Telic Convergence: From Ukraine to Iran

Zionism, Christian fascism, hauntology, and the military-industrial complex.

War is not a rational force. It cannot be reduced to any one causative mechanism. It cannot be neatly explained as an ideological conflict between major religious identities, as proposed by Samuel P Huntington in Clash of Civilizations: to the contrary, “civilisations” cannot be modelled as homogeneous, eternalist blocs with cohesive internal identities. Cultural evolution is fluid, complex, and computationally irreducible. More saliently, we do not have any such large-scale “civilisational” wars, which should quickly discredit Huntington’s hallucinogenic thesis; ideological differences do not inevitably lead to conflict. As I remark in Epistemic Telos, war certainly cannot be explained by the confused language game that is the maximum power principle, which H T Odum defines as such: “during self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency”. This proposition is so vague as to be meaningless. How are “power intake”, “energy transformation” and “efficiency” to be defined and segmented? Even given a rough working definition, Enrico Sciubba shows in What did Lotka really say? that the principle cannot hold as a general rule. The implication of the maximum power principle is tautologically that whatever is better at persisting persists—except that this can never be falsified, because all behaviours can be said after the fact to have been a result of the “maximum power principle”.

Cui bono?

For instance, did the Iraq War follow the maximum power principle? Maximum power for whom, exactly? For the US, who lost trillions of dollars, wasted thousands of lives, dismantled its global credibility as a liberal hegemon—and through destabilising the Middle East, provoked what the CIA calls blowback, helping form ISIS and strengthening the adversarial Iranian regime? Or how about for Iraq, who suffered the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, massive damage to civilian infrastructure, oil spills, and radioactive contamination? There was no meaningful thermodynamic gain for any state involved—in fact, it was a horrendous net loss. As Branko Marcetic quips in Twenty Years Ago, the Iraq War Changed Everything: “even on the foreign policy establishment’s own narrow, power-seeking terms…the invasion was one big case of Washington elites shooting themselves in the foot.” The only actor that benefited, as ever, was what Eisenhower coined the military-industrial complex, as exposed by Smedley D Butler in his famous speech, War Is a Racket. In The Greatest Evil is War, Chris Hedges writes:

In Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War Seymour Melman described the defense industry as viral. Defense and military industries in permanent war, he wrote, distort economies. They upend social and economic priorities. They redirect government expenditures toward their huge military projects and starve domestic investment in the name of national security. We produce sophisticated fighter jets, while Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on schedule.

And further:

Melman, who coined the term permanent war economy to characterize the American economy, wrote that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is a very lucrative business. It is gilded corporate welfare. Defense systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are always guaranteed.

So at least the powerful military-industrial complex got to continue siphoning funds from taxpayers with plausible deniability. Moreover, though the war was a failure even by the standards of the power elite, it still provided narrative justification for the passage and maintenance of a barrage of authoritarian legislation such as the Patriot Act, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, and the Military Commissions Act, which variously enhanced state surveillance capacities and stripped away constitutional protections. As Hedges elaborates in Death of the Liberal Class, war is always used as a rallying cry to suppress dissent and erode the moderating influence of the liberal class on the elites. Fear and nationalism—what Hedges describes in Nero’s Guests as a negative unity—are powerful motivators. In War and the Intellectuals, Randolph Bourne writes:

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government’s disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear towards the society of which he is a part.

Of course, the folly of the “maximum power principle” is that someone can always be found to benefit; it does not serve as anything near a sufficient causative explanation.

