This new state, forged in the crucible of conflict with two nuclear powers, pursues a militarized sovereignty that renders it simultaneously insular and strategically aggressive. Paradoxically, however, this emerging Iran presents President Trump with a workable chance to exit the Middle East to focus on rebalancing the US-China relationship, promoting domestic industrial renewal, and securing the Western Hemisphere — priorities laid out in Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy.

Khamenei’s most notable move is the elevation of Mohsen Rezaei as secretary of the country’s Supreme National Security Council, which coordinates decision-making across the state’s various security and military agencies. Rezaei is a close adviser to Khamenei, and is the longest- serving commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, having overseen Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s. The council was most recently headed by Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr after an Israeli air strike killed its high-profile secretary Ali Larijani in March. 

While Zolghadr has taken on a new role as Khamenei’s political adviser, his removal is a blow to the pragmatic-conservative bloc that has coalesced around the speaker of the Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, since Larijani’s assassination. Qalibaf, of course, has been Vice President JD Vance’s chief interlocutor in the stalled effort to bring the war to a negotiated settlement. Zolghadr’s replacement by the hard-line Rezaei is a telling indicator of the new supreme leader’s views on how the US-Iran talks were handled.

The previous arrangement — which empowered Qalibaf and Zolghadr — had effectively sidelined Khamenei from direct oversight over Iran’s deep state: his passive role repeatedly became a source of controversy in the negotiations. Khamenei’s hiding (due to fear of assassination) didn’t help the situation. In appointing Rezaei to lead the security council, Khamenei is now seeking to regain control and diminish what he likely sees as Qalibaf’s excessive influence in the system.

The Rezaei appointment is coupled with a run of high-level appointments in the Iranian military. These include Maj. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi as commander in chief of the IRGC and Maj. Gen. Ali Abdollahi as chief of staff of the armed forces. Both men are IRGC commanders who played leading roles in the Iran-Iraq War. 

Not all of the appointments are anti-Qalibaf. Having led Iran’s primary operational command in the current war, Abdollahi is a close ally of Qalibaf’s, having served as his deputy in multiple positions. Vahidi, meanwhile, is Rezaei’s protégé going back to the ’80s. Seen in tandem, the appointments represent a careful balancing act aimed at preempting potential internal power struggles and stamping the new supreme leader’s authority on the security state as a whole. 

At the same time, the appointments underscore Khamenei Jr.’s tightening grip on power and Tehran’s hardening — if audacious — strategic trajectory.

At first glance, the appointment of “security-first” veterans ensures that while the state’s military and logistics are run with efficiency, its overarching direction remains uncompromising. The Islamic Republic’s leadership views the conflict with Washington through an existential lens. This perspective turns the state’s red lines into rigid, non-negotiable realities for the nation as such. After all, when survival is at stake, any regime’s internal fractures yield to a unified front, as dictated by necessity and shared strategic priorities.

More from this author

The dangerous martyrdom of Khamenei

By Arta Moeini

Yet, this defensive consolidation and rallying around the flag in the face of war doesn’t mean that internal politics have gone away. Nor does it imply that long-term institutional and ideological rivalries have ceased. Rather, beneath the surface of wartime unity, Iran’s deep state remains locked in a fierce, quiet civil war between two competing factions — not over the Islamic Republic’s desired end state, but over how to get there. The resolution of this internal struggle, combined with Mojtaba Khamenei’s evolving leadership strategy, could also determine the fate of the Middle East.

The internal schism splits Iran’s security establishment between those who advocate for a technocratic Islamic Republic with normal ties with the rest of the world; and those who believe the only way to safeguard Iran’s sovereignty and national security is by turning the country into an autarkic fortress capable of fierce power projection in its near abroad.

The first faction is composed of technocratic-military elites and conservative clerics. Qalibaf is their most visible representative. But there are many others, including the cleric Ali Asghar Hejazi, the network’s main powerbroker, who served as an intelligence consigliere to Khamenei Sr., and who remains the deputy chief of staff at the Office of the Supreme Leader. This camp views the state through the lens of (Islamic) legitimacy and bureaucratic rationality. Having witnessed the devastating economic and physical toll of protracted conflict, its members advocate a “smart authoritarianism” — a model akin to Putinist Russia or post-Mao China. For them, Iran’s military and nuclear leverage aren’t holy relics, but strategic bargaining chips to be traded for sanctions relief, economic stabilization, and regime survival.

Opposing them is the regime’s old-guard intelligence and military network, spearheaded by Rezaei, Vahidi, and former IRGC chief Yahya Rahim-Safavi. The faction’s most critical internal enforcer is the ruthless shadow operator Hossein Taeb, Mojtaba Khamenei’s confidant and the former chief of the IRGC Intelligence Organization, now appointed to head the Basij paramilitia that operates as an auxiliary branch of the IRGC. This faction is unyielding about defending what it regards as the true principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and subscribes to a doctrine of permanent mobilization and attritional warfare. Members view any diplomatic overture or concession on the nuclear dossier not as statesmanship, but as an existential trap designed by Washington to trigger systemic collapse. To them, the Strait of Hormuz and the country’s uranium stockpiles are vital instruments of deterrence, never to be bargained away.

When Mojtaba Khamenei assumed power following the death of his father, many anticipated an immediate purge of the establishment. Instead, Khamenei bided his time in the shadows and honored his father’s appointees, exercising a remarkable degree of strategic patience. Most notably, he chose to retain Ali Asghar Hejazi at the apex of the security apparatus, despite reports that Hejazi had actively sidelined Mojtaba in the final years of the elder Khamenei’s life and had lobbied against a hereditary succession.

This decision was not born out of affection, but systemic necessity. The new leader understood that in a period of intense external threat and internal transition, sacrificing his own personal agency and desire for vengeance was the price of preserving state stability. He needed Hejazi’s institutional memory and control over the vast web of state bureaucracy to prevent systemic paralysis during an existential war. 

The upshot is that, despite the monumental shift in leadership brought about by the US-Israeli assassination of Mojtaba Khamenei’s father, up until now, little has changed in Tehran since the war politically or structurally. The regime’s characteristic dual-track approach remains intact: Tehran brandishes its sword (Vahidi and the IRGC drone and missile attacks), even as it shows a diplomatic face to the world in the form of Qalibaf’s Cheshire Cat grin.

But the continuity wasn’t destined to last. As Mojtaba Khamenei consolidates his power, he is systematically building a parallel architecture to dictate his own distinct authority and vision — one that marks a sharp departure from his father’s era and its strategic ambiguity. The reshuffling of the SNSC to install Rezaei is a signal to the technocrats: the regime has entered a state of permanent warfare.

Put another way: the Western fantasy of a sudden internal collapse has failed. External aggression has instead hardened the state, expanding its domestic control and revitalizing its elite cohesion — a case study in the remarkable resilience of regimes that fully embrace the structures of the modern total state. Unlike the ideological rigidity of civilian hard-liners like Saeed Jalili, Mojtaba Khamenei’s rising faction is deeply pragmatic and militaristic about state survival. Yet, this is a pragmatism entirely divorced from Western integration or liberal norms, using autarky not as a temporary shield, but a structural choice (as long advocated by Rezaei himself).

Where Qalibaf’s technocrats seek survival through a win-win diplomatic deal or a grand bargain with Washington, Mojtaba Khamenei’s camp — bolstered by Rezaei’s uncompromising stance on Iran’s absolute sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz — seeks to translate raw military defiance and the ethos of resistance into permanent strategic gains. The latter group views Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities as critical levers to achieve the maximum deterrence needed to avoid the historical fates of disarmed states like Libya.

With the security-first crowd at the helm, the future of Iran is, in short, an autarkic, anti-American fortress that refuses to surrender its security assets or exchange its sovereignty for Western promises or economic incentives. 

The autarkists are convinced that Donald Trump is constitutionally erratic, aggressive, and untrustworthy; and that the only language his administration understands is that of strength. Consequently, they believe that the only way to free Iran from the looming shadow of war is if Washington comes to recognize and accept its defeat and is publicly humiliated — underscoring the futility of future military action. It’s a risky strategy, to be sure, but one they feel is the only solution to re-establish Iranian deterrence given Trump’s particular psychology.

Suggested reading

How the ‘American Way of War’ failed in Iran

By Michael Lind

Paradoxically, this intensely inward-looking and sovereigntist Iran presents Trump with a realistic opening to fundamentally redraw the Middle Eastern landscape. A true realist foreign policy framework must reject the failed dogmas of regime change and endless “forever wars.” Instead, it must embrace a ruthless pragmatism centered on America’s core national interest alone: avoiding protracted entanglements in a region that is of secondary importance (at best). Realism doesn’t require trust; it requires predictable, self-interested state actors; and an insular, survival-focused Iran is far more predictable than a desperate, collapsing state driving a regional civil war.

By abandoning its penchant for primacy and military intervention in the Middle East, Washington can shrewdly leverage Iran’s consolidated, predictable power structure to enable the region’s (long-disrupted) natural balance of power to return. The emerging regional alignment — reinforced by the landmark Mecca defense pact that Egypt and Iran can eventually join — has already underscored the rise of the ME5 (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran) in a post-American Middle East. 

These five sovereign regional heavyweights are increasingly demonstrating a desire to manage their own neighborhood, explicitly rejecting being dragged into an unwanted regional war or serving as platforms for unilateral American military adventures, as seen in the Persian Gulf states’ recent resistance to assisting US naval blockades. In fact, a major motivating factor behind Riyadh’s and Tehran’s détente since 2023 remains their shared, pragmatic exhaustion with being used as proxies in strategic rivalries of external great powers. This is why the Saudi-Iranian reset has survived nearly six months of regional war — even military strikes on Saudi ports in the Red Sea by the Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen.

But such a strategic reset can’t be brought about unless Trump alters his perception of Iran. He must give up the pipe dream of liberalizing the Islamic Republic, and end America’s decades-long pursuit of a “grand bargain” aimed at transforming Iran’s domestic society. Instead, Trump must heed his own vice president’s counsel, abandon containment strategies that prioritize the interests of foreign states like Israel and the United Arab Emirates over the American people, and swap Cold War-era Manichean mentalities for a transactional recognition of a bounded Iranian sphere of interest in a polycentric world. 

Unlike Nixon’s opening to China, shifting Iran policy wouldn’t hinge on a formal deal or bilateral treaty between Washington and Tehran. By merely accepting Iran as an enduring regional power that will neither relinquish its sovereignty nor tolerate foreign meddling, Trump has a unique Nixonian opportunity to withdraw from the Middle East and offload regional security onto the ME5 themselves. 

This nascent regional equilibrium, sustained by a balance of indigenous powers, rather than an expensive and deeply resented American military umbrella, would finally provide Washington with the strategic off-ramp it has sought for a generation — freeing the United States to retrench, preserve its great-power status, and focus on its most vital priorities at home and abroad.

Still, if Seyyed Ali Khamenei had choreographed his own death, he could scarcely have designed a more potent political end. After all, he was not merely Iran’s head of state: he was a religious symbol for Shi’ites worldwide. His assassination — by US-Israeli bombs during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, while fasting and overseeing wartime resistance planning — instantly transcended geopolitics and entered the realm of sacred myth. For supporters of the Islamic Republic, the symbolism is nothing short of miraculous, and among the Shiite population worldwide, it instantly resonates within their collective memory.

Most fundamentally, Khamenei’s death during Ramadan evokes the assassination of Imam Ali, the first Imam of Shi’ism and a central figure in the sect’s political theology. Delivered by a poisoned sword during prayers in Ramadan, Ali’s death was the climax of the first Islamic Civil War — the First Fitna — and was viewed by the Shia as deep-seated political conspiracy that led to regime change and the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate. Over nearly four decades in power, Khamenei — a “Sayyid”, or direct descendant of Ali — had carefully cultivated his public persona on this symbolic (and literal) lineage, presenting himself as a custodian of revolutionary piety and personification of resistance. The manner of his death instantly apotheosized that cultivated mythology into something far more transcendent: martyrdom.

With the Ayatollah’s death as powerful as the killing of the Pope during Easter, Khamenei was elevated overnight to the status of Imam-e Shahid — the “martyred saint.” That symbolism matters far more than many Western strategists appear to understand. In Shiite political theology, martyrdom is not loss but transfiguration. It converts political defeat into moral victory and transforms fallen leaders into sources of enduring mobilization. The assassination has therefore not merely removed a leader; it has mythologized him among his followers. And myth, in revolutionary regimes, is a fount of power and renewal. 

Khamenei’s assassination has already proved a mobilizing force for his millions of followers. Unmoored from the cultural and religious intricacies of the Middle East, the US and Israel wagered that killing the Supreme Leader would expose the fragility of the regime in Tehran and weaken political resolve across the Islamic Republic, causing defections and perhaps even a popular domestic uprising. Instead, his death has rallied the regime’s active supporters — perhaps a quarter of Iran’s 93 million people — while fomenting strong anti-American sentiment and open revolt among Shi’a from Bahrain and Iraq to Pakistan and Kashmir. 

In life, Khamenei was an ardent ideologue whose leadership left Iran isolated and crisis-ridden. One of the last surviving leaders of the 1979 Revolution, he believed it was his divine mandate to preserve the Islamic Republic’s ideological purity: Islamic conservatism, anti-imperialism, self-reliance, and resistance. He systematically conflated Iranian national sovereignty with revolutionary ideology, often sacrificing pragmatic flexibility in service of doctrinal continuity, compromising only when the regime’s survival was at stake. A notable example occurred in 2013, when Khamenei, a stubborn critic of negotiations with the United States, greenlit the talks that led to the Obama nuclear deal, calling it “heroic flexibility”.

As Iran’s relative power declined, sanctions tightened, and domestic legitimacy sank, he leaned ever more heavily into narratives of resistance and victimhood, drawing heavily on Shi’ite mythology — especially Imam Hussain’s martyrdom in the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, at the hands of the more powerful Umayyad Caliph Yazid. In this way, Khamenei framed Iran as the righteous victim of unjust global powers, especially the United States and Israel, whom he labeled the “hegemonic order”. 

