Inhuman affairs
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
In this opinion piece, historian Ramachandra Guha profiles the three leaders he holds chiefly responsible for the ongoing West Asia conflict: Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and US President Donald Trump. Drawing on the late sociologist André Béteille‘s counsel that history is shaped as much by malign actors as by people of goodwill, Guha contends that all three men share a willingness to deploy lethal violence. Yet he resists moral equivalence: he argues Khamenei pursued repression and regional expansionism when democratic and developmental alternatives were available; Netanyahu, whom the International Criminal Court has designated a war criminal, systematically destroyed any prospect of Palestinian statehood; and Trump, driven not by ideology but by vanity and greed, launched an unprovoked military assault on Iran.
Guha’s central argument is that, while Iran’s record of internal repression and proxy warfare forfeits it the status of innocent victim, Israel and the United States—commanding vastly superior military arsenals and demonstrably willing to use them against civilian populations—bear the greater share of moral and political responsibility for the conflict’s human catastrophe. The piece is an exercise in differentiated moral judgment: condemning all parties while insisting that proportionate culpability must follow from the scale of destructive capacity and its use. Readers should note that all characterisations of motives and conduct are the author’s stated views in an op-ed context.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Evil Is Not Equal
Guha argues that condemning all three leaders as morally culpable does not mean treating them identically — the scale of destructive capacity makes Israel and the US more responsible.
Khamenei’s Three Roads
The author contends Iran’s late Supreme Leader chose repression and expansionism over two available alternatives: democratic reform or Singapore-style developmental authoritarianism.
Netanyahu: Ideology and Self-Interest
Guha portrays Netanyahu as driven by hardline Zionist ideology and personal self-preservation — sponsoring Hamas to weaken the Palestinian Authority, then responding to the 2023 attack with devastating military force.
Trump: Expediency Over Ideology
Unlike Khamenei’s theocracy or Netanyahu’s Zionism, Guha argues Trump operates without coherent ideology — guided instead by vanity, greed, and the shifting logic of personal expediency.
A Global Crisis in the Making
Guha describes the combined human cost — thousands killed in Iran, a million displaced in Lebanon — and calls the wider regional and oil-market instability potentially the gravest global crisis since the Cold War ended.
History Shaped by Malign Actors
The framing device of sociologist André Béteille’s counsel establishes the article’s intellectual foundation: that historians must reckon with evil as seriously as with goodwill in understanding how events unfold.
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Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Culpability Without Equivalence
Guha’s central argument is that moral condemnation of all parties to a conflict need not — and should not — produce moral equivalence. Because Israel and the US possess and willingly deploy vastly superior military force, the author contends they bear proportionally greater responsibility for the human catastrophe, even though Iran’s own record of repression and proxy warfare is indefensible.
Purpose
To Argue Against False Balance
Guha writes to resist the intellectually lazy position of treating all belligerents equally and to model a more demanding form of political analysis — one that acknowledges wrongdoing across the board while still insisting on differentiated judgments. As an op-ed, the piece aims to persuade rather than merely inform, and the author deploys biographical portraits of each leader as evidence for his assessments.
Structure
Framing Device → Three Portraits → Differentiating Verdict
Anecdotal Frame → Analytical Portraits → Comparative Verdict. Guha opens with Béteille’s counsel as an intellectual frame, then delivers three successive leader profiles in descending order of ideological coherence (Khamenei → Netanyahu → Trump), before closing with a carefully calibrated verdict that condemns all while assigning graduated responsibility based on military capacity and willingness to use it.
Tone
Grave, Judicious & Deliberately Provocative
The tone is that of a senior public intellectual delivering an unsparing moral verdict — controlled and analytical in structure, but deliberately blunt in its condemnations. Guha uses the register of the historian rather than the polemicist, grounding judgments in evidence and acknowledging complexity, while refusing the diplomatic hedging that characterises much geopolitical commentary. The op-ed form is employed with full awareness of its persuasive function.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
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Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
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The act of deliberately breaking faith, trust, or a solemn promise; deceitful and treacherous behaviour, particularly by those in positions of power or authority.