Hauntology

In The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as National Security Advisor under the Carter administration, lays bare the dominant attitude among the American geostrategic elite that no Eurasian challenger should emerge that could dominate the region and thus challenge US global preeminence. This disposition is in line with the neoconservative movement, which advocates the unilateral promotion of “liberal democracy” through foreign military intervention. Evidently, if Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq are anything to go by—among countless other debacles—this logic of imperial preemption in the name of stability is often far from rational; it is spectral. The wars of today are stitched from the phantom zeitgeists of yesteryear. It is what Derrida would describe as a Cold War hauntology: the ontological persistence of cultural elements of the past that haunt the present. Derrida defines the term hauntology in Specters of Marx as the impossibility of the narrative isolation of the present from the past, or indeed the past from its past; historical meaning is endlessly deferred in a process he calls différance. The semantic context of the Cold War is deferred to World War II, then to World War I, and so on, in an impenetrable hauntological maze. History is always a broken, incomplete snapshot, a narrative of narratives papered over an impossibly chaotic underlying progression.

In Specters of Marx, Derrida excoriates Francis Fukuyama’s declaration in The End of History and the Last Man that the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the apparent end of the Cold War constitute the “the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution”. The binary moral schema of liberal democracy vs communism that characterised the Red Scare and the Truman Doctrine—and the equivalence of American hegemony with the liberal telos of Progress—still persist today in the form of the war on terror and neoconservatism. Derrida writes of the spectre of Marxism:

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neoevangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the “end of ideologies” and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth.

His condemnation of the end of history mirrors a common sentiment among pessimistic philosophers, notably Albert Caraco in The Breviary of Chaos, written during the late 1960s:

One day, we will drink the water from the poles, whose pack ice will serve our needs. One day, we will be able to turn everything into delicious food. One day, the mountains of waste will sink into the bowels of the earth through the cracks in the ocean floor. One day, we will no longer need to work to live, and will spend our time with distractions. One day, we will colonize all the planets, one by one.

These fairy tales are told at a time when three-quarters of humanity are living worse than our dogs or cats, with no hope to escape their misery, while the remaining quarter, to whom unlimited abundance is promised, has every reason to doubt the reality of these miracles. For one war is all it would take for the end to spread rapidly over the surface of this planet in successive waves, and for the survivors of unmitigated horror to once again suffer under the yoke of former poverty.

Indeed, it is not “rational optimisation” of energy flows, but rather narrative ossification that drives much of the US approach to geopolitics. People are not “rational actors”; governments are no different. In The Pimps of War, Hedges remarks of the rogue deep state: “the same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate.”

They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks—Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institution. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power that are vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including ours, leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.

Unsubstantiated, preposterous claims about the presence of “weapons of mass destruction” are the echoes of the Soviet ghost that haunts the American psyche. Of course, I must stress again that the interplay between the military-industrial complex and neoconservative dogmatism is far from the only factor in motivating war. For instance, while Cold War hauntology certainly played a major part, I believe the Ukraine war was also provoked by the West—through plans of NATO expansion, the Western-aligned Maidan Revolution in 2014, then through a breach of the Minsk accords and the shelling of the Donbas in 2022—partially in response to the depletion of fossil fuels and the resulting rise in energy prices. I suspect cutting off Europe from Russian oil supplies—through both sanctions and the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline exposed by Seymour Hersh—served a similar function to interest rate hikes: the mitigation of hyperinflation. As Blair Fix demonstrates in Do High Interest Rates Reduce Inflation?, rate hikes predictably do not prevent inflation; I propose instead that they prevent runaway hyperinflation through the immiseration of the working class, thereby reducing net demand for energy goods. If we observe a graph of oil prices over time, we see that after the reopening of the global economy following the COVID pandemic, crude oil skyrocketed:

In fact, apart from an initial spurt higher following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, prices have since declined thanks to a reduction in global energy demand. Bogging down Russia in Ukraine also likely allowed the US and Turkey to get their desired regime change in Syria, sabotaging the Russia-Syria-Iraq-Iran-Hezbollah coalition and bringing the al-Qaeda offshoot HTS to power, branded by the West as “moderate rebels”. Finally, in a tale as old as time, I believe the war was also used as a narrative justification for the European economic stagnation that was inevitable and already taking place regardless of the war. As Hedges lays out in Death of the Liberal Class, the abandonment of workers and the poor by the liberal class inevitably leads to imperial overreach and economic catastrophe, in response to which any dissent is quashed through the aforementioned state of permanent war. Economic decline may be papered over through temporary bursts of military Keynesianism—stimulus through military spending. It is a death spiral of desperation.