More from this author

The virtue of America First

By Arta Moeni

Crisis and conflict management became inevitable aspects of Khamenei’s governance style. He steered the country from one crisis to the next, ruling not in spite of emergencies but through them. But government-by-crisis had a paradoxical effect. Under Khamenei, the Islamic Republic evolved from a crude revolutionary state into a highly resilient political system. In close partnership with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — with which he forged deep bonds during the Iran-Iraq War — he oversaw the transformation of the regime into a decentralized, hyper-institutionalized, horizontally organized state with multiple redundancies, overlapping factions, and a pervasive security apparatus. The IRGC branches and offshoots expanded into the civilian space, while religious foundations and quasi-governmental trusts (or Bonyads), mushroomed to create a parallel economy to evade US and international sanctions. The system wasn’t designed for efficiency, but to guarantee survival under relentless domestic and foreign pressure.

Over time, this architecture produced a modern total state capable of absorbing shocks that would shatter other regimes. Power in Iran is disaggregated across clerical bodies, security institutions, economic conglomerates, and parallel chains of command. The Islamic Republic is neither a monolith nor personality-driven. The regime treats individuals — leaders included — as expendable in service of its long-term survival. Indeed, the system is expressly designed to absorb loss, from wartime commanders in the Eighties to nuclear scientists and generals killed by Mossad. Succession mechanisms are embedded in the structure itself.

This structural nature is what Trump and Netanyahu overlook, leading to severe miscalculation. The US-Israeli strike was conceived as a classic decapitation blow: remove the Supreme Leader, showcase the state’s weakness, and trigger either elite fracture or popular revolt. Yet this logic reflects a profound misreading of the Islamic Republic. Buoyed by his success in securing regime compliance in Venezuela by removing Nicolás Maduro, Trump may have become overconfident and overplayed his hand in Iran. Its tactical and intelligence achievements notwithstanding, the decapitation has failed to produce any strategic objectives. Quasi-totalitarian Iran is not Saddam’s Iraq in 2003, or Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, or even Chavist Venezuela under Maduro. 

Under its Islamist and revolutionary garb, Iran is a civilizational state with deep institutional continuity stretching back millennia and a sizable industrial base. It represents a cultural domain shaped by its geography and historical pedigree that goes beyond the Western nation-state model. What’s more, the current regime itself has been forged in decades of war, sanctions, and internal upheaval. Indeed, Iran belongs to an entirely different category of state: a middle power with regional heft and structural resilience.

As such, the systematic destruction of domestic opposition, compounded by hybrid wars and economic sanctions that hollowed out the middle class and tied economic survival to the state, made organic regime change increasingly unlikely absent elite fragmentation and the defection of the security forces. And absent a large-scale ground invasion, an external air campaign was always unlikely to produce systemic collapse — particularly given the dysfunction of the Iranian opposition and their lack of organization inside Iran.

In this light, Khamenei’s martyrdom offers Tehran a rare strategic windfall, serving as a powerful engine of political solidarity by reenergizing the familiar trope of the “righteous victim”: thus overshadowing the regime’s wider legitimacy crisis. In that sense, Khamenei’s death may ultimately strengthen the ideological core of the Islamic Republic more than his decades-long rule ever did. Despite being despised by millions of Iranians who hold him personally responsible for the death of thousands of protestors last month, millions of Khamenei’s own supporters are already occupying the streets in mourning across the country. What the embattled leader struggled to achieve in life — renewed revolutionary fervor — he may now accomplish in death. The regime now possesses a renewed reservoir of spiritual capital — a unifying narrative capable of sustaining elite cohesion through a fraught succession.

That succession is unlikely to produce moderation. If anything, the structural incentives point in the opposite direction. Leadership transitions during conflict, amid national trauma and the fog of war, tend to empower security-first factions with a more nationalist bent. In Iran’s case, the likely outcome is a successor more tightly aligned with the IRGC — the country’s real center of power — and less constrained by Khamenei’s more cautious and restrained approach to geopolitics. More Western-aligned, reformist factions, already marginalized, will hardly resonate in an atmosphere suffused with martyrdom and a siege mentality against what the Iranians view as unprovoked Western aggression.

Ironically, Khamenei himself may have also been a moderating force in at least one crucial domain: nuclear weaponization. Despite his revolutionary zeal and ardent support for Iran’s right to (peaceful) nuclear sovereignty, he maintained a religious prohibition — a fatwa — against the bomb. Guided by the IRGC and Iran’s more realist security establishment, his successor is unlikely to adhere to Khamenei’s theological or ideological qualms. Watching a Supreme Leader assassinated by foreign powers will inevitably encourage nuclear deterrence as the ultimate insurance policy. Indeed, the CIA had already concluded as much before the strike. If anything, then, the killing may accelerate the very nuclear option it sought to prevent. 

This very possibility reveals how Washington suffers from strategic myopia and a lack of endgame in Iran. Instead of coercing surrender, military pressure may radicalize Iranian elites while narrowing the space for diplomacy. Rather than empowering moderates who would engage the US, it validates the worldview of hardliners who have long argued that compromise invites aggression. The upshot is a hardened security state, narrowing the already limited space for internal pluralism. Instead of instigating regime collapse in Iran, the conflict risks producing the opposite dynamic: an escalation trap with no easy off-ramps.

There are other risks too. The opening days of the conflict have already seen the conflict expand, drawing in Iranian proxies and exposing vulnerabilities among American partners in the Persian Gulf. A mission conceived as a decisive blow could metastasize into another open-ended Middle Eastern conflict — precisely the kind of protracted entanglement successive American administrations have pledged to avoid. While a full-on invasion is unlikely and would be a political suicide for the GOP, the war could still escalate and fester as a quagmire Washington can’t soon escape: risking US blood and treasure and a broken global economy for Israel‘s regional ambitions, without any upside for the United States.

Such a scenario carries wider strategic implications. In an increasingly multi-nodal world, prolonged regional wars impose real opportunity costs. They drain resources, strain stockpiles, and divert attention from higher-order geopolitical interests. For a United States confronted with the end of the unipolar moment, another forever war in the Middle East — even absent US troops on the ground — risks accelerating America’s relative decline instead of strengthening its great power status. Given the already transregional and escalatory nature of the war, Iran could easily become the conflict that completes the “rupture” in the rules-based order.  

Suggested reading

How JD Vance lost the foreign policy war

By Sohrab Ahmari

None of this means the Islamic Republic is invulnerable. It faces deep structural challenges: economic stagnation, demographic pressures, and periodic explosions of domestic unrest. Its population is deeply polarized, and Islamism itself appears an exhausted ideology even within the regime’s own rank and file. But external decapitation strikes are poorly suited to exploiting those vulnerabilities. On the contrary, they consolidate regimes by supplying precisely what they lack in times of internal strain: a unifying external enemy and a mobilizing myth. 

Ironically, Khamenei’s assassination has handed the Islamic Republic both. It has replenished the regime’s symbolic and spiritual reserves, reinforced elite cohesion, and justified a more hardline security trajectory. In trying to eliminate the man, Washington may have strengthened the system in Tehran.

For a Trump administration that claims to practice hard-nosed realism, this represents a striking miscalculation. It reflects a failure to grasp both the civilizational depth of Iran and the adaptive endurance of the Islamic Republic. Iran is neither a brittle petro-state nor a hollowed-out personal dictatorship waiting to fall. It is a historical power with institutional durability and real material strength. Here, the US-Israeli tactical brilliance — precision strikes, intelligence coups, targeted assassinations — could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory that does not automatically translate into strategic success. 

Amid war, destruction, and political discontent, the Islamic Republic will likely endure — less flexible, more defiant, and newly consecrated by the blood of its fallen leader.

Despite Donald Trump’s provocative assertion that the United States is going to “run” Venezuela and manage its transition for the foreseeable future, Washington has so far avoided the far costlier path of outright occupation. Trump has openly dismissed US-backed opposition figure María Corina Machado as lacking the domestic “support and respect” necessary to lead the country, while signaling that his administration is instead liaising with Venezuela’s vice president (and, tellingly, its oil and finance minister) Delcy Rodríguez, whom he described as “willing to do what we think is necessary.” 

With Rodríguez named interim president by Venezuela’s Supreme Court (presumably with American approval), and no indication that Washington is prepared to deploy the hundreds of thousands of troops required to govern the country directly, Trump appears intent on “running” Venezuela indirectly — through the existing state apparatus and the military — while using sanctions, naval embargoes, and the credible threat of renewed force as an albatross around the neck of the Venezuelan leadership. 

The objective, in short, is not regime change in the conventional War on Terror sense, but instead managed continuity: preventing immediate collapse, securing oil infrastructure, and coercing compliance without assuming responsibility for the country’s political and social wreckage. If true, this raises the likelihood that the entire episode has been a US-backed military coup that will ironically preserve Chavismo and Bolivarian politics in Venezuela in a new US-dealing, “business-first” garb: simply without Maduro himself.

Such an outcome would suggest that the Trump administration resisted the temptation of full-scale ideological regime change and remains pragmatic enough to avoid a prolonged ground invasion of Venezuela. The fallout — refugee crisis, internal unrest, and elite fragmentation — remains to be seen. Yet history offers little comfort that Maduro’s removal will lead to stability, let alone liberal democracy. If past US interventions are any guide, the long-term effect is more likely to be the further militarization of Venezuelan politics, with nationalism and social order emerging as the primary glue of regime solidarity. 

Suggested reading

Venezuela’s path to freedom

By Juan David Rojas

Indeed, despite widespread discontent with Maduro’s rule, pro-government crowds have already gathered in Caracas to protest his overnight ouster by a foreign power. Chavismo, long sustained by anti-imperialist rhetoric, may now find renewed legitimacy precisely because Maduro was removed not by Venezuelans themselves, but by Washington and the CIA.

Beyond Venezuela itself, the broader message of the operation is unmistakable. The United States has forcefully communicated to the nations of the Western Hemisphere that it will justify its military interventions by claiming the right to enforce US law internationally — at least in the Americas — regardless of sovereignty, regional instability, or political blowback. Coming on the heels of the National Security Strategy’s call to reassert an updated, neo-mercantilist version of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the strike represents an ultimatum: Washington will act as the hemisphere’s police, enforcing its economic sphere of influence by force if necessary.

Washington’s actions in Venezuela reflect a Trump doctrine that views the world less as an ideological battlefield of liberals and autocrats than as an arena of zero-sum economic competition among great powers. In this framing, the Western Hemisphere is not merely a security perimeter, as in Roosevelt’s doctrine, but a commercial hinterland whose resources, markets, and supply chains must remain firmly under American control. Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, critical minerals, and strategic location for maritime trade therefore loom far larger in Washington’s calculus than any abstract concern with democracy, international law, or human rights.

Ideology, again, is secondary here. What matters is deal-making, playing ball, and cooperating with US commercial interests. This helps explain Washington’s readiness to work with figures drawn from the core of the Chavista state rather than the long-favored exile opposition. Loyalty is transactional, not doctrinal; legitimacy flows not from ballots or values, but from compliance with the imperial center.

This also explains why the attack on Venezuela appears unprovoked when assessed through traditional security frameworks. Caracas posed no credible military threat to the United States, nor was the country on the brink of imminent collapse, something that might have triggered intervention on classical Rooseveltian grounds. The intervention’s triggers were economic; its legalistic framing as countering narco-terrorism or drug-trafficking is nothing but window dressing. The goal was to secure US leverage over Venezuelan resources while decisively excluding non-hemispheric competitors — above all China and Russia — from consolidating their economic footholds in the Americas.

The unresolved question is whether this “Trump Corollary” is geographically bounded. Does it, to put it bluntly, actually put America First? Will the military interventions stop in the Americas, or does it foreshadow a broader claim that the entire world constitutes a legitimate US sphere of interest — continuing the decades-long tradition of transforming the American military into a global police force?

Only time will tell. But if the “American-Sphere” logic that undergirds the Trump doctrine loses its geographic grip and sense of limits to bleed into outright globalism, promoting US corporatism worldwide down the barrel of a gun, then the Trump administration has learned the wrong lesson from America’s postwar misadventures. While the more macho America Firsters might try to justify military interventions in the hemisphere on realpolitik and geoeconomic grounds, such militarism will be exceedingly difficult to explain, and indeed execute, across far-flung Eurasia: where other regional powers will inevitably exercise their own claims to sphere of influence. 

Ultimately, unrestrained militarism is not only expensive and inflationary, but risky and escalatory. If Trump loses touch with basic tenets of Washingtonian realism, and refuses to adapt to the more regionalist and civilizational world that is emerging, then his checkmating of Maduro will be remembered as a pyrrhic victory that reenergized military interventionism, emboldened the globalists, and precipitated America’s decline as a great power.

Regardless, the approach lays bare the fiction that Trump’s foreign policy is isolationist. It is not. The Trump Doctrine may be skeptical of nation-building, regime change, and Middle-East-style forever wars, but it has no aversion to unilateral, willful, and even unprovoked use of force. On the contrary, it will resort to military action whenever and wherever it perceives American economic dominance to be challenged.

This exposes the central contradiction at the heart of Trumpian realism. While the National Security Strategy speaks the language of sovereignty, national interest, and restraint, it simultaneously treats the sovereignty of adversarial states as conditional and expendable. The logic is blunt and unapologetic: power decides. Unless adversaries are sufficiently strong to deter American action, they can be intimidated, coerced, or even removed.

Suggested reading

Maduro has called Trump's bluff

By John Masko

By framing a cross-border military strike and the forcible abduction of a sitting head of state as an extension of domestic criminal process, Washington has effectively asserted a doctrine of extraterritorial police power backed by overwhelming force to use as cover for economic conquest. If national sovereignty can be nullified by indictment from a foreign, extra-judicial court, then no state outside the protective umbrella of US power can consider itself secure. Today it is Venezuela; tomorrow it could just as easily be Iran — or any other regime that can be rhetorically and legalistically reframed as “criminal” rather than simply a political, ideological, or strategic rival.

