“You cannot bomb a civilization into submission.”Colonel Douglas Macgregor, decorated combat veteran, former senior adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Defense
The Lie That Started It All
Let us begin with what every serious analyst already knows, what the intelligence community of the United States itself confirmed under oath, and what the American press (corporate, servile, and Epstein-class controlled) has collectively refused to say plainly: Iran had no nuclear weapons program. It had no nuclear weapon. It was not building one.
Tulsi Gabbard, as Director of National Intelligence, testified before Congress in March 2025 (under oath, in congressionally required testimony) reiterating verbatim what all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies had unanimously concluded with high confidence since November 2007: Iran stopped any weapons-related nuclear activity at the end of 2003 and had not resumed it. The supreme leader’s fatwa against nuclear weapons, according to Ray McGovern, a 27-year CIA analyst who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally briefed President Reagan, “means a hell of a lot more than an encyclical or any other high-sounding religious statement.”
And yet Tulsi Gabbard has vanished. McGovern dryly notes that a friend did a cartoon of a missing-person milk carton:Have you seen Tulsi Gabbard?
Iran was not a nuclear threat. Iran was, in the words of the Omani foreign minister who personally mediated the talks, hours away from a comprehensive deal as late as the final days of February 2026. The Omanis had brokered a session in Geneva on February 26th. The Iranian foreign minister had made sweeping concessions on enrichment. UN inspectors, for the first time in history, were on the table. The Omani mediator flew immediately to Washington and told the Vice President: We almost have a deal. He then went public on CBS, elated.
What happened within hours? The attack on Iran began.
McGovern is unsparing: “The deal was this close… and we decided to simply join in because Israel attacked first.” Marco Rubio, Secretary of State and National Security Adviser simultaneously, meaning the sole funnel through which all intelligence reached Trump, admitted on camera that Israel had notified the United States of its intention to strike Iran.The conclusion is self-evident: we entered this war not because Iran threatened us. We entered it because a foreign government told us it was going, and we chose to follow.
John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, states it without equivocation: “There is overwhelming evidence that the lobby and Israel itself helped in a major way to push the United States into this war.” Speaker Mike Johnson said it. Lindsey Graham bragged that he worked with Netanyahu to advise him on how to convince President Trump to attack Iran. The fingerprints are everywhere.
And as Brian Berletic, former U.S. Marine and political analyst, reminds us, none of this is improvised. The Brookings Institution published a paper in 2009 titled Which Path to Persia?, laying out in excruciating detail every option for regime change in Iran. “Chapter by chapter, word for word, the United States, from the Bush Jr. administration all the way up to this current Trump administration, has executed every single option they laid out.” This was always the plan. The peace talks were never meant to succeed. As Berletic states flatly: “They are deliberately using diplomacy as a pretext for war.”
Iran had no nuclear weapons. Iran was actively negotiating. Iran was making concessions that no one can credibly portray as the endgame of a rogue state. The American press said nothing. The American Congress said nothing. The Zionist oligarchy of Pax Silica (the same complex of tech wealth, financier power, and military-industrial money that owns both parties) demanded war, and war was delivered. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the documented, sworn, on-record record.
The Istanbul Pattern: How America Scuttles Every Peace
Americans with short memories should be reminded that we have seen this film before, recently, catastrophically, and at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.
In the spring of 2022, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators met in Istanbul. A framework for peace was within reach. The Ukrainians had agreed to neutrality. The Russians had agreed to withdrawal from Kyiv. Then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv, dispatched, as Gilbert Doctorow and countless others have documented, carrying the message that the West would not accept a settlement. Zelensky, who had been elected in 2019 on a 73% mandate for peace and had been immediately told by NATO-funded NGOs and U.S.-trained right-wing militias that he was not allowed to talk peace with Russia without NATO in the room, reversed course.
The result? Ukraine is now a sea of devastation, fighting a war of attrition it cannot win, having lost hundreds of thousands of its young men, its cities in rubble, its economy destroyed, for what? So that Victoria Nuland’s project, conceived at the 2014 coup (”Fuck the EU”), could be completed? Angela Merkel later admitted that Minsk was “an opportunity to buy time to build a Ukrainian army.” The peace deal was never meant to be honored. Ukraine was used, as Richard Sakwa (professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, and the leading Russia scholar in Europe) argues, as a tool in the imperial project of the political West, weaponized against Russia and ultimately against the European peoples themselves.
