The current war in West Asia did not start on February 28 when the US and Israel launched coordinated attacks on Iran, provoking a series of retaliatory missile attacks by Iran across the region. The war has escalated since, engulfing the region and threatening to spread further afield. The roots are, in fact, much deeper. Beneath the trilateral rivalry lies not just history but a universal human quest for recognition.

While much of the analysis has attempted to understand the war through the familiar language of geopolitics, nuclear proliferation, regional security and so on, the insights, though useful to make sense of the crisis, are inadequate to fully grasp the underlying dynamics of the conflict.

They answer questions about how the war is sustained and its ostensible causes, but they gloss over the deeper questions of why it has assumed an intensity to the point of annihilation. Here, the famous German philosopher Hegel comes in handy to fully grasp the underlying dynamics of the war.

Hegel posits that we are hard-wired to seek recognition from others. This is the fundamental drive that marks human beings and by extension political communities who seek recognition from other states with the aim to affirm their existence and dignity. It has both moral and psychological aspects. In its moral dimension, when you recognise someone for who they are, you come to bear a certain moral responsibility towards them and see them as autonomous agents. This creates a whole host of moral obligations that bind them in a relationship.

Hegel goes even further and asserts that self-awareness exists only through recognition. I know myself as self only when I am recognised by the other. Thus, self-consciousness has a second-person structure and is already social. Misrecognition or denial of recognition can deeply harm a person and hamper their positive relationship with their own selves and by extension with others.

The idea is more profound than it appears. We are deeply bound up with each other, and our existence and self-consciousness depend on mutually recognising each other. This takes on a more intense form when it is projected onto the larger plane of nation-states beyond individual cognition. Denying recognition is the root of conflicts and frictions everywhere and anywhere.

Viewed from this perspective, the brutal war between Israel, the US, and Iran can be seen not merely as a strategic or military clash but also as a struggle over divergent claims to recognition within the international (dis)order. The US seeks affirmation of its place as the global policeman and, in that capacity, as the guarantor of international norms and security (which paradoxically it has often honoured more in the breach than in the observance). It asserts the legitimacy of its intervention in the name of stability, non-proliferation, and democracy.

Case in point: Israel

Israel, having experienced historical trauma, demands recognition of its own concerns, which it sees as beyond negotiation. But the way it has sought to enforce those concerns is beyond inexcusable, according to critics. Meanwhile, since 1979, Iran has seen itself as a sovereign civilisational power resisting Western domination, and has sought recognition of its autonomy and regional stature.

The escalation that followed the coordinated US-Israel strikes on Iran in February 2026 and Iran’s retaliatory missile attacks across the region illustrates how the withholding of recognition can quickly transform political rivalry into existential confrontation.

When each actor sees its perceived identity denied, challenged, or dismissed, continued capitulation to that treatment becomes equated with humiliation, and military force emerges as the language through which recognition is demanded.

Inevitable instability and violence

Yet, Hegel’s idea of recognition also reveals the fundamental asymmetry at the heart of the struggle for recognition at the level of nations. When a single actor or set of actors appropriate to themselves universal authority while denying others an equal recognition of their rights, it leads not to security but only to instability and violence.

As in Hegel’s formulation of the master-slave dialectic, America acts like the sovereign master of the world demanding unquestioned recognition of its identity and interests, often violently thrusting it upon others when they withhold such recognition; but refuses reciprocal recognition to other states, which become akin to the slaves in Hegel’s dialectic.

In the contemporary international system, this asymmetry is more evident in the self-perception of the US as an exceptional nation endowed with divine power to maintain global order. Thus, the American state has always framed its actions and interventions—whether justified or not—as being in the defence of democracy, world order, and human rights, and sought moral recognition for them on these grounds.

Nonetheless, we know how skewed, self-serving, and problematic American intervention has proven to be. As a matter of historical record, wherever the US intervened, the values it claims to promote have been undermined and threatened, be it Vietnam, Panama, Cambodia, or Iraq, to name a few. The human rights language used by the American state serves only to conceal its own nefarious interests.

Therefore, from the standpoint of states such as Iran, this approach is seen not as neutral or driven by interests of democracy but as shaped by power politics and American strategic interests. This creates the asymmetry of recognition—where a global superpower denies the same democracy to other nations that it claims it is defending worldwide. The US has poked its nose selectively in the internal affairs of many states for its own strategic and economic interests, and with a brazen disregard for international norms and human rights.

Trump’s way

US President Donald Trump seems to have partially stripped off the cloak of providence and exceptionalism that America has always operated under. His eccentricities are given a freer rein than perhaps any other US President so far, largely because of the current dynamics of American politics, besides other factors, personal and political. In this sense, Trump is both an aberration and a fulfilment of the American self-perception of “exceptionalism”. As The New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen wrote: “President Trump has revealed a deep malady within the country: America’s unshakable faith in its ability to shape the world to its liking, indifferent to what others might want and supremely confident that its plan is the right one.”

We would probably inhabit a more peaceful world if recognition of other states is based more on genuine and mutual understanding than on selective and strategic interests of a particular hegemon.

Yet, as Niccolo Machiavelli taught us, international society should not be seen as an extension of individual morality, since states will always be driven primarily by strategic and economic imperatives. Nevertheless, adhering to even minimal norms of international community makes the world a little better than it would otherwise be. A decisive move in this direction would inevitably foster a form of mutual recognition not grounded in the shifting whims of any particular superpower.

Irshad Rashid holds a PhD in political science and has been a lecturer in Kashmir.

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