There is an uncomfortable irony at play here. In removing the head of a sovereign country through a swift “special military operation”, Donald Trump accomplished precisely what Vladimir Putin attempted — and failed — to achieve in Ukraine. He excised an intractable thorn on his side in hopes of reestablishing America’s sphere of influence over a country in its near-abroad. The difference lies not in principle, but in capability. The operation showcased the overwhelming superiority of US military power while signaling Washington’s renewed willingness to enforce its hemispheric dominance. After all, preventing Western encroachment in Ukraine is far more existential for Russia than Venezuela is for the US. 

Trump will undoubtedly tout this as a decisive victory. He outmaneuvered Maduro, avoided US casualties — at least for now — and demonstrated American primacy and resolve to the region. Yet the more difficult task lies ahead. Whether Washington can compel Maduro’s successor — be it Vice President Rodríguez or Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López — to subordinate Venezuelan sovereignty to American economic and strategic interests remains far from certain. The assumption that, through US military coercion or its “Big Stick”, Venezuela will simply offer up its oil and mineral wealth to US companies reflects a deep imperial hubris that harkens to the 19th century and is at odds with the post-unipolar reality of our time.

In the end, US machismo may have bested Chavismo tactically. Strategically, however, it risks entrenching the very dynamics it claims to oppose: hardened nationalism, militarized politics, and a regional order defined less by stability and mutual recognition than by fear and intimidation. It also does little to address the fentanyl crisis in the United States, which has nothing to do with Venezuela being a cocaine transit hub. 

Still, the precedent has been set for new waves of US military interventions abroad — and in a multinodal world increasingly resistant to American primacy, the costs of enforcing an economic empire through global policing may yet exceed the benefits.

 Yet the Islamic Republic declined to participate, with the Iranian foreign ministry justifying its rejection by citing America’s “criminal acts” during the 12-Day War: namely, joining Israel’s bombing raid and thus violating Iran’s sovereignty in contravention of international law. Soon after, Iran’s foreign minister condemned Trump’s decision to resume American nuclear testing as a “blatant violation of international law” and Washington’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On the surface, these gestures appear merely rhetorical — symbolic denunciations intended for foreign media. Yet they reveal a consistent pattern in Iranian discourse: an almost obsessive appeal to international law and the alleged double standards of the Western powers in applying it. Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, routinely invoke the sanctity of international legal norms to indict Washington and its allies for hypocrisy. This language of legality, justice, and sovereignty has become central to Tehran’s moral posture as a self-declared righteous challenger of what it calls the “hegemonic order.”

We have, then, a curious paradox: a state that defines itself as revolutionary, revisionist, and “anti-Western” is apparently one of the last true believers in a rules-based international order that the Western powers are increasingly abandoning. Leaders in Tehran and other “outlaw” states often believe, with apparent vehemence and sincerity, that if they can just get the United Nations or some other transnational body to view their situation objectively, the world will know, once and for all, that they aren’t outlaws.

In other words, the Islamic Republic (and China and others) still have faith in the institutional and legal architecture of the liberal international order — an order designed to enshrine Western priorities. The invocation of international law by a regime that claims to reject Western liberal modernity isn’t merely incoherent; it is a symptom of an internalized Westernization, a sign that the ideological liturgy of liberal modernity has colonized even its most strident critics.

Iran is not alone in this contradiction. Russia, too, has cloaked its actions in Ukraine in the language of international law. Moscow’s justifications for its “special military operation” have drawn heavily on the doctrines and precedents pioneered by NATO itself — particularly the “responsibility to protect” invoked during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. In this case, Moscow claims to be protecting ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine trapped under an ethno-chauvinist Kyiv regime. China, meanwhile, regularly extols the principles of state sovereignty, non-interference, and equality enshrined in the United Nations Charter. In each case, powers positioned as adversaries of the West strive to articulate their worldviews within the normative and legal frameworks that the West itself created.

More from this author

The virtue of America First

By Arta Moeini

On one level, this may indicate a certain pragmatism: none of these states seeks to dismantle the liberal international order outright. Their declared objective isn’t revolution, but reform — an ostensibly fairer and more balanced application of existing rules. Yet such demands betray a fundamental naiveté. To call for the impartial enforcement of international law presupposes that such a law exists independently of power — that international norms can restrain states, and that international institutions can tame the will to power. But this is fiction. From a realist standpoint, international law isn’t an autonomous realm of justice; it is an expression of power, a moral architecture used to clothe domination in legitimacy.

As Carl Schmitt observed, every legal order is ultimately grounded in a concrete spatial and political order: the result is a “pluriverse,” which he identified as the nomos of the Earth: the concrete, culturally-rooted structural reality of the world. The artificial, legalistic world that emerged after 1945 and that deeply entrenched itself after 1991 thus merely reflects the geopolitical ascendancy of the West and the universalization of its parochial values under Pax Americana. To demand that the international legal system be applied fairly and equitably is thus to demand the impossible: the false dream of a neutral, global law, detached from the particular political and material conditions that produced it and that overcomes the biases of those self-charged with enforcing it.

In their appeals to legality, these “anti-Western” powers expose not only their idealism, but also their dependence on the very metaphysical assumptions of liberalism that they purport to oppose.

The paradox runs deeper still. The faith of Iran, Russia, China, and others in legalism, proceduralism, and egalitarianism in international politics points to their thorough entrapment within the globalist paradigm of modernity. Each of these states proclaims its civilizational distinctiveness — Persian, Russian, or Sinic — but all are, in essence, products of the modern state system. Their bureaucratic rationality, meliorism, and moral universalism are hallmarks of the same Enlightenment project that gave rise to liberalism. They are haplessly embedded in the very worldview they claim to want to overthrow.

Modernity’s essence lies in its universalizing impulse — the conviction that history has a direction, that reason can order the world, and that moral progress can be codified into human institutions and norms. Even those regimes that reject the West’s liberal ideology have internalized this mental structure.

The Islamic Republic’s doctrine of “resistance” against America and Zion, for instance, is a sort of liberation theology, premised on a universal moral dichotomy between the oppressed and the oppressors, possessed and dispossessed, echoing the moral Manichaeism of liberal humanitarianism. Despite its broad support for multipolarity, China remains a defender of economic globalization and inclusive global governance based on what it calls the “common values of humanity.” Likewise, Russia’s self-conception as a Katechon — an Orthodox Christian bulwark against terminal liberal decline and a defender of “traditional values” and “civilizational diversity” — echoes the same universal and moralistic tone it attributes to the Global West.

In their current form, the so-called “pariah states” are not civilizational alternatives to the liberal order, but its dialectical mirrors. They contest its dominance not by exiting its sacred moral canopy, but by claiming to embody its true meaning. Just as Marxism arose within and against liberal capitalism, these contemporary challengers articulate their opposition within the same fundamental framework. Their rhetoric of justice, equality, and international legalism reproduces the liberal myth of moral progress, even as it is turned against liberal (political) hegemony.

Realism teaches that in the anarchic realm of international politics, power, not morality, is the final arbiter. Norms, laws, and institutions are mere superstructures built upon the scaffolding of material power: the ability to transport whole infantry divisions across the globe, to parachute special forces behind enemy lines, to deliver strategic weapons that can turn nations and continents into radioactive glass. When Iran denounces US actions as “illegal,” it is not appealing to some transcendent order of justice (even if it professes to do so); it is engaging in the moral theater of power politics. But by doing so, it inadvertently legitimizes the very discourse it seeks to undermine.

Indeed, the liberal international order survives not because of its moral superiority, but because even its critics play by its discursive rules. Every invocation of international law, every appeal to the United Nations, every citation of the NPT or other postwar treaties reinforces the moral authority of the very institutions that entrench Western dominance in the first place. The unwitting tragedy for states like Iran and Russia is that their defiance is conducted in a language that ensures their subordination.

The recent turn toward civilizational discourse — what might be called the “pluralist turn” in global politics — appears at first glance to signal a break from liberal universalism. When leaders from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran speak of cultural particularity, historical continuity, or their unique civilizational spirit, they seem to reject the homogenizing cosmopolitanism of liberal modernity. Yet this, too, may conceal a moral universalism in new garb.

This is because, at present, even civilizational states (like nation-states) are first and foremost modern states, which are systemically prone to totalizing their non-political and sociological basis of power for more central control. As modern Leviathans, they politicize every aspect of human life to become the sole sovereigns of human society, obliterating the traditional guardrails that historically separated and thereby protected the different domains of human societies (familial, cultural, religious, economic, political, and others) from overreach and tyranny. 

By concentrating all authority within itself, the totalistic modern state cannibalizes its own body politic to feed its incessant hunger for power — eating away at the very social fabric that sustains it and that it is supposed to protect, and leaving a hollow shell organized by a draconian bureaucracy and ruled by a professional managerial class whose values and ideals refract those in London or New York.  

Suggested reading

Iran’s devastating hubris

By Sohrab Ahmari

Given the Manichaean backdrop of the postwar order — good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, human rights versus atrocity — civilizational states could be even more tempted to assert their own exceptionalism or mission, inevitably claiming a universal significance for themselves. They could subvert their own historical cultures by reducing them to an ideology, tout their inherent superiority, and claim for themselves a world-historical role in redeeming mankind from decadence and barbarism. 

Civilizational politics thus risks becoming yet another moral crusade, a dialectic substituting one universalism (the liberal kind) for a new one elevated as its other. In the process, the rhetoric of cultural authenticity may paradoxically deepen, rather than overcome, the moralization of international relations. But its ultimate result remains tragically unchanged: more global convergence, the proliferation and hardening of modern statism, and the cancerous growth of modernity and its metaphysics. 

Significantly, the return of “civilization” does not necessarily herald the return of realpolitik; it may instead inaugurate new forms of moral imperialism, with each civilization seeking to universalize its own particularity as the Civilization fighting global barbarism — in a clash of abstracted civilizations, a Huntingtonian world where civilizations merely mask the global domination of the modern state and all harbor the same force behind their religio-civilizational “veil” (Confucian, Orthodox, Shiite): namely, modernity. 

The tragic insight here is that the moralistic impulse seems inescapable within the framework of the modern state. Every modern regime — whether liberal, communist, Islamist, or nationalist — claims to possess the formula for human flourishing. Modernity itself is a theological project, animated by the belief that politics can and must redeem humanity. As long as this metaphysical conviction endures, the moralization of international politics will persist and, with it, the illusion that law and justice can transcend power.

In the end, the ideological opposition between the “liberal” West and the collection of renegade, revisionist, non-Western powers is an illusion. The contest between them is not a clash between different worlds, but an internal struggle for primacy within the same modernist paradigm.

Iran, Russia, and their allies self-project as the moral conscience of an unjust world order, yet their very moralism reveals their complicity in the postwar world’s ideological foundations. Their invocation of international law is a testament to its total victory — the triumph of a moralized conception of politics that even its enemies cannot escape, at least until such a time when modernity itself, as a zeitgeist and worldview, disintegrates under the weight of its discontents and contradictions. 

The true alternative to liberal hegemony would require the deliberate renunciation of the political and normative universalism associated with the modern project, rather than multiplying “universalisms” under different national or civilizational disguises and claiming one’s own moral superiority. Meanwhile, practically speaking, the insistence on vindicating sovereign “rights” under international law leads these powers to miss actual opportunities to engage with the West and win real concessions — such as by showing up to meet Trump in Egypt. 

Yet so long as even the global adversaries of liberalism remain enthralled by its moral categories, the world will continue to revolve within modernity’s closed circle—an endless dialectic without transcendence, a tragedy without catharsis. Ironically, Trump, the leader of the power that presides over the liberal imperium, has moved on from rules-based-order cant. It’s time the self-proclaimed enemies of that order did the same.

Now, though, the unipolar moment that began in 1989 is over. Yet what we see today is not fragmentation or chaos — but a return to normalcy. The international system is reverting to its natural condition: a post-hegemonic, multi-nodal, and regionalized world where sovereign, civilizational powers coexist and balance one another within their historical spheres of interest. Elsewhere, I have called this process the Great Transition, one which emphasizes the re-emergence of geopolitical plurality and cultural multiplicity after a brief, artificial experiment in universalism.

If there is any coherence to a Trump doctrine, it is in recognizing this reality. And in this context, the Pentagon’s new “National Defense Strategy” (NDS) offers a much-welcome shift. Accepting the return of history and geopolitics, the proposed draft affirms the need to adapt to the changing international environment. It prioritizes defending the homeland and the contested boundaries of “American Sphere” from extra-regional interference — over the global military containment of China or Russia. Yet many in Washington, and even some Trump appointees, will abhor this shift.

From the moment he came down that golden escalator, Trump declared war on the foreign policy blob — the bipartisan consensus that treated America as a sucker, paying for others’ security, underwriting institutions that constrained us, and intervening in conflicts that made us less secure. Whatever one thinks of his style or execution, his insistence on “America First” was a necessary corrective, a reminder that the first duty of American statecraft is to its own people.

Still, these welcome bouts of realism are not only bound to be interrupted by the expected fervors of moralism and tired shibboleths about US global leadership, but also by a deeper, more entrenched force: globalism. This globalism is less about free trade or international cooperation and more reflects a broad cognitive bias. It is not a coherent ideology but an ideational reflex so deeply institutionalized that it pervades our foreign policy establishment, our universities, and even some among the MAGA counter-establishment. It is not a cabal to be purged but a mentality that saturates the very air of Washington.

More from this author

Trump can forge a new Middle East

By Arta Moeini

This mindset itself manifests in two forms. The first is the liberal universalism of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas, who sought to expand alliances, international institutions, human rights organizations, and liberal democracy: all at gunpoint and in pursuit of a cosmopolitan dream of global homogeneity. In the post-Trump era, however, its more enduring variant is the militarized globalism of figures like John Bolton. This latter group insists on permanent unipolarity and American unilateralism, achieved via the primacy of the US military.

The Boltonians — and their acolytes in Jerusalem — weaponize a cartoonish idea of “Western civilization” in a Manichaean struggle against a caricatured notion of global barbarism and international terrorism. The liberal internationalists Trump deposed championed the universalism of US values and yearned for the “woke imperium”; for the Boltonians and closeted Neocons who successfully infiltrated the MAGA-verse, the universalism of imperial force reigns supreme. Nevertheless, both groups are globalist, both are dogmatic defenders of US global hegemony, and both find common cause in mortgaging American sovereignty at the altar of ideology.

