In the early days of the Cold War, the United States helped construct a global order built around a simple premise: sovereignty. Nations would govern themselves. Disputes would be mediated through institutions like the United Nations. Wars, though never eliminated, would at least be constrained by shared rules.
That system was imperfect from the beginning. Yet for decades it provided a vocabulary for international conduct. Even great powers felt the need to justify their actions within it. Today that vocabulary is collapsing.
The latest evidence came with the announcement that Mojtaba Khamenei had been chosen as the new supreme leader of Iran, succeeding his father Ali Khamenei. The decision, taken by Iran’s Assembly of Experts during the most volatile moment in the region in decades, was always going to be controversial. What made it extraordinary was not the decision itself but the reaction to it.
Before the appointment was even finalized, President Donald Trump publicly suggested that the United States should have a role in determining who leads Iran. The statement, delivered with characteristic bluntness, implied that any Iranian leader unacceptable to Washington might not be allowed to remain in power.
Israel went further still. Its defense minister warned that whoever emerged as Iran’s new supreme leader would automatically become a military target. Pause for a moment and consider what that means.
A sovereign nation chooses a leader. Another country announces that the leader will be hunted? Diplomacy has rarely heard such a doctrine stated so plainly.
The principle at stake is larger than Iran or Israel or even the United States. It touches the core question of international order: Who has the authority to decide who governs a country? Is it the people of that country? Or the most powerful states in the world?
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For decades the United States insisted that sovereignty was the foundation of global stability. Washington helped write the charters that codified it. American presidents invoked it when defending the independence of nations threatened by invasion or coercion. Yet American policy has often contradicted that principle in practice.
The record is long and familiar. In 1953 the United States helped orchestrate the overthrow of Iran’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Twenty years later Washington supported the coup that toppled Chile’s President Salvador Allende. During the Cold War American intelligence agencies quietly backed regime change operations across Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Even after the Cold War ended, the pattern persisted. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed Saddam Hussein and attempted to construct a new political order in his place. In Libya in 2011, Western intervention contributed to the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. Afghanistan became a two-decade experiment in externally supported state-building.
Each intervention came with its own justification: containing communism, preventing terrorism, protecting civilians, securing regional stability. But they all shared an underlying assumption. That the United States possessed both the capacity and the legitimacy to shape political outcomes in other countries.
The problem is that legitimacy is far harder to sustain than power. When President Trump suggested that Washington should have a say in choosing Iran’s supreme leader, he was articulating a belief that many critics have long attributed to American foreign policy: that sovereignty applies selectively.
It applies when the United States supports a government. It becomes negotiable when it does not.
Israel’s statement about targeting any Iranian leader pushed that logic even further. If every future Iranian leader is automatically considered a military target, the implication is stark. Iran may choose a leader, but that leader will survive only if outside powers permit it. Such declarations may be intended as deterrence. But they also reshape the norms of international behavior.
Once one state claims the right to veto another nation’s leadership through force, other states may adopt the same principle. Imagine the precedent. China announcing that it will eliminate any future president of Taiwan. Russia declaring that Ukraine’s leaders are legitimate targets regardless of international law. Regional powers deciding that governments in neighboring states are acceptable only if they align politically.
The architecture of sovereignty would collapse. And with it the fragile stability that sovereignty provides.
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The danger is particularly acute in the Middle East, where power imbalances and historical grievances already make the region combustible.
Israel is a small country geographically and demographically. Yet it possesses one of the most formidable militaries in the region and enjoys unwavering strategic support from the United States. That alliance has given Israel extraordinary confidence in confronting adversaries it perceives as existential threats.
From Israel’s perspective, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and regional network of militias represent precisely such a threat. Israeli leaders argue that waiting passively would be far more dangerous than acting decisively. Many Israelis therefore see pre-emptive strikes and aggressive deterrence not as recklessness but as survival.
Yet power exercised without restraint carries its own risks. When a country publicly threatens to kill any future leader of another nation, it signals not only military capability but also a willingness to redefine the limits of acceptable conduct in war. History suggests that such thresholds, once crossed, rarely remain confined to a single conflict.
The erosion of restraint is already visible in other ways. The institutions created after World War II to manage global conflict appear increasingly sidelined. The United Nations struggles to influence events even when wars threaten international stability. Multilateral agreements once championed by Washington have been abandoned or weakened.
In their place has emerged a world where power is exercised more directly and justification arrives afterward, if at all. The consequences are not limited to diplomacy. They shape how war itself is perceived.
For millions of viewers around the world the unfolding conflict in Iran appears not as lived human tragedy but as an endless stream of images: drone footage, missile strikes, satellite maps. The violence plays across screens like a strategic simulation. Casualties appear as statistics. Cities become coordinates.
When reports surfaced that hundreds of schoolchildren had died in an attack on a girls’ school in Tehran, the tragedy quickly became another battlefield of narratives. Competing claims flooded social media. Each side blamed the other. The facts became secondary to the spectacle. War has become content.
Meanwhile the United States itself faces mounting domestic strain. Energy prices have surged amid fears that conflict could disrupt Middle Eastern oil supplies. Economic data show job losses mounting in key sectors. Gun violence continues to scar American schools with heartbreaking regularity. Yet Washington’s political conversation remains dominated by geopolitical confrontation.
Presidents throughout history have discovered that foreign crises often eclipse domestic anxieties. Wars redirect attention outward. They rally supporters and silence critics, at least temporarily.
But they also expose contradictions. How does a nation struggling to manage violence at home claim the authority to impose order abroad? How does a country grappling with economic uncertainty commit itself to another open-ended conflict?
These questions rarely have simple answers. Nations act according to perceived interests as much as ideals. Yet the tension between power and legitimacy remains unavoidable.
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The United States still commands unmatched military capabilities. Its defense spending exceeds that of most other countries combined. Its alliances span continents. Its technological dominance shapes the modern battlefield.
But military supremacy does not automatically translate into moral authority. History offers many examples of powerful states discovering that lesson too late.
The Soviet Union learned it in Afghanistan. France confronted it in Algeria. Britain faced it during the final decades of empire. The United States itself encountered it in Vietnam and again in Iraq.
Political legitimacy cannot be imposed indefinitely from outside. Even when force removes a government, it rarely determines what replaces it.
Iran’s own history illustrates the point vividly. The resentment generated by foreign involvement in Iranian politics during the twentieth century became one of the forces that fueled the Islamic Revolution of 1979. That memory remains deeply embedded in Iranian political consciousness.
Every external attempt to dictate Iran’s leadership risks reinforcing the very nationalism it seeks to undermine. The appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei may or may not stabilize Iran’s political system. Dynastic succession in a revolutionary republic will inevitably provoke debate within the country itself. But that debate belongs to Iranians.
The broader question confronting the world is whether the principle of sovereignty still carries meaning. If powerful states openly claim the right to determine who governs weaker ones, the international system will enter a far more volatile phase.
Leadership will become conditional. Independence will become negotiable. Missiles will replace ballots as the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy.
The twentieth century spent decades building institutions designed to prevent exactly that outcome.
The twenty-first century now risks dismantling them.
In moments like these, a single question becomes unavoidable. Not who has the power to decide. But who has the right.