Now the same script has been run against Iran twice. First in June 2025, when a U.S.-Israeli surprise attack came during negotiations in Oman. Then again in late February 2026, when, as Alex Krainer, former hedge fund manager and market analyst, documents: “Iranian leaders were assassinated in the middle of the process of negotiations… the Iranians were, according to Omani officials, very yielding, very accommodating, and were practically giving the Americans everything they wanted, and then they got killed.” The third time. Not twice. Three times. Fool me thrice.
As Macgregor puts it: “We continued with the fiction that there were negotiations underway. This has hurt us with Russia. It has destroyed us in the Middle East. We are rapidly following Israel into this corner reserved for pariah states.”
Step by Step: How This War Has Escalated, and Where It Is Headed
The American media has reported this war the way it reports everything: as a series of triumphant U.S. strikes with Iranian responses framed as aggression. The reality is a methodical, deliberate escalation ladder, with the United States climbing it recklessly, without strategy, without endgame, and without the munitions to sustain what it has started.
Phase One, Decapitation and Air Supremacy: The opening strikes of late February 2026 killed the Supreme Leader Khamenei in his own home (not in a deep bunker, in his office, because he chose martyrdom. They eliminated senior military and civilian leadership. They established initial air dominance. Trump assumed) as Steve Witkoff confirmed publicly, that the mere sight of the armada would cause Iran to surrender. It did not.
Phase Two, Assassinations and Infrastructure: Having failed to achieve shock-and-awe capitulation, the strikes moved to systematically target Iran’s leadership, its Revolutionary Guard command structure, its ports, its airports, its energy infrastructure. The South Pars gas field, the largest in the world, was struck. Refineries were hit. Desalination plants that provide water to 90 million people were targeted. A girls’ school in Minab was vaporized. 163 children between the ages of six and twelve, dead. Pete Hegseth had already dissolved the Pentagon unit responsible for civilian casualty verification. McGovern names him directly: “He deleted the unit that verifies there will be no civilian casualties. He who says ‘show no mercy’ is personally responsible.”
Phase Three, Horizontal Escalation: Iran, as the Pentagon itself had warned Trump (warnings he dismissed), responded by striking American bases across the region (at least 27 of them, from Incirlik to Dubai. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain was hit. The vertical missile-loading crane) essential for rearming naval vessels, was destroyed, forcing U.S. ships to travel all the way to Diego Garcia for resupply. The Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed. The Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea: shuttered. Qatar’s LNG facilities were struck. Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura, one of the world’s largest oil refineries, was taken offline.
Phase Four, The Energy War: As Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi, former adviser to Iran’s nuclear negotiating team and professor at Tehran University, makes clear: Iran’s deterrence doctrine is escalation dominance through energy. “If Iran’s vital infrastructure is destroyed, Iran will destroy everything on the other side of the Persian Gulf. Those regimes (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait) are all complicit. They allowed the airspace, the bases, the tanker refueling. They will be finished.” The Gulf monarchies are not neutral. They are, as Brian Berletic observes, politically captured proxies, in the same position as Ukraine. They cannot say no to Washington. And like Ukraine, they are expendable.
Phase Five, Boots on the Ground and the Nuclear Threshold: Marines from the Asia-Pacific have already been redeployed to the theater. The 82nd Airborne has been dispatched. B-52s loaded with bunker busters are en route. Trump has spoken publicly of ground troops, which Colonel Wilkerson calls “pure nonsense”: “You could put a million American soldiers in Iran and they’d disappear in five years. This is a 90-million-person country. We put 12 million men into a 70-million country called Germany. And you’re talking about terrain far more difficult than Iraq.”
