Don't Pray for Peace. Pray for Victory.
On March 6th, President Donald Trump posted what I believe was one of the most important statements made during the war between the United States, Israel and the Islamic regime occupying Iran. The first sentence in particular:
“There will be no deal with the Islamic Republic except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.”
What struck me was the clarity of it. It reflected an understanding that has become increasingly rare in the Western world: there are some forces that cannot be reasoned with because their ideology depends upon perpetual conflict. They do not seek peaceful coexistence. They seek victory. The question, then, is whether we have the courage to seek it too.
If there were a button I could press that would instantly bring genuine peace to the Middle East without another missile being launched or another life being lost, I would press it without hesitation. I suspect almost every decent person would. Nobody with a functioning conscience celebrates war for its own sake. War is tragic. It leaves behind broken families, shattered cities and generations forced to carry scars they never asked for.
Unfortunately, there is no such button.
Peace generally refers to a state of harmony and freedom from hostility, violence or mental disturbance. It is one of humanity’s highest aspirations. Yet somewhere along the way, we have begun confusing peace with the mere absence of fighting. We celebrate ceasefires before asking whether they actually resolve the conflict. We praise diplomatic agreements simply because they postpone violence. We convince ourselves that if the guns fall silent for long enough, peace has somehow arrived.
But that is not peace.
Peace is not secured simply because two sides stop shooting at one another. History shows that lasting peace is achieved when the ideology driving the conflict is defeated so decisively that it loses the ability to impose itself through violence. A ceasefire may postpone a war. A negotiated settlement may pause it. But neither necessarily ends it. The question is not whether the fighting has stopped. The question is whether the cause of the fighting still exists.
The Middle East offers a painful illustration of this reality.
The Islamic regime occupying Iran has spent decades exporting its revolutionary ideology across the region while holding the Iranian people hostage inside their own country. Millions of Iranians have risked everything to reclaim their nation, only to be imprisoned, tortured or killed for demanding the very freedoms many of us take for granted. At the same time, the regime continues to arm and finance proxies whose purpose extends far beyond defending its interests. Their mission is ideological.
Hezbollah has turned large parts of Lebanon into a battlefield from which it can wage war against Israel while simultaneously holding the Lebanese people hostage to a conflict many of them do not want. Hamas remains committed to the destruction of Israel and refuses to disarm, despite repeated opportunities to do so. Even now, after so much devastation in Gaza, its leadership remains more committed to its revolutionary cause than to the welfare of the people it claims to represent.
These are not isolated conflicts unfolding independently of one another. They are different fronts in the same ideological struggle, fuelled by a revolutionary movement that has spent decades spreading instability throughout the region.
That is why I find myself increasingly frustrated whenever I hear people say, “Pray for peace.”
I understand the sentiment. I genuinely do. It comes from a good place. But good intentions are not enough if they are built upon a misunderstanding of how peace is actually achieved.
For many people, peace has become synonymous with ending the fighting. Secure another ceasefire. Sign another agreement. Return everyone to the negotiating table. Yet history repeatedly shows that when an ideology is fundamentally committed to conquest, terrorism or perpetual revolution, negotiations alone cannot resolve the problem. At best, they delay it. At worst, they give those committed to violence the time and space to regroup.
What Is Peace?
That is why I believe we should be praying for something else entirely.
Not for peace.
For victory.
That statement will undoubtedly make some people uncomfortable. It sounds too militant. Too uncompromising. In an age where every conflict is expected to end around a negotiating table, calling for victory can almost sound primitive. Yet history tells us that some of the greatest periods of peace have only been achieved after those committed to conquest were decisively defeated.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched a number of prominent voices urge people to “pray for peace.” Many of them come from the isolationist wing of the American Right. Interestingly, they often find themselves echoing the same instinct as those on the far Left. Although they arrive there by different routes, both seem to share the belief that war is largely self-inflicted; that if the United States and the wider Western world simply withdrew from international conflicts, the conflicts themselves would somehow fade away.
I find that view profoundly detached from reality.
It assumes that conflict exists because the West chooses to participate in it, rather than because there are movements whose ambitions exist entirely independently of the West’s wishes. The Islamic regime occupying Iran did not spend the last four decades building a revolutionary network throughout the Middle East because America provoked it into doing so. Hamas did not massacre civilians on October 7th because Western governments failed to negotiate hard enough. Hezbollah did not accumulate an arsenal capable of holding Lebanon hostage because Israel refused to compromise.
These organisations possess agency. They make choices. They pursue objectives that they openly declare to the world.
One of the strangest habits of modern political discourse is that we often take ideologies less seriously than the people who actually believe them.
When the leaders of the Islamic regime chant “Death to America,” call Israel a cancer that must be eradicated, and repeatedly promise the destruction of both, we are told not to take the rhetoric too literally. When Hamas explicitly states that its struggle will continue until Israel ceases to exist, many still insist that the organisation’s goals are ultimately negotiable. We convince ourselves that enough diplomacy, enough economic incentives or enough carefully crafted agreements will eventually persuade these movements to abandon the very ideas upon which they were founded.
Why?
History gives us remarkably little reason to believe that revolutionary ideologies simply moderate themselves when confronted with goodwill.
Instead, history teaches precisely the opposite. It shows us that movements built upon conquest tend to interpret concessions not as acts of generosity, but as evidence that their opponents lack the will to resist. They do not see compromise as the beginning of peace. They see it as an opportunity to regroup before continuing the struggle.
That is precisely why so many of us looked at the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and the Islamic regime with deep scepticism.
We were immediately accused of wanting war. Of being “neocons.” Of preferring bombs to diplomacy.