Consider Ukraine. Nato expansion — promoted as the defense of liberal order — has in fact destabilized Europe and entangled America in an attritional war with no clear endgame. By offering promises America was neither willing nor able to fulfill, Washington walked Ukraine down a primrose path that left it devastated, Russia emboldened, and Europe vassalized. Instead of securing stability, then, Nato expansion has deepened insecurity and forced America into another open-ended commitment very far from its vital interests.

Or take the Middle East, where the Boltonians have hoisted their flag most strongly. Just weeks ago, the United States found itself dragged into the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran. Despite the IDF’s heavy bombardment of Iranian military targets and nuclear enrichment facilities, shadowed by America’s own strikes, the war demonstrated once again that force cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, technological know-how, or its will to rebuild. Iran emerged bloodied but resilient, its nationalism hardened. Yet Washington reflexively positioned itself as a co-belligerent — risking escalation, draining munitions, and distracting from higher priorities.

Besides the fact that both Europe and the Middle East are peripheral to America’s main strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere, as noted in the NDS, perhaps the highest priority for the savvy American strategist is ensuring US competitiveness in the 21st century through a project of national renewal. To remain a great power, Washington must urgently upgrade its infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, while creating regionally integrated supply chains for essential items like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and microchips.

Instead, by remaining enmeshed in endless conflicts abroad, America has accumulated $37.5 trillion in debt, devastating communities and harming the middle class. For most Americans, bombing the Houthis — whom they have never even met in real life — to protect maritime trade to Europe could never justify the costs. Additionally, rampant US intervention has serious military consequences, compounding their societal and economic impacts. In June, over less than two weeks, the US spent billions to defend Israel, depleting its global stockpiles of advanced missile interceptors like THAAD, even as it exposed serious vulnerabilities in its munitions procurement and overall military readiness. All this, it goes without saying, makes America less secure.

In any case, these examples reveal the deeper truth. Universalism in all its forms — whether liberal or militarized — erodes sovereignty, global cultural pluralism, and the righteous spirit that undergirds anti-hegemonic movements like America First. It collapses the diversity of civilizations into a single template, one to be imposed by force and maintained by empire. It multiplies and extends permanent commitments that serve the imperium and its managerial class, along the way betraying the republic’s founding principles.

Even strands of neorealism, such as John Mearsheimer’s brand of offensive realism, fall prey to this globalist bias: by globalizing great-power competition and advocating for China’s military containment, they portray international relations as nothing more than a mechanistic, Hobbesian race for hegemony, everywhere and forever. But this, too, is not realism; it is rationalized universalism. And it has led Washington, like Athens in Thucydides’ history, towards imperial overstretch and decay.

Suggested reading

Trump’s strategy of peace

By George Beebe

Ultimately, a state can be a conservative commonwealth serving its people, or an empire enriching its special interests, war oligarchs, and security-rentier class. But it cannot be both. Yet for decades, America, corrupted by its globalist reflex, has chosen empire. In fact, our “bipartisan” foreign policy consensus has corrupted and redefined the “national interest” itself, turning it into a justification for permanent war.

The danger today is that the globalist bias — be it liberal or realist, Neocon or Boltonian — will keep us chained to the illusions of unipolarity, luring us with enchanting calls to hegemony like the sirens of Greek mythology. Fixating our gaze on the 20th century, and the postwar status quo, they reduce the world to a zero-sum battlespace between perpetual black and white blocs — encouraging endless military intervention while resurrecting old dogmas to justify them. In short, the globalist cognitive bias prevents us from conceiving a cohesive grand strategy for the post-hegemonic era that has now arrived, keeping us vulnerable and hastening our decline.

What the country needs now, instead, is something I’d call sovereign realism: a radical foreign policy unburdened by ideology, freed from the conceits of universalism, and grounded in the conservation of American strength. That means privileging sovereignty over universalist crusades, regional balances of power over global policing, selective protection over blanket primacy, and renewal at home as the foundation of strength abroad. It means diplomacy without illusions: talking to adversaries and allies alike based on reciprocity and strategic empathy, not sanctimony or moralism.

Above all, it means adopting a new approach that shapes itself to the polycentric world at hand, rather than resisting it with futile bids for unipolarity. The Great Transition is not a threat to be conquered, then, but a reality to be navigated. For, in the end, the postwar “international community” was little more than a projection, international law a polite fiction, and globalization artificial and contrived. What lies ahead is not disorder but the world as it truly is — a concert of civilizational powers insisting, as America itself does, on their own sovereignty and resisting a managerial empire: whether run from Washington or Beijing.

Yet the ceasefire, for now, is holding. And that means that a rare window of opportunity remains open — an opportunity for transformative diplomacy. After all, the devastating US-Israeli attacks and the retaliatory Iranian missile barrages showed both the power and the limitations of military action. There was no clear winner. But as the fog of that war recedes, a bigger prize could be on offer. If stability in the Middle East is truly the objective, the United States must seize this moment to broker a comprehensive diplomatic settlement with Iran.

To do so, it will need to recognize that the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East has shifted fundamentally. Ever since the 1979 revolution, dialogue between Washington and Tehran has been impeded by myths, biases, and outdated frameworks. Whether or not the West has noticed, though, the chances of rapprochement are becoming more favorable.

Within Iran, the culture has gradually transitioned from ideological fervor to pragmatic nationalism. Decades of economic sanctions and international isolation, combined with generational shifts among Iran’s youth and elites, have tempered the regime’s revolutionary zeal and increased the strategic emphasis on national interests. The Persian civilization, with its rich historical continuity, has reasserted itself, taming the isolationist and confrontational impulses that marked Iran as a pariah state in the late 20th century.

More from this author

Iran's next president will be just as powerless

By Arta Moeini

More broadly, the Great Transition — that is, the end of a period of history marked by unchallenged American global dominance — has redirected American priorities and given the middle powers a better hand in negotiations. Despite taking serious damage from Israeli and US bombing during the 12-day war, Iran remains a civilizational state with a population of 90 million, regional reach, and historical longevity, marking it a resilient middle power. In that brief conflict, Iran launched strikes of its own, overwhelming Israeli and US defenses. The much-touted and expensive US THAAD and Israeli Arrow air defense system together shot down only 201 of Iran’s 574 ballistic missiles, depleting around a quarter of US global stockpiles in twelve days and costing US taxpayers $ 2 billion.

Those missiles will take years to replenish. It is another inconvenience of a conflict that distracts from America’s foremost strategic priority: competing with China. From the prism of national interest, the Middle East is no longer a priority for Washington. Successive US administrations — from Obama to Trump via Biden — have sought to reduce American military commitments in West Asia, reflecting a structural shift in US strategic priorities towards East Asia and China. This strategic retrenchment necessitates a sustainable regional balance. And this balance can be achieved not by isolating and excluding Iran, but by incorporating Tehran as a focal point of a new West Asian security order. Already, Iran has embraced its erstwhile rivals in the Persian Gulf, attempting, with the help of Saudi Arabia, to contain the rise of an expansionist, neo-Ottoman Turkey led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Traditional alliances, in other words, are in a state of flux due to changing regional and global dynamics.

Such geopolitical circumstances recall the diplomatic opportunities seized by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. Then, rapprochement with China fundamentally altered the global order, setting in motion a series of events that culminated in the end of the Cold War. President Trump, facing a similar historical juncture, now has the unique chance to reset and mend relations with Iran after 46 years of hostility, potentially reshaping the region’s security architecture for decades to come. It is already the case, as I have argued, that structural changes, and shared interests, have made improved US-Iran relations more likely. But proactive American diplomacy could accelerate this trajectory, allowing Trump to secure a significant legacy for himself: not just international recognition, but even the Nobel Peace Prize he so covets.

Nonetheless, considerable obstacles remain. Chief among them is Israel’s staunch opposition to US normalization with Iran. Note the timing of Israel’s surprise attack against Iran: 13 June, two days before a pivotal round of talks between Washington and Tehran, which analysts expected could result in a major breakthrough. While Tehran’s revolutionary ideological fervor has waned, Israel under Prime Minister Netanyahu has increasingly mirrored zealotry of the early Islamic Republic.

The Netanyahu government has adopted an ideological, Manichean worldview that defines security exclusively through confrontation and perpetual militarization. This worldview has shifted Israel away from the pragmatic and defensive policies championed by past Israeli leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin. It is a profound change. The United States’ unconditional support for Israel has been a major cause for the systematic radicalization of Israeli society, promoting hubris, recklessness, and overreach while protecting the country from the consequences of its unrestrained behavior. Within this strategic context, Netanyahu’s neoconservative approach — emphasizing Jewish exceptionalism, religious fundamentalism, and hegemonic expansion — has produced a state perpetually at war, undermining Israel’s long-term security and diplomatic flexibility in pursuit of the quixotic dream of turning Israel into a regional hegemon.

And it is hardly the case that Netanyahu has been, in that respect, successful. Despite repeated tactical victories, Israel’s leadership has failed to convert short-term military successes into lasting peace and regional stability. Rather, the new Israeli establishment uses the spectre of war as fuel for its existential threat narratives, spun to further securitize Israeli domestic politics. In becoming akin to ancient Assyria — an imperial state perpetually at war with its neighbors and driven by militant extremism — Israel risks strategic overstretch, exhausting its resources and threatening its future viability.

Suggested reading

Israel is losing US support

By Emily Jashinsky

The first Trump administration, motivated partly by its desire to “solve” the Middle East and finally extricate the US by bolstering Israeli power, attempted to form an anti-Iran regional bloc, via the Abraham Accords, that brought Israel together with the Sunni Arab states. Although they brought some level of diplomatic normalization to US allies in the region, the Accords ultimately fell short of addressing the region’s structural imbalances. Iran remains an indispensable regional power, possessing civilizational continuity, a substantial population, significant indigenous technological and industrial capacity, and the resolve to assert its interests. Its exclusion from the regional order perpetuates instability, undermining American strategic objectives and increasing regional insecurity.

Recognizing this, Washington must now pivot towards a diplomatic strategy that integrates Iran within a broader regional security framework. Tehran, pragmatically recognizing the limits of confrontation, has indicated openness to diplomacy that respects its sovereignty, dignity, and core strategic interests. Despite their rhetorical and performative chants against Israel and Western hegemony, Iranian leaders have signaled a willingness to quietly abandon aggressive strategic postures, including dissolving the expensive and geopolitically contentious “axis of resistance” in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean — forsaking its regional allies and proxies like the Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis. In exchange, Tehran seeks political normalization based on the full recognition of its sovereignty, including its right to domestic enrichment and conventional military capabilities, and economic reintegration with Washington and its regional allies.

This emerging diplomatic consensus could take the form of a comprehensive Perso-Abraham Accord, ending entrenched hostility between Iran and Israel and redefining regional security through mutual recognition, diplomatic normalization, and shared economic interests. Such an accord would significantly reduce the US military footprint in the Middle East, aligning with America’s broader strategic reorientation towards Asia. Simultaneously, it would curtail the ambitions of regional powers such as Turkey, whose neo-Ottoman expansionism has alarmed Arab states and Israel alike.

For such an accord to materialize, however, the United States must practice strategic empathy and prioritize sustained diplomatic engagement over coercion. Rather than continuing a counterproductive cycle of sanctions and intimidation, Washington could offer tangible incentives, such as American investment in Iran’s civilian nuclear technology. These incentives would be accompanied by stringent monitoring mechanisms managed through US firms and a regional consortium, whose inspections would replace those of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which Iran now views with suspicion. This approach would simultaneously demonstrate US goodwill and ensure transparency in Iran’s nuclear activities, effectively addressing international proliferation concerns.

Equally critical is the role of Israel, which must acknowledge the strategic folly of perpetual confrontation and sabotage. A reset in regional relations offers Israel a unique opportunity to redefine its security through diplomacy rather than continuous militarization. The alternative — a perpetuation of escalation cycles — not only incentivizes Iran to nuclearize as a means of deterrence, but also risks embroiling the region in a broader war. It is a war that neither Washington nor Tehran desires, and one Israel itself cannot ultimately afford.

Looking at the bigger picture, the recent conflict between Israel and Iran, despite its immediate devastation, has clarified a crucial geopolitical reality: military force alone cannot secure lasting peace or dismantle Iran’s nuclear program permanently. The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” War is never an end in itself, but must have clear strategic objectives that advance core state interests. The Twelve-Day War, and the shaky ceasefire that has followed, have done the opposite. They have destabilized the region, pushed Iran closer into the Chinese orbit, and further entangled the United States in Middle Eastern quagmires — all while signaling to Iran that if it wants to avoid the harrowing fates of Libya and Syria, then it must try to end the Israeli monopoly on nuclear weapons.

A better path to regional stability lies through strategic diplomacy, respect for mutual interests, and the careful incorporation of Iran into a renewed regional security architecture. The time is ripe for such a diplomatic reset, a comprehensive agreement that could not only redefine relations between the US and Iran, but also fundamentally reshape the broader region. Donald Trump, uniquely positioned by history and circumstance, holds the key to this transformative opportunity to midwife the birth of a new Middle East. Choosing diplomacy over perpetual conflict could become the defining act of his presidency, establishing a legacy of statesmanship and peacemaking that not only resonates with his base but also reverberates far beyond his tenure in office.

Both possibilities, however, are unlikely: the former ruled out by the Iranians’ uncharacteristic but persistent denial of any foreign interference, and the latter by their fixation with regime stability and national security. And yet, while speculation on the cause of death seems inconsequential, with elections due to take place later this month, the incident highlights the ever-diminishing significance of the presidency in the Islamic Republic.

In its current form, Iran’s presidency was established in 1989 through a major revision to the Iranian constitution as part of a power-sharing agreement between Ali Khamenei and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Khamenei replaced the Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the Supreme Leader, who was to have more of a supervisory role as the head of state. Rafsanjani became the head of government as president, overseeing a more powerful and independent executive. The intervening decades, however, saw an initial power struggle and clash of personalities between Khamenei and Rafsanjani that resulted in the increasing marginalisation of the presidency: Khamenei moved to eliminate challengers to his authority, and to concentrate power in an ever-narrowing circle of loyalists and trusted advisors. The upshot has been the mortgaging of the Revolution’s republican tenets to sustain its Islamist and revolutionary drives and ensure strategic continuity under the direction of the Supreme Leader’s office (known as the Beit).

This exclusionary process culminated in the presidency of Ebrahim Raisi, whose most defining characteristics were his mediocrity and subservience. His lack of sophistication and charisma combined with his unquestioned loyalty to the Supreme Leader allowed him to secure the top public-facing and politically sensitive positions in the Islamic Republic, such as the Head of the Judiciary, prior to his tenure as president. Raisi appealed to Khamenei and his Beit precisely because he was the perfect LARPer, compliant enough to be included in the circle of trust and play the roles delegated to him, but one who was neither effective nor charismatic enough to eventually muster a popular (or even populist) challenge to the Supreme Leader’s authority as previous presidents had done. Raisi’s deficiencies, combined with his lack of a genuine public base, also made him palatable to the rest of the Establishment — as he was never a serious contender to become Khamenei’s eventual successor. Finding a similarly pliable yet consensual replacement might not be as straightforward.

It will entail a new game of electoral musical chairs carefully orchestrated by the Beit and the closely aligned Guardian Council. Although the Islamic Republic is not monolithic, state policy is decided by the Supreme Leader through consensus-building among informal power brokers, including the IRGC, hyper-revolutionary reactionaries, pragmatic Islamo-technocrats, parastatal economic foundations known as the bonyads, and ultra-conservative clerics and seminarians. The caveat behind the largely successful consolidation of power around an informal group of insiders is the disempowerment of Iran’s formal government institutions.

Indeed, Khamenei’s first public message in the early hours of the crash that the country’s affairs would continue “without disruption” was more than mere rhetoric: it signalled the weakening and decentring of the presidency itself. The Iranian president is effectively reduced to being the regime’s chief operating officer at best and its public spokesman at worst, with key decisions on both personnel and policy being made elsewhere. Raisi’s presidential tenure was punctuated by public gaffes and meme-worthy episodes that provided a comedic foil to his lack of fitness and executive experience, making a mockery of the office. In one such clip that went viral, Raisi is seen responding to public grievances about economic hardships faced by the working class by aloofly asking them if they had been given lunch, which made for a stream of jokes that in the wake of his crash Raisi himself had become lunch for the bears.

Suggested reading

Iran is weaker than we think

By Edward Luttwak

There is a lot of commotion and speculation inside Iran regarding the identity of the country’s next president, partly owing to public intrigue about the balance of power and further fuelled by a state media looking to boost voter participation from the record-low turnout of the legislative elections in March. Of the 80 people registered to run in the special election on 28 June, only six were approved by the Guardian Council. Former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was perhaps the most high-profile candidate to be deemed unfit by the Council. Similarly rejected was Ali Larijani, the former speaker of the Iranian Parliament (the Majles) and JCPOA supporter who was expected to be a strong candidate uniting moderate conservatives with pragmatists close to former President Hassan Rouhani.

The final list of presidential candidates includes several contenders from the different wings of the conservative Principlist camp along with one reformist. Among the Principlists vying for the country’s number two position is Saeed Jalili — the notorious ideologue and former chief nuclear negotiator in the Ahmadinejad era who is strongly backed by the regime’s most extremist, ideological, and autarkistic faction. The reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian—former Minister of Health in the administration of Iran’s popular former president Mohammad Khatami and current representative from Tabriz — has found early momentum and could be the dark horse. An ethnic Azeri and officially backed by the reformists, he is a relatively surprising inclusion likely approved to entice more people to vote, especially in northwest Azari region of Iran. His chances hinge on whether he can get the disaffected Iranian urban middle class that has largely boycotted recent elections to return to the polls, a tall order in the wake of the Mahsa Amini protests.

When the news of Raisi’s death first broke, initial expectations were that the current interim president Mohammad Mokhber — a close confidant of the Supreme Leader and formerly in charge of his finances and the major bonyads linked to him — would be Khamenei’s preferred choice for the role. Yet Mokhber’s unexpected decision not to run after overnight consultations with the current head of the Majles and former Tehran Mayor Ali Ghalibaf, and the latter’s U-turn to announce his candidacy on the last day of registrations, strongly suggest that Ghalibaf — who has the better name recognition — may have emerged as the Beit’s preferred candidate. A former IRGC commander, Ghalibaf not only boasts strong links with the country’s security apparatus but also embodies the regime’s pragmatic instincts. Despite his reputation for corruption and lavish spending, when all is said and done, Ghalibaf may be the candidate around whom many in the establishment could coalesce.

In practice, the upcoming election will be mostly performative, a highly propagandised and theatrical affair orchestrated by the Beit and its chief of staff Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani. Regardless of who becomes the next president, he — like Raisi — will owe his position to the Supreme Leader and his Beit and be expected to stick to Khamenei’s line. Iran’s true game of thrones will only commence after Khamenei’s eventual demise and the genuine succession crisis it may trigger. Still, a presidency often reflects the personality of its occupant. Given the Principlist establishment’s — and Khamenei’s own — apprehensions about a potentially “deviant” or non-revolutionary successor who could weaponise the power of the presidency to finally bring about the revolution’s Thermidorean moment and radically transform the Islamic Republic, the nation’s executive branch looks set to be helmed by obsequious foot soldiers and mediocre yes-men for the foreseeable future.

The systematic, if pre-emptive, purging or banishment of influential figures, especially former presidents, who dared to defy Khamenei’s will (even if only occasionally and privately) was meant to foreclose the possibility of future deviancy or fundamental transformation. It is why reformists close to Khatami (who the conservatives disparagingly call the liberal mullah) are almost entirely cut off from power, and why Ahmadinejad’s rejection was a foregone conclusion. The establishment’s paranoia about change and obsession with purity has radicalised the system, particularly its next generation, many of whom are alumni of Imam Sadegh University and see themselves as the true heirs of the Revolution. Ironically, the hardliners associated with this faction (sometimes labelled Paydari) are devotees of Jalili and regard the older generation and especially the more pragmatic among them like Ghalibaf (who has called for a “new Principlism”) as too modern, materialistic, corrupt, and non-revolutionary. Indeed, the one interesting rivalry to watch for in the upcoming election could be the showdown between Ghalibaf’s Islamo-technocratic supporters and the ultra-revolutionaries rallying behind Jalili to get a sense of the two camps’ appeal and relative clout within the Islamic Republic’s rank-and-file.

In many ways, the Bell 212 helicopter tasked with Raisi’s transport represents the state of the Iranian presidency: it has become little more than an empty shell reduced to a quasi-functional and semi-ceremonial role. But it’s an even better metaphor for the Islamic Republic itself: another relic of the Seventies that is simultaneously modern and archaic and whose external metallic frame and complex machinery hide its internal corrosions and outdated instruments.

Some might even say that there is a degree of poetic justice in the chopper’s crash being caused not by nefarious machinations from the outside but by the natural elements, its own ageing equipment, and its inability to adapt to real-world conditions. Considering the severe mismanagement in the run-up to the crash, the botched emergency response, and its media fallout, the event revealed what has become a near truism of Persian history: that given time, Iranians are ultimately their own worst enemies. Consider, for instance, that the CIA had actually botched its planned 1953 Coup against Iran’s then-prime minister Dr Mohammad Mossadegh, and that his downfall occurred only days later in a cascade of events whose major protagonists were the Iranians themselves — mainly due to an unholy alliance of Iranian royalists, bazaar merchants, mobsters, and clergymen like Ayatollahs Kashani and Behbahani (who had turned against Mossadegh for his secularism), coupled with Mossadegh’s own intransigence, overconfidence, and underestimation of his enemies. Not to mention how Tehran was so paranoid about a potential US military response in the aftermath of its 2021 retaliatory strikes on America’s Al-Asad airbase in Iraq that it mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger airliner killing all on board to international and domestic outrage.

Suggested reading

Biden's secret support for Iran

By Jacob Siegel

The crash symbolises yet again that, despite looking formidable from the outside and displaying a particular nous for navigating geopolitical crises as most recently displayed during its latest tit-for-tat with Israel, the Islamic Republic is far less robust and judicious internally. Indeed, Raisi’s death underscores the fact that Tehran is at its most vulnerable when left to its own devices and not actively provoked by its foreign strategic competitors, leaving it unable to use the spectre of international conflict to rally its forces behind its flag.

For all its faults and strategic missteps, the Biden administration has at least shown the foresight to engage with the Iranians at critical junctures to prevent escalation and reach a mutual understanding on regional security as evidenced by a series of third-party talks in Oman. Whether a new Trump administration would display similar restraint and play the long game by pursuing an interest-based and transactional relationship with Tehran is an open question. (During his first term, Trump was repeatedly attacked for his supposedly transactional approach to foreign policy, but his Iran policy, largely left to the Neocons, was especially provocative, hawkish and ideological.)

Still, Bell 212’s crucial lesson for the outside world is to exercise strategic patience in dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran — for ultimately all revolutions devour themselves and implode under the weight of their own shortcomings and contradictions. Considering how eight years of the Western-backed Iran-Iraq War and decades’ worth of international sanctions actually strengthened the IRGC and undermined the Iranian people, we must learn that foreign interference, provocation and war will only delay — not quicken — that eventuality.

The entire episode parallels the global reaction to the Ukraine war, in which solidarity with Ukraine as a victim of foreign aggression or empathy with Russia as a victim of Western hegemonic overreach divided the world. Some might view this phenomenon as a hallmark of human compassion and care — the result of greater awareness of human suffering owing to the power of modern technology. Still, there are numerous examples of brutal conflicts and atrocities that do not capture international public and governmental attention and thus remain local and ultimately ignored.

Judging by history, this global internalisation of distant wars by outsiders is a highly unusual, and rather pathological, development. It happens when both the ruling classes and the civilian populations across the world begin to perceive a far-off external conflict in existential terms and put themselves at the centre of it as a messianic protagonist. The question is: why?

On the one hand, the Ukraine and Gaza wars are distinctively modern — both because of the sheer magnitude of destruction and because they are conflicts of nationalism, a contemporary ideology that links the future of peoples to states. On the other hand, the global milieu within which they take place is one of a profound crisis of meaning and legitimacy exacerbated by the identitarian turn taken by both the Left and the Right since the Sixties, and the complete politicisation of all aspects of life in late or hyper- modernity.

In today’s globalised world, identity-based existence, muddying the boundaries between the political and the personal, has become a poor man’s substitute for the deep-rooted and embodied meaning that was previously derived from communal, traditional life and held in common within a culture. Stemming from an external locus of control, all modern identities thus reflect what Nietzsche called an inherent “ressentimental” drive and are constructed around overcoming the systemic oppression of an abstract and highly symbolic “us” by a privileged “them” that is subsequently cast as evil.

In this metaphysical account, being downtrodden is morally superior. Privilege and power are inherently evil. And one can become righteous by projecting oneness or identity with the virtuous victim. In both Israel and Ukraine, we can see how this ontological, if tragic, struggle for coherence within the modern self through self-identification with the “disempowered” is carried over into the realm of global geopolitics.

Regardless of the actual historical context of the globalized conflicts and the ostensible animosity between the partisans of the two sides, the underlying motivation for the opposite sides of these seemingly binary and zero-sum conflicts (who don’t actually experience the war and its violence) is a contestation over oppression and a struggle to determine the “virtuous” victim.  In other words, real wars over land, resources, and survival are co-opted by the rest of the world and transformed into wars of victimhood with which they can intrinsically relate. War thus becomes therapeutic and is turned inward as yet another means for identity formation in one’s internal quest for social identity.

For the civilian populations living abroad, therefore, these faraway conflicts are more than mere distractions: they are an opportunity for catharsis. They offer the fleeting possibility of escaping the existential angst of an atomised life lived under the automatism of modernity, and for feeling a sense of unity, purity and spiritual community forged in the virtual fires of war — all from the safety and comfort of their digital devices. As Ernst Jünger wrote in an often-overlooked monograph War as an Inner Experience, “action in itself is nothing, conviction is everything” — and the lost mimetic souls of hypermodernity epitomise it.

Suggested reading

The tragic death of Labour Zionism

By Richard Johnson

But not only are these wars co-opted by the global masses seeking transcendence; they are also simultaneously internalised and instrumentalised by the establishments in foreign countries to buttress and justify their political regimes. Where civilian populations’ ontological insecurity stems from an essential need for meaning and permanence, the ruling classes suffer from an additional insecurity that is rooted in the need to legitimise their power (even to themselves) in a world where all institutional authority is increasingly doubted.

Modern statehood is predicated on political regimes, all of which, whether we are conscious of this or not, legitimise themselves according to modern ideologies that claim to be liberating and righteous. Even as modern universalist ideologies such as liberalism and Islamism dismiss each other as tyrannical and unjust, both these state ideologies, in different ways, profess to transform the world for the better by eliminating oppression as such.

Within the framework offered by globalised social justice, modern entities such as Ukraine, Israel and Palestine are removed from their concrete territorial contexts and transformed into pet projects and ideological proxies by different foreign actors. Ukraine thus becomes existential to the United States, even though the fate of Ukraine will never have a decisive impact on America’s national interest or the collective interest of Americans. Israel’s cause, meanwhile, is forever identified with the post-war liberal international order and the triumph over National Socialism: our commitment to it must thus remain sacrosanct and unwavering. Because the North Atlantic establishment essentialises liberal internationalism as part of its institutional identity, both Ukraine and Israel become places where Western political leaders can fight against the disintegration of the liberal order and hence baptise themselves in the cathartic waters of foreign wars.

Suggested reading

Saudi Arabia's empire of sand

By Ben Judah

Similarly, to the vanguard of the Islamic Republic in Iran backing Hezbollah (or the Muslim Brotherhood revolutionaries backing Hamas), “Palestine” has for years symbolised what Ukraine now represents to the Atlanticist elites in the West: the physical embodiment of a world-transforming “cause” and the symbol for a self-righteous ideology animated by eliminating suffering, imperialism and exploitation. In both cases, the ideological proxies become the scene for a Last Judgement, a Rapture based on a highly religious framing about innocence and transgression, purity and stain. Each ruling class sees displaying solidarity and support — whether for Ukraine and Israel or Palestine — as a test for moral purity, and victory takes on an existential and millenarian meaning, signalling the final unveiling of history to justice and salvation.

