by Syed Ahfadul Mujtaba
A reflection linking Shakespeare’s Richard II to modern geopolitics, arguing that legitimacy, not force, determines power, and its erosion reshapes wars, alliances, and global perception
Here is an embarrassing admission: I have a degree in English literature, and I never really read Richard II. I skimmed it. I knew the famous lines. I could have bluffed my way through a dinner party. But I didn’t understand it, not until a real war forced the play’s central question into my daily news feed.
That question is deceptively simple: what makes authority feel real? Not legal. Not just. Real, in the sense that people obey, defer, and rally around it. Richard II is Shakespeare’s most searching answer, and in early 2026, watching the conflict between Iran, Israel, and the United States unfold, I kept seeing the same drama playing out on a global stage.
The crown is not a metal object. It is a shared mental state.
What Richard II Is Actually About
King Richard II is the rightful ruler of England, anointed, legitimate, divinely ordained, or so he believes. He is also a poor king: impulsive, financially reckless, surrounded by flatterers. When he makes one catastrophic mistake, seizing the inherited estate of his exiled cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, to fund a foreign war, he sets off a chain of events he cannot control.
Bolingbroke returns to England. He says, at first, that he only wants what is his by right. But allies flock to him. Richard’s supporters quietly vanish. And without a single decisive battle, the kingdom changes hands.
Richard is not defeated militarily. He loses something harder to see and harder to recover: the collective belief that he has the right to rule. His authority drains away the moment enough powerful people stop acting as though it is real.
Shakespeare captures this in one devastating speech. Returning from Ireland to find his position crumbling, Richard abandons the performance of confidence and begins narrating his own collapse: “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings.” He speaks of a crown that “keeps Death his court”, grandeur on the outside, mortality within. The hollow crown.
Later, during the formal transfer of power, Richard asks for a mirror. He wants to understand how he can look like a king and no longer be one. He smashes it. The point is devastating: authority, once cracked, cannot be reassembled into a seamless image.
Richard does not simply lose a battle. He loses the audience.
Why This Matters Now
In late February 2026, the United States and Israel launched strikes against Iran, framed officially as pre-emptive self-defence against an imminent nuclear threat. Iran denied any such intention. And almost immediately, the conflict became not only a military event but an argument, about legality, about justification, about who gets to define aggression.
The weeks that followed showed exactly what Shakespeare meant. Spain declared the war illegal and closed its airspace to US military aircraft. Germany’s chancellor expressed doubts about the clarity of the war’s aims. More than a hundred American international law experts signed an open letter arguing that some US strikes may constitute war crimes. Switzerland’s defence minister invoked the United Nations Charter to call the attacks a breach of international law. At the Security Council, fierce wrangling broke out over the wording of a resolution on the Strait of Hormuz, with China objecting to any language that might be read as authorising further force.
Legitimacy, the collective sense that an action is justified, legal, and within the bounds of what powerful states may do, was being contested in real time: in allied capitals, in UN conference rooms, and in newspaper columns across the Global South. That contest was already shaping coalition behaviour, diplomatic latitude, and the fragile stability of global shipping lanes.
Iran, meanwhile, had its own story to tell, and it was not starting in 2026. Iran’s modern history is, in large part, a story of legitimacy wounds that never fully healed. The 1953 coup, in which the United States and Britain covertly removed the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and restored the Shah, remains part of Iranian national political identity. When foreign military action comes today, it is easily narrated as repetition, the empire doing what the empire does. That narrative, whether one agrees with it or not, has real power. It sustains resistance long after temporary battlefield losses.
Richard II understood this too late: you cannot govern or project power through force alone. You need the room to be believed in.
When legitimacy evaporates, power must either escalate into raw coercion — or be replaced.
The Lesson We Keep Refusing to Learn
Shakespeare gives us no policy prescriptions. He gives us a warning: legitimacy is a resource you spend, often faster than you can replenish it.
When the stated reasons for an action keep shifting, when civilians bear visible costs, when allies go quiet or turn hostile, the performance of lawful, bounded force collapses. Coalition partners hedge. Swing states calculate their options. The war may be won militarily, while something essential is being lost everywhere else.
Richard II shows this with painful clarity. The king wins every argument. He has the better speeches. He is the rightful occupant of the throne. And none of it saves him, because legitimacy is not about being right. It is about being recognised as right, by enough people, in enough rooms, for long enough.
Robert Kaplan and the Courage to Accept Tragedy
There is a book I have been reading alongside this conflict, and it reframes everything: The Tragic Mind by Robert D Kaplan.
Kaplan is a geopolitical writer who has spent decades reporting from places where order collapses, and power is nakedly revealed. In The Tragic Mind, he argues that the greatest failure of modern foreign policy thinking is its allergy to tragedy. We prefer to believe that problems are solvable, that with enough willpower, enough precision, enough righteous intent, things can be set right. Tragedy, Kaplan insists, is the refusal of that comfort.
The tragic mind does not wallow in despair. It looks steadily at the world as it is, at the limits of power, at the costs of action, at the way good intentions produce terrible outcomes, and refuses to look away. It accepts that every choice forecloses other choices, that every use of force carries consequences that cannot be fully controlled, and that the arc of history does not bend toward justice automatically or cheaply.
Richard II is a tragedy in exactly this sense. Richard is not a villain. He is a man who genuinely believes in his own sacred right to rule — and who discovers, too late, that belief alone is not enough. He cannot adapt. He cannot see past his own performance of kingship to the political reality underneath. He is a man without the tragic mind: certain of his rightness, blind to his fragility.
Kaplan would recognise the current conflict immediately. He would note that every major actor, the United States, Israel, and Iran, has its own story of righteous necessity, its own narrative of existential stakes. Each believes, with genuine conviction, that it is defending something real and precious. And each is largely blind to how its actions look from the other side of the mirror.
The tragic wisdom Kaplan calls for does not say: do nothing. It says: act with eyes open. Understand that force has limits, that legitimacy, once lost, is brutally hard to recover, and that the international audience, allied capitals and the billions of people watching, is not a backdrop to the real action. It is part of the action.
The United States and Israel are not Richard II. Iran is not Richard II. But all of them are, in different ways, performing authority in front of an audience that is deciding whether to keep believing. And the audience, as Shakespeare knew and Kaplan confirms, always has the last word.
The tragic mind does not wallow in despair. It looks steadily at the world as it is, and refuses to look away.
I wish I had understood Richard II when I was studying it. I could have read it as a museum piece, a quaint drama about medieval succession, safely remote. Instead, I came to it late, through the side door of a war I was trying to understand. Shakespeare had already written down what I was watching. He just set it in the fourteenth century, so we would not recognise ourselves.
We always do, eventually.
(The author, after retiring as IGP in Jammu and Kashmir Police, was a member of the Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission. Ideas are personal.)
