The room was quiet, apart from the constant buzzing of the air conditioning. On a screen, a geopolitical map pulsated with bright beams: dark red for Russia, a brighter red for China, a threatening purple for Iran, an absolute black for North Korea. The West, a uniform expanse of a reassuring blue. The image, presented in an evening television studio, reported no data, no figures, no context. It was pure cartographic emotionality. A graph of perception. The conductor, with his calm and deep voice, uttered words like “defy”, “threat”, “get ready”. Never the word “war”. The forbidden word, the ugly and dirty one, had been replaced, as by a sophisticated semantic editing software, with the most noble and acceptable term of “Defence”. In that substitution, in that delicate but powerful slippage of meaning, lies the core of the question. Who has the power to define the aggressor? Who owns the patent on fear?

The question that snakes, silenced but insistent like a continuous bass, is simple in its form and devastating in its implications: are you sure that it is they who want to attack you, or is it you, understood as the collective West, to attack they? It’s not a rhetorical barricade question. It is a screwdriver to be inserted into the slots of the official narrative, to unscrew the panel and observe the tangle of circuits, interest wires and ideological transistors that feed the story. It is the question that transforms the citizen from a passive spectator to an investigator of his own reality. Because, as an analysis on the role of information notes, language is never neutral: it is the vehicle through which consensus is built and precise political agendas are legitimised. Defining someone as a “threat” is not a descriptive act, it is a performative act. It is the first legal, moral and psychological step to justify any subsequent action.

The Architecture of Consent: Language, Lobby and the Machine of the Present Perpetual

The mechanism is holistic, it touches every layer of experience. Start with the lexicon. “Strategic reorganisation” for welfare cuts. “Stabilisation interventions” for bombs. “Collateral damage” for dead children. It is a new language that does not serve to communicate, but to prevent critical thinking. Dismantling this architecture, as observed, becomes a primary responsibility for those who communicate. But who builds it? The operation is too perfect, too coordinated across national borders and the different media, to be the result of chance. A “weapons lobby” acts that is not limited to financing political campaigns, but tries to normalise the rearming agenda by infiltrating public discourse, even presenting it as a source of “jobs”. It is capitalism that finds in fear its most profitable final product: an infinite consumer good, national security, which requires expensive and perpetual updates.

The media system, often dependent on this very economy of tension, works like a well-oiled gear. The media are immersed in complex power dynamics, where owners, publishers, official sources and the same audience (through the logic of clicks) influence what is told and how. The concentration of media ownership in a few hands, a phenomenon documented in many Western countries, further narrows the range of acceptable perspectives. The result is a journalism that often, instead of “afflicted the comfortable and comforting the afflicted”, does the exact opposite. Voice and almost exclusive space are given to narratives of power, while critical or dissonant voices are relegated to the periphery of the debate, labelled as “extremist”, “naïf” or “pro-dictatorial”.

This is not conspiracy theory. It is the simple and ruthless analysis of a flow. A senior NATO officer says that Russia “is working closely with China, North Korea and Iran to try to disturb our societies” and is preparing for a “long-term confrontation”. The claim is presented as a disturbing revelation, although trade and military exchanges between these countries have been known for years. Its function is not to inform, but to prepare. It serves to justify in one fell swoop: the increase in military spending of NATO countries, the tightening of internal control, the suspension of those uncomfortable civil principles in the name of security. It is the creation of an emergency “perpetual present”, where there is never room to ask: why is this happening? What actions, what policies, what expansions have contributed to forging this hostile bloc? The fundamental question—“Defend yourself from whom? Defend yourself from what? How to defend yourself?” —Is systematically evaded.

The narrative is self-fuelled. The threat justifies rearming. The rearmament of my faction is perceived as a threat from the other faction, which in turn is rearmed. It is the prophecy that is self-realising, sold in installments on the market of fear. And while military spending breaks through every roof, funds for the ecological transition—the only real existential threat to humanity—are being hijacked, absorbed by the abyss of the war industry. You choose to invest in the end of the world, rather than in its preservation. The logic is iron and crazy: it is better to die for a war against an external enemy than to admit the need for a radical reconversion of our life model.

The Empire’s Point of View: Why Shouldn’t China Suffocate?

Let’s take the cases, one by one. Not as a list of rogue nations, but as a dossier of resistance.