None of this is meant to discount the fact that there are genuine geopolitical causes behind these conflicts, but to emphasise that, when it comes to their globalised nature, often ontological insecurity and ideology drive foreign powers’ geopolitical interest in that region in the first place. Just as the Palestinian cause serves as a lever for Iranian influence within an Arab world steeped in post-colonial trauma and paranoia, the historical trauma many Central and Eastern Europeans experienced under Russian communism makes them understandably anxious about Russian aggression and eager to join the Western camp. Nevertheless, for the major powers outside these regions, interjection in conflicts abroad is not simply a cold calculus in realpolitik, but an opportunity to bolster their legitimacy by siding with the state or cause which serves as their ideological proxy.

Together, the civilian and political drivers that motivate the global internalisation of local wars explain the strange phenomenon already perceived by George Orwell in the 20th century as “transferred nationalism”: “Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.” Transference allows one to be “much more nationalistic than he could ever be on behalf of his native country” and gain moral capital and social prestige while doing so.

Suggested reading

The defiance of Israel's border towns

By David Patrikarakos

Despite the protestations from the dissident Right and the anti-war Left, Ukraine is the paradigmatic example of this; consider the overwhelming consensus between the ruling class and its civilian base in the universities, media and the professional-managerial class as to the identity of the virtuous downtrodden (hint: it wasn’t the Russians), and how this consensus mirrored by European capitals galvanized the West behind Ukraine. Yet these exercises in generating ersatz nationalism for the political regime are not always seamless, and can quickly turn toxic and corrosive.

As seen with the Israeli-Gaza conflict already, trouble arises when a regime’s establishment and its sources of civilian support find themselves on the different ends of the oppression narrative spectrum. The current rift between the Biden administration’s unquestionable support for Israel as the victim of terrorism and a large section of the Democratic base condemning what they call the “Palestinian genocide” is a clear indication that they fundamentally disagree on the identity of the “virtuous victim” here. A similar dynamic can be observed in Britain’s Labour Party. In this way, internalisation of foreign wars can become a source of political instability and domestic strife.

Moreover, not only could such internalisation of wars abroad be a source of social discord, but the public and political fixation on them could motivate more than virtual engagement — resulting in physical intervention in distant conflicts that could possibly escalate them into real regional and even world wars, not to mention completely warp the national interests and security priorities of the intervening power. After all, ideology and fanaticism resent rapprochement and diplomacy.

In one of his final commentaries before he died in September, Christopher Coker, the international theorist and scholar of war, wrote: “the existential dimension [of war] is no less important [than its political side] for it also involves power, or more correctly perhaps, the empowerment, both material and spiritual, of those who do the actual fighting.” To this we must add: “and also the desire for empowerment by those who don’t do any of the actual fighting — but who nonetheless live vicariously through it.”

Both responses were entirely predictable; and both suffer from a similar misapprehension about the emerging paradigm of international relations today and the structural shifts on the horizon.

From the Euro-Atlantic standpoint, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a galvanising event. The war reforged a long-dormant Manichaean framing of existential conflict between Russia and the “West”. What is, for Ukraine, a physical and territorial conflict thus assumed ontological, apocalyptic dimensions. In the spiritual fires of the war, the myth of the “West” was rebaptised. For a Nato that was seeking a mission ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, here was an opportunity to renew its institutional and ideological rationale, as well as to project solidarity in an the face of an emergency crisis.

From the perspective of America’s elites, meanwhile, the Ukraine war has underscored Europe’s profound military dependence on Washington and further reinforced the US-centric basis of transatlantic relations. Not only did it ostensibly justify their long-held position that Europe must pay a much larger share for the privileges of a US security guarantee, but the debate over the strategic worth of Nato and its enlargement was effectively silenced. Since the invasion, the alliance has already expanded to Finland, while Sweden remains in the process of accession. All of this was cause for celebration, if not triumphalism, in liberal internationalist circles: America, along with the Western order it sponsors against great power challengers such as China, appeared to be vindicated.

It was not surprising, then, that Macron’s remarks drew the ire of the Atlanticist foreign policy establishment, who not only falsely conflate the transatlantic relationship with Nato and measure its health in terms of Nato’s strength and durability but, crucially, have also internalised America’s Wilsonian and “Nato-centric” approach to European security. For them, the endurance of Nato as a permanent alliance serves as an effective hedge to the formation of a European defence force independent of Washington. Yet, the alliance is also an instrument for continued American influence over European policy. As Ronald Steel presciently wrote in the Sixties: “There is more than one kind of empire, more than one way of exerting control over others, and more than one justification for doing so.”

In his war memoirs, former French general and president Charles de Gaulle certainly agreed, calling Nato a “false pretence” designed to “disguise America’s chokehold over Europe”. The Americans, he argued, “should recognise that the United States’ best ally is not the one who grovels before them, but the one who knows how to say no to them”. Yet, de Gaulle, a proud European aristocrat who had had to deal with an imperious Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War, was also more pessimistic about the future direction of US policy, fearing Americans had developed “that taste for intervention in which the instinct for domination cloaked itself”.

Across the Atlantic, de Gaulle’s views found parallels with those of America’s original cold warriors, such as George Kennan and Dwight D. Eisenhower. “If in 10 years”, observed then-Presidential-candidate Eisenhower in 1951, “all American troops stationed in Europe for national defence purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole [Nato] project will have failed”. Recognising the strategic value of the Europeans as equal and sovereign partners, Eisenhower understood that US policy should aim to foster a separate transnational defence force in Western Europe with the capacity to eventually become fully self-reliant.

Some seven decades later, it appears we have gone full circle. More than a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the sense of consensus produced by the tragic war is slowly dissipating. As French President Emmanuel Macron noted, with America shifting its strategic focus to Asia, the question of European strategic autonomy is no longer academic but vital if Europe wants to be one of the “poles” in the emerging multipolar world, rather than a vassal of Washington.

Yet there is also a different, more complex story here, too. Notwithstanding their questionable practicality, recent calls for a collective defence initiative premised on European unity and its claims to shared identity paradoxically suffer from a globalist and Caesarist predisposition: not only are they wedded to the project of European integration designed to keep Franco-German elites in a position of primacy, but their cast of mind seems entranced by the notion of great power competition on a global scale.

Indeed, Macron has internalised the epistemological basis of modern international relations theory and its stubborn fixation on global realpolitik. This reflects the far-too-common modern bias towards the world as the spatial setting of choice for both life and strife. “The fundamental event of modernity”, as Heidegger wrote, “is the conquest of the world as picture.” Within this distortive vision, to stay relevant, an entity — whether individual, national, or organisational — must develop the capacity to influence the global, because one draws existential meaning from the hope of mastering the world as such.

Suggested reading

Is the West escalating the Ukraine war?

By Arta Moeini

However, the return of geopolitics and militarisation to Europe has also exposed the reality of internal competition between the different blocs of states over the contours of any collective agenda — a reality that will inevitably force a more inward reckoning about what it means to be European. While Macron is focused on the projection or exteriorisation of European power to compete on a world scale, the interiorisation of Europe is more likely — a process forming new axes and blocs in response to the new regional and geopolitical realities in the continent.

In fact, for all the talk of Western unity inspired by the war in Ukraine, we are beginning to see cracks in the ranks within the Nato alliance. There are two main reasons for this. First, the American push for Nato expansion since 1991 has enlarged the alliance by adding a host of faultline states or “regional balancers” from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The strategy, which began with the Clinton administration but was fully championed by the George W. Bush administration, was to create a decidedly pro-American pillar on the continent centred on Warsaw, which would force an eastward shift in the alliance’s centre of gravity away from the traditional Franco-German axis.

By using Nato enlargement to weaken the old power centres in Europe that might have occasionally stood up to it (such as in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq), Washington ensured a more compliant Europe in the short-term. The upshot, however, was the formation of a 31-member behemoth made up of three distinct categories of states with deep asymmetries of power and low compatibility of interests. As I recently argued with Zachary Paikin:

“The alliance now essentially consists of three tiers: a globe-spanning and maritime great power, the United States (with its closely-aligned Anglo partners in Canada and the UK); a number of continental ‘middle powers‘ with different views on the desirability or viability of the US-led postwar international order including France, Germany, and Turkey; and a collection of states in and around the post-Soviet space led by Poland, which serve as ‘regional balancers’ against both historical European powers and Russia.”

Nato, as a consequence, has become a highly heterogeneous alliance, in which members have different security priorities and threat perceptions, increasing the likelihood of irreconcilable rifts between Western European states and their CEE counterparts, especially as the United States pivots to the Pacific. In other words, Nato’s very expansion could likely be the cause of its ultimate breakdown into at least two different alliance structures, ententes, or minilateral regional arrangements.

Meanwhile, the nominally North Atlantic military alliance is no longer confined to the European theatre, let alone its original basis in Western Europe and the Atlantic region. By adopting US policy priorities since the Cold War, the alliance has metastasised into a global collective military conglomerate that not only extends to Eastern Europe but stretches across Eurasia and into the Pacific, with its latest outpost just opening in Japan.

Suggested reading

Does Europe need to split?

By Thomas Fazi

Although CEE leaders such as Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki continue to double down on the United States as “the absolute foundation” of security in “our part of Europe”, most European nations still choose to placate Washington, even if they have little interest in stepping up the escalation ladder in places such as Taiwan. Predictably, the imperative one feels to project solidarity with Washington lessens the further West one goes in Europe and the further away one gets from the ontological presence of the Russian threat.

While Macron espouses a pan-European, EU-centric model of security through which he hopes to leverage France as a major power on the world stage, the reality is that the EU’s institutional sovereignty cuts against the geopolitical interests and national sovereignty of smaller member states — and more acutely so given that a similar “Easternisation” has also occurred in relation to the EU with Ukraine, Moldova and even Georgia slated to become future member states. While they are much more likely to fear abandonment by Washington, these post-Soviet states are, ironically, far more sovereigntist, conservative, and nationalistic, tending to resist the liberal institutionalist and integrationist agenda of their Western European counterparts. Indeed, the frenzied backlash to Macron’s warnings about European entanglement in Taiwan suggests that a power struggle may already be underway in the EU. As such, the entrenched disagreements over a shared EU strategy toward China could well become the catalyst for a future split in Europe along a West-East axis.

Ultimately, the return of geopolitics catapulted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has meant that the proper expanse of “Europe” as well as its security identity is once again in doubt. This is a tale of divergent strategic interests among competing “allies” seeking to secure one another’s conformity: each side looking to impose their interests and ontological vision as the sine qua non of the Western alliance.

And, over the medium to long term, this new reality informs European states’ relations both toward external actors and among themselves. On the one hand, continental Europe must determine the proper scope of its relationship with the United States (and the Atlanticist Anglosphere). On the other, it must increasingly contend with the divergent approaches toward Moscow by Eastern and Western factions which will likely also affect their future postures toward Beijing (the former seeking the complete expulsion of Russia from European affairs, the latter hoping for an eventual normalisation of relations).

As it struggles to resolve the Russia question, Europe thus finds itself having to re-examine its identity as a distinct cultural and geopolitical realm, recalibrate its proper boundaries, and discover its strategic orientation (and voice) vis-à-vis a “collective West” premised on US-led Atlanticism. It is here that the continent’s long history might serve as a guide.

As it expanded, the Roman Empire simply became too large, finding it difficult to reconcile the increasingly incompatible priorities of its different regions. Overextension has always been the mother of entropy, and the declining Roman Empire lacked the resources and military capacity to respond in a unified way to the disparate security concerns of its eastern and western quadrants. This was perhaps the primary reason why Emperor Theodosius formalised an already-growing division between the two halves of the Roman world, so that each could better respond to its immediate security challenges. While the West remained preoccupied with ongoing economic problems and barbarian incursions along the Germanic frontier, the East organised itself to confront the persistent challenge of its peer-competitor, the Sassanian Empire. Simply put, the Romans had to split into two Romes in order to more effectively meet a plethora of systemic challenges.

Suggested reading

How Nato seduced the European Left

By Lily Lynch

The Roman example is certainly not a perfect analogy for today’s Europe, but it is instructive. Present-day Europe is much more stable and formidable compared to the late Roman era, with neither bloc facing the prospect of imminent collapse. Nevertheless, as with the late Rome, today a split along the Franco-German and Polish axes would reflect the differing strategic priorities of the two sides. Over time, this might mean the expiration of Nato as a project and its replacement by two alternate minilateral security ententes — one in Western Europe centred on Germany and France and the other in Northeast Europe anchored in Poland and the Baltic states sympathetic to it.

In any such future realignment, the German question remains the key conundrum. There, the rise of the Green Party, personified by the über-hawk and Americanist foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, is outrightly undermining Germany’s concrete national interest and industrial sector. Under the cover of “Europeanism”, such German liberal internationalists are engaged in a sort of a Faustian bargain with the United States and its key CEE allies in which Berlin acquiesces to Nato’s eastward shift in Europe for the sake of greater control over the defence and economic imperatives of the alliance. This is unsustainable in the long term, not only because it is wholly dependent on America’s continuing presence in Europe but also as it contradicts the interests of Western Europeans, who would have to bankroll and sustain the military austerities which the East needs to confront a Russian threat that Western populations do not feel nearly as acutely.

Since the Second World War, partly as a result of the Cold War’s legacy and partly due to unrelenting Anglo-American interference, Europe is no longer the primary mover of world affairs. Instead, it has devolved into a regional theatre akin to the Middle East, in which competition among other great powers — for many decades Washington and Moscow — takes centre stage.

If this is to change — if Europe is to recover its geopolitical distinctiveness — its political leaders must first recognise that it is not a monolith, but a mosaic composed of different blocs. The idea of the “West” might be ontologically alluring or comforting in times of chaos and tragedy, but it is an illusion that weaponises collective paranoia for ideological unity, designed to decentre Europe and disenfranchise its various elements from pursuing their particular interests that may or may not oppose America’s crusades for global primacy.