“The courage he showed in his last days — when juxtaposed with the brute force and perfidy of his enemies…”
In a manner characterised by excessive pride or overconfident self-belief, especially when it leads a person or state to overreach and court eventual downfall or disaster.
“Iran under Khamenei hubristically set itself up as the leader of the Islamic world.”
A political doctrine that advocates for incorporating into one state territories that are culturally, historically, or ethnically connected to it but currently under another state’s control.
“…the ideology of Islamic theocracy in the first case, and of Zionist irredentism in the second.”
Literally, the removal of internal organs; used figuratively to mean the complete destruction of the essential content or effectiveness of something, leaving only a hollow shell.
“…successive presidents of the US who have turned a blind eye to…his evisceration of any possibility of a sovereign Palestinian State.”
Relating to deep, instinctive emotional feeling rather than rational thought; when applied to political hatred, it suggests a raw, gut-level hostility that overrides strategic or reasoned calculation.
“His hatred of the Palestinian Authority was so visceral that at one stage he even sponsored Hamas to undermine them.”
Strong hostility or active ill will directed toward a particular person, group, or nation; more than mere dislike — it implies a motivating hatred that shapes conduct and policy.
“…displaying a particular animus towards the Jewish State of Israel, which it has regularly attacked through its proxy, Hezbollah.”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1According to Guha, the fact that Khamenei displayed personal bravery in his final days means he should be remembered primarily as an anti-imperialist hero.
2According to the article, what is the primary basis on which Guha distinguishes the degree of guilt between the three leaders and their countries?
3Which sentence best captures the intellectual framework that Guha uses to justify analysing this conflict through the lens of individual leaders’ characters?
4Evaluate whether the following statements about the article’s content are accurate.
Guha argues that Trump, like Khamenei and Netanyahu, is primarily motivated by a coherent and consistent political ideology.
The article states that Iran, despite its repression and proxy warfare, cannot be treated as an entirely innocent victim in the conflict.
According to Guha, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 preceded Khamenei’s era, during which Iran had a more active role for women in professional and educational life.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5What can be inferred about Guha’s view of left-wing intellectuals who portray Khamenei as an anti-imperialist icon?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Guha argues that while all three leaders — Khamenei, Netanyahu, and Trump — share a willingness to deploy extreme violence, they must not be treated as equally culpable. His criterion for differentiated guilt is the scale of military power each commands and the demonstrated readiness to use it against civilian populations. Since Israel and the United States possess vastly superior arsenals to Iran, they bear proportionally greater moral and political responsibility for the conflict’s human cost.
Rather than simply condemning Khamenei’s record, Guha strengthens his moral case by outlining two viable alternatives the Supreme Leader could have pursued given Iran’s oil wealth, educated population, and rich cultural history: democratic reform with economic growth, or Singapore-style developmental authoritarianism without democracy. By showing that real alternatives existed, Guha argues that repression and expansionism were deliberate choices, not historical inevitabilities — making Khamenei’s culpability greater, not lesser.
Guha argues that Khamenei and Netanyahu were each animated by a coherent ideological framework — Islamic theocracy and Zionist irredentism respectively — that gave their actions a certain internal logic, however destructive. Trump, by contrast, is portrayed as entirely non-ideological: his conduct is governed by personal expediency, vanity, and greed rather than any consistent set of political beliefs. This distinction matters for understanding the nature — though not the severity — of the harm each leader has caused.
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This article is rated Advanced. Guha writes at the level of a senior public intellectual, deploying sophisticated vocabulary — perfidy, hubris, irredentism, evisceration — and expecting readers to follow complex comparative moral arguments across multiple biographical portraits. The article requires distinguishing the author’s stated views from facts, tracking the structure of an argument built across several political figures, and reading critically as an opinion piece rather than as a news report or academic paper.
Ramachandra Guha is a prominent Indian historian and public intellectual, best known for works including India After Gandhi and biographies of Gandhi and environmentalist Verrier Elwin. He writes regularly for The Telegraph India. His perspective here is explicitly that of a historian trained to take individual character and moral agency seriously as forces in history — a position he grounds in the late sociologist André Béteille’s counsel that the role of evil in human affairs deserves as much analytical attention as the role of goodwill.
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