Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 48: Fabricating the war story

War narratives are contrived into seeming reality – until their contradictions unravel them

The battlefield determines who prevails. Yet long before that verdict is rendered, another contest unfolds: over how the war itself is to be understood. From a plurality of competing explanations, a single narrative, or at least a dominant theme, gradually crystallizes and comes to define the conflict.

How wars acquire their story

At the outset of many wars, governments advance a range of justificatory claims, from strategic interests to security threats and humanitarian concerns. Through narrative consolidation, these competing accounts are gradually subsumed into a single dominant story that comes to constitute the war’s moral identity.

The process and its effects were described long ago by the American journalist and political theorist Walter Lippmann. In Public Opinion (1922), he argued that citizens rarely encounter political reality directly. Instead, they apprehend the world through simplified “pictures in their heads,” fashioned by elite discourse and mediated through the press. In this sense, speeches by political leaders do more than announce policy: They begin to shape the narratives through which conflicts are rendered intelligible.

The mechanics of this construction were later laid bare with unusual candor by Edward Bernays, a pioneer of modern public relations. He argued that democratic societies depend upon what he termed the “engineering of consent”: the deliberate formation of public opinion through the orchestration of carefully crafted persuasive narratives.

More recently, critics such as the linguist Noam Chomsky have examined how such narratives circulate through institutional media systems that systematically privilege and amplify elite perspectives while marginalizing alternative voices.

Different thinkers have variously described the mechanism in different ways. Yet the underlying insight remains the same: Wars seldom arise from a single story, but they are often explained – and sustained – by one. Once established, a war’s narrative can become as consequential as the conflict itself.

Stitching the war message together

War narratives typically evolve through a structured sequence. They propagate from inchoate beginnings through a discursive cascade, as successive actors repeat and adapt the message; they crystallize and come to cohere through narrative consolidation, as competing accounts are gradually subsumed into a dominant interpretation; and they acquire force through rhetorical intensification, as the resulting narrative eventually assumes the appearance of not merely plausibility, but inevitability.

As the war message cascades from the decision center to the periphery, successive statements are iteratively refined and brought into mutual alignment around a common narrative core, which is progressively strengthened through accretion.

Where such amplification rests on haphazard piecemeal construction, analytical fallacy, or rhetorical artifice, however, the emerging narrative, though authoritative in appearance, proves inherently vulnerable, with its internal contradictions poised to unravel it.

In an official video message on 28 February 2026, US President Donald Trump announced that the US had commenced “major combat operations in Iran,” presenting the campaign as a preventive exigency in response to “imminent threats” posed by the Iranian “regime”. He justified the action by invoking Iran’s purported nuclear ambitions, its missile program, and its long-standing record of proxy violence.

The commander-in-chief cast the operation as both defensive and stabilizing, directed at eliminating prospective danger and restoring deterrence – despite contested evidence concerning Iran’s actual intent and the immediacy of the purported threat.

Through the layering of rhetorical devices, these contested premises were compressed into a seemingly plausible narrative of necessity, even as its internal tensions remained analytically exposed.

This framing functioned both as a signaling device and conceptual umbrella, under which a wide range of drastic and far-reaching measures were purportedly rendered permissible, including the extrajudicial killing of the Shiʿa world’s foremost religious authority.

As Trump’s adumbrated message diffused, what had been inchoate justificatory strands began to coalesce into dominant narrative leitmotifs. In early March 2026, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed and amplified the nascent discursive pattern, depicting Iran as “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism” and casting the American campaign as an effort to dismantle its military capabilities so as to make the world safer.

Rubio’s underlying formulation combines moral absolutism (presenting moral claims as universally valid and indisputable) and loaded designation (using value-laden labels that prejudge the subject: “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism”) with circular reasoning (treating the label as its own warrant) and teleological framing (justifying action by its intended end: “to make the world safer”). In so doing, Rubio recasts contested claims into a simplified, seemingly self-evident narrative in which eliminating Iran’s capabilities appears as a universal, teleological imperative.

Ten days into the campaign, German Chancellor Merz entered the discursive cascade, assuming a prominent role in the message relay. He construed the Islamic Republic as the center of global terrorism that must be “shut down” and cast US and Israeli operations as a means to that objective. The war, he contended, would cease once Tehran’s clerical leadership desisted, framing the campaign as defensive – after earlier portraying Israel as performing the world’s “dirty work.” These remarks give rise to serious objections on logical, ethical, and rhetorical grounds.

Later that same day, Britain’s defense secretary, John Healey, characterized the Iranian government as “a destructive force which has slaughtered protesters” and urged Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions and return to negotiations – even as US and Israeli strikes during the holy month of Ramadan had killed the country’s supreme religious leader and abruptly terminated talks reportedly nearing agreement.

