The axis of evil: A critique of US foreign policy and its consequences

When George W. Bush stood before Congress in 2002 and uttered the phrase “Axis of Evil,” it was delivered with the certainty of a man who believed history itself had chosen sides.

On one side: civilisation, order, righteousness, embodied by the United States.

On the other: chaos, terror, barbarism, embodied by its enemies.

It was a seductive fiction. It still is.

Because what that speech really did was not identify evil, but monopolise the right to define it. It gave Washington, and those aligned with it, a blank cheque to wage war while claiming moral immunity.

Two decades later, that cheque has been cashed in full.

The joint U.S.–Israeli assault on Iran is not an aberration. It is the logical conclusion of the “Axis of Evil” doctrine. Pre-emption has become permanent war. Suspicion has become justification. Power has become its own morality.

Let’s strip away the language.

A sovereign state is bombarded. Its infrastructure is systematically degraded. Its military leadership is targeted for assassination. Civilians die, not as accidents, but as predictable consequences of a strategy built on overwhelming force.

And yet, this is still narrated as restraint.

This is the grotesque inversion at the heart of the modern international order: when the US and Israel unleash violence, it is framed as necessity. When their adversaries respond, it is framed as proof of their inherent savagery.

The categories never change. Only the targets do.

The “Axis of Evil” was never a list of states. It was a rhetorical weapon, one that redraws the moral map of the world so that some forms of violence are always legitimate, and others are always condemned.

What we are witnessing now is that logic, fully matured.

There is a particular arrogance to empires in decline. It no longer seeks to persuade; it asserts. It no longer justifies; it declares. And when challenged, it escalates, not because it is strong, but because it cannot imagine a world in which it is not.

The US today operates less like a guarantor of order and more like its chief disruptor, intervening, striking, destabilising, and then narrating the aftermath as someone else’s failure. Israel, backed by that power, has embraced a doctrine of permanent pre-emption, where security is pursued not through stability, but through the continuous production of enemies.

This is not strategy. It is a cycle.

And cycles have consequences.

Each strike on Iran does not eliminate a threat; it multiplies it. Each act of “deterrence” deepens the very insecurity it claims to resolve. Each civilian death, minimised, explained away, buried in the language of collateral damage, becomes another fracture in whatever legitimacy remains.

What is most striking, however, is not the violence itself. It is the insistence that this violence is virtuous.

This is where the comparison that many are tempted to make, however crudely, begins to emerge. Not in crude historical equivalence, but in something more unsettling: the belief that power confers moral exemption. That actions taken in the name of security exist outside judgment. That the destruction of others can be rationalised as the preservation of order.

History has seen this logic before.

Not as repetition, but as pattern.

The lesson of the 20th century was supposed to be that no state, no matter how powerful, should be allowed to define itself as inherently righteous while exercising unchecked violence. That the language of civilisation should never again be used to mask destruction.

And yet, here we are.

The tragedy is not just that the “Axis of Evil” was wrong. It is that it worked. It reshaped how violence is justified, how enemies are constructed, and how accountability is avoided.

It taught the world that if you control the narrative, you can invert reality itself.

So when bombs fall on Tehran, they do not register as aggression, they register as policy. When cities burn, it is not war, it is strategy. When civilians die, it is not horror, it is unfortunate necessity.

This is not the absence of morality.

It is its corruption.

The real axis in global politics today is not between good and evil. It is between those who can act with impunity and those who cannot. Between those who write the rules and those who are crushed by them.

That is the axis that matters.

And until it is confronted honestly, the phrase “Axis of Evil” will remain what it has always been: not a description of the world, but a disguise for it.

* Brown is an MPhil candidate at UCT.