By Mohamed Harees –

Lukman Harees

Western elites’ management of the Epstein files, Donald Trump’s shifting tactics around their release, and Washington’s apparent readiness to join Israeli military action against Iran all expose a deep crisis of credibility in the “liberal” order that the US claims to lead. Together, they point, less to isolated scandals than to a pattern: an increasingly unaccountable elite deploying distraction at home and force abroad while invoking values it no longer convincingly embodies.

Epstein files and elite impunity

The Epstein files—tens of thousands of pages of investigative material and estate records—document a transnational network of sexual exploitation involving powerful businessmen, politicians, and cultural figures, and the corresponding failure of institutions to restrain or expose them for years. Commentators argue that the documents reveal not just individual depravity but a “two-tier justice system” in which proximity to power all but guarantees impunity for crimes that would destroy ordinary lives. For decades, Western governments and media sold an image of rule-bound, rights-respecting governance; the Epstein archive instead shows law enforcement, prosecutors, and intelligence agencies tolerating or leveraging blackmail-friendly environments around elites.

Analysts who connect the “Epstein ecosystem” to Western decline contend that these files are a kind of X-ray of American and broader Western power structures. The liberalinternationalist project that underwrote US hegemony since 1945 assumed that Western institutions, though imperfect, were fundamentally anchored in norms of legality and human dignity. By contrast, the Epstein record suggests that key parts of the elite world operated for years “outside any recognisable moral limits,” while still making decisions over wars, markets, and cultural narratives. That disconnect—between professed values and the tolerated conduct of those at the top—is crucial for understanding why faith in Western institutions is collapsing, both domestically and in the Global South.

Trump’s diversion tactics and the Epstein scandal

Trump came to power twice as a self-styled iconoclast promising to “drain the swamp,” including by declassifying the Epstein files; yet his behaviour in office has mirrored establishment evasiveness rather than rupturing it. After his 2024 campaign vow to release all available Epstein material, the Department of Justice in early 2025 announced only a vague “first phase” of declassification, accompanied by an unsigned FBI memo essentially advising against substantive disclosure. When pressure mounted from both critics and supporters, Trump ordered the DOJ to seek access to a small tranche of grand jury records—about 70 pages—despite the government already holding roughly 100,000 pages of other Epstein-related documents.

The federal judge overseeing that move bluntly described the grandjury gambit as a “diversion.” He noted that the administration did not need judicial permission to release the files it already controlled and that its new motion seemed designed to deflect attention from its own withholding of far more extensive records. Simultaneously, reporting emerged that Trump’s name appears multiple times in internal Epstein materials and even in a “bawdy” birthday letter, deepening suspicions about his personal incentives to stall or choreograph disclosure.

Public messaging has followed a familiar pattern. At different moments, Trump has called the focus on the Epstein files a “Democrat hoax,” urged Republicans to vote to release them, told his supporters not to “waste time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein,” and attempted to redirect outrage toward his opponents instead. Analysts describe this as a textbook use of deflection and counteraccusation: promising transparency, delivering minimal substance, then blaming political enemies and the media when demands for full disclosure persist. In doing so, Trump has not broken with the culture of elite impunity signalled by the Epstein saga; he has become one of its most agile practitioners.

Moral erosion and the Western self-image

For critics, the Epstein files crystallise what they see as the “moral collapse” of Western elites: a class that talks incessantly about human rights, women’s equality, and the rule of law while protecting or minimising the most serious abuses in its own midst. One commentary argues that Western societies now confront “a rupture between people and elites,” as citizens watch institutions close ranks around offenders and then appeal to proceduralism and “ongoing investigations” to avoid deeper accountability. The scandal has become a touchstone for populist narratives about a decadent aristocracy more focused on shielding its lifestyle than upholding the standards it applies to others.

This perceived hypocrisy corrodes the soft power that once allowed the US and its allies to frame themselves as guardians of a rules-based order. The same political and media establishments that lecture rivals about corruption or misogyny are now understood, even by many of their own citizens, to have enabled a system of exploitation that targeted some of the world’s most vulnerable girls. When these governments then justify sanctions, regimechange efforts, or military strikes in the language of human rights and democracy, large audiences—especially in the Global South—interpret such claims through the lens of Epstein, Iraq, Libya, and a host of other episodes that suggest double standards rather than universal principles.

US military adventurism and Israel’s confrontation with Iran

This crisis of moral credibility is sharpened by Washington’s continuing willingness to project military force abroad, now again in the direction of Iran. In mid2025, as Israel expanded a campaign of airstrikes on Iranian nuclear and military infrastructure, the US began visibly preparing to join the offensive. Israeli jets had already hit key enrichment facilities and production sites; Netanyahu boasted that Israel was progressing “step by step” toward dismantling Tehran’s program and made clear that US participation would accelerate that goal.