At the same time, Washington, too, must adapt to the structural shifts and the increasing regionalisation that are shaping a polycentric world based around civilisational middle powers. Just as “Nato unity” is a mirage that is meant to rhetorically mask the shaky foundations of Western universalism as underwritten by US power, “European identity” is an equally ambiguous and problematic notion because, geopolitically speaking, there are at least two Europes with diverging security interests, value systems, and cultural pedigree. Choosing to ignore this division amounts to nothing more than kicking the can down the road — and risks breaking apart the Western alliance itself.

“War is a continuation of policy with other means,” wrote Clausewitz in 1832. A year into the Russo-Ukrainian War, what is that policy where Ukraine is concerned? Or America, Germany, and other Nato allies? Are Ukraine’s repeated calls for more support and the West’s accommodating response a case of leveraging “strategic publicity”, performative diplomacy, alliance solidarity, or something else entirely? After all, as much as the Ukrainians are fighting Russian forces and suffering massive casualties to protect the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian state, today Nato is openly engaged in a proxy war that risks spiralling into a catastrophic conflict between the West and Russia.

Although foreign policy realism can help sketch, even predict, the general contours of the war and explain policy in Moscow and Kyiv, this mainstream realist position, as represented by the likes of John Mearsheimer, provides an incomplete account of the behaviour of most Western allies, especially the United States. To understand Western decision-making and the peculiar inter-alliance dynamics of Nato, we need a more radical realism that takes seriously the non-physical, psychological, and “ontological dimensions” of security — encompassing a state or an organisation’s need for overcoming uncertainty by establishing orderly narratives and identities about its sense of “self”.

Still, “structural” realist accounts — centred on systemic anarchy, physical security, the balance of power, and political dimensions of strategy — can help explain aspects of Ukraine’s strategic decision-making. In a recent study for the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, which I co-authored, we investigated the structural reasons that drive Ukraine’s strategic calculus. We suggested that, as a “regional balancer”, Ukraine took a massive risk in defying the Russian redlines about Kyiv explicitly rejecting Nato overtures and stopping any military integration with the West. This was a maximalist gambit that presupposed Western military support and risked actively provoking Moscow to its own strategic disadvantage.

In choosing the riskier, zero-sum strategy aimed at thwarting the historical and geopolitical sphere of influence of a neighbouring regional and civilisational power, Ukraine was perhaps imprudent — but by no means irrational. As we wrote:

“Practically all of America’s security alliances today are asymmetrical arrangements between the United States and regional balancers — a class of smaller, more peripheral regional states seeking to balance against the dominant middle powers in their respective regions. As a great power, America possesses an inherent capacity to encroach on other regional security complexes (RSCs). In this context, it is reasonable for regional balancers to attempt to coax and exploit American power in the service of their particular regional security interests.”

Setting such a lofty objective, however, effectively meant that Kyiv could never succeed without active Nato intervention shifting the balance of power in its favour. By virtue of its decision, Ukraine, along with its closest partners in Poland and the Baltic nations, became the classic “trojan ally” — smaller countries whose desire for regional clout against the extant middle power (Russia) is predicated on their ability to persuade an external great power and its global military network (here, the US and, by extension, Nato) to step in militarily on their behalf. As we noted in our study, “this comes at great risk to the regional balancer and at great cost to the external great power”. For ultimately, the arrangement depends on “the threat of the use of force and military intervention” by that external great power, without which the regional balancer would fail.

Suggested reading

Will Ukraine survive Russia's spring offensive?

By David Patrikarakos

Ukraine’s strategic ambition is to overcome Russia once and for all and break away from Moscow’s historical control. Putting aside the specious and facile Russian justifications for the invasion that seek to lampoon Nato’s military intervention in Yugoslavia, it is crushing this larger Ukrainian ambition that motivates the Kremlin. This explains Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, its aspirations for the Minsk agreements, and this final resort to military action.

Once the Russian invasion began, Kyiv’s goal of thwarting Moscow and keeping intact its territories became impossible without Western military intervention. Ukraine’s future as a sovereign state would now hinge on its ability to successfully engineer an escalation. From Ukraine’s perspective, therefore, the desire for supplies of ever more sophisticated weaponry from the more powerful Western nations is not primarily motivated by their immediate practical and tactical impact — after all, the delivery of and training for these systems will still be months away. No, Ukrainian demands largely stem from what the introduction of these weapons would represent politically, as well as their long-term geostrategic consequences for the next phase of the war.

For it is in Kyiv’s interests to steer Nato into becoming more closely entangled in the war. Ukraine has resorted to a combination of tactics — including information warfare and exploiting historic Western guilt — to instigate an informational and reputational cascade among Nato members that would assure accedence to Ukrainian demands. Given its clear long-term weaknesses in quality manpower, artillery, and ammunition, the Zelenskyy government has shrewdly fought a hybrid war from the start, knowing that Ukraine cannot defeat Russia without Nato fighting on its side. The question now is whether the West should allow itself to be entrapped into that war and jeopardise the fate of the entire world in doing so.

In the materialist framing of security offered by most realists, there is little upside for America and western Europe, and certainly no genuine national or strategic interest, in getting dragged into what is essentially a regional war in Eastern Europe involving two different nationalistic states. From an ontological standpoint, however, an Anglo-American foreign policy establishment that strongly “identifies” itself with US unipolarity has been heavily invested in maintaining the status quo, and preventing the formation of a new collective security architecture in Europe, which would be centred on Russia and Germany rather than the United States. As geopolitical analyst George Friedman observed in 2015: “For the United States, the primordial fear is… [the coupling of] German technology and German capital, [with] Russian natural resources [and] Russian manpower.”

Perhaps following a similar logic, the US establishment has worked to destroy any possibility of a Berlin-Moscow axis forming by aligning itself with the Intermarium bloc of countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea, repeatedly opposing (and openly threatening) Nord Stream gas pipelines, and deliberately rebuffing Russian insistence on a neutral Ukraine. In relation to Ukraine, the initial objective for an ideological Western alliance that is skewed toward “shared values”, as Nato has become with the dissolution of the USSR, was to turn that country into a Western albatross for Russia, to bog down Moscow in an extended quagmire to weaken its regional power and influence, and even to encourage regime change in the Kremlin.

Suggested reading

How Russia can end the war

By Edward Luttwak

If one were to accept the logic of this strategy, then a limited Western military support of the Ukrainian war aims — directed towards creating an attritional, frozen conflict — seems plausible. Yet, even in such a scenario, any expansion in scope and degree of that support to include advanced weapon systems, such as F-16s or long-range missiles, is not only unwise but increasingly suicidal in any cost-benefit calculation. Such explicitly hostile support could escalate the proxy war into a direct, conventional war — a World War III scenario, which President Biden insists he wants to avoid. Moreover, in the unlikely event that such expansive military assistance is successful in driving Russian forces out of the Donbas, let alone Crimea (where Russia holds a large naval base), it would dramatically increase the likelihood of a nuclear event, given how Moscow regards protecting its strategic stronghold in the Black Sea as an existential imperative.

Why, then, does the West continue to oblige Ukraine and give in to reputational pressure and arm-twisting from Nato’s newest members in the Intermarium corridor? There are a number of causes, ranging from the private and institutional interests of the liberal internationalist establishment to the spread of a Manichaean worldview in the alliance. Most important, however, is the phenomenon of group compulsion toward escalation aggravated by ontological insecurity — which happens when abrupt and tragic world-historical events such as the Russian invasion disrupt one’s unified sense of order and continuity in the world.

Exacerbated by Nato’s enlargement and transformation into an institutional behemoth of some 30-odd nations with differing perceptions of threat and security, this compulsion has shaped and reinforced a unified “identity” among Western nations — a narrative of us against them. Under the condition of ontological insecurity, socio-psychological and emotional undercurrents enable reputational cascades, enforce conformity in the name of Western unity, and empower “group polarisation” around the riskier choice, which ensures the more extreme and escalatory policies are ultimately adopted. And, crucially, trojan allies understandably use these dynamics to advance their very real national and security interests from within the alliance, giving them a far more prominent role in decision-making than their relative power might suggest.

A closer inspection of the inter-alliance discourse within Nato also reveals an activist psychology lurking beneath the political and ideological signalling. Given that ideology — namely liberal humanitarianism and democratism — plays a key role in the maintenance of the alliance, its decision-making process is predisposed to the action bias fallacy: the idea that doing something is always better than doing nothing. This sort of reciprocal, mutually reinforcing mentality among alliance peers who profess an activist “ethic of care” reflexively interprets responsibility as taking action, while rebuking hesitance and restraint as inhumane. The dynamic recalls Nietzsche’s observation in The Birth of Tragedy that “action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of illusion” — here, that “veil of illusion” is provided by the ontological process of identity-formation and the shared narratives of “collective responsibility” and “Western unity”.

Within the context of inter-alliance decision-making, such an ethic cannot help but indulge any demands put upon it, especially since the loudest peers can dress up this compulsion under the allegedly moral imperative of advancing Western unity, defending “our values”, and fighting reactionary evil. The ontological security-seeking of a global and hegemonic great power such as the US foregrounds the need for an ideology that can offer it a sense of coherence, make its actions appear to itself meaningful and justified. The same phenomenon applies to Nato, which — despite not being a state but an institution — is today practically an alter-ego of the US.

Suggested reading

The madness behind the battle for Bakhmut

By David Patrikarakos

Now, this may seem to indicate an inherent tension between the desire for an anchoring tale about “who we are” and the more traditional material security that is based around physical self-preservation. But while this is true in some cases, especially in relation to ideological great powers such as the US, whose idealistic self-narrative of American exceptionalism often collides with its real interests, ontological and physical security-seeking are more congruent in smaller and middle-tier states for whom both interests and identities are more rooted, localised, and real.

In the Anglosphere, perhaps owing to the legacy of imperialism and the historical reality of unipolarity, there is currently a disconnect between authentic national interests, narrowly and concretely defined, and the behaviour of its liberal internationalist foreign policy establishment that prioritises ontological security-seeking with global ramifications. This fact needs rectifying. Thankfully, there are early signs that President Biden and at least some of his advisors, including the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, have sensed this dreadful reality and its potentially dangerous fallout, and are now beginning to speak of the need for negotiations and diplomatic settlement in Ukraine.

As we begin the second year of the war, it has finally dawned on many in Washington that the likely outcome of this tragedy is stalemate: “We will continue to try to impress upon [the Ukrainian leadership] that we can’t do anything and everything forever,” one senior Biden administration official said this week. For all the talk of Ukrainian agency, that agency depends entirely on Nato’s commitment to continue to support Kyiv’s war effort indefinitely. Such a maximalist desire for “complete victory” is not only highly attritional and suggestive of yet another endless war, but it is also reckless; its very success could trigger a nuclear holocaust.

Moscow has already paid a high price for its transgressions in Ukraine. To prolong the war at this point in an ideological quest for total victory is both strategically and morally questionable. For many liberal internationalists in the West, the clamour for a “just peace” that is sufficiently punishing to Russia suggests little more than a thinly-veiled desire to impose a Carthaginian peace on Moscow. The West has indeed wounded Russia; now it must decide if it wants to let this wound fester and conflagrate the entire world. For unless Moscow is provided with a reasonable off-ramp that recognises Russia’s status as a regional power with its own existential imperatives of strategic and ontological security, that is the precipice towards which we are heading.

Put to one side the fact that the impetus for al-Qaeda terrorism was not “our democracy” but America’s liberal hegemony and military interventionism abroad — the exaggerations in this dramatic piece of historical revisionism echoed a speech Biden had made in Philadelphia mere days earlier. Speaking in an eerie set-up at Independence Hall, Biden had warned against the threat of a different terror, closer to home — from “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans”, who “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”. According to him, they promote “political violence” and “undermine democracy itself”.

After 21 years, it appears we have gone full circle: the War on Terror’s “you are either with us or against us” mentality has come home. Where George W. Bush used American exceptionalism as a basis for militarism and political absolutism, Biden has leveraged democratic exceptionalism — weaponising the mythos of democracy for partisan gains.

Seen together, Biden’s speeches highlight the often-overlooked synergy between domestic and foreign policy: his rhetoric depicts his administration’s war against the amorphous spectre of  “MAGA fascism” at home and its stated goal of militarily defeating autocracies abroad as two sides of the same coin. These speeches could ensnare sceptics on all sides of the spectrum, enmeshing them in false equivalencies. Deny the Establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy and risk being brandished as one of the “extremists” at home; defend America’s civil liberties and due process toward January 6 rioters, and you are in league with Vladimir Putin. This is troubling for any critic of US policy in Ukraine or Taiwan right now, especially the voices of anti-interventionism on the Left. Such voices are already under pressure to conform to the party line and self-censor their restrained positions for fear of being associated with Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.

Admittedly, the military withdrawal from Afghanistan last year was a breath of fresh air. But the Biden administration still exhibits decidedly hawkish attitudes, as showcased by the Alaska summit, the rhetoric around toppling Putin, and the recent security pledge to Taiwan. And to justify them, it spins an ideological narrative, centred on the existential clash between democracies and autocracies. What’s more, this invented Manichaeanism can be used to browbeat political opponents at any time. Put simply, in addition to creating a moralistic concept of statecraft to use abroad, this existential framework is used to silence those critical of American military interventionism and liberal hegemony, such as the foreign policy realists and restrainer critics of the Blob in Washington.

Suggested reading

Am I really a threat to democracy?

By Mary Harrington

This form of language game is designed to coerce critics into feigned obeisance, valorise the liberal hawks as the crux of the Democratic party, and undermine the remnants of the Anti-War Movement on the Left. It is perhaps ironic — if always inevitable — that the global Democracy Crusade would come home to haunt Americans. The abstract and ominous nature of “authoritarianism” is a convenient way to dismiss Trump supporters en masse as sympathisers with global tyranny — and to disingenuously equate realism and restraint with Trumpism.

