Let me paint you a picture of diplomacy, American-style.
An unarmed Iranian warship, the IRIS Dena, sails peacefully into Indian waters. It's February 2026, and the vessel is a guest of the Indian Navy, participating in the Milan 2026 multinational naval exercise alongside 18 foreign warships . The Americans are there too, not with a ship, but with a P-8A Poseidon aircraft, rubbing shoulders with their Iranian counterparts in that strange theater of military diplomacy where adversaries pretend they're not adversaries .
The Iranian sailors march on land. They parade before Indian officials. They smile for photographs. They are, by any civilized measure, guests enjoying the hospitality of a friendly nation .
Days later, they are dead at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. And the United States of America—self-proclaimed beacon of rules-based order—has provided the world with a masterclass in cowardice dressed up as strength.
On March 4, 2026, the IRIS Dena was approximately 40 nautical miles south of Galle, Sri Lanka, steaming home through international waters . Not blockading. Not attacking. Not threatening anyone. Just going home.
A US submarine, lying in wait like a predator in the depths, fired a Mark-48 torpedo, one of the most lethal weapons in the American naval arsenal . The first time since World War II that an American submarine has sunk an enemy warship with a torpedo. A dubious distinction resurrected after eight decades.
The ship sank within Sri Lanka's exclusive economic zone. Among the approximately 180 souls on board. Sri Lankan rescuers would eventually pull 87 bodies from the water. Thirty-two injured survivors were rushed to Karapitiya Teaching Hospital in Galle. As of this writing, nearly 150 sailors remain missing, their bodies likely feeding the fish in waters far from their homes.
Let that number sink in. One hundred and fifty families waiting for sons, husbands, and fathers who will never return.
Now, one might expect a nation that has just committed such an act to at least have the decency to look ashamed. One would be wrong.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, lets remember that name, addressed the media with all the moral gravity of a high school quarterback bragging about a touchdown. The Iranian ship, he explained with evident satisfaction, "thought it was safe in international waters". Instead, it was sent to the bottom.
But the pièce de résistance was his declaration that "America is WINNING - decisively, devastatingly, and WITHOUT MERCY".
"Without mercy". Lets sit with those words for a moment. This is not some rogue actor or isolated commander speaking out of turn. This is the United States Secretary of Defense, the second-highest-ranking official in the US military chain of command, openly boasting that his nation fights without mercy.
The Geneva Conventions, which the United States has ratified, explicitly require belligerents to "take all possible measures... to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded, and sick" after each engagement, "without discriminating between their own and enemy personnel". The US Naval Handbook lists "offenses against the survivors of ships and aircraft lost at sea, including killing, wounding, or mistreating the shipwrecked" as representative war crimes .
But Hegseth doesn't seem overly concerned with such niceties. Why would he? This is the same man who, days earlier, complained about "stupid rules of engagement" interfering with the ability to "fight to win". This is the Defense Secretary who systematically removed senior military lawyers, abolished civilian protection teams, and rolled back restrictions on cluster munitions and landmines. When you dismantle the guardrails, you shouldn't act surprised when the car goes over the cliff.
Here is where the story moves from ugly to unspeakable.
The US submarine that fired the torpedo? It left. It just... left. It departed the area without searching for survivors, without rendering aid, without so much as a glance backward at the men drowning in the oil slick.
The rescue fell entirely to the Sri Lankan Navy, which received a distress signal at 5:08 a.m. and scrambled whatever assets it could . Sri Lanka - a nation with neither the resources nor the obligation to clean up America's mess, pulled bodies from the water while the world's most powerful military steamed away to fight another day.
Geostrategist Brahma Chellaney, Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, put it bluntly: "The ship had just participated in India's flagship MILAN-2026 naval exercise... By sinking a vessel returning from an Indian-hosted multilateral exercise, Washington effectively turned India's maritime neighborhood into a war zone".
Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi was even more direct: "Frigate Dena, a guest of India's Navy carrying almost 130 sailors, was struck in international waters without warning. Mark my words: The U.S. will come to bitterly regret the precedent it has set".
But wait, there's more. Because what is a war crime spree without a girls' school thrown in for good measure?
Before the IRIS Dena sank, before the Indian Ocean became a watery grave for 150 Iranian sailors, another image had already seared itself into the global conscience: the graves of more than 150 schoolgirls in Iran's Minab region.
The Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls' School was hit on Saturday, the first day of joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran. Minab Governor Mohammad Radmehr reported that the strike directly hit the school while classes were underway. The building was largely destroyed. Parts of its concrete roof collapsed onto classrooms. The victims were girls aged between 7 and 12.
Iranian officials say 168 students and staff were killed. One hundred and sixty-eight children who will never grow up, never marry, never have children of their own. All because someone, somewhere, decided that bombing a primary school was an acceptable military tactic.
