During the winter of 1940, a few months after the Wehrmacht completed its conquest of France, the 31-year-old philosopher Simone Weil published an essay on The Iliad in the Marseilles-based journal Cahiers du Sud. “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” reads Homer’s epic as an inhuman spectacle whose lessons are entirely contemporary. For Weil, the poem is a “study of extremes and of unjust acts of violence”, which presents an unflinching portrait of what force does to the humans who wield it and suffer it alike. It either “turns a man into a stone”, she wrote, or, “exercised to the limit, makes a corpse out of him”.

The contemporary significance of Weil’s text lies not only its depiction of what force does to individuals, but also to societies and civilisations that fall under its spell. At the root of so many of our moral and political crises today is what Weil, describing life under European fascism, called “the adoration of power in its most brutal form”.

The vulgarity of the American and Israeli war against Iran is only the latest demonstration of Weil’s prophetic powers. In the days since bombing commenced, the belligerents have made little attempt to produce any legal or moral justification for taking lives: put bluntly, they believe that the power to dominate confers a licence to kill. In refusing to articulate any coherent rationale for launching what has now become a regional conflict, with consequences too vast to calculate, Trump and Netanyahu have sent a clear message: they acted because they could.

Pete Hegseth, America’s secretary of war, has boasted that Iranians will face “death and destruction from the sky all day long”, and announced that “we are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be”. He shows us what Dwight Macdonald (who first brought Weil’s essay to Anglophone readers when he published it in Politics in 1945) described as “the maximum of physical devastation accompanied by the minimum of human meaning”.

As in The Iliad, the adoration of force has become “the true hero, the true subject” of our times. All the nightmares of our present are woven from its threads: genocide and oligarchy; thermobaric bombs and AI kill lists; fascist cults of masculinity and bare-knuckle machismo; masked men snatching children off American streets and narco-executions in the Caribbean; carceral archipelagos and caged immigrants; rebaptised departments of war and renewed arms races; conflicts stretching from Sudan to Ukraine to now aerial bombing and drone strikes in the Middle East.

Over the course of this century, force has shed any need for justification and moral cover. The collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 created a world with a single dominant authority, facing no rival capable of constraining it. For the first time in the modern era, the US operated without a counterweight, or the self-limitation that other great powers might impose on it. For most of the 1990s, the nature of this order was obscured by the language of globalisation, which suggested a world of flows and mutual interdependence, rather than life turning around a single core of military and economic might. American dominance was discussed within the softer rubric of ‘hegemony’, which is based on consent and the willing deference of others. It was also an unheroic time, when geopolitics was reduced to ‘surgical’ mopping-up operations and high-altitude ‘intervention’ was executed under the vacant banner of ‘humanity’.

But the attacks of 9/11 revived the fortunes of more tough-minded terms like ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ – which are now freely used to describe the unilateral assertion of American will across the globe. The neoconservatives of the Project for the New American Century, who moved seamlessly from think tanks into the George W. Bush administration, openly admitted that US dominance was not a fate to be managed, but a destiny to be prosecuted with force. As one senior Bush advisor famously put it in 2004: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were the result, along with black sites, torture memos and surveillance systems, and the subsequent transfer of battlefield equipment into domestic police forces.

The attempt to enforce American primacy by military means led to catastrophe in Helmand and Fallujah, just as Wall Street imploded at home. What has emerged from that failure is something more dangerous than either the Cold War order or the unipolar moment. The US may still be hegemonic in Europe, where obedient satraps like Merz and von der Leyen genuflect to Washington, but for the rest of the world, America has stopped being either leader or lodestar. “The unravelling of the neoconservative project,” Giovanni Arrighi wrote in 2009, “has for all practical purposes resulted in the terminal crisis of US hegemony – that is, in its transformation into mere domination”.

