Much of that kind of thinking, however, collapses under scrutiny to reveal instead the deep loathing that the Western media reserves for the Western liberal order that is all that stands between it and the horrors of Iranian-style theocracy.

A first question to interrogate is whether America is actually losing on the battlefield and Iran is winning. The answer is clearly “no”. Reports of Iranian resilience obscure the reality that the country has lost the bulk of its navy and much of its missile and drone launch capacity, while its air force and air defence systems have been heavily degraded. Data shows that the rate of Iranian drone and missile launches is down roughly 95% compared to the start of the war. A state that has suffered this scale of battlefield destruction is not in a position of strength. In conventional military terms, Iran is close to defeat and would probably have sought terms, were it not for the autocratic nature of its governing system, which allows it to sustain losses that representative governments could not.

A second question is whether the United States (US) has achieved nothing of strategic importance and, on the contrary, left Iran strategically stronger than before the war began. Again, the answer is “no”. The American objective, and that of its Gulf state partners, has not been territorial conquest but strategic degradation. On that measure, the outcomes are clear. Iran’s capacity to threaten its neighbours and Israel has been significantly reduced, while its ability to develop and deploy a nuclear weapon has been pushed even further back.

Beyond Iran, America has demonstrated to China a willingness to commit forces to securing a degree of strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific. China is far and away the greatest loser from Hormuz, and the threat the war poses to its oil resources, especially on the back of the US disrupting those flowing from Venezuela, which presents a grave threat to the stability of China’s economy. It is for this reason that there is merit to the idea that China played an important role in pressing Iran on the ceasefire announced earlier this week.

The implications for the balance of power between China and America in the Indo-Pacific are vast and may, in time, come to be read as perhaps the most important strategic consequence of the war.

And beyond China and America, the war has pressed Europe into reassessing its energy policies and dependencies, which is very much in the best interests of America, and in the best interests of the strength of the Western liberal order.

To say then, as much of the Western media has, that nothing has been achieved by the war, that it was pointless to begin with, and that the whole affair reflects nothing other than the madness of US President Donald Trump and his administration is quite false.

The third question is whether the war has caused an unprecedented global economic upheaval. Here too, a month into the war, the evidence does not support the prevailing narrative. During the first five weeks of the war, oil prices remained in line with their inflation-adjusted averages of the past 15 years, so have petrol prices in both South Africa and America. Global growth forecasts have remained broadly consistent with projections at the end of 2025.

The US dollar, which would typically strengthen sharply in a true global crisis, is weaker than it was a year before the war started. Equity markets tell a similar story. The FTSE 100, the S&P 500, and the Johannesburg All Share Index have all continued to trade substantially higher (around 40%) than their levels a year ago. From a global economics and markets perspective, there has not been that much upheaval.

So, what is going on, why have the headlines of Armageddon, nuclear disaster, “the Third World War”, the madness of Trump, Iranian wins, American humiliation, and market collapse kept coming? Because the extent of the detachment between the reality of the war, and how it is being reported in much of the West, really stretches the bounds of credibility.

The answer lies chiefly in a deep strain of self-loathing among Western media actors toward their own societies and the values that underpin the Western liberal order, exacerbated by the loathing many of these institutions feel for Donald Trump. Matched against each other, these two forces have generated a vast mound of alarmist, misleading, and often frankly false, news reporting on the war.

In all of that something even more important is lost. Western media actors have the great privilege of operating in free societies where they can write and say what they wish. Iran is not that kind of country. Any effort (not that this was a primary strategic objective of the war) to challenge or bring down its theocratic regime should be welcomed as a good and decent thing to do. That a cruel regime still stands, one under which any Western media house would long since have been banned, and its journalists arrested, should not be celebrated by those same journalists and media houses with unconcealed schadenfreude. That such schadenfreude is all over in evidence is to rather give the game away that, for much of the Western media, denigrating the Western liberal order is far more important than either the facts on the ground or the brave effort, in as far as it is that, to give Iranians a chance at representative government.