When Will The West Discover The Value of Human Life?

Two recent media events necessitated this question.

At a recent Oval Office exchange, a journalist, NewsNation White House correspondent Libbey Dean, casually asked Donald Trump whether nuclear weapons were off the table in the conflict with Iran. Trump replied that he would “never say” they were excluded, even as he called the question “stupid.”

Trump considered the question foolish not because a Bimbo asked it or because nuclear war is beyond the bounds of legitimate thought, but because in his fevered imagination, Iran was already militarily defeated - at least 52 times.

The unspoken premise remained: the use of a weapon capable of annihilating cities, killing millions, could be placed on a president’s menu of options and discussed in the language of ordinary policy.

Just as disturbing was the question put by the German journalist Michael Martens to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in Belgrade: “What can we Europeans do to help you kill more Russians, more Russian soldiers, of course?” Martens later conceded that his “we Europeans” was activist language unbecoming of a journalist, but defended the underlying sentiment: that Europe should help kill enough Russian soldiers to force Moscow to negotiate.

One wonders what has happened to the moral imagination of journalism when “How can this war be ended?” gives way to “How can we help kill more?”

Journalists should know that serious geopolitics begins where childish moral and ideological absolutism ends. We all know that governments commit crimes, and armed groups commit atrocities. It is also a given that states pursue interests under the cover of principle. They also should know that the principles of international law prescribe that imperfections of another government cannot confer upon Washington, Berlin, or any other capital a license to destroy an entire society.

That is why journalists should not be the loudest voices for mass annihilation. Unfortunately, Western journalists never see a war they don’t like.

Journalists ought to know that laws are not mere decorations and that without those international principles, no country on earth would be entitled to exist.

Libby Dean should have known that Iran has not declared war on the United States; neither has her country declared war on Iran. She should have known that since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Washington has maintained a succession of sanctions and coercive measures against Tehran. She shouldn’t be ignorant of the fact that the Congressional Research Service describes these as among the most extensive sanctions regimes maintained by the United States: restrictions on trade, finance, energy, shipping, manufacturing, and other sectors, as well as blocked assets and sweeping secondary sanctions.

Successive American governments explain such measures as retaliation for Iran’s nuclear program, regional interventions, support for militant groups, and human-rights record. While those concerns may be debated, what cannot be denied is that ordinary Iranians have lived for decades beneath the weight of a policy designed to constrain, isolate, and pressure their country.

A 2025 study, in The Lancet Global Health, exposed the grotesque human cost of what Western governments blandly call “sanctions”, as though starvation, deprivation and preventable death become morally harmless merely because no bomb is dropped. In the five-decade study covering 152 countries, researchers estimated that unilateral sanctions were associated with about 564,258 excess deaths every year, while sanctions overall were associated with approximately 776,610 deaths annually. Most chillingly, children under five accounted for 51% of the estimated deaths, with children and the elderly bearing the overwhelming share of the mortality burden.

These figures demonstrated that while missiles loudly announce themselves, sanctions often do not. That while missiles kill in seconds, sanctions kill through empty pharmacy shelves, through the hospitals whose equipment parts cannot be obtained, through the mother who cannot afford food, and the child whose weakened body succumbs to a preventable disease.

The Lancet’s figures demolish the comforting fiction by Westerners that sanctions are bloodless instruments of diplomacy.

Yet Western governments routinely present this form of economic warfare as humane because its victims do not fall beneath television cameras.

Even with the unprecedented economic warfare waged against it for 47 years, Iran has repeatedly shown a willingness to talk when a diplomatic opening appeared. This is the strange spectacle before us: a country subjected to nearly half a century of economic aggression remains prepared, at intervals, to negotiate, while the supposedly civilized power keeps rehearsing the language of domination.

The answer lies partly in the old psychology of empire where imperial power gradually mistakes its preferences for universal law. The same way it confuses predominance with legitimacy and resistance with pathology. Those who obey imperial diktats are called responsible members of the international community; those who refuse are labeled threats to security, peace, and human civilization itself.

The language of universal values becomes a polished instrument for presenting Western selfish interests as the interests of humanity itself. The West wrapped itself in a humanitarian halo and presents itself as humanity’s messiah when it actually is the one branch of humanity that is responsible for the most massacres in human history.

The ever-perceptive Fanon wrote: “Europe has gained such a mad and reckless momentum that it has lost control and reason and is heading at dizzying speed towards the brink from which we would be advised to remove ourselves as quickly as possible.

When I look for man in European lifestyles and technology, I see a constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders.

Let us decide not to imitate Europe, and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavor to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving. Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the United States of America has become a monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions.”

With their experience of slavery and colonialism, Africans know this language of imperial double-talk too well.

Most astoundingly, Africans, for all the injuries inflicted upon them, did not spend centuries demanding the extermination of Europe. We have continued to trade, study, migrate, negotiate, and coexist with the descendants of those who wronged us. The Iranians have done the same thing.

This is not a weakness as Westerners often presumed; It’s a recognition that humanity cannot be built upon an infinite inheritance of vengeance. The Iranians understood very well, as do the Africans.

The question the Iranians must be asking themself is the same we do in Africa: Why does the West, especially the United States, find “live and let live” so difficult? Why does the West have this unquenchable appetite to poke noses into the affairs of other people?

A hegemonic order built on racism cannot easily imagine equality. To Washington think-tankers, another nation’s quest for sovereignty appears insolent; its desire to negotiate is interpreted as a tactical delay, and any quest for independence becomes defiance. This is why, having boxed itself in its entrenched position, the Hegemon regards any compromise as tantamount to surrender.

This is not strategy; it’s the emotional reflex of a racially constructed hierarchical power incapable of accepting a plural world - Übermensch versus untermensch.

Unfortunately, history, which should have cured Europe of this pathological disease, did not do a good job.

We witnessed the absence of historical education recently in Belgrade, which itself carries the memory of European violence, including NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign. In such a city, a German journalist’s casual formulation about helping kill more Russians possesses an extraordinary historical resonance.

As analysts like Scott Ritter have repeatedly warned: A nuclear weapon is not merely another item of ordnance; its use would be the negation of the political imagination, and make the distinction between victory and defeat meaningless. Once nuclear weapons are used in a major-power confrontation, the battlefield is no longer a region; it becomes global. This probably is why the Russians have backed away from using them in Ukraine.

The West possesses all of Kant’s dream of perpetual peace, the Christian just-war tradition, the Enlightenment’s language of universal dignity, and universities crowded with experts in ethics and human rights. What we have in the West today is a civilization fluent in the vocabulary of humanity but increasingly casual about the disposal of human beings.

The West, with all its vocabulary of civilization, must learn that a sensible future is not a world without disagreement, but a world in which disagreement does not automatically become a warrant for the strangulation or annihilation of the foe.

Per Lord Palmerston, nations do not need to love one another before they can negotiate. Neighbors do not need to admire each other before agreeing not to burn down each other’s houses.

That is the minimum demand of morality: not universal affection, but reciprocal restraint.

The West should learn how to live and let live; that is all that is required of it.

Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com