Two threats to democracies: Iran’s missiles and the West’s relativism - opinion

We find ourselves in the midst of the anarchic and dangerous age forewarned by the prophet Isaiah: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.”

As Sen. Lindsey Graham exclaimed in his recent television interview with Sean Hannity (broadcast on March 9, 2026): “People were wrong about Hitler, and people are wrong about the Ayatollahs… they are religious Nazis.”

Yet while Graham identifies the evil clearly, a moral Iron Curtain has descended across the West, causing vast parts of it to see in him – and in the State of Israel – the primary threat.

Here emerges a disturbing paradoxical alliance – an unholy convergence between radical Islam and radical liberalism. At first glance they appear to be polar opposites, yet in the end the circle closes and they meet, even if neither side fully understands the nature or implications of the connection.

Radical Islam seeks to drag humanity back toward a pre-civilizational state in which “might makes right.”

Radical liberalism seeks a future in which humanity is liberated to reclaim the boundless rights of the “noble savage,” allegedly stolen from him, as Rousseau imagined, when humanity first began restraining itself through moral norms.

This convergence threatens balanced liberals – conservatives – who, guided by their moral convictions, recognize war as a struggle between good and evil and therefore support it. Radical liberalism, in its pursuit of absolute freedom from responsibility and restraint, finds a natural partner in the Islamic anarchist who seeks to dismantle the Western order that both despise.

This moral Iron Curtain is tearing democracies apart from within, creating an alliance between forces of disorder – an alliance even Samuel Huntington did not foresee.

Greek democracy relied on majority rule as a mechanism for resolving moral and political disputes, precisely because no single religious authority was accepted as defining binding moral truth. This constituted democracy’s fundamental weakness – one that the Anglo-Saxon democracies sought to overcome by subjecting democratically legitimate decisions to moral judgment grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics.

Here the paths diverged.

These societies separated the state from the church and religion, yet they did not declare the death of God nor abandon Judeo-Christian moral values. This framework prevented majority rule from degenerating into tyrannical injustice.

Moral reasoning grounded in Judeo-Christian values – which inspired many of the great struggles against evil in the previous century – is not the “religionization” of politics. Rather, it recognizes that civic freedom rests upon a shared moral foundation.

Just as the laws of nature govern the physical order of life – such as the law of gravity – these moral values likewise derive from a cosmic order that produces balance in nature and seeks to produce balance in human society. For this reason, their status is objective rather than relativistic.

The debates that developed in these democracies concerned the quality of moral judgment within the shared framework of values – not the legitimacy of those values themselves.

In continental Europe, by contrast, the separation of state and church expanded into a separation from religion and from the moral heritage of the biblical tradition – without creating an alternative framework of shared civic duties.

This absence of a common moral foundation allowed Nazism to rise to power through processes that were formally democratic.

Into this moral vacuum, beginning with the French Revolution, flowed social ideologies based on the assumption that truth itself is relative – ideologies that emphasized human rights detached from human duties and brought a chain of disasters upon the world.

A simple analogy illustrates this point.

The obligation of one driver to stop at a red light is what allows another to safely exercise his right to cross the intersection on green. Without the fulfillment of the duty by one party, the right of the other cannot exist.

The Anglo-Saxon democracies repeatedly saved the world from the disasters of relativism. Yet after the collapse of communism, even they adopted Francis Fukuyama’s vision of the “end of history,” rather than Samuel Huntington’s warning of a “clash of civilizations,” and gradually drifted away from their own moral traditions.

If the United States leads the effort to remove the external military threat, it must also lead a renewed moral clarification of the foundations of liberal civilization.

In the Anglo-American world, this task largely involves restoration – reviving the tradition of civic covenant and moral responsibility that has eroded.

In continental Europe, it requires something different: a normative transformation – the introduction of a missing language of duty and responsibility into a political culture that has grown accustomed to speaking almost exclusively in the language of rights.

Only such a clarification can remove the moral Iron Curtain now threatening to fracture liberal democracies from within.

Sen. Graham, who has spoken with clarity about the Nazi-like nature of the enemy, should now rise above partisan politics and initiate in Congress – even while the war continues – the creation of a joint inter-parliamentary commission bringing together representatives from the United States, the British Parliament, and European parliaments.

The commission’s first task should be to examine the serious drift within Anglo-Saxon democracies themselves from the republican values and the traditional British civic ethos symbolized by the monarchy – and to develop a renewed common ground with European democracies.

Only a joint Anglo-American and European moral reassessment can reset the moral traffic lights, dismantle the paradoxical alliance between the enemies of the Western order, and ensure that balanced liberal civilization does not collapse beneath the moral Iron Curtain that has risen within it.