The sinking of IRIS Dena: A quiet death of the rules-based order

At 05:08 local time, in international waters 40 nautical miles south of Galle, Sri Lanka, a Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo — one of two fired, with the first missing its mark — struck the IRIS Dena beneath her keel. She was returning from India’s MILAN 2026 multinational naval exercise at Visakhapatnam as an officially invited guest, and was unarmed in accordance with the exercise’s return-voyage protocol.

She had 180 crew members aboard. At least 87 are now confirmed dead, another 32 were rescued and about 60 people were likely unaccounted for, Sri Lankan ​authorities said. The vessel was approximately 1,700 nautical miles from Iran’s nearest coastline and over 1,350 nautical miles from the nearest active theatre of Operation Epic Fury.

The submarine that sank her — identified by CBS News, citing multiple officials, as USS Charlotte, a Los Angeles-class attack submarine — left the area without conducting search and rescue operations. The Sri Lankan Navy recovered survivors and bodies from the water alone.

Pete Hegseth called it a “quiet death.” He was describing a torpedo strike. Without realising it, he was also eulogising something larger — the rules-based international order that the United States and its partners spent 80 years constructing and now appear, with evident satisfaction, to be dismantling.

What “quiet death” reveals is not a military assessment but a doctrine: we can do this, anywhere, to anyone, and frame it as dominance rather than law.

Across independent polls conducted after the strikes on Iran, roughly 60 per cent of Americans opposed the campaign. Support was concentrated almost entirely among self-identified MAGA Republicans, whose fragile enthusiasm Donald Trump acknowledged by invoking the “silent majority.”

This operation was not calibrated for America. It was not calibrated for the world. It was calibrated for a base. And when a Secretary of Defence crafts press-conference language as a loyalty signal rather than a legal or strategic communication to the international community, something has gone quietly wrong with the function of government itself.

One doctrine, three expressions

The pattern did not begin with IRIS Dena. On Thursday, February 26 — two days before the bombs fell — Iranian and American negotiators concluded what Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, described as the most intense round of talks yet, and agreed to reconvene in Vienna the following week. Both sides said progress had been made.

The bombs fell on Saturday.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — 86 years old, the spiritual authority of 85 million people — was dead by nightfall. Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Albusaid, who had brokered months of diplomatic architecture, said he was dismayed that “active and serious negotiations” had been destroyed. The Member of International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) director-general had stated publicly, and on the record, that the agency had found no proof of an active Iranian nuclear weapons programme — a position consistent with US intelligence assessments.

Iran was negotiating. Then it was bombed.

Hours later, that same Saturday, a missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, in Hormozgan province. Between 165 and 180 people were killed — the majority girls aged seven to twelve, sitting in class on a Saturday........

© Dawn Prism