Of course, just because the Ukraine war serves several rational purposes does not make it rational overall. The death of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians was not necessary to cut off Europe from Russian oil; both Ukraine and Russia are bleeding economically, demographically and geopolitically; and the US is wasting many billions of dollars on an unwinnable war overseas. Russia is driven by its own hauntology of revanchist imperialism—stoked by a national decline of its own—and its state media is even more comical and hallucinogenic than ours, as demonstrated by Russian Media Monitor, a YouTube channel run by Julia Davis. The media’s one-sided, jingoistic depictions of the war exemplify Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in which he argues that media presentations make it impossible to distinguish between what is truly happening, and its stylised, selective misrepresentation through simulacra. In Russia, the war is still referred to as a “special military operation”—likely because Putin cannot handle the embarrassment of his initial underestimation of Western prowess—in which the patriotic Russian fighters are demolishing the neo-Nazi-infested Ukrainians, in a spectral callback to their Pyrrhic triumph over the Nazis in World War II. In the West, Ukraine is portrayed as a shining beacon of liberal democracy, invaded without provocation by an aggressively expansionist, Hitler-esque dictator—and of course, in a callback to World War II, he must not be appeased. There are shades of truth to both of these caricatures. Ukraine does have a neo-Nazi problem, as exposed by Guy Mettan in Report from Donbas; and the invasion was certainly not justified, nor do the Ukrainians see the Russians as “liberators”.

Zionism

The dogmatic US support of Israel—a mercurial, openly genocidal apartheid state—is often considered to be an enigma. In The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt note that following Israel’s dominant victory in 1967 Six-Day War, America has been extraordinarily generous to Israel. They surmise that initially, after having demonstrated its military capabilities, Israel may have served as an asset during the Cold War:

By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.

However, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, US support of Israel has become even more fervent, with the justification that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Muslim world, and by “rogue states” that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. But as Mearsheimer and Walt counter:

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.

They further remark that so-called “rogue states” in the Middle East do not seriously threaten the US: even if they were to acquire nuclear weapons, neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed without “suffering overwhelming retaliation”. Finally, they point out that Israel does not behave like a loyal ally: “Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders).” Mearsheimer and Walt conclude that it is the outsized influence of the Israel lobby—in particular, AIPAC—that drives the US subservience to Israeli interests. They elaborate further in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. As exposed by Max Blumenthal on The Grayzone, the Trump administration is radically infiltrated by AIPAC assets: “with the cameras off, AIPAC leadership provided unusually candid details of their activities. In one revealing admission, [AIPAC CEO Elliott Brandt] explained how he and his lobbying organization groomed the future CIA director and other top Trump officials as pro-Israel assets.”

Obviously, it is reductive to characterise the US-Israel relationship as that between a slave and a master, or vice versa. The Israel lobby aligns with the neoconservatives, who seek a Fukuyama-style “liberal” hegemony throughout the Middle East. This unholy marriage had its watershed moment in 1996 with the presentation of A Clean Break by Richard Perle et al, which argued for a “clean break” with Israel’s prior half-hearted attempts at peaceful diplomacy, and an aggressive reassertion of the “principle of preemption”. Preemptive war is a war crime under international law. Perle, along with his co-authors Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, served in the Bush administration, and were instrumental in catalysing the Iraq War—along with many others such as neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who founded the Project for the New American Century, and in 1998, called for regime change through appeals such as Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough:

Saddam Hussein must go. This imperative may seem too simple for some experts and too daunting for the Clinton Administration. But if the United States is committed, as the President said in his State of the Union Message, to insuring that the Iraqi leader never again uses weapons of mass destruction, the only way to achieve that goal is to remove Mr. Hussein and his regime from power. Any policy short of that will fail.