Well into the war’s third week, selectively passing over prior unprovoked Israeli strikes on Iran’s South Pars gas field – the world’s largest – Healey ascribed sole responsibility for regional destabilization to Tehran. He characterized Iran’s retaliatory actions against Gulf energy sites as a “serious escalation,” eliding the fact that these strikes were precipitated by prior Israeli belligerent action and directed specifically at American assets rather than indiscriminately at neighboring states more broadly.

Healey invoked this framing to justify increased “defensive” support for Gulf states and to attribute rising living costs, especially gas prices, in the U.K. solely to Iran. This came despite the fact that it was the US and Israel that chose to initiate an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran and that Israel then seized the initiative in striking Iranian energy infrastructure, part of a broader pattern of relentless Israeli escalation.

The distinctive confluence of messages is salient. In many cases, a war narrative crystallizes into a singular, sharply defined formulation as it propagates through aligned political discourse. In the Iran case, however, the relay yielded a composite of partially overlapping yet mutually reinforcing messages.

In the course of narrative diffusion, a range of central propositions crystallized. At the highest level of abstraction stood the thesis that the world would be safer without an Iranian nuclear weapon, a claim that begs the question by presupposing an Iranian intention to develop one.

The convergence of reinforcing leitmotifs serves to obscure the absence of any empirically substantiated war justification and admits of subsequent adjustment, while producing an effect akin to that of more precise and disciplined messaging. At the very least, it renders it materially difficult for other states to come to Iran’s defense or to penalize the US and Israel.

Yet as the narrative percolated through the discursive chain, its internal flaws multiplied with each stage of articulation. With the proliferation of analytical fallacies and rhetorical artifices, the central postulates grew increasingly vulnerable to critique. The British defense secretary’s claims offer a case in point.

The proliferation of narrative distortion

Healey’s apologia effectively attributes sole responsibility for the breakdown of diplomacy to Iran, notwithstanding unilateral actions by the opposing side that were themselves solely responsible for bringing talks to a premature end. This narrative inversion exemplifies the twin persuasive devices of causal erasure and reversal of responsibility (a form of the false-cause fallacy).

After excising initiating action from the causal account, victim and perpetrator are transposed, with the coerced party being recast as the initiator and hence constituted as the locus of moral culpability. By eliding prior Israeli strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure, Healey cast Tehran, the victim, as the sole agent of escalation.

A related instance of causal inversion emerged within the broader logic of ex post facto reasoning, whereby subsequent reactions are invoked to justify the very actions that provoked them.

Commentary recast Iran’s defensive response (the post factum), namely its strikes on US military infrastructure across the region and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to enemy vessels, as retroactive justification for the prior US-Israeli attack on Iran. This constitutes a paradigmatic instance of justificatory engineering in war, wherein causal inversion gives rise to a self-fulfilling logic.

The ex post facto rationalization, which folds the adversary’s response back into the original rationale as retroactive evidence, followed upon an ex ante justification, defined as preemptive legitimation prior to the event.

In a classic “proactive defense” argument, the US and Israel had rationalized their attack on Iran as a necessary response to an anticipated, imminent threat arising from Iran’s alleged nuclear and long-range ballistic missile programs. They contended that preventive and ostensibly “defensive” strikes were required to forestall Iran’s development of an atomic bomb and its potential to launch intercontinental missiles against America and its allies. One is reminded that Rome, too, built its empire under the guise of defending its so-called friends (amici).

After the attack, the initiating actor invoked and recast the aggrieved party’s response ex post facto as both confirmation of the purported threat necessitating preemptive action and as retrospective proof of the attack’s necessity, even though the reaction would not have arisen but for the prior belligerent act. The argument thus rests on a reverse-causation fallacy, functioning rhetorically as a form of retrospective legitimation of the initial precipitating intervention.

This retroactive preemptive justification – narrative reasoning that reinterprets subsequent events to validate actions taken prior to their occurrence – was amplified by a speculative, counterfactual assertion to the effect that regional strikes by Iran would have proved far more devastating had the country possessed nuclear weapons. Such speculative thought experiments exploit the epistemic asymmetry that claims about an indeterminate future, being presently unfalsifiable, resist decisive refutation.

Ex ante justification is not inherently fallacious; it becomes so when conjecture substitutes for evidence, with purely hypothetical threats being elevated to the status of established realities, thereby transmuting prudential reasoning into circular or worst-case logic.

To be properly grounded, such reasoning must rest on credible evidence, reasonably foreseeable risk, proportionality of response, and consistency with the information available at the time. Error arises when ex ante claims lack evidentiary grounding, serving merely to confer legitimacy on a predetermined course of action.