Under the current regime, the US has little left to offer the world but a shameless display of coercion and destruction. Trump and his lieutenants seem intoxicated by their own impunity, indifferent to international law, uninterested in manufacturing consent, and exercising a form of political gangsterism through intimidation, kidnapping or offing rival heads of state. “Force,” Weil wrote, “is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims. The second it crushes; the first it intoxicates.” The stupefaction that descends on those who discover they can act without consequence is what she saw as arguably the deeper and more enduring catastrophe. The wielder of force experiences their own power as the natural order of things, and cannot imagine that it could be otherwise, or that the people their force is directed against – women, immigrants, Muslims, progressives and liberals – are human beings at all.

This exaltation of dominance is the gospel of a cohort that glories in mocking its perceived inferiors. “Just because the rest of our culture has gone soft, and effeminate, and apologetic,” Hegseth wrote in his book The War on Warriors (2024), “doesn’t mean our military can afford to. Staying tough, manly, and unapologetically lethal is the lifeblood of the fighting man.” Few images are as symbolically resonant as the recent one circulating on social media of Andrew Tate. The kickboxer and alleged sex trafficker has built a vast global following through incantations that divide the world into the dominant and the dominated, as well as screeds arguing that the only authentic masculinity is one that has purged itself of tenderness. On the second day of the war, Tate posted a video of himself with the caption “Me in Dubai while the bombs fall.” (Tate was apparently not in the country at the time.) It’s the performance of a man wholly sealed inside the spectacle of his own masculine invulnerability, the adoration of force in its purest form.

In Weil’s reading of history, Rome was the original civilisation that made this worship of force into a total culture. Romans, she argued, “believed themselves to be exempt from the misery that is the common human lot”. They saw their nation as chosen by destiny to be “mistress of the world”. And from that conviction of chosenness flowed the contempt for strangers, enemies, the weak and the vulnerable; all of whom became, in Roman eyes, things upon which Roman will could be violently exercised without guilt.

The doctrine of exceptionalism, a bipartisan article of faith in American politics, which holds that the US is not bound by the rules it imposes on others – that it may invade, sanction, bomb and destabilise without submitting to the jurisdiction of international law – is Roman in its self-understanding. So, too, is the Israeli doctrine of absolute military superiority, which expresses itself through apartheid and the systematic obliteration of an entire people.

Indeed, Israel is the most theologically elaborated case, in Weil’s framing, of the Roman consciousness in the contemporary world. The Israeli right has constructed a complete intellectual, legal, and religious architecture for intoxicated, unlimited force, which begins in the Hebrew Bible, runs through the founding myths of the state, and has culminated, under Netanyahu and his coalition of settlers and ultranationalists, in wars that its own participants gleefully describe in the language of annihilation.

In “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”, Weil locates an idea that she believed the modern West had rendered literally unspeakable. “Nemesis” was what defined Greek thought about humankind and nature. She suggests that it may have passed, under the name of karma, into the Buddhist traditions of the East. But the West, Weil wrote, “has lost it, and no longer even has a word to express it in any of its languages”. The ideas of limit, measure and equilibrium, which Weil believed ought to determine the conduct of life, survive in Western modernity only, she observed with devastating precision, “in the vocabulary of technics”.

Nemesis is not simply revenge, but rather the inescapable retribution that follows the adoration and abuse of force. Those who act as though they are exempt from the common lot of humanity will be returned to it, by the nature of things, with interest. It is not a moral principle imposed from outside, but a feature of reality, the way that force, pursued beyond limit, blows back upon its wielder. The Greeks made it “the soul of the epic” and the mainspring of their tragedy because they understood, with a clarity the West has seemingly lost, that unlimited force is not a solution to the human condition but a devastating expression of it.

In Gaza and Iran, from detention centres to private jets, across online shitstorms and pay-per-view cage fights, the adoration of force has become the West’s ruling passion. For Weil, the key question was whether the civilisation that has made force its defining ethic retains any internal mechanism of self-correction, or whether it must wait, as civilisations before it have waited, for Nemesis to arrive.