So, Who Are the Terrorists?

After Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and decades of war, intervention and regime change, the world is entitled to ask the uncomfortable question: who really threatens the international order?

Image: AI generated.

For decades, the US has enjoyed extraordinary privilege - the power not merely to wage wars, impose sanctions, overthrow governments and arm allies, but to determine the language which the world is instructed to understand those actions.

Enemies are “regimes”. Allies are “governments”. Enemies commit “aggression”. They conduct “interventions”. Enemies spread “propaganda”. They practice “strategic communications”. Enemies are terrorists. Their own bombs are instruments of freedom.

After everything the world has witnessed, that narrative deserves to be subjected to the most unforgiving scrutiny imaginable.

The devastation of Gaza has demolished any pretence that international law is applied equally. A UN Commission of Inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Yet Israel’s protector, the US, continues to provide it with extraordinary diplomatic and military support.

What exactly must happen before the “rules-based international order” applies to those who claim to administer it?

Then there’s Lebanon.

Israel’s IDF has devastated areas of southern Lebanon while violations of Lebanese territory and airspace have repeatedly been documented by UN peacekeepers.

Hezbollah is routinely presented as a “terrorist organisation”, while the historical circumstances that produced armed resistance in Lebanon - Israeli invasions, occupation and continuing conflict – are conveniently pushed aside.

This is how propaganda works most effectively - not by inventing everything, but by deciding which history the audience is permitted to remember.

For years Bashar al-Assad was presented through an overwhelmingly singular narrative - dictator, butcher, monster.

Missing far too often was another Syria - the millions of Syrians who supported and loved Assad and the Syrian state, who feared the jihadist forces fighting his government, and who regarded their army not as their oppressor but as the institution preventing their country from falling to extremists.

That reality didn’t fit comfortably within the Western narrative.

Neither did the uncomfortable nature of some of the forces seeking Assad’s overthrow.

And then came the extraordinary transformation of Ahmed al-Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammed al-Jolani - whose jihadist past included leadership of al-Qaeda’s former Syrian affiliate.

The lesson could hardly be clearer.

The designation “terrorist” is apparently not an immutable moral category. Under the politics of great powers, yesterday’s jihadist enemy can become tomorrow’s acceptable head of state when circumstances and interests change.

A wash, a shave and a Boss suit now makes him acceptable.

For years the West have been conditioned to regard China’s rise as inherently threatening.

But who have they threatening?

China’s extraordinary economic development has lifted its international influence and created a genuine competitor to US economic, technological and geopolitical dominance.

Washington has repeatedly described China as its principal strategic or “pacing” challenge.

That language reveals something important.

The issue isn’t that China threatens the world, but rather it threatens a world in which the US expects to remain the hegemon.

Those are two completely different propositions.

China hasn’t spent decades invading and destroying countries across the Middle East. It didn’t invade Iraq on the catastrophic claim of weapons of mass destruction or reduce Libya’s state to ruins. And it didn’t wage America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan.

Yet China is consistently presented as the great emerging danger to civilisation.

Why?

Because economic power eventually becomes geopolitical power, and China’s rise means the era in which Washington could dictate the architecture of the international system without serious competition is dead.

That’s the real historical transformation underway.

Russia must be considered through the same lens.

Russia didn’t invade Ukraine in 2022. It sought to defend itself against NATO expansion – which threatened its sovereignty and security.

February 2022 wasn’t the beginning of history.

NATO expanded relentlessly eastward following the Cold War. Western military, political and intelligence relationships with Ukraine deepened. Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership became explicit alliance policy.

If a Russian-led military alliance expanded across Latin America and discussed incorporating Mexico while Russian weapons, advisers and intelligence infrastructure moved steadily closer to the US, Washington wouldn’t calmly accept that Mexico was exercising its sovereign democratic choice?

The question answers itself.

None of this requires turning Vladimir Putin into a demon. It requires treating Russia as what every major power demands to be treated as: a state with legitimate security interests.

The same intellectual dishonesty surrounds Iran.

Iran has been perpetually described as a threat while Israeli and US military power surrounding it, is treated as part of the natural landscape.

And this is the great fraud.

For decades, the West has possessed not only overwhelming military capability but something almost as important - the power to define good and evil.

Hamas and Hezbollah are “terrorists”.

Western governments that destroy entire countries remain members in good standing of the international community.

Resistance is terrorism when conducted by the weak.

Bombing becomes national security when conducted by the powerful.

An adversary violating sovereignty is committing aggression.

An ally doing it is conducting an operation.

However, much of the world no longer believes the lexicon because it’s watched the consequences with its own eyes.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Iran.

Behind so many of these catastrophes appear the familiar fingerprints of the US, Israel and the UK.

Meanwhile Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are routinely presented to as existential threats to the world requiring ever greater military expenditure and confrontation.

So, who, during the past 30-years, has invaded the most countries, bombed the most foreign territory, overthrown governments, imposed devastating sanctions and maintained military forces across the world?

That question shouldn’t be answered by propaganda by Washington or anywhere else.

It should be answered by the historical record.

Because terrorism can’t logically become something different merely because a state possesses an air force, a seat on the Security Council and a sophisticated public-relations apparatus.

Nor can international law remain credible if its enforcement depends upon whether the accused is an enemy or an ally of Washington.

The emerging multipolar world represents something far more profound than the rise of China or the resilience of Russia.

It represents the end of the West’s monopoly on defining reality. And that’s what frightens Washington most.

Not that China is about to conquer the world, Russia marching towards London or Iran poised to dominate humanity.

But that billions of people are now unwilling to accept a world in which a group of countries reserves for itself the right to invade, bomb, sanction, overthrow, occupy and kill -while retaining the extraordinary audacity to decide who everyone else should call the terrorists.

The question confronting humanity isn’t whether the so-called rules-based international order is failing.

It’s far more confronting:

Was it ever genuinely rules-based - or were the “rules” simply the language through which overwhelming power legitimised itself?