In particular, prospective reasoning lapses into fallacy when it relies on the speculative threat fallacy (treating possibility as certainty), slippery-slope reasoning (positing adverse outcomes as an inevitable cascade), worst-case or precautionary overreach (privileging extreme scenarios over more probable ones), or begging the question (circularly presupposing the threat to justify the response). In its most problematic manifestation, the preventive war fallacy, it lowers evidentiary thresholds, invites self-fulfilling escalation, and substitutes anticipation for evidentiary proof.

The imputation of an Iranian nuclear threat lacks such evidentiary grounding. On the contrary, the reverse obtains: Nuclear weapons are explicitly proscribed by a fatwa (a legal ruling) derived from statements by the late Supreme Leader, which declares their production, stockpiling, and use to be haram (forbidden) under Islamic law. The ruling is most clearly articulated as prohibiting nuclear weapons, but Iranian officials have often extended its scope to encompass all weapons of mass destruction.

At bottom, narrative constructions do not merely represent reality; they bind those who advance them. In effect, the fatwa has functioned as an efficacious mechanism of normative and rhetorical entrapment, constraining Iran to act in accordance with its own professed principles and declaratory commitments.

Notably, Western officials, including former US President Barack Obama, repeatedly invoked the Supreme Leader’s fatwa for the purpose of normative anchoring. This technique frames policy as an emanation of an actor’s own avowed precepts, thereby recasting external demands as requirements grounded in the imperative of internal consistency rather than coercion.

Foreign demands were presented as aligned with Iran’s declared prohibition of nuclear weapons rather than as external impositions. The normative injunction thus served as a basis for diplomatic engagement oriented toward negotiated constraint rather than armed conflict.

Moreover, Iran’s declared posture was subject to rigorous verification under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015, with UN inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN-affiliated nuclear watchdog, repeatedly confirming the absence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. This landmark nuclear accord was subsequently abrogated by US President Trump in contravention of the morally grounded “logic of appropriateness,” which transcends narrow, technical cost-benefit analysis. Moreover, the US intelligence community consistently assessed that Iran is not building an atomic bomb.

In sum, the conjunction of preventive reasoning and retrospective narrative construction reveals how policies are justified ex ante on the basis of anticipated risks, yet subsequently legitimized ex post facto by reference to ensuing events. Neither mode withstands analytical scrutiny, leaving the justificatory edifice structurally vulnerable to challenge.

Making war legible – and seemingly legitimate

Conflicts emerge in complexity; they endure in narrative. Those narratives shape how conflicts are apprehended, how legitimate – and necessary – they appear, and how long they persist.

Wars rarely commence with a single, coherent narrative, yet often come to depend upon one. They originate from tangled histories of rivalry, fear, confusion, tension, and miscalculation, as well as undifferentiated assemblages of partial and competing explanations.

As a rule, a simplified narrative subsequently arises that purports to explain the conflict, assigns blame, and promises resolution, thereby rendering it legible and, in turn, seemingly inevitable to the public.

What begins as amorphous complexity is given intelligible form through cascade, stabilized through consolidation, and elevated into necessity through intensification.

In a casuistic progression, war narratives frequently move from ex ante justification to ex post facto legitimation. What is prospectively advanced as exigency before the war is often retrospectively reinforced by being framed as vindicated by subsequent events, with analytical fallacies and rhetorical artifices introduced in the course of narrative evolution.

History furnishes many instances in which conflicts that began in ambiguity are later recast in a seductively streamlined narrative, transmuting an inchoate, opaque, and perplexing reality into a conveniently reductive moral fable with expedient solutions, readily grasped and endorsed by audiences.

Such simple narratives circulate memetically in the age of viral geopolitics, imposing coherence upon events that were never so orderly while mobilizing broad, often unreflective support in discursive echo chambers. Yet the clarity they afford is often illusory, and, at times, profoundly misleading.

The empirical record attests to how perilous such viral narratives prove to be when analysis yields to storytelling that collapses immense geopolitical complexity into formulaic slogans, and when leaders themselves come to believe their own mantras, mistaking narrative for reality itself.

When a single narrative structure, or a selectively configured set of resonant themes, comes to predominate, it does more than interpret events; it constrains the range of questions citizens feel permitted to ask.

Understanding how such narrative strains are engineered therefore represents not merely a sterile – and bloodless – academic exercise. It is among the few means by which democratic societies can preserve space for doubt at moments when certainty is most politically opportune.

The stakes are considerable. For history repeatedly reminds us that when messages propagate through a discursive cascade, coalesce through narrative consolidation, and intensify through rhetorical amplification into apparent ineluctability, statecraft can give way to storytelling and fiction displace fact.

When narrative hardens into determinacy, the story seldom unfolds and concludes as its authors had promised – if it remains within their control at all.

[Part 4 of a series on viral geopolitics. To be continued. Previous columns in the series: