Just hours after Israel launched its strikes on Iran in the early hours of Friday, June 13, US President Donald J. Trump declared that it was "not too late" for Tehran to return to the negotiating table over its nuclear program. The level of delusion displayed by the joint aggressors here is simply staggering. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu justified the bombs being rained on Iranian cities as a means to bring "freedom."

The US-Israeli axis sees no contradiction in reducing a sovereign nation to rubble while draping its aggression in humanitarian rhetoric. The strike came even as Washington and Tehran were engaged in protracted negotiations over the thorny nuclear issue. This is not diplomacy; this is coercion cloaked in diplomatic theater. Worse, it will go down as a day of infamy in international relations: a moment when negotiation was used not to resolve conflict, but to disguise premeditated violence.

Regime change blowback

What did Israel and the United States hope to achieve through this betrayal? Regime change? The total submission of a sovereign nation to a militarized settler state forged in 1948? Are we now expected to believe that post-regime change, Tehran will suddenly embrace Tel Aviv – as some delusional pro-Israel ideologues like to fantasize?

Incredibly, Israel now casts itself as the victim. Russia's deputy UN envoy Dmitry Polyansky brusquely described Israel's claims that it was only acting in "self-defense" as "very perverted logic." But such perversion runs deep in the policies and pathologies of the Israeli state.

As key Iranian infrastructure is bombed to ruins, and as Netanyahu urges Iranians to overthrow what he calls "an evil and oppressive regime," many Iranians are calling, ironically and defiantly, for their government to acquire nuclear weapons as the only credible deterrent against the endless cycle of sanctions, sabotage, targeted killings, and military strikes unleashed by the US-Israeli axis. Under such circumstances, can Tehran be blamed for cultivating and arming proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas in an effort to contain Israel? Just look at what Israel did to its neighbours before these groups existed.