When asked about this atrocity, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered the immortal assurance that "the United States would not deliberately target a school" and that the Department of War would be "investigating" .
Investigating. How reassuring. I'm sure the families of those 168 girls will rest easier knowing that a thorough investigation is underway, presumably conducted by the same moral luminaries who brought us "without mercy".
UNESCO condemned the bombing as "a grave violation of humanitarian law". But what does UNESCO know? They're just the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. What possible standing could they have to comment on the deliberate destruction of an educational facility?
Lets pause to appreciate the sheer strategic brilliance on display here.
America's stated rationale for this war, the one we're supposed to believe justifies torpedoing unarmed ships and bombing elementary schools is that Iran poses an imminent threat. President Donald Trump, with his characteristic gift for eloquence, explained: "If we didn't do it first, they would have done it to Israel and give us a shot, if that was possible".
Never mind that the ship they sank was unarmed and heading home from a friendly port call. Never mind that the school they bombed contained nothing more threatening than crayons and homework assignments. The threat was imminent, you see. Imminent enough to justify whatever horrors the Pentagon's targeting algorithms spit out.
Professor Michael Schmitt of the University of Reading, an expert on the law of armed conflict, was quoted as saying: "Under longstanding international law during both peacetime and armed conflict, there is an obligation to take practicable measures to rescue individuals who have been shipwrecked". But what does international law know? It's just that pesky set of rules that nations invented precisely to prevent exactly what just happened.
Perhaps most damning of all is the response - or rather, the non-response from American media and political institutions.
As of this writing, there has been no congressional authorization for this war. No UN sanction. No meaningful debate. Just a Defense Secretary boasting about winning "without mercy" while networks run segments on oil prices and market volatility .
The bombing of a girls' school is treated as a regrettable but inevitable "incident" worthy of an investigation that everyone knows will conclude with "mistakes were made" and precisely zero accountability. The torpedoing of an unarmed ship returning from a diplomatic visit is framed as a legitimate military target because it was, technically, a warship, never mind the context, never mind the hospitality, never mind the 150 men left to drown.
Brahma Chellaney, never one to mince words, has argued that this war has little to do with nuclear proliferation or terrorism. If those were the real concerns, he notes, the more obvious US target would be Pakistan, a declared nuclear-armed state whose state-backed networks have been linked to major transnational terrorist attacks. But Pakistan doesn't have the oil. Pakistan doesn't sit astride the Strait of Hormuz. Pakistan doesn't threaten China's energy supplies.
No, this is about geopolitics. About control. About ensuring that a certain rising power in the East has its arteries squeezed. The girls of Minab and the sailors of the IRIS Dena are just collateral damage in a great game they never asked to play.
I am genuinely hard-pressed to think of any other nation throughout history that would do something so thoroughly cowardly and despicable. Invite a ship to a multinational exercise, then torpedo it on the way home. Bomb a school, then "investigate" while the bodies are buried. Refuse to rescue drowning men, then boast about fighting "without mercy."
We are genuinely in a league of our own.
The Germans at least had the decency to feel ashamed after the Holocaust. The Japanese, however imperfectly, acknowledged Nanking. But America? America just keeps winning - decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy, while the media shrugs and the politicians look the other way.
Nitin Pai, Director of the Takshashila Institution, posted on X: "It is not our concern who's at war with who. It's our concern if they bring that war to our vicinity" . But it should be everyone's concern. Because when the world's most powerful nation decides that international law is optional, that rescue obligations are inconvenient, and that elementary schools are legitimate targets, the entire global order trembles.
Remember my International Law book, nestled comfortably between "The Lord of the Rings" and "Alice in Wonderland"? It's feeling right at home these days.
Because here's the thing about fantasy, it requires at least a passing acquaintance with reality to be compelling. Tolkien's Middle-earth had rules, even for its darkest villains. Sauron didn't invite elves to a diplomatic gathering and then stab them in the back on the road home. The Orcs didn't boast about fighting "without mercy" while leaving the wounded to drown.
Carroll's Wonderland was nonsensical, yes, but even the Queen of Hearts offered a trial before the execution. "Sentence first, verdict afterwards" was the joke, not the official policy of a global superpower.
We have managed to create a world more morally bankrupt than fiction. We have built an empire that lectures others about rules-based orders while systematically dismantling every rule that might inconvenience us. We have elected leaders who boast about war crimes and media outlets that treat mass murder as just another news cycle.
And somewhere in the Indian Ocean, 150 Iranian sailors are still missing, their bodies drifting in currents that don't care about geopolitics or oil supplies or great power competition. They were guests at a party. They were going home. And America killed them, left them, and called it winning.
I moved International Law to the fiction section months ago. At this rate, I'll need to clear an entire shelf for the collected works of American moral leadership. It's going to be a very, very long shelf.
But then again, it's always been fiction. We just didn't want to admit it.