Theodore Postol, MIT professor of Science, Technology and National Security, recipient of the Norbert Wiener Award for exposing the Patriot missile fraud in the 1991 Gulf War, provides the definitive technical assessment of this war: Iran’s ballistic missiles are now equipped with maneuvering warheads, rocket-assisted terminal acceleration, and electronic countermeasure decoys. The THAAD radars, of which perhaps 13 exist in the entire world, are being systematically destroyed, three to five already gone. Interceptor stocks are nearly exhausted. “The intercept rates have been a few percent at most… things are going to go to hell in a handbasket as this war goes on.”U.S. bases in the Gulf are now being defended with guns because the interceptors have run out.
And at the top of the escalation ladder? McGovern invokes the Samson Option, the Israeli nuclear doctrine of pulling down the temple rather than accept defeat. “Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis has any nuclear state been forced in extremis… Netanyahu is a homicidal maniac. He would not stop before he used a nuclear weapon.” Postol concurs, with growing alarm: “I am becoming extremely concerned that we are walking into a global nuclear war… Netanyahu could use nuclear weapons, and if he does, Iran will build its own within weeks and respond.”
Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University professor, former UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser, one of the world’s most respected economists) delivers the summation: “It is viewed catastrophically all over the world. There is no question in anybody’s mind that this is a war of naked aggression by two mentally unstable individuals without any justification whatsoever.” What we are witnessing, Sachs says, is “not only a constitutional crisis, it is a crisis of the most minimal kinds of competence. There is no process. There was no review. There was no congressional process. These were decisions made by Trump and a few incompetent people around him.”
The Economic Catastrophe: Scorching the Earth We Stand On
If the military dimensions of this war are disastrous, the economic consequences are civilizational.
One in five barrels of crude oil exported globally passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Alex Krainer, tracking oil markets in real time: “Friday close was $73.50. Within days, we’re trading close to $80. One-in-five barrels of global crude oil exports passes through the gates of Hormuz. If they keep it closed, we could see oil reach deep into triple digits, $200, $300 a barrel. Nobody can predict this.”
Colonel Wilkerson ran the war games in Beijing: “Oil went to $200 a barrel when the Strait of Hormuz and Ras Tanura were blocked. Shippers wouldn’t ship. Insurers wouldn’t insure. This is the only commodity on the face of the earth that every state extent needs.”And he notes, with devastating precision, that Trump had pledged to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to 500 billion gallons. “We’re at 415 right now. He didn’t put a gallon in there.”
India, which sources 60% of its oil through the Strait of Hormuz, faces a fiscal emergency of $15 billion for every 10% rise in crude, and had on hand approximately 25 days of supply at the outbreak of hostilities. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, all of them dependent on Middle Eastern energy, are watching their economic foundations crack.
And Europe? Michael Hudson, Professor of Political Economy, author of Super Imperialism and The Destiny of Civilizationdescribes a continent in the grip of pathological self-destruction. European natural gas was already costing five to six times the Russian rate after Brussels agreed to blow up Nord Stream, or let the United States blow it up and then depend completely on American LNG. Now Qatari LNG, the backup, is being destroyed by Iranian strikes. Hudson: “Europe is looking at a future that’s going to be some combination of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
The Eurasian oil blockade on China that Berletic has tracked for years is now materializing simultaneously, Venezuela’s oil cut off, Iranian exports disrupted, Belt and Road infrastructure under attack, Russian energy targeted by CIA drones. The United States is attempting, in the closing window before China’s irreversible economic rise (~2030), to strangle the Chinese economy by controlling every energy route, not through strategic genius, but through frantic, desperate overextension. “A desperate, wounded empire is the most dangerous empire imaginable,” Berletic states.
The Dollar, the Petrodollar, and the Architecture of American Power
The petrodollar system (the arrangement by which oil is priced in U.S. dollars, recycled through American financial markets, and used to sustain deficit spending) was always predicated on U.S. military control of the Persian Gulf. That control is now being destroyed by the very war that was supposed to consolidate it.
Colonel Macgregor: “The dollar is losing airspeed and altitude. Economically this is a catastrophe. Financially it’s a disaster. Its going to take more time but over time it’s going to get worse.” Marandi goes further: the Strait of Hormuz, now under effective Iranian control, could become the lever by which Iran demands that oil transiting through it be priced in currencies other than the dollar, dismantling the petrodollar architecture from below.