This is an absurd equation. The Trump administration housed many globalists such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, who used their tenure to advocate for “maximum pressure” against Iran, call for regime change in Venezuela, and facilitate the bombing of Syria. Moreover, criticism of US liberal imperium, and the “liberal international order” it has masterminded, comes from both sides of the political divide; it is neither partisan nor the exclusive domain of populists. While the logic of democratic exceptionalism has been routinely — if selectively — applied to justify liberal interventionism abroad, this agenda has an atrocious track record. It should remain open to criticism from all quarters, particularly in a democratic republic.

After all, the conventional wisdom underpinning the promotion of democracy as a foreign policy objective has now been seriously challenged. Such policies have routinely failed, especially because they tend to focus on the performative and procedural elements of democracy, rather than strengthening effective governance — an approach that masks profound systemic dysfunction. America’s failed policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti are perhaps the most notable examples, but so too are challenges in West Africa, where the US has been compelled to devise a new approach. The failure to prevent an anti-democratic coup in Myanmar, meanwhile, underscores the limitations of US geopolitical reach.

In a different era — at the height of the Cold War, perhaps — Biden’s Manichaean rhetoric might have been a rallying cry for many nations in the developed and developing world. But today’s era is multipolar. Nations, especially in the Global South, are unshackled from the ideological straitjacket of the Cold War and its perception of shared global threats; they are driven instead by the pursuit of economic prosperity and recovering their regional and civilisational strength. America’s democracy agenda rings hollow.

Suggested reading

There is no "Biden Doctrine"

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The same is true at home. American public opinion has grown weary of the activist and internationalist posture of US foreign policy, embodied by decades of endless wars. Democracy promotion is no longer seen as an effective way to advance core US geopolitical interests. The US ruling class has therefore sought to adapt and reframe America’s global adventures and interventionism in terms of a domestic threat that would presumably be more easily marketable to the American public.

This logic has now become the operating principle behind what may be called the Biden Doctrine, which is expected to be unveiled in the administration’s forthcoming National Security Strategy. It holds that the fight for democracy is incessant, totalising, and all-encompassing. That neutralising the alleged threat of fascism at home, personified by MAGA and former president Trump, is part of a larger apocalyptic struggle to defend the liberal international order abroad.

The Biden Doctrine elevates “democratic exceptionalism” as the ideal trope with which to advance its foreign and domestic agenda, while using it as political mallet to normalise any efforts to silence, cancel, and discredit dissent. The latter has long historical precedents with the US ruling class in the 20th century: it echoes the US. establishment’s support for anti-German hysteria in the First World War, the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War, and the persecution of American socialists during the McCarthy era.

The underlying conviction is that in the increasingly polarised America, securitisation and weaponisation of threat, through its identification with domestic enemies, is a viable galvanising force — one that justifies and maintains the imperial controls of the state. In this neo-Jacobin milieu, democratism offers a crucible with which to meld and cohere domestic preferences with foreign ambitions.

During his presidential campaign, Joe Biden stressed the importance of building an “alliance of values” based on democratic principles. After two years on the job, his goal of democratic resurgence has become double-edged: to defeat political opponents at home and confront hegemonic challengers abroad. Biden might consider this double-edged agenda “a battle for the soul” of the United States and the “challenge of our time”. But this existential, ideologically-charged language only underscores the need for a sober assessment of this worldview — particularly at a time when America’s credibility as a model democracy is in doubt and its ability to lead remains uncertain.

Bombs are not raining down on our cities; instead, what we are experiencing is the psychological weaponisation of war — and its exploitation as a tool of indoctrination and statecraft in the hands of the establishment.

The Ukraine crisis is undoubtedly a tragedy, but it is merely the latest in a series of geopolitical events stretching back at least 20 years in which the media coverage has been biased, one-sided, and ideological. All of these instances — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Afghanistan Withdrawal — were riddled with “structural information traps” that we ignored at our peril.

With each of these conflicts, the coverage gets worse, and the traps become ever more luring and incendiary. In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action. But none compares to Ukraine. Here, we have witnessed the media of the Free World disseminating dishonest or otherwise uncritical coverage, fake news, Ukrainian disinformation, and propaganda aimed at conditioning the public to internalise the establishment’s Manichean narrative of a deranged madman’s random war of aggression.

Not only has the Ukraine coverage been highly charged, morally self-righteous, and plainly political, it actively demands a collective suspension of disbelief as it cultivates and redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation. Some, such as the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have irresponsibly vilified the entire Russian population. Others, such as The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, have begun to senselessly demonise prescient realist American academics for daring to shed light on Russia’s basic national security interests and the possibility of a confrontation if they go unrecognised.

So far as the Western legacy media is concerned, we really do live in the post-historical age Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed in 1989, with liberal internationalism the only acceptable paradigm through which to understand the world. Alternative views are now tantamount to championing tyranny. In each instance, the dictator comes to personify internationally Hegel’s thymotic, if savage, primitive man — the inhumane antithesis of the “last man” —  fighting maniacally against liberal democracy, the march of modernity, and progress itself. Assad, Ghaddafi, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin all fit this archetype as reactionary actors par excellence necessitating a holy alliance to confront and civilise.

Suggested reading

A Putin puppet government will fail

By Vladislav Davidzon

Such a melioristic framing of international politics justifies and indeed privileges a Manichean narrative of good and evil. In this context, rationality itself is bound to the good, defined as effective conformity with liberal hegemony.

This is how the permanent members of the ruling class view the world. The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, has made the enlightening observation that the years-brewing war in Ukraine was a result of Putin simply becoming “unhinged”, suggesting he might be suffering from neurological problems. Not to be outdone, Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the Iraq War and the ill-advised 2008 Bucharest declaration (which affirmed Nato’s “open door” towards Ukraine and therefore helped to spark this most recent conflict), bemoaned Putin’s “delusional rendering of history” and “erratic” behaviour.

Perhaps, given the profound crisis of meaning in the West and the gap in solidarity and social cohesion, we should not be surprised. Living under the conditions of rootlessness, spiritual emptiness, and angst, every crisis is an opportunity for mythopoesis. Tragedy is reborn, and we are easily enthralled by the periodic cycles of worship and hero-making. Our faith in the cult of expertise, meanwhile, blinds and lulls us to the potential dangers of such black and white thinking.

As good Straussians, American neoconservatives were among the first to intuit this fact: that owing to disenchantment and the dissolution of our “sacred canopy”, the myth — or the Platonic “noble lie” — can be used to strengthen the Regime. Through their co-option, they would ensure the inherent power of the “noble lie” would be harnessed to regularly generate casus belli for global liberal imperialism. After all, what better unifying force than the “grand American project” of war to energise one’s desire for national greatness and the need for the regimentation of life in a disordered, chaotic Zeitgeist. Led by America, the grand mission of the Anglosphere would therefore have to be “to advance civilisation itself”. Not to mention, heroes also need villains, and it does help that in the Ukrainian archetype, ‘evil’ is not an intangible virus but can be personified onto an ‘other’ — in this case, Vladimir Putin.

This is the fake, performative, and internationalist nationalism of the American elite class: they use emotional triggers to rally the people behind the flag of the state in the name of lofty humanitarian causes which mask their own self-importance and narcissistic greatness. In fact, the systematic and periodic milking of tragedy to sow mass hysteria and manufacture support for the liberal imperium and its rulers has become the modus operandi in Washington. The consequence is not only further empowerment of the martial state, but also the enabling and even the ennobling of America’s war machine.

But so what? So what if our information ecosystem in the West is substantively flawed and prejudiced? Is this kind of systemic information bias, unbalanced coverage, and outright favouritism not endemic to all culture-complexes, prevalent also across state-run media in China, Iran, and Russia? The answer is certainly yes, but with an important qualification: the latter are not liberal democracies.

Some might say the foreign policy hawks have not learned from their catastrophic regime-change wars in the Middle East. But they have. They learned the importance of narrative control and information warfare targeting domestic audiences: consolidating the media, tightening their hold on information, marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain, and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement or Putinism. Undoubtedly, the situation seriously endangers civil liberties and freedom of thought in the Anglosphere, undermining the very foundation of Western democracy.

Suggested reading

This is how despotism ends

By Will Lloyd

But wedded to a disturbing, yet ascendant, neo-McCarthyism, the homogenisation of the Western media environment could ultimately prove more ominous than simple government censorship à la North Korea or Iran. At its core, the phenomenon aims to condition public opinion into “correct” acceptable speech patterns in the service of the “noble lie” — using the good heart of most ordinary citizens and their repulsion at human suffering as bait.

This noxious development, unless fully defanged and neutralised, could yet tear the very fabric of Western society, unleashing the dystopia of internalised totalitarianism, wherein the public-private boundaries disappear and citizens — even informed ones — can hardly distinguish between planted or socially-reinforced information and their own views. In such a world, the only choice is to virtue signal and self-censor.

Gone unchecked, it could amount to mass indoctrination around key national security questions and spell the end of democracy — in spirit if not procedurally. This is the ultimate fog of war.

Despite their litany of failures, the lesson drawn by the foreign policy establishment from their calamitous interventionism under the banner of democracy and freedom (“democratism“) was not to abandon their evangelical crusades for empire and to affirm restraint, moderation, and prudence. It was, instead, a desire not to be caught in the lie, as they were with their patently false claim about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To achieve this, the military-industrial-congressional complex and the professional-managerial class that runs it had to dominate a new battlespace: information. Not for foreign audiences, in which Western intelligence has had a long track record, but to domesticate, intellectually sterilise, and effectively neutralise their own citizens.

To guarantee the continuation of its globalist misadventurism, the establishment had to control and limit the political discourse at home. It has done so largely in two ways. The first was to claim monopoly over ‘truth’, and to discredit anyone who might not go along with the endorsed narrative by doubting their patriotism and brandishing them as appeasers, apologists, and/or outright traitors. The second was to ensure a total consolidation of national security narratives — so that even when instances of falsehood and misinformation are discovered, this would not receive much exposure but be shunned to the darkest corners of the internet.

Any war is a tragedy. We should work to de-escalate and see it end in Ukraine. But there are always at least two sides to a conflict: two agendas, not counting the designs of external actors. War does not occur in a vacuum. It often betrays (and is the culmination of) a long history of grievances and distrust.

Having claimed over 14,000 lives since 2014, the conflict in Ukraine is not about Vladimir Putin and his character but realpolitik, national interest, and great power rivalry. Countries have genuine security interests, some of them existential. They have real red lines.

“No Russian leader could stand idly by,” Putin told William Burns, now the director of the CIA, and accept Nato membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus, or allow Western weapons systems into these countries. As one of American greatest strategists and the architect of “containment” against the Soviet Union, George Kennan’s reaction to the Clinton administration’s insistence on Nato’s enlargement is particularly telling: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

Suggested reading

How Vladimir Putin weaponises refugees

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Almost 25 years on, such sober-minded analysis is increasingly rare. And this sidelining of neutral, dispassionate scrutiny in the Russo-Ukrainian War is particularly alarming because this is not America’s war. The North Atlantic has little vital geostrategic interest in Ukraine other than in trying to avoid a refugee or energy crisis. Yet many in Washington, London, or Brussels have goaded and encouraged, and are now revelling in, the conflict — convinced as they are that an extended quagmire there could become the kind of vulnerability for Russia that Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, a malignant tumour metastasising to the whole of the Russian body politic and instigating regime change.

While diehards may desire a West-East clash packaged under the tired rubric of Democracy versus Autocracy to prove their machismo, the situation in Ukraine is boiling over — and it is still early days. Things are about to get far more dreadful. Ukraine is a small state neighbouring a great power, a historical buffer and bridge between Russia and the West. “To Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 2014. “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus,”. The sooner we heed and accept this fact, the sooner we can sensibly gauge the situation as is and review our commitment critically.

Statesmanship is the art of not letting emotions drive policy. Sentimentality is the enemy of reason, all sense of proportion, and limits: in short, it kills realism and breeds wishful thinking. Such utopianism is senseless and dangerous: it will prolong the conflict and get lots of innocent civilians needlessly killed. Meanwhile, fomenting false hope in the public domain could further fan the flames of war, entangling Europe and the US in a confrontation with nuclear Russia — an Armageddon the tale of which we will likely not live to tell.

War is not sports-betting, where one can feel good about siding with the underdog from the comfort of a couch or a bar. It is geopolitics in its most visceral, existential form: wagers have real costs involving human lives, and they are settled only with power and political will.

The point is that this tragedy was entirely predictable and avoidable. We invited (if not compelled) conflict with our politics of intrigue and meddling in Eastern Europe, our disregard for Moscow’s security interests, and our moral grandstanding over items like Nato’s eastward expansion, Ukrainian neutrality, and demilitarisation. Any seasoned diplomat of the Cold War would be left utterly mystified. This was and remains political and strategic malpractice.

The question now is whether we want to put millions of Ukrainian lives in jeopardy simply to keep it as a Western Bulwark on Russia’s frontier and a dagger at Moscow’s throat. The Russo-Ukrainian War must be condemned and brought to an end using diplomacy, but the West must accept a degree of culpability for leading the Ukrainians “down the primrose path” and egging on their showdown with their giant neighbour to the east. Any attempt to escalate and prolong this conflict by giving false hope to the Ukrainian people with tough rhetoric, moralistic bluster, lethal arms, and economic sanctions, the brunt of which will be felt by civilians on both sides, is irresponsible and callous. It would only ensure more death and suffering.

Suggested reading

Ukraine is winning the online war

By David Patrikarakos

As former US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor contended in a recent television interview: “I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something that they have been talking about for years, [and] we simply chose to ignore… We will not send our forces to fight, but we are urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win. We’re going to create a far greater humanitarian crisis than anything you’ve ever seen if it doesn’t stop.” Only this time, our liberal conceit and messianic delusion could potentially spiral a regional conflict into a global maelstrom that would exterminate humanity in a nuclear apocalypse.

The road to hell, as the wise aphorism has it, is paved with good intentions. Unless we course-correct now, we could soon find ourselves in a Huxleyan Brave New World that exploits the illusion of freedom while normalising the sophistic manipulation of public discourse to manufacture consent around the establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.

When all roads lead to interventionism and war, pause, think, and consider how we got to where we are. Ask yourself who designed this dystopian city of lies and to what purpose — before it is too late.