Jonathan Guttentag: Iran exposes the West’s crisis of moral clarity

Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag is a UK representative of the Coalition for Jewish Values and a communal rabbi based in Manchester.

 As the confrontation between the United States, Israel and Iran unfolds, Western governments — including Britain’s — now face not only a strategic challenge but a test of moral clarity.

Public statements from many European capitals have emphasised legal caution and diplomatic restraint while avoiding direct engagement with the ideological nature of the Iranian regime.

That hesitation reflects a deeper uncertainty within Western societies: an increasing difficulty in distinguishing between regimes that defend civilisation and those that undermine it.

This is not merely a geopolitical problem. It is a test of whether Western societies still possess the moral clarity required to recognise ideological threats.

For decades the Islamic Republic of Iran has maintained a posture of hostility toward Israel while supporting proxy militias across the Middle East. Its leadership has invested heavily in ballistic missile development and pursued nuclear capabilities while sponsoring armed groups operating from Lebanon to Yemen.

None of this has been hidden. The strategic outlook of the Iranian regime has been visible for many years.

Yet reactions across parts of the Western world to the recent confrontation have been strikingly confused. Within days of military strikes against Iranian targets, demonstrations appeared in several Western cities condemning Israel and the United States, while paying little attention to the actions and ideology of the Iranian regime itself.

At precisely the moment when the nature of the Iranian government’s policies should have become clearer, many in the West seemed unable to say plainly what they were witnessing.

The crisis exposed by Iran is therefore not only about Middle Eastern strategy. It reflects a wider Western uncertainty about power, religion, and the moral foundations of political order.

A deeper civilisational uncertainty

During the twentieth century, Western democracies ultimately recognised that certain ideologies represented existential threats to civilisation. Nazism and Soviet communism were understood not simply as political adversaries but as systems fundamentally hostile to human dignity and freedom.  Today that moral clarity appears to be weakening.

In much contemporary discourse, liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes are increasingly treated as morally interchangeable actors in a global system. The language of “both sides” has too often become a substitute for serious moral judgment.

Yet moral relativism becomes difficult to sustain when one side openly pursues destabilisation across an entire region.

Iran’s ruling ideology combines religious absolutism with revolutionary hostility toward Western influence in the Middle East. Its regional strategy has centred on supporting armed proxy groups and expanding its strategic reach through networks of allied militias.

These are not the policies of a conventional state pursuing ordinary diplomatic interests. They are the policies of an ideological regime.

A memory from another moment

For me, these debates carry echoes of an earlier period.  In the late 1970s, as a teenager studying in yeshiva in Israel, the radio would often carry news bulletins referring to bnei ha’arubah — “the hostages”. The phrase was repeated constantly during the Iranian revolution and its aftermath, when diplomats and civilians were held captive in Tehran.

For a young student immersed in Torah study, hearing those broadcasts created a vivid impression. Even then it was clear that something profound had shifted in the Middle East: a revolutionary regime had emerged that openly challenged the norms of international conduct.

Those memories return today when watching the current crisis unfold. The ideological roots of the confrontation we see now were already visible in those early years.

The language of a revolutionary regime

Another feature of the Iranian revolution that left a lasting impression was its political language. From the earliest years of the regime, public rallies and official demonstrations were marked by chants calling for the destruction of the United States and Israel. These slogans were not fringe expressions; they formed part of the official vocabulary of the state.

For many outside observers this was sometimes dismissed as rhetorical theatre. Yet slogans matter. They reveal the ideological worldview of a regime and the moral climate it cultivates within its society.

When hostility toward entire nations becomes embedded in public ritual and political messaging, it signals something deeper than ordinary geopolitical rivalry. It reflects a revolutionary ideology that defines itself through confrontation with the outside world.

Religion and power

One of the deeper problems raised by the Iranian regime is the way in which religion itself can be distorted when fused completely with political power.

The Islamic Republic presents itself as a religious state governed by clerical authority. Yet history repeatedly shows that when religious leadership and state power become fully merged, faith can easily become a tool of political control.

The Jewish political tradition developed a different model. In the biblical structure of leadership, authority was distributed across distinct institutions. The king exercised political power — and even he was subject to explicit limits in the Torah’s law of the king (Deuteronomy 17) — while the kohen embodied religious authority and the prophets spoke with an independent moral voice. These roles were not intended to collapse into one another.

In other words, the Hebrew Bible recognised very early that faith must sometimes stand as a restraint upon power rather than an instrument of it.

This arrangement allowed religion to function not merely as an instrument of state authority but as a source of ethical critique of power itself.

In that sense, the Jewish tradition anticipated a principle that later became central to Western constitutional thought: the need to restrain concentrated power and preserve independent moral authority within society — a principle that would eventually find expression in the Western idea of limited and separated powers.

When legalism replaces moral judgment

Another revealing feature of the recent crisis has been the hesitant response of some Western governments. In Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, official statements have often emphasised legal caution and diplomatic restraint while avoiding direct engagement with the ideological nature of the Iranian regime.

Another complication in the present debate has been the tendency to frame criticism of Western preparedness for Iranian escalation as though it were simply an endorsement of a more confrontational American posture toward Iran. That framing risks obscuring the real issue. It is entirely possible to reject reckless rhetoric or unilateral adventurism while still asking whether Western governments adequately recognised the scale of the Iranian threat and prepared accordingly. A serious strategic discussion should not collapse into caricatures about “pro-war” or “anti-war” positions; the more relevant question is whether the warning signs were visible and whether governments responded with sufficient foresight.

Instead of asking the most basic moral question — whether a regime pursuing aggressive regional expansion should be permitted to acquire the means to make those ambitions irreversible — much of the debate has revolved around a narrower legal question: whether military action satisfies particular interpretations of international law.

International law plays an important role in restraining the arbitrary use of force. But when legal frameworks become the sole lens through which governments view serious threats, they risk paralysing the very societies they were meant to protect.

Democratic governments should not lightly resort to war. But neither should they allow procedural legal debates to obscure the underlying moral reality of the situation.

The classical just war tradition, which shaped the development of Western law, recognised that the defence of innocent life may at times require decisive action — a principle that also appears in Jewish law’s distinction between necessary and discretionary wars and in the Talmudic teaching that one may rise in self-defence against a mortal threat.

The question facing Western leaders today is therefore not simply legal.  It is whether they still possess the moral clarity required to defend the societies they govern.

Recovering moral confidence

The conflict with Iran will eventually subside, as conflicts always do.  But the deeper question facing Western societies will remain.  Do we still possess the moral confidence required to defend the values that built our civilisation?  Or will we continue drifting into a moral fog in which democracies and authoritarian regimes are treated as morally equivalent actors?

The Iranian regime represents not only a geopolitical challenge but also a warning about the dangers of unconstrained power justified in religious terms.  Recovering that clarity — moral, political and institutional — may prove essential if the West is to defend the civilisation it has inherited.