US officials signalled that this was under serious consideration. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “we have plans for every detail,” while redeployments of US assets, evacuation of non-essential diplomats, and enhanced force protection for roughly 40,000 American troops in the region all pointed toward readiness for large-scale operations. Reporting indicated that military planners were examining options for bunker-busting strikes on deeply buried sites such as the Fordow enrichment plant, moves that would open what experts warned could be a “Pandora’s box” of regional escalation.

The dynamic between Washington and Tel Aviv is central here. Netanyahu’s government has long signalled that it will not tolerate an Iranian nuclear weapons capability and has repeatedly pressed US administrations to adopt a more confrontational posture. In 2025, after days of intensive consultations, sources described Trump as “increasingly inclined” to employ American forces to help Israel cripple Iran’s program, even as he publicly hedged, saying “I may do it; I may not do it.” Israeli officials, for their part, made no secret that they regarded US backing as the decisive factor in achieving strategic success against Tehran, despite the enormous damage Iran’s missiles caused in Tel Aviv.

US credibility has also been gravely damaged by its role in enabling Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza, widely condemned across the Global South as a genocidal war. Even as images of mass civilian deaths, destroyed hospitals, and deliberate deprivation of food, water, and medicine circulated globally, Washington continued to supply weapons, provide diplomatic cover, and block or dilute ceasefire resolutions, insisting that Israel was merely exercising its right to self-defence. For many outside the transatlantic sphere, this exposed a brutal double standard: the same US that invokes “rules-based order” and “humanitarian norms” against its adversaries was seen underwriting what UN experts, major human rights organisations, and numerous states described as potential genocide or at least atrocity crimes. In this view, US support for Israel’s war did not just weaken America’s moral standing; it shattered any remaining claim that Western power is fundamentally constrained by law or universal principle, reinforcing the perception that rights talk is a strategic instrument rather than a genuine ethical commitment.

From the vantage point of many observers, this looks like another episode of US military adventurism: a superpower edging toward offensive action in a complex region, driven not only by its own strategic calculations but by the insistence of a close ally with its own maximalist security doctrine. The rationale is familiar. Officials and sympathetic analysts invoke existential threats, non-proliferation obligations, and the need to protect a so-called ‘democratic’ ally from a theocratic regime, casting strikes as regrettable but necessary steps in defence of a “rules-based order.”

Critics counter that this argument ignores the broader history of US interventions that destabilised the Middle East while eroding international law—from Iraq in 2003 to the covert and proxy campaigns in Syria and beyond. They argue that the same government that struggles to come clean about the Epstein files, and that tolerates a domestic justice system visibly skewed in favour of the powerful, is in no position to lecture others about law and morality while preparing pre-emptive attacks that many jurists would deem of doubtful legality. In their view, a State that cannot credibly police its own elites has limited legitimacy when it claims to use violence abroad in the name of universal principles, rendering the UN system a toothless tiger.

The juxtaposition is stark: at home, Trump and other leaders deploy a churn of spectacle—partial document dumps, grandjury manoeuvres, accusations against opponents—to keep the political arena focused on personalities and partisan theatre rather than systemic complicity revealed by the Epstein files. Abroad, the same leadership class speaks the language of moral clarity as it weighs participation in a potentially massive regional war, framed as a necessary stand against evil regimes and nuclear blackmail.

Commentators who see these as connected phenomena argue that diversionary tactics around scandals like Epstein are not just about individual survival; they help preserve the larger architecture of elite impunity and foreignpolicy continuity. By keeping domestic publics fragmented, cynical, and fixated on episodic outrage, leaders reduce the likelihood of sustained scrutiny of the deeper structures that link permissive treatment of abusers at home to permissive use of force abroad. Meanwhile, every new military confrontation offers a fresh stage on which to perform Western virtue—defender of allies, protector of civilisation—even as the moral capital that once gave those claims traction has been quietly spent.

In the end, the story that runs from the Epstein files to Trump’s diversionary theatrics and the drumbeat for yet another war is not really about one man, one scandal or one strike package over Iran. It is about a system that protects its predators and punishes its critics, that buries evidence at home while dropping bombs abroad, and that still insists on calling this arrangement “the free world.” A West that cannot bring its own elites to account for industrial-scale abuse, that arms and shields an ally accused of waging a genocidal war, and that toys with igniting a regional inferno at Israel’s insistence, is not merely hypocritical; it is morally disoriented. The question is no longer whether such a system can credibly preach about human rights and the rule of law, but whether it can continue to command obedience once its subjects fully grasp how thoroughly those words have been emptied of meaning.