In the era of hybrid warfare and cognitive wars, transnational media play a pivotal role in constructing security and diplomatic realities. Given the recent military and security confrontations in West Asia (particularly Operation "True Promise 2"), the Arab world's media landscape has turned into a battlefield of conflicting discourses. However, no study has yet been conducted that employs modern discourse analysis methods to comparatively examine the "discourse of diplomacy" of two networks, Al-Alam and Al-Arabiya, in covering this event. The current study aims to analyze and comparatively study the "discourse of diplomacy" governing the Al-Alam and Al-Arabiya news networks in their encounter with the "True Promise 2" military operation. This qualitative study was conducted in the autumn of 2024, applying the "Operational Discourse Analysis" method at five levels. The research data consist of 10 key news reports focusing on "media coverage of events and incidents following the operation," which were extracted and analyzed through purposive sampling from among the reports published in the first week after the event (October 1–7, 2024). The findings indicate that these two media outlets have articulated two completely opposing discursive types. Al-Arabiya, by adopting a discourse of "threat exaggeration and retaliation justification," sought to marginalize Iran's legal arguments, thereby providing a cognitive foundation for legitimizing reciprocal military response. In contrast, Al-Alam, by constructing a discourse of "consolidation of deterrent authority and legitimization of defense," presented a rule-of-law narrative of Iran's military activism and equated missile capability with the concept of regional stabilization. The results of this comparative study imply that the media diplomacy apparatus of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in order to protect national interests and neutralize the rival's fear-mongering, needs to transition from a denial-based defense to a proactive narrative-building offense strategy and to develop organic and inter-discursive networking.