On June 17, 2026, Donald Trump signed a peace agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran at the Palace of Versailles. Days earlier, the same man had been presiding over a naval blockade and airstrikes on Iranian soil. The same Iran that had, for forty-seven years, been the greatest nemesis of the “Great Satan” was now a reconstruction partner promised $300 billion.No facts changed about Iran between February and June. What changed was the need.

Identity on loan from the enemyUmberto Eco’s essay “Inventing the Enemy” opens with a simple provocation: a community that lacks an enemy must invent one, because without an adversary it cannot know itself. The enemy is not a problem to be solved but a mirror to be looked into. We define our freedom against their tyranny, our reason against their fanaticism, our order against their chaos.

The Iran-U.S. relationship was a near-perfect demonstration of this. “Death to America” was not a foreign-policy position; it was an identity statement for a revolution that needed an outside corruptor to justify its inside purges. American declarations of Iranian roguery served the same function in reverse, for the theocratic monster made Washington the natural leader of a civilised world. Each side rented its self-image from the other’s villainy.Eco notes that the method is always the same: make the enemy different, then make the difference grotesque. Ugliness does the moral work. The more inhuman the........

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