But that criticism fundamentally misunderstands the objection.
The objection is not that we dislike peace. The objection is that we do not believe this is peace.
There is a profound difference between ending a war and ending the ideology that started it. As long as the Islamic regime retains the ability to rebuild its military, finance its proxies and continue exporting its revolutionary vision across the Middle East, the underlying conflict has not been resolved. It has merely been postponed.
That is not peace.
It is an intermission.
The Lesson of History
History has already shown us where the logic of appeasement leads.
In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain travelled to Munich to negotiate with Adolf Hitler. The agreement that followed allowed Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia, in exchange for Hitler’s promise that he had no further territorial ambitions. Upon returning to Britain, Chamberlain famously declared that he had secured “peace for our time.”
It has become one of the most famous misjudgements in modern history.
The problem was not that Chamberlain desired peace. Every decent leader should desire peace. The problem was that he fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the regime with which he was negotiating.
Hitler did not seek peaceful coexistence with his neighbours. His ideology demanded expansion. It demanded conquest. It demanded domination. To believe that one concession would satisfy those ambitions was to misunderstand the ideology itself.
Hitler was not appeased.
He was emboldened.
Every concession reinforced his belief that the democracies of Europe lacked both the confidence and the resolve to stop him. Six months later, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, plunging Europe into the deadliest war in human history.
It is worth asking a difficult question.
How was peace ultimately restored to Europe?
It was not restored because Hitler experienced a change of heart. It was not restored because another agreement was signed or because another diplomatic summit was convened. Peace returned only after the Allies decisively defeated the Axis powers and dismantled the machinery that had driven the war in the first place.
The cost was unimaginably high. Millions died. Entire cities were reduced to rubble. Families were scattered across continents. There is nothing glorious about war.
But there is also nothing peaceful about allowing an expansionist ideology to continue unchecked.
Iran Belongs to the Iranian People
That lesson matters just as much today as it did then.
The Islamic regime occupying Iran has spent nearly half a century building a network of proxies designed to export its revolution throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen and countless militias across Iraq and Syria are not isolated movements pursuing unrelated objectives. They form part of a broader revolutionary project that has brought misery not only to Israelis, but also to Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis and, above all, to the Iranian people themselves.
The greatest victims of the Islamic regime have always been the people of Iran.
For decades, millions of courageous Iranians have risked imprisonment, torture and death in pursuit of something most of us scarcely have to think about: the right to choose their own government, to speak freely, to worship freely, to allow women to live as equal citizens, and to build a future without fear.
Time and again, they have poured into the streets believing that this might finally be the moment their country is returned to them.
Time and again, they have been met with bullets.
It is one of the cruellest ironies of modern politics that so many people in the West claim to stand with the Iranian people while simultaneously advocating policies that would leave the very regime oppressing them intact.
The people of Iran do not need another agreement that allows their oppressors to rebuild.
They need the conditions that make liberation possible. That does not mean outsiders should decide Iran’s future. Quite the opposite.
Iran belongs to the Iranian people. It always has.
But before a nation can reclaim itself, the machinery of repression that keeps it enslaved must first be weakened to the point where ordinary people have a genuine opportunity to rise.
That is not a rejection of peace. It is the necessary precondition for achieving it.
Lebanon and the Path to Peace
If the argument I’ve made so far sounds too theoretical, Lebanon offers a glimpse of what it looks like in practice.
For years, Hezbollah has held Lebanon hostage. It transformed large parts of the country into a launching pad for its war against Israel while dragging the Lebanese people into conflicts many of them never chose. As long as Hezbollah remained overwhelmingly powerful, there was little room for genuine peace. No Lebanese government could meaningfully challenge it, and no serious conversation about the future of the country could take place.
That has begun to change.
After nearly two years of sustained military pressure, Israel has severely degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. Its leadership has been decimated. Its command structure disrupted. Its aura of invincibility shattered.
Something remarkable has happened as a result.
Many Lebanese, who for years were too frightened to openly confront Hezbollah, have begun finding the courage to do exactly that. Conversations that once seemed impossible are now taking place. Cooperation between Lebanon and Israel, however limited it may currently be, is no longer unthinkable.
That is not because everybody suddenly likes one another.
It is because the greatest obstacle to peace has been weakened.
There is still a long road ahead. Hezbollah must ultimately be disarmed if Lebanon is ever to become a fully sovereign nation. But for the first time in years, genuine peace feels like a realistic possibility.
Not because somebody negotiated a better agreement with Hezbollah.
Because Hezbollah is losing.
Peace Is Worth Fighting For
People will inevitably accuse those of us who hold this view of wanting endless war.
They have it backwards. We want the forever wars to end.
Not for six months.
Not until the next ceasefire collapses.
Not until the next terrorist army rearms.
We want them to end once and for all.
That is why so many of us looked at President Trump’s call for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” and saw something far more significant than a political slogan. We saw moral clarity. We saw an understanding that there are some ideologies which cannot be accommodated because they leave no room for peaceful coexistence. They seek domination, not compromise. They do not interpret restraint as goodwill, but as weakness.
Peace is one of humanity’s highest aspirations. It always has been. It is the foundation upon which families are built, societies flourish and ordinary people are free to pursue meaningful lives. Precisely because peace is so precious, we should be careful not to confuse it with surrender, appeasement or temporary pauses in violence.
So no, I will not pray for a pause in the fighting if all it accomplishes is postponing the next war.
I will pray for the kind of victory that makes peace possible.
Because genuine peace has never been the absence of conflict.
It has always been the defeat of those committed to perpetual conflict.