Why Do Nations Go to War? Unmasking the Ego Behind the Geopolitical Curtain
In the aftermath of every conflict, from the devastating war in Gaza to the recent US-Israeli strikes on Iran and the retaliatory missile barrages that followed, the world’s editorial rooms and foreign ministries hum with a familiar machinery. Geopolitical analysts dissect balance-of-power calculations. Experts trace the arc of historical grievances. Strategists debate resource competition and the shifting architecture of alliances. These explanations are offered with great sophistication by highly credentialed people, and they are not, strictly speaking, wrong. They describe the furniture of the room with considerable accuracy. But there is a question that remains conspicuously, revealingly unasked amidst all this sophisticated analysis. It is a simpler, more dangerous question: who is the one fighting? Not which nation, not which ideology, not which scripture, but who, actually, is doing this? What does this person want? And why does the wanting never stop?
To ask this question is to step outside the comfortable framework of international relations theory and into the uncomfortable territory of the human psyche. It is to suggest that the causes of war may not ultimately lie in disputed territories or scarce resources, but in a place far less accessible to diplomats and treaties: the bottomless hunger of the unexamined human ego. This is the provocative and profound argument made by Acharya Prashant, who challenges us to look beyond the geopolitical stage and see the actors who strut upon it, driven by a need that no quantity of oil, no strategic victory, and no historical vindication can ever satisfy.
The current crisis between the US and Iran provides a perfect case study for this line of inquiry. The standard narrative is one of clashing civilizations, nuclear ambitions, and regional hegemony. But consider what a single historical fact does to that narrative. Until 1979, Iran and Israel were functional allies. Two nations that now describe each other in the apocalyptic language of “surgical removal” and “satanic identity” were, within living memory, strategic partners. What changed was not a territorial dispute or a resource conflict. What changed was a revolution that placed religious identity at the absolute, non-negotiable centre of the Iranian state. The Islamic Republic made opposition to Israel a central pillar of its identity, not because of anything new that Israel had done, but because a state founded entirely on theological identity requires something to define itself against. A Jewish state served that purpose with devastating theological precision.
This is not, as Acharya Prashant argues, geopolitics wearing a religious costume. This is something far more profound and dangerous. This is the ego colonizing the very force meant to tame it. Religion, at its irreducible core, exists to civilize the animal. Every great spiritual tradition is an attempt to take the creature driven by the biological logic of survival—consume, expand, eliminate the threat, secure the territory—and elevate it into something capable of clarity, compassion, and self-knowledge. But the ego is remarkably resourceful. It can drape itself in scripture, recite holy verses with genuine fervor, and emerge looking not like a beast at all, but like a soldier of God. When that happens, religion does not merely fail at its purpose. It becomes the most potent accelerant the ego has ever discovered. The hunger for dominance now carries the blessing of the divine. Violence becomes sanctified. The enemy is not merely an adversary to be defeated, but a heretic whose destruction is itself an act of devotion. The war is no longer political; it is holy. And holy wars have no end.
The standard geopolitical explanation for the US-Iran confrontation often defaults to resources, specifically oil. But this explanation is the most persistent alibi, and the most easily dismantled. The United States is today among the world’s largest energy producers. It has no material need for Iranian oil that could possibly justify the staggering risks of a direct military confrontation with a nation of ninety million people in the most volatile region on earth. The resource explanation fits the surface narrative, but it does not fit the deeper reality. What fits is the logic of an ego that requires domination not as a strategy, but as a psychological condition. It is an ego that cannot tolerate the existence of an entity that refuses to subordinate itself to its hierarchy. You cannot give it enough. Feed it every oil field in the Gulf, and it will discover it needs recognition. Give it recognition, and it will discover it needs submission. Give it submission, and it will discover it needs the annihilation of any future possibility of challenge. The hunger has no floor because the hollowness it is trying to fill has no floor either. Everything else—the sanctions, the strikes, the frameworks, the summits—is just rearranging weapons into configurations that feel temporarily safer, and then calling that rearrangement “peace.”
Strip away the theological dressing and the geopolitical framework, and what remains is something both simpler and infinitely more intractable: the ego’s bottomless need to feel complete. This is a hunger that no diplomatic architecture has ever been built to address, for the simple reason that the architects themselves are running on the same engine. The diplomats, the generals, the strategists, the pundits—they are all human beings, all subject to the same unexamined drives. How can the blind lead the blind out of the ditch?