China. For four centuries, global hegemony has been Atlantic, first European and then American. The “short century” was the American century. Now, for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, the centre of gravity of economic power—and soon, perhaps, technological and cultural—is shifting to the East. China has not invaded a continent. He hasn’t bombed half a dozen countries in twenty years in the name of democracy. He simply produced, commercialised, innovated, following the same rules of global capitalism that the West has written. His “blame” is success. The question is not: “Why is China threatening us?”. The question is: “Why can’t the West accept that it’s no longer the only actor on stage?” . Containing China is not a defensive policy; it is the response of an empire that sees its monopoly fade. It is the last, desperate move to maintain control of a game that no longer has the best cards. Wondering if China should accept being suffocated is like asking the sun to stop rising.

Russia. The narrative is that of a neo-imperial and irrational expansion. But the story has a depth that the newspaper headlines erase. In the 1990s, humiliated and kneeling Russia was made promises—never formalised on paper—not to enlarge NATO to the East. Those promises were broken, one after the other. The military alliance that had been created to counter the USSR continued to expand, getting closer and closer to the Russian borders. Imagine the panic that a Cyno-Sexian military alliance that would install bases and missiles in Texas would arouse in Washington. So the question is not only: “Why is Russia invading?”. It is also: “What series of actions, provocations and humiliations have led the Kremlin to believe that the use of force was the only option left for its own safety?” . It is not a question of justifying, but of understanding. And understanding is the first, indispensable step for a peace that is not only the surrender of one of the parties. The imposed peace is just a truce.

Iran and North Korea. Here logic reaches its peak of cynical transparency. Iran cannot possess nuclear weapons. His “emper Zionist enemy”, Israel, owns them in an unspecified number and has never signed the Treaty of Non-Proliferation. The Western powers that accuse him have arsenals such as to destroy the planet ten times. The unwritten rule is clear: weapons of mass destruction are lawful for members of the exclusive club, prohibited for others. It is the divine right of the sovereign applied to international relations. For North Korea, isolated, sanctioned, openly threatened, the atomic bomb is not an instrument of aggression, but the only guarantee of survival against an externally sponsored regime change. It’s the elementary logic of the jungle: if you don’t want it to arm itself, stop hunting it.

“The darkness is not in the Republic or the Monarchy. The darkness, unfortunately, is in us, in our ignorance, or indifference, in our uncertainties, in our class selfishness or in our biased passions”.

These words, written in another context, resonate today with prophetic force. The darkness of our perception. Our inability—or unwillingness—to put ourselves in the shoes of the Other. We see the glitter in the eye of Putin, Xi, of the mullahs, but not the beam in the eye of our hypocrisy. We are the Good, so our actions, however violent, are by definition right. They are Evil, so any move of theirs, however defensive, is by definition aggressive. It’s a political theology, not a strategy.

Towards Another Look: The Difficult Art of Complexity

What to do, then, in 2026? The first revolutionary act is the simplest and most difficult: stop accepting pre-packaged answers. Exercise the atrophied muscle of doubt. When a headline shouts at the threat, ask yourself: Cui prodest? Who benefits?

• Analyse the language: Every time you hear “Defence”, try to mentally replace it with “war” or “rearm”. Whenever you hear “international community”, ask yourself: who is included? Who is excluded?

• Search for primary sources: Read the full speeches of the “adversary” leaders, not just the clippings chosen by our media. You could discover arguments, complaints, worldviews that were completely obscured to you.

• Study history: Not that of school textbooks, but that of international relations, secret diplomacies, betrayed agreements. Today’s crisis is always the result of yesterday’s poorly resolved crises.

• Revaluating multilateral institutions: They are slow and slurdling machines, it’s true. But, as the climate agreements show, they are the only tool we have to find common solutions and prevent the law of the strongest. Their progressive marginalisation in favour of the logic of military blocs is a sign of regression, not of progress.

The alternative to this tiring work is an increasingly polarised world, more and more armed, ever closer to a conflict that, this time, may not have winners. Rearming does not produce security; it only produces more expensive and lethal insecurity. The real Defence does not lie in accumulating missiles, but in building bridges, however precarious. In recognising that the security of one nation cannot be based on the perpetual insecurity of all others.

The final question, therefore, is not “who wants to attack us?”. The question is: do we still have the courage to build a world where no one feels the need to attack? Or are we so trapped in our narrative of fear that we prefer the reassuring certainty of the enemy to the risky, uncertain, splendid possibility of PEACE?

#Geopolitics #MediaNarrative #PowerDynamics #CriticalJournalism #PeaceStudies #WarPropaganda #Complexity