Gas, God and grifters: Unholy war and the death of normalcy

No great intellect is needed to identify the dangerous dysfunction that currently reigns in international affairs – but it takes the brightest minds of nuclear physics to give credence to the alarm bells increasingly audible to us all. This January, the Science and Security Board of the US Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its infamous Doomsday Clock closer to ‘midnight’ than ever before, warning of a looming global cataclysm exacerbated by ‘increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic’ power politics which ‘favours grandiosity and competition over diplomacy and cooperation’.

Yet among many in Western political and media circles there is a cognitive danger that coexists with, and exposes us further to, the geopolitical threats we face: normalcy bias. The phenomenon is defined by the Yale School of Medicine as ‘our tendency to underestimate the possibility of disaster and believe that life will continue as normal, even in the face of significant threats or crises’. Normalcy bias manifests politically in myriad ways – from the inability to name a genocide despite overwhelming consensus around the fact, to the ‘sanewashing’ of Donald Trump by journalists seeking strategy, in vain, amidst the noise.

At the heart of this futile search for reason lies an unwillingness to grieve the death of normalcy and recognize the mind-bending consequences of its demise. In Europe, much of our political elite is thus afflicted, having come of age steeped in post-WWII received wisdom about the parameters of the world order: the kind of states which commit crimes against humanity and those which do not; the improbability of a land invasion of Europe; the unbreakable transatlantic bond and the rules-based order.

Today, even as these Fukuyamian assumptions crumble away, Europe’s political class still attempts to apply the norms and frameworks of another age to the chaotic geopolitics of our present – not least in its dealings with Trump’s White House. Witness the breathless rush for some semblance of status quo in the wake of the Greenland crisis, with Mark Rutte’s lickspittle justifications for Trump’s adventurism in Iran coming just two months after Allies prepared to spill blood defending the Arctic territory against US forces. Or the conclusions of the March European Council, which ‘condemns’ and ‘urges’ Iran eleven times but fails to mention the United States once.

In their January communiqué, the Atomic Scientists scorned ‘complacent and indifferent’ governance in the face of warmongering. Europe’s response is better understood as a political expression of normalcy bias: an inability among some leaders to grapple with the illogic at work behind the collapsing global order. Yet as they perform the temperate diplomacy and binary morality of a different time, they unwittingly serve the same ‘sanewashing’ function as the Washington press corps, undertaking a ‘sanitized repackaging [of] sheer ignorant madness’ which serves to conceal the terrifying reality: the rational actors have left the stage, and the old rules no longer apply.

Like Greenland and Gaza, the conflagration in the Gulf is a startling case in point. It is an illegal war of choice – yet graver still, it is a conflict devoid of reason or logic, as evidenced by the White House’s endlessly shifting communications regarding the impetus, objectives and timescale of the intervention. It is neither a denuclearization effort, nor a regime-change operation. There is no plan. The quagmire is essentially, tragically, a febrile clash of three sociopathic personality cults: each incentivized to push ahead for reasons of self-preservation, and with egos emboldened by extremist religious narratives which view total annihilation – rather than conventional military victory – as ‘a divinely sanctioned outcome’.

It is entirely possible that a face-saving ceasefire will yet emerge from the escalatory rhetoric of recent days. However, in this high-stakes clash of Gods and grifters, there is little incentive to blink first. Whatever the outcome of the conflict, it has already served to highlight the emergent global disorder. Like the American ideological attack on Europe, the threat from Russia, or ecosystem collapse, it offers a disturbing glimpse into a new world too unpalatable to fully stomach, where the language of holy war and hellfire has graduated from back-room jihad to geopolitics via Sunday service in Arkansas. This chaotic shift of the Overton window leaves rational actors fearfully watching the Doomsday clock as it ticks towards midnight, while the architects of the Gulf conflict appear to be gleefully counting down.

This is not normal. Europe’s strategic interest now lies in recognizing this strange new world and preparing for its implications. Truly lucid Realpolitik begins with a clear-sighted assessment of strategic risks – even the ones we dare not imagine – and planning for these scenarios. The real or simulated ‘ignorant madness’ of leaders, and their norm-defying latter-day crusades, should be counted among them. Normalcy bias left both President Zelenskyy and many European leaders in denial about the Russian threat to Ukraine until hours before the first assault, so blinkered by old geopolitical and logical assumptions that the head of German intelligence was stranded in Kyiv on the morning of the invasion. The failure to imagine the unthinkable is a costly error which Europe should consider carefully as it mulls its next steps in the Gulf.

There is precedent for a more clear-sighted approach: Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon were both assumed to be insane by US and Soviet military strategists respectively during the Cold War. But while both men were adherents to the ‘Madman theory’ of dissuasion, we should not assume a Machiavellian gambit this time around. To do so would be to fall once again into the trap of normalcy bias – wrongly ascribing strategy and reason to narcissistic agents of chaos, in the hope that our gut instincts and worst fears are unfounded.