Of course, there are still some remaining liberal Zionists, who naively believe the Israeli narrative that the Holocaust justifies a Jewish state as the only safe bastion for Jews against antisemitism. Liberal Zionism as a social justice movement is itself a hauntological project: a symbolic fixation emerging from Holocaust trauma and Western guilt, perpetuated through compulsive overperformance. However, as Hedges rebuts in The Death of Liberal Zionism, following the genocide in Gaza, the notion that Israel’s existence can be compatible with liberal, socially progressive values has largely run its course. Then, there is the narrative intimacy between Israel and the US, as Hedges explicates in The Shared Mythological History of Israel and the US:

American exceptionalism mirrors Israeli exceptionalism. The belief that America, ordained by God to lead the world, replicates Israel’s messianic vision of itself. The two countries, because of their similar national myths, insist they are exempt from international and humanitarian law.

They share an open disdain for the “lesser breeds of the earth,” each tracing their roots to European colonialism. Israeli Jews, [Amy Kaplan writes in Our American Israel], are at once eternal victims and lionized for their military prowess. Palestinians, in the process, have been at best rendered invisible and often demonized as subhumans, representations of the barbarians the United States and Israel seek to suppress in their clash of civilizations.

It is the telic segmentation I describe in Epistemic Telos: narcissism and garden-variety racism against brown people. And finally, there are the Christian Zionists, as elucidated by Kaplan:

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 proved to believers the accuracy of the ancient prophecy that God would restore the Jews to Zion and that this ingathering would trigger a chain of events culminating in the end of days. This restoration of the Jews to Zion meant something very different from secular Zionism. The significance of Israel was not in realizing the political goal of Jewish sovereignty, but in manifesting God’s sovereignty and making it possible for some Jews to convert to Christianity to correct the fatal mistake they had made in rejecting Christ two millennia ago. In this prophetic narrative, Israel is the epicenter of the apocalypse, where Christ will launch the final battle of Armageddon and vanquish the Antichrist to inaugurate God’s kingdom on earth. Conjoining eschatology and geopolitics, this old belief system energized the movement called Christian Zionism, which has become one of the most powerful sources of American support for Israel’s right-wing politics from the 1980s into the new millennium.

This paradoxically antisemitic Zionism is canon among Christian dominionists, who are now a key faction within American electoral politics, as explained by Hedges in American Fascists, and were instrumental in Trump’s victory in 2024.

Extremism

Israel’s motivating identity as a “righteous victim” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Through its continued and escalating oppression of the Palestinian people, and the general provocation of the surrounding Arab world, it generates more insecurity for itself. It then uses this as a casus belli for further war crimes, encasing itself in a cocoon of hostility. In fact, as Juan Cole argues in Top 5 Ways Israeli PM Netanyahu Kept Hamas in Power, Israel actively catalysed and strengthened the rule of Hamas in Gaza, which they were eventually able to use as justification for the genocide. Certainly, Palestinian acts of terrorism should be condemned. Leftists do not do themselves a favour by refusing to condemn the October 7 attacks outright. Moreover, Islamic fundamentalism, just as much as Christian fundamentalism, should be condemned as unequivocally oppressive and regressive; authoritarian Islamic regimes must be condemned just as the amoral regimes of Putin and Xi Jinping. It is Islamophobic to caricature typical Muslims as violent and hateful; it is not Islamophobic to denounce violence and sadism. As Žižek appeals in Against the Double Blackmail:

And yet another Leftist taboo that needs to be abandoned is that of prohibiting any critique of Islam as a case of ‘Islamophobia’. This taboo is a true mirror-image of the anti-immigrant populist demonization of Islam, so we should get rid of the pathological fear of many Western liberal Leftists that they might be guilty of Islamophobia. Recall how Salman Rushdie was denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and thus held responsible (partially, at least) for the fatwa condemning him to death—all of a sudden the crux of the problem was not the fatwa as such, but the way we might have aroused the ire of the Muslim rulers of Iran… The result of such a stance is what one might expect: the more Western liberal Leftists probe their own guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. Such a paradigm perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the pseudo-moral agency demands of you, the more guilty you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be.

