, where signatures mean nothing, where ancient civilisations are bombed with cruise missiles, and where the institutions built to prevent exactly this update their press releases while the fire spreads.

The question is not whether the world order is broken. The question is whether anyone with the power to rebuild it has any interest in doing so, or whether we are simply watching the opening act of something the prophets of three religions spent millennia warning us about, while the diplomats update their LinkedIn profiles and the peace prizes gather dust.

*JCPOA  - Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action - It’s the formal name of the nuclear agreement reached in 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 countries (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, plus Germany) along with the European Union.

Amandeep Midha is a technologist, writer, and global speaker with over two decades of experience in digital platforms building, data streaming, and digital transformation. He has contributed thought leadership to Forbes, World Economic Forum, Horasis, and CSR Times, and actively engages in technology policy-making discussions. Based in Copenhagen, Amandeep blends deep technical expertise with a passion for social impact and storytelling.