There is a powerful temptation, particularly for citizens of the nations doing the striking, to watch this drama from a position of apparent safety. It is easy to feel a flicker of pride at a display of national power, or a simple sense of relief that the devastation is happening at a geographical distance comfortable enough to be consumed as news, as entertainment, as a backdrop to dinner. This is the ego’s most seductive illusion: that the fire it lights in the world stays in the world. That you can sanction the destruction of other people’s cities, other people’s families, other people’s futures, and return to your own life carrying none of that destruction inside you.
The truth, as Acharya Prashant argues, is far more unsettling. The inner condition that produces belligerent foreign policy—the need for enemies, the hunger for dominance, the certainty of one’s own righteousness—is the same inner condition that produces the epidemic of depression, anxiety, addiction, and inner purposelessness that has become the defining psychological signature of the most militarily powerful societies on earth. You cannot burn your neighbor’s house and rest in peace. This is not a mystical law; it is a psychological one. The act of burning changes the one who burns. And that changed person then returns to the home he imagined was safe and wonders why he cannot sleep. The senses are made to face outward. The ego, using only the senses, sees only what is outside, never what is within. This is the structural predicament of the geopolitically entranced mind. It looks outward at the adversary, at the threat, at the historical injustice, and it never pauses to notice that what it keeps finding out there—the hunger, the fear, the need for enemies, the certainty of its own righteousness—is a precise mirror of what has never been examined within.
The call, therefore, is not for a new treaty or a more stable balance of power. Those are necessary, but they are not sufficient. The call is for a radical, uncomfortable, and deeply personal form of introspection. Ask yourself what you genuinely feel when you read the news from Gaza or Iran. If a missile strike produces something that feels uncomfortably close to satisfaction—a sense that the right people are being punished, that “your side” is winning, that the world is being corrected—sit with that feeling for a moment before scrolling to the next headline. Ask what it is fed by. Ask what it would mean for your sense of identity if the world stopped arranging itself into enemies you could feel righteous about. The ego that requires enemies to sustain its own coherence does not disappear when the missiles stop. It waits until it finds the next available occasion. And the wheel turns again.
The wheel will not be stopped from the outside. There is no treaty elegant enough, no alliance powerful enough, no diplomatic architecture sophisticated enough to address what keeps turning it. The wheel is turned from within, by an unexamined centre that has been given every instrument of analysis and statecraft except the one that could actually change something: the willingness to look at itself with the same ruthlessness it has always reserved for its enemies. That is the only disarmament that lasts. Not a new agreement, not a new government, not a new ideology dressed in the vocabulary of the old one. Just a human being, finally willing to ask: what in me is producing this world? And what would remain of my sense of who I am if I could no longer find an enemy to confirm it? That question, honestly pursued, is the beginning of the only peace that has ever been real.
Questions and Answers
Q1: What is the central, unasked question about war that the article proposes?
A1: The article argues that the fundamental question, almost never asked by analysts, is not about geopolitics or resources, but about the individual: “who is the one fighting?” It asks what this person (the leader, the decision-maker) truly wants, and why this wanting for dominance, recognition, and enemies never seems to be satisfied, regardless of what is achieved.
Q2: How does the article use the historical relationship between Iran and Israel to make its point?
A2: The article notes that until 1979, Iran and Israel were functional allies. The shift to enmity was not caused by a territorial or resource dispute, but by a revolution that placed religious identity at the core of the Iranian state. This new identity required an enemy to define itself against, and Israel served that purpose. This suggests that conflict can arise from the psychological need for an adversary, not from material causes.
Q3: According to the article, how can religion, which is meant to “civilize the animal,” become an accelerant for war?
A3: Religion is meant to tame the ego’s base instincts. However, the ego can “colonize” religion, draping its hunger for power and dominance in sacred scripture. When this happens, violence is no longer just political; it becomes sanctified. The enemy becomes a heretic, and their destruction is framed as a divine duty, making the conflict holy and therefore potentially endless and without moral restraint.
Q4: Why does the article dismiss the “resource explanation” (like oil) as the primary cause of the US-Iran conflict?
A4: The article argues that the resource explanation is an “alibi” because the US is now a major energy producer and has no material need for Iranian oil that would justify the immense risk of war with a nation of 90 million. Instead, it suggests the conflict is driven by an ego that requires domination as a “psychological condition” and cannot tolerate any entity that refuses to submit to its hierarchy.
Q5: What is the “only disarmament that lasts” according to the article’s conclusion?
A5: The only lasting disarmament is not a treaty or a diplomatic agreement, but individual introspection. It requires a person to look inward and ask what in themselves is producing the need for enemies and the satisfaction in their destruction. It is the willingness to examine one’s own ego with the same ruthlessness usually reserved for external adversaries, and to question what would remain of one’s identity without an enemy to confirm it.