But one should also heed the words of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak: “if I were a Palestinian at the right age, I would have joined one of the terrorist organizations at a certain stage.” Insecurity breeds major ideological shifts. With an impotent liberal class and concomitant socioeconomic insecurity, violent extremism almost always prevails. It is what happened in Weimar Germany. It is what happened in Yugoslavia. It is what is happening now in America. In the case of the Palestinians, it was an incompetent and corrupt Palestinian Authority, as illuminated by Adam Hanieh in The Oslo Illusion, combined with the pressure of total military subjugation. As for Israel, the Zionist project was built on violence from the beginning, starting with the 1948 Nakba and progressing ever since. The 2011 Israeli social justice protests in response to the rising cost of living and deterioration of public services, a result of continuing civilisational collapse, portended a further national shift to the right. In Nero’s Guests, Hedges writes:

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its ‘democracy’—which was always exclusively for Jews—has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country towards fascism. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.

Convergence

Trump has entered Israel’s war with Iran, falsely claiming that Iran is on the brink of acquiring weapons of mass destruction. As his niece Mary describes in Too Much and Never Enough, Trump is a venal, narcissistic, deeply insecure figure with no real politics of his own. He sees the military as an extension of himself: his birthday parade served as a display of his Lacanian phallus—the signifier of the Imaginary strength that could fill his constitutive lack. All of this makes him extremely suggestible, and combined with the influence of the Israel lobby, it would not have taken much flattery for him to abandon any prior anti-war position. In his remarks to the press following the US bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites, he demonstrated this vulnerability: “there’s no military in the world that could’ve done what we did tonight—not even close. There’s never been a military that could do what took place just a little while ago.” This repetition is not rhetoric; it is superficial enjoyment followed by unbearable disappointment, and a displacement of the fantasy of fulfilment. It is a desperate compulsion, an attempt to convince himself that the Imaginary is Real, what Lacan calls phallic jouissance. Trump knows, on some level, that the war is a lie. He does not care. In Like George W. Bush, Donald Trump Is Lying His Way Into War, Marcetic elaborates:

It is widely understood that the US war with Iran that the Donald Trump White House is barreling toward, and the regime collapse that seems to have become the unofficial goal of the Israeli government, would be terrible for everyone involved, and for the same reasons as the Iraq War was twenty years ago: massive civilian death in yet another Muslim-majority country that will inflame a new round of anti-American terrorism; US troops and even civilians needlessly sacrificed as they become targets of reprisal in the region and possibly beyond; a violent internal power struggle involving ethno-sectarian violence and a tug of war for influence by foreign powers; and a flood of weapons and desperate, angry people leaving Iran’s borders that destabilizes neighboring countries, nearby regions, and even the very same Western countries backing this war.

Trump himself knows all this very well because he watched it all play out with George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion and, taking the political temperature a decade’s worth of chaos later, used it to viciously pounce on Bush’s brother in the 2016 Republican primary. "Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, alright?…[W]e can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty,” he said on the debate stage, shocking the Washington establishment. “We should have never been in Iraq, we have destabilized the Middle East.”

Trump himself is a symptom of a declining nation feverishly seeking a long-lost Symbolic coherence. America’s battered and bruised fiction of exceptionalism can no longer sustain itself through economic prosperity or cultural shine; as in Putin’s Russia, only military force remains. As I explain in Epistemic Telos, hypermasculinity is the end result of a society that has given up its hope for love. When nothing else is left, war is a force that gives us meaning. In The Folly of a War with Iran, Hedges writes:

“They think it’ll be an easy war,” said Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat and member of British intelligence (MI6) who spent decades in the Middle East, told me of the neocons when I interviewed him. “They want to reassert American power and leadership. They feel that every so often throwing a small country against the wall and smashing it up is good for this.”