Michael Hudson has spent decades diagnosing the terminal contradiction of the American financial model: “The United States is no longer industrialized. It’s de-industrialized. All of the growth since the 2008 junk mortgage crisis has been in the stock, bond, and real estate markets. It’s financial wealth. It’s not the wealth of real production. Living standards have not risen for more than half of Americans since 2008.” The empire must extract tribute from the outside world because it can no longer produce wealth for its own citizens. Tariffs are extortion. Military force is debt collection.
And now that extortion model is breaking down. Hudson notes that Trump’s demands on Korea (a $350 billion “investment” commitment or face tariffs) (identical to demands made on Japan, on Europe, on the BRICS) represent not strength but the protection racket of a declining hegemon. “You either pay us money or we raise tariffs and cause a crisis. That’s a shakedown fee. Either pay tribute or accept our demands to dismantle your industry.” South Korea, Hudson reports, is now in Beijing asking: “If we lose the American market, we may walk away from them. What deal could we make with you?”
The Alliance System Is Collapsing: From BRICS to Seoul
Richard Sakwa, whose new book The Russo-Ukrainian War: Follies of Empire provides the definitive scholarly framework for understanding this era, describes four competing models of world order: the U.S.-led political West (with its “commonwealth” and “imperial” faces), the anti-hegemonic alignment of Russia and China, the Global South, and the emerging Trumpian power-based model that respects no rules at all, including its own.
The fourth model (pure power, “I’m bigger than you, I do what I want,” contemptuous even of allies) is now accelerating the very multipolar countercoalition it was designed to prevent.
Russia: The attack on Iran has electrified the Russian foreign policy establishment. Doctorow documents what he calls “a switch that changed in Russia, like switching a light on and off.” People who had accepted Putin’s cautious negotiating posture suddenly saw, in what Trump did to Iran in three days (killing leadership, destroying air defenses, obliterating infrastructure) exactly what the United States could do to Russia. The drone assassination attempt on Putin’s compound at Valdai, previously dismissed, is now being seen differently. “If the Americans want to do a decapitation strike on Russia with Putin and all his buddies, they can do it.” Gorbachev is now being called a traitor on Russian state television. Restraint is being reinterpreted as weakness. The pressure on Putin to escalate dramatically in Ukraine, and to rebuild nuclear deterrence, is now enormous.
China: Beijing watched Iran’s Chinese-supplied air defense systems fail on Day One and drew its conclusions. China and Russia, despite their public support, failed to conclude a mutual defense treaty with Iran, which Tehran had itself declined. Doctorow is blunt: “Russia’s view of China as an important ally in their contest with America, that went down the rat after the American strikes on Iran.” At the same time, China is watching the United States strangle its energy supply chains from Venezuela to Iran to the Russian Arctic. Jiang Shigong (one of China’s leading political theorists, discussing these dynamics with Diesen) puts it plainly: China is approximately five years from irreversibly surpassing the United States in every meaningful metric. The United States knows this. The window is closing. That is why everything is being risked now.
India: Modi’s government, which had attempted to maintain strategic autonomy between Washington and Moscow, now faces a $15 billion immediate fiscal shock from oil prices and supply interruptions. India’s 25-day oil reserves are already strained. The Indians who had declined to join the anti-Russia sanctions coalition are now discovering that U.S. “protection” offers nothing but exposure. Wilkerson predicts the loss of South Korea within 24 months as a U.S. ally, the pulling of Patriot missiles from Seoul to deploy in the Persian Gulf having made explicit what Seoul always knew: “The only reason we’re on the peninsula is to fight China, not to protect Korea.”
Turkey: Already a NATO member watching its interests diverge from Washington’s on every theater, Turkey is now observing Israeli ambitions to arm Kurdish groups across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and potentially within Turkey itself, what Wilkerson describes as Netanyahu’s explicit objective of “chaos, total chaos,” running “rampant over the entire Levant from Turkey to Eastern Africa.”
Japan and South Korea: As Macgregor notes, both countries are now reconsidering their alliance architecture. “I think the Japanese are watching this and beginning to wonder just how tightly aligned with us they want to be.” Hudson documents Korean officials already in Beijing asking about an alternative security architecture. Macgregor: “The new rules for the future are not going to be written in Washington. They’re going to be written, largely, in Asia.”
The forced alignment of Russia, China, India (however reluctantly), Iran, and the wider Global South into a new Cold War tribe is not an accident. It is the predictable, predicted result of a foreign policy that treats every non-submissive state as a target. The United States is constructing its own containment. It is manufacturing the coalition that will limit it. The very thing it sought to prevent, the emergence of a coherent multipolar counterweight, is being accelerated by every bomb dropped on Tehran.
The Media Is Silent, the Congress Is Owned, the Democracy Is Dead
Glenn Greenwald reported on March 15, 2026 that the CIA was preparing a criminal referral against Tucker Carlson for the crime of having spoken to Iranian officials before the war. “The clear implication was that Tucker had committed acts of subversion, or even treason, by speaking to Iranians in advance of the war that was about to be launched on their country.” The country that lectures the world about freedom of the press is preparing to prosecute journalists for talking to citizens of the country it is bombing.
This is McCarthyism wearing the skin of democracy. Hudson documents that voices calling for negotiations or acknowledging the legitimacy of Palestinian or Iranian grievances are being criminalized, in Germany, literally: “If you say that the Palestinians are human beings, that’s a crime.”
Meanwhile, the American corporate press, what Marandi calls “Epstein-class controlled”, from the Guardian to Breitbart, has produced virtually no coverage of the destruction being wrought on Iranian civilian infrastructure, no coverage of the peace talks that were scuttled, no coverage of the 163 dead schoolgirls in Minab. What it has produced is war porn: the White House’s official accounts posting video-game clips of bombing runs. “It’s a celebration of violence,” Diesen observes. “Very ugly, especially coming from the White House.”
Mearsheimer notes that less than 29% of Americans support this war. Trump campaigned explicitly on ending forever wars. He promised to end the war in Ukraine on Day One. He has delivered the opposite on every front. The political class, Republican and Democrat alike, is, as Berletic states, working for Wall Street. “No matter what theater they perform in front of the American public, they’re always going to work for Wall Street.” Both parties voted for this war. The Uniparty is complete.
Jeffrey Sachs, addressing members of Congress directly: “Congress has the sole power to declare war. You cannot wash your hands of it. Read the Constitution. Remember your oath.”He might as well be addressing statues.
The Empire in Its Death Spiral
What we are watching is not a policy disagreement. It is not a strategic miscalculation. It is the terminal behavior of an empire that can no longer compete economically, can no longer maintain its military supremacy, and can no longer justify its global dominance through anything but violence.
Macgregor: “Tactics win battles. Strategy wins wars. We have no strategy. When everybody asked what’s the purpose, well, it sounded like regime change. But regime change hasn’t worked. This is a 93-million-person country, the size of Western Europe, and it seems to be holding together.”
Jiang Shigong’s diagnosis is clinical: “The American financial industry lacks the capacity to self-correct… the entire American financial industry is one great Ponzi scheme about to explode… when it collapses, it’ll probably take the entire economy with it. So you’re basically looking at civil war.”
Krainer, comparing the trajectory to the Western Roman Empire: “When the Roman Empire was one of the most important empires in history, it never reformed and it persisted on the road to collapse to the point where stone houses disappeared from the archaeological footprint. Dirt floors became the norm. Markets disappeared because money disappeared.”
Hudson’s formulation is the most precise: “The United States has lost its own ability to be self-sufficient, and its response to Europe is to destroy Europe’s ability to be economically and commercially and financially self-sufficient.” When you cannot build, you plunder. When you cannot compete, you coerce. When you cannot lead, you threaten. This is the logic of American foreign policy in 2026.
And Sakwa, the most measured of the voices assembled here, provides the structural frame: the “political West” has always had two faces, the commonwealth and the imperial. The commonwealth face delivered public goods, rules, institutions, prosperity for those within it. The imperial face dominated, extracted, and silenced. “What Trump represents is not an aberration from this system. He is its logical endpoint, the pure power model, contemptuous of international law, contemptuous of allies, contemptuous of any constraint at all.”
What distinguishes this moment from previous imperial overstretch is the speed of collapse. Empires typically decline across generations. The United States is managing to accelerate the process within a single presidential term. In less than three weeks of war against Iran, it has:
- Depleted years of Tomahawk cruise missile production
- Destroyed 3 to 5 irreplaceable THAAD radar systems
- Pulled air defense systems from South Korea, straining its most critical Asian alliance
- Triggered an oil price shock threatening to push Europe into depression and India into fiscal crisis
- Provided Russia with a geopolitical windfall, higher oil revenues, lifted sanctions attention, and a demonstrated case study for why nuclear deterrence is non-negotiable
- Accelerated BRICS and Global South alignment against the dollar system
- Destroyed the credibility of every diplomatic commitment the United States has made or will make to any country, for any purpose, ever
And for what? “I cannot for the life of me figure out what was Trump’s upside,” Krainer writes, “because the downside was very clear. You could get ejected from the region. You could sustain hundreds if not thousands of casualties. Israel is probably finished. This must go down in history as one of the dumbest policy decisions ever made.”
What Iran Is, and Why It Will Not Break
The American political class (Trump, Hegseth, Rubio, the neocons crawling back from their Iraq disgrace) have projected onto Iran their experience of New York real estate. You threaten, you overwhelm, you bankrupt, and the other side folds and signs. This is not a real estate deal.
Macgregor: “You can kill a leader, but you can’t bomb a civilization into submission. Iran is ultimately Persia. That civilization is much older. Killing Khamenei has made him a martyr that even people who don’t like Islam can honor.” Wilkerson: “We’re taking on a people who are 3,000 years old, 90 million strong, 53% Persian, who have lots of problems but who will seal themselves into their very doom to give us a truly vicious headache.”
Iran has been under U.S. economic warfare since 1979. It survived eight years of a war in which the United States provided Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons and eventually shot down an Iranian civilian airliner with 290 people aboard, the act that made Khomeini accept the ceasefire. It survived the maximum pressure campaign. It survived the assassination of General Soleimani. It has spent twenty years preparing for exactly the war that is now being waged against it. Postol confirms that Iran’s missile capabilities (now maneuvering warheads at Mach 10 to 12, defeating every interceptor system deployed against them) vastly exceeded U.S. intelligence assessments.
Marandi: “Iran has escalation dominance. The United States does not have escalation dominance here. Iran still hasn’t shown its hand. Nor has the Axis of Resistance collectively shown its hand. Yemen hasn’t yet entered. Iraqi resistance is still pacing itself. Hezbollah is fighting very effectively but has not fully engaged.”
The Iranian people (who march nightly in the streets under airstrikes, in rain, in snow, during Eid prayers) are not rising up against their government to welcome American liberators. Every bomb that falls on a school, every hospital whose nurses flee into the streets, every desalination plant taken offline galvanizes a population that knows exactly who is doing this and why. Regime change is dead. As McGovern states: “Any kind of regime change is out of the question. The new Supreme Leader was in the house when his father was killed. His wife was killed. His teenage son was killed. He was spared, but still in hospital. Under those circumstances, there is no give at all in the Iranian position.”
The Wake-Up Call America Refuses to Hear
Every single expert cited in this article (every former CIA officer, every decorated combat veteran, every Nobel Prize-winning economist, every professor of international relations, every former Pentagon adviser, every market analyst) has said, in one form or another, the same thing: This war is catastrophic, unwinnable, illegal, unprovoked, economically suicidal, strategically insane, and likely to escalate into a conflict that could kill millions.
Not one of them has been quoted on CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any major American media outlet. Not one of their analyses has been placed before the American people in any accessible form by the institutions that claim to inform them. The press does not report; it performs. It translates White House press releases into the passive voice and calls it journalism.
Ray McGovern’s daughter, an educated woman in her 50s, asked her friends what they thought of the war. They knew there was no plan. They were worried about the draft. But none of themnonecould answer the question: Why did he do it?Because it was not in the newspapers. The reason is simply not reported.
“War of naked aggression.” Jeffrey Sachs.
“A war of whim.” Jeffrey Sachs.
“The most staggeringly dumb policy decision ever.” Alex Krainer.
“We do not understand the nature of the conflict upon which we have embarked.” Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, 31-year veteran military planner.
“There is no strategy.” Colonel Douglas Macgregor, former senior adviser to the Secretary of Defense.
“A complete and utter breakdown of competence.” Jeffrey Sachs.
“A collapse of American governance.” Jeffrey Sachs.
“The dullest mind”to borrow the question posed at the outsetcan see the relationship between the war on Iran, the supply chain disruptions, the energy shock, the economic catastrophe spreading across the global economy, the destabilization of allies from Seoul to Riyadh to Berlin, and the accelerating decline of American power and credibility. The dullest mind can see that we are forcing Russia, China, India, Iran, and the Global South into a counter-coalition of exactly the kind that will end the unipolar era, permanently, and on terms we will not control.
The people who cannot see it, or will not, are not dull. They are complicit. They are paid. They are blackmailed. They are owned. And they are sitting in the Congress of the United States, reading from teleprompters, pledging allegiance to a foreign flag while the country they claim to serve slides toward catastrophe.
What Comes Next
Doctorow warns that no good outcome remains available. “You never want to put large or great powers in a strategic position where it’s all or nothing, where they risk everything and feel their back is against the wall. I see almost all of these powers now in such a situation.”
Macgregor: “Were seeing the end of the old Middle East. Were seeing the end of American military hegemony and political dominance. That’s what we’re watching.” The Gulf monarchies (the family dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait) are in Marandi’s assessment living on borrowed time. Iran has the capability to destroy their energy infrastructure and their desalination plants. Without water and without oil revenue, these regimes collapse.
Europe (already facing recession, already economically dependent on American LNG at six times the Russian rate) is now staring at the prospect of natural gas cut off from both Russia (by its own political choices) and Qatar (by Iranian missiles). Krainer: “European economies which are already in severe recession are now looking to accelerate into depression and probably hyperinflation.”
Mearsheimer: “We are now in a long war, a war of attrition. That’s a war the Iranians prepared for. That’s a war the Iranians are in an excellent position to prevail in. If you think about the various steps up the escalation ladder, what you see is that the Iranians can match us at every point. They have the ability, as you go up the escalation ladder, to tank the international economy.”
And at the summit of the ladder, the nuclear threshold, the civilization that would not build a bomb because its supreme leader issued a fatwa against it now watches that supreme leader’s body grow cold, his son wounded, his wife dead. Postol: “I am beginning to become concerned that we are walking into a global nuclear war.”
A Final Word
This article will be dismissed in certain quarters as anti-American and pro-Iranian propaganda. Let the record speak.
Every authority cited here is American, British, European, or otherwise Western: a former CIA analyst who briefed the President, a retired colonel who advised the Secretary of Defense, a former Army Chief of Staff’s chief of staff, an MIT professor who exposed missile defense fraud, a Columbia University economist, a University of Kent professor of Russian and European Politics, the founder of The Intercept and one of America’s foremost journalists, a former hedge fund manager, and a market analyst who was calculating oil price trajectories in real time.
Not one of them is employed by Iran, Russia, or China.
Not one of them is a propagandist.
Every one of them is telling the truth. Every one of them has been silenced, marginalized, or excluded from the platforms that reach the American public. Every one of them has been right. Every warning they gave has materialized.
The United States is not losing its soul. It lost it when it watched 163 girls between the ages of six and twelve be vaporized in Minab and then lied about it on Truth Social.
What remains now is the reckoning (economic, political, strategic, and eventually historical) for a nation that confused power with wisdom, and military supremacy with civilization.
You cannot bomb a civilization into submission.
Persia was here three thousand years before the United States existed.
It will be here long after Trump, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz.
The author writes on geopolitics, energy markets, and imperial decline. This article draws on extensive primary-source transcripts from Diesen, Sachs, Mearsheimer, McGovern, Wilkerson, MacGregor, Hudson, Doctorow, Marandi, Berletic, Krainer, Sakwa, Postol, and Jiang Shigong. All quotations have been verified against original transcript text.
Related reading
- American Empire in Ruins: The Unprovoked, Unconstitutional, and Catastrophic US-Israeli War on Iran
- Trump’s Iran War, China Trip and the Vanishing Empire
- The Last Blunder: How the US-Israel Attack on Iran Killed the American Empire's Operating System
- What American Media Won’t Tell You About the Iran War and the End of the American Century in Asia
