Yes, human consensus is fundamentally driven by herd mentality

Iran managed to spin an illegal invasion and killing a school full of girls against the opponent. Lead by the most clownish head of state in living memory. An amazing, deftly feat. Fill out with some hundreds of words and a mandatory word count about Theocratic, Murderous, Regime, Dictatorship, Propaganda, and you have your standard IR piece.

Maybe they watched Team America.

I think what many people don't realize is that the target of this propaganda isn't the Iranian people, but American's and the west.

This isn't difficult to do with someone like Trump in power. They aren't shouting "Death to America" because they don't have to. They can easily position Trump as an enemy of the people, just as American's have done to the Ayatollah in the past.

In the West, I have always felt, we were in support of the Iranian people, but not the leadership which barely represented them. Now in the US, you have a similar dichotomy.

I don't think anyone in the west is hoping for a stronger Iran, but we're also not wishing for a stronger America.

Note: I'm Canadian, but have lived in the US and have much of my family in the US

Since the beginning of the war, the American presence in the region has weakened, with military bases having their infrastructure destroyed or even being expelled and attacked by local groups, as in the case of Iraq. Many of the dictatorial regimes that are allies of the United States are learning that the United States will not effectively protect them if they host American military bases on their territory. This makes such bases a huge disadvantage, as they drag these regimes into a war they never wanted to start. Meanwhile, Iran has grown stronger by effectively controlling the Strait of Hormuz without anyone being able to stop it, while the American hope for a change of government in Iran to one more docile to its demands is further away than before the war.

To me, this looks something very close to "winning." Which isn't much of a surprise. The United States has never been very good at winning wars against those who can defend themselves. Of course, Iran cannot survive a total war with the United States. But a total war would also be too costly for the United States and the global economy, making such a scenario more difficult to pursue.

So nice of the Economist to start off by setting the stage as a free democracy versus a murderous dictatorship. The two are starting look more and more similar each day. Which one has killed more Iranian civilians recently? Trump and Hegseth are openly committing war crimes and threatening genocide while claiming it's not even a war.

The article could have talked all about the meme war and how successful Iranian is at it without first aggrandizing the US and villianizing Iran.

> A joyless theocracy produces wittier videos than the Trump administration

"One joyless theocracy produces wittier videos than another joyless theocracy" would have laid bare the comparison, I guess.

But this isn't terribly surprising. One of the pillars of the Trump regime is people having grown tired of cloying propaganda that aims to live up to positive ideals (perhaps even earnestly), but then falls terribly short. It's been replaced with some sort of empathizing with the emotional struggles of an entitled dictatorial simpleton, not even claiming to do anything for any type of good reason, but rather just lashing out to exert some kind of mark on a world they don't understand. So traditionally-effective lofty-ideal propaganda just isn't in their wheelhouse.

If there had been some attempt to manufacture a casus belli in that context, then perhaps more Americans would look at the current war and end up identifying with the "totally unforeseeable" struggles of our local regime. But instead without feeling a need for any of this to have happened, we just see utter incompetence, graft, a puppet of Netanyahu, a distraction from the Epstein files (the likely reason for being a puppet), and so on.