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OPINION
The paradox of flows: when the same hand arms its own enemy
Editorial by N3R1-70
Series “The paradox of flows” · 7 of 7
This piece tries to answer that with a simple idea: using non-state armed groups as a tool of power is not the exception of some "bad" regime. It is an ordinary practice, used by governments that present themselves as opposites — and that accuse each other of it, while doing the same thing.
Calling what a rival does "terrorism" and what an ally does "national security" is convenient, but it hides the reality: almost every power, when it suits it, backs an armed force it doesn't directly control, to achieve something it couldn't achieve with its own troops. The problem isn't that this happens. The problem is when it's denied, or excused only for one's own allies.
A tool for not lumping everyone together
Saying "everyone does it" would be convenient, but it's laziness dressed up as honesty. Judging well requires one more question: what kind of violence does this support produce? There's a difference between a government that uses an armed group as a tactical move abroad, while remaining subject to a free press and independent courts at home — and a government for which violence, at home and abroad, is how it holds itself together. In the first case we're talking about a calculation, however cynical. In the second, about a system that couldn't stand without that violence.
This site has verified, source by source, six episodes that help show the mechanism from several angles. Israel let Qatari money flow to Hamas for years, funding tolerated as a tactical calculation. The United States appears twice: weapons from the Timber Sycamore programme ended up in the wrong hands in Syria, and state torture at CIA black sites in Europe, now condemned by real rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. Russia sends its own Africa Corps mercenaries into Mali alongside the local army, with civilians killed in the process. Turkey, together with China, is now militarily backing both sides of the same Libyan conflict, in violation of the UN embargo. And Iran funnelled nearly a billion dollars to Hezbollah in 2025 alone, according to the US Treasury, at the head of a network that also includes Hamas and the Houthis.
These are different governments — Israel, the United States, Russia, Turkey, China, Iran — each of which would use opposite language to describe its own foreign policy. Yet the mechanism repeats itself identically: a state actor funding, arming, or turning a blind eye to a force that doesn't answer directly to it, and that it disowns when things go wrong.
Of these six cases, Iran comes closest to the second type of violence described above — not an occasional tactical move, but a declared part of its own political identity through what Tehran calls the "Axis of Resistance": a network holding together Shias, Sunnis and even Zaydis (religious groups often at odds with each other) not through shared faith but through shared convenience against a common enemy. That's an important difference of degree from the other five cases, and it shouldn't be flattened away.
Whoever arms a group often loses it
Whoever funds an armed force rarely manages to control it fully, or for long. Every sponsor of this kind sooner or later suffers the blowback of what it created: a group trained against one enemy turns against whoever armed it, or against an ally of whoever armed it. But it would be just as wrong to think of these groups as mere "puppets." They have their own strategy, their own ideology, their own calculations — and they know how to use the money and weapons they receive to their own advantage, just as their funders use them.
The limits of this comparison
An honest comparison must also say where it stops. Otherwise it becomes the opposite of what it claims to be: instead of looking at the facts, it simply judges "the West" or "its enemies" regardless of what they actually did. Three things need to be said clearly.
First: on the practical level — money, weapons, training given to an armed group — the calculation is identical everywhere. But international law remains the only shared yardstick we have for judging everyone the same way, even though it was born in 1945 among that era's victors. Using it anyway is a choice, and we state it openly.
Second: a government that commits serious crimes beyond its own borders, but that at home allows a press capable of investigating it and courts capable of convicting it, is not the same as a government that eliminates any such check from the outset. This is not an acquittal for the first. It is a real difference, not merely a rhetorical one.
Third: similar effects — failed states, civil wars, civilian deaths — don't always come from the same causes. One collapse can come from an intervention that removes a power without calculating what comes next. Another can come from a deliberate, sustained strategy over time. Recognising that effects look alike doesn't mean responsibilities are interchangeable.
Where this site stands
We don't side with one bloc of countries to accuse another. A government's cynical calculation remains cynical even when a rival's propaganda is the one pointing it out — and that rival's propaganda remains propaganda even when, for once, it tells the truth about someone else's crime. Our job isn't to find an even-handed balance at all costs. It's to look at the facts steadily, without letting any government wash its hands using another's crimes as an alibi.
Internal sources: the six news pieces cited, published on this site with source-by-source verification. Source of the reasoning: internal working document "The Paradox of Flows," July 16, 2026 (unpublished).