These neocons, bonded with the Israeli leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, he went on, “will not tolerate any rival power, any challenge to American leadership and American greatness.” They will create facts on the ground—a war between Israel and Iran—that will “pull Trump into a war with Iran.”

In Israel, Netanyahu’s government is in peril, and his coalition is in danger of collapsing. His war on Iran has allowed him to harness the patriotic power of negative unity, and served for now as a successful distraction from internal tensions. This, however, cannot last. Israel cannot sustain an elongated conflict with Iran, a country many times its size, both in geography and population. Its military resources, in addition to its alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent. Russia will not mind an escalation; its desperation in Ukraine means it will take any opportunity to exhaust the West, and its media has already positioned in support of Iran. China will likely maintain an air of strategic ambiguity, as in Ukraine, due to its greater dependence on global trade.

If, by some miracle, Israel and the US succeed in their regime change operation, they will gain control over the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most strategically important chokepoints, and Iran’s oil production, which makes up around 4% of the world’s total. This will be critical during a time of global economic collapse. With Iran’s nuclear program shut down completely, Israel will continue to be able to use its own weapons of mass destruction as blackmail, and will pursue its expansionist Greater Israel project with impunity. Disaster capitalists, as described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine—corporations, hedge funds, oligarchs—will take advantage of the chaos to push through toxic neoliberal policies such as deregulation and privatisation, increasing inequality and decimating public infrastructure.

Of course, this will not work. Even if they manage to decapitate the Iranian government, it will be an impossibly uphill battle for a stable, Western-aligned coalition to emerge as the dominant force. As Hedges remarks in War Deja Vu: “the history of modern Iran is the history of a people battling tyrants propped up and funded by Western powers. The brutal crushing of legitimate democratic movements over the decades resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian clerics to power.” The military-industrial complex does not care; they get to keep siphoning funds. The Israel lobby does not care; they get to continue their suicidal mission for a Greater Israel. Netanyahu and Trump do not care; they get to feel powerful for a little longer. The Israelis do not care; they have totally surrendered to the psychotic death cult of Zionist fascism. The Christian fascists do not care; they do not like the Arabs nor the Jews, and they eschatologically see Zionism as killing two birds with one stone. The neoconservatives might care if they were not hauntologically blinded by their fantasy of American supremacy, and cartoonish animosity towards the so-called “axis of evil”, which conveniently happens to consist entirely of major non-Western-aligned powers. The government gets to continue to justify its surveillance, suppression of dissent, and other abusive legislation; “military Keynesianism” is just a bonus narrative to spin for the economists. In the end, only the military-industrial complex materially benefits from this war; any destabilisation serves as a guarantee of future cash flows.

Coda

The war on Iran is a telic convergence of countless different political actors. In reality, there is never a single, unifying force that one can designate as the sole causative factor for a major event. As Christopher Phillips notes in Battleground, the instability in the Middle East cannot simplistically be reduced to energy flows, Western imperialism, or “ancient hatreds” between Sunni and Shia Muslims. The world is unfathomably complex. In a single cubic millimetre, one can find many quadrillions of particles that coalesce to roughly adhere to some larger-scale, human-comprehensible behaviour. This is the nature of emergence. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change can result in large differences in a later state. Perhaps this war could be traced back to an offhand remark, or a boy who wasn’t loved nearly enough, or a Palestinian child killed 30 years ago. As Derrida understands, history can only ever be parsed through a chaotic, tangled web of deferred meaning, with useful heuristic fictions serving as our narrative anchors, morphing and mutating under our gaze.

In Nero’s Guests, Hedges writes:

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit Indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority—reviled by most Palestinians—to do the bidding of the colonizers.

All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the long term, it is suicidal.

He continues:

Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate the native population through genocide and the spread of new infectious diseases such as smallpox. By 1600 less than a tenth of the indigenous population remained in South, Central and North America. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another nine million in the diaspora. They cannot, as many Israelis wish, wