COMMENTARY: By Richard David Hames
Dear warmongers:
You are sleepwalking towards a war in the Middle East that could set the whole world ablaze. Do not pretend you don’t know this.
Your generals know it. Your intelligence agencies know it. Financial markets know it. Every citizen with a memory longer than a news cycle can feel it in their bones.
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This is an open letter from a species that wishes to survive. I will be blunt.
1. Halt all preparations for a war of choice against Iran or any other state in the region. Freeze strike planning. Pull back offensive deployments. If you really have evidence of an imminent threat, present it to independent, technically competent, international scrutiny. If you will not do that, the world is entitled to assume this is a manufactured crisis.
2. Put in place binding, monitored arrangements to stop accidents turning into cataclysms: naval and air incident protocols, hotlines that actually work, rules of engagement that favour restraint, not bravado. If you cannot even agree to that, you are not avoiding war — you are courting it.
3. Stop playing God with other people’s governments. Regime‑change schemes — whether by bombing, sanctions that strangle civilians, or covert destabilisation — have left a trail of wrecked societies across the Middle East and beyond. You know the record. You just refuse to learn from it.
4. If you possess nuclear weapons, stop using them as toys for your vanity. Commit — publicly, in law — to never being the first to use them. Make it clear that any nuclear use by anyone, anywhere, will be treated as an unforgivable crime. If you cannot do even that, your talk of “values” is a sick joke.
5. Choke off the money pipeline that keeps this war machine humming: end the revolving door between government and arms manufacturers, subject major arms sales to real global oversight, and stop treating conflict as a business model. As long as war pays, someone will always be lobbying for it.
6. Admit that your own house is not in order. Societies riven by inequality, corruption and polarisation are more prone to lash out abroad. Fix the rot at home instead of reaching for foreign enemies to distract your populations.
7. Above all, drop the delusion that domination is leadership. Real leadership today is the courage to restrain your own power when using it would shatter the fragile systems that keep all of us alive.
You are not emperors. You are temporary stewards of a civilisation perched on the edge of multiple tipping points, and you’re not any good at that either.
If you drag us into yet another avoidable war, with nuclear forces in the background, you are gambling with everything that breathes.
So here it is, without poetry or excuse:
Step back from your stupidity. Submit your claims to scrutiny. Rein in your war machines. Protect those who speak truth. Treat nuclear weapons as the abomination they are. Stop feeding the economy of perpetual conflict.
If you cannot do that, then you only have the right to call yourselves fools.
Richard David Hames is an Australian philosopher-activist, strategic adviser, entrepreneur and futurist, and he publishes The Hames Report on Substack. This article is republished with the author’s permission.
