Over the weekend, the US and Israeli governments attacked Iran. In the days since, both militaries have reportedly struck thousands of targets, and Iranian forces have retaliated by launching hundreds or even thousands of missiles and drones at Israel and at US bases in surrounding Gulf countries.
When announcing the operation, President Trump explicitly said it was meant to free the Iranian people from the regime they currently live under. And, indeed, the first strikes targeted and killed dozens of Iran’s leaders—including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. However, it quickly became clear that there is no organized internal guerrilla force or government-in-waiting for the invading powers to install, as there typically is in a genuine regime-change operation.
What we’ve seen so far has looked a lot more like an attempt to bring about regime collapse than regime change. And that isn’t necessarily surprising. As I explained last week, despite all the propaganda and focus-group-workshopped talking points we’re subjected to about the Iranian regime’s supposed obsession with starting a suicidal nuclear war, the true motivation for this entire decades-long conflict with Iran is to protect and expand Israeli hegemony over the Middle East.
And to that end, state collapse, or the condition of permanent civil war that is often called a “failed state,” would be just as much of a success as the installation of a puppet government. It wouldn’t be good for the Iranian people, or the exiled Iranian opponents of the regime that have been used to sell this war. But the suffering of the Iranian people at the hands of the regime in Tehran was an excuse for starting this war, not a true motivation for it.
Regardless, the key to any campaign to collapse or, at least, greatly weaken the Iranian regime is to destroy its ability to launch ballistic missiles. And that has clearly been the focus of the air campaign so far. But that has to be done quickly. Last June, during the so-called Twelve Day War, it quickly became clear that the rate at which the US and Israel were burning through missile interceptors was unsustainable and would soon leave them almost entirely defenseless in the face of Iranian missile and drone attacks—which is why it was the US and Israel who approached Iran about a ceasefire.
Interceptors cost a lot more and take a lot longer to build than the weapons they’re used to destroy. This was not an unforeseen or unpredictable problem. It’s one of the many reasons why many were warning against what Trump and Netanyahu just did—including some of Trump’s own generals.
So now, the American public has been pulled into bankrolling a massive air campaign where American and Israeli forces are racing to destroy Iran’s extensive and highly-dispersed ballistic missile footing before the interceptors run out. And, even if that’s somehow successful, there are other concerns like the economic ramifications of oil infrastructure getting struck, as we’re already seeing, or the Strait of Hormuz becoming too dangerous for ships to traverse.
There’s also a real risk of violence breaking out here in the US. There are hundreds of thousands of Shia Muslims in the United States, and our government just helped kill their highest-ranking religious leader. If even a dozen or so angry young men from that large domestic population get set on taking some form of violent revenge that could result in some real mayhem here at home—it may have already begun with a shooting in Texas on Saturday.
It’s also hard to believe that, in a world of “Great Power Competition,” the US would really just walk away after the Iranian regime collapsed and leave a vacuum for a rival power like China—which isn’t spread nearly as thin as the US—to fill. The Trump administration is adamant that this won’t turn into another endless nation-building exercise, but it’s hard to see how that would be avoidable if they really try to go all the way.
All of this barely scratches the surface of all the reasons to be concerned about the consequences of what Trump and his Israeli counterparts decided to do, which is why so many of us were warning against this in the first place.
But, while all these details and potential consequences are important and worth discussing, it’s also important to take a step back and remind ourselves of the big picture. Because the problems with this new war with Iran go far deeper than the fast-changing events in the news this week. And being overly focused on them can feed the impression that, even if it’s difficult, it is possible that this can all end well. It isn’t.
Because, remember the situation we’re in. Our government is almost $40 trillion in debt, and the population is in the grips of an escalating inflation crisis—what some people misleadingly call the “affordability crisis.” This isn’t happening because of “corporate greed” or because taxes are too low, but because our government is spending a tremendous amount of money every year and hiding the direct cost of much of it by printing new currency. The sheer scale of all this spending has put us on an unsustainable path.
And a major reason for this—arguably the primary reason—is because, after WWII, the government in DC used the American people’s wealth, and their own relatively strong footing compared to the rest of the global powers who had been more directly impacted by the war, to transform the United States into a highly-militarized global empire.
Using the Federal Reserve, the government brought about what is, in effect, a permanent wartime economy. And then, using the lie that the USSR was planning to militarily invade the entire world—including the continental US—as an excuse, the American political class built the largest and most powerful military in human history. And then, immediately, they turned around and offered this massively powerful military and intelligence apparatus up for sale to the highest briber—be it a domestic interest group or foreign government.
And so for decades now, the American people have been forced by our government to fund tens of trillions of dollars’ worth of unnecessary wars, military operations, and armament buildups around the world—not because they were necessary or in our interest to do so—but because they were beneficial for weapons companies, foreign “allies” that were good at lobbying US lawmakers, and the ballooning military-intelligence bureaucracy in DC.
The reason this is a problem is not merely because it’s a bad deal, or that the system is “inefficient,” but because this extremely expensive and ever-accelerating imperial project is killing our country. Or, more specifically, killing the institutions and norms that made American society wealthy and socially cohesive enough for this empire-building to even be possible in the first place.
While the scale of the American empire is unmatched in history, the cycle we’re on is not. History is full of empires. All began as societies with strong wealth-building, pro-social institutions—namely, a private property norm, sound money, and a respect for rights. But all destroyed those institutions by centralizing into a single imperial state that unnecessarily siphoned more and more of the society’s wealth and resources away from honest, creative uses into violent, destructive imperial projects—mainly war. And wars kill empires.
That doesn’t even necessarily mean losing a war—just look at the British Empire. It can also come from an imperial state stretching itself so thin with an endless series of wars that enrich and empower the ruling class enough to encourage them to escalate or kick off new larger wars that grow and grow until the population cannot sustain it anymore, and the empire collapses into a pathetic shell of whatever strong and genuinely impressive society the state used to fuel its expansion.
As Pat Buchanan put it, war is “how empires perish.” It is how the classical empires perished. It is how the British, French, Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires perished. And it will be how the American empire perishes, unless we put ourselves on a new path. Those are the stakes.
Trump’s electoral success came from people recognizing how badly we need meaningful change. There’s still plenty of confusion about what specifically has gone wrong and what the path out looks like, but there is a widespread sense that our current national trajectory is unsustainable.
The problem with this new campaign in Iran is not merely that it will likely have bad near-term consequences or that it risks turning into another long nation-building exercise. The main problem with this operation is that it represents the American government doubling down on the imperial project that brought about our accelerating national crisis. All, as Secretary Rubio all-but-admitted on Monday, to help the current Israeli government face down a geopolitical rival.
We need to stop charging towards our own collapse. We are an empire that can opt out of its own decline. But only if we first stop falling for the lies that either we are perpetually one intervention away from achieving a durable peace that will result in our imperial state voluntarily giving up its globe-spanning power, or that this massive, expensive, aggressive, ever-expanding warfare state causing our decline is actually fine as long as most wars don’t play out exactly like Vietnam or Iraq. These lies are being pushed very hard right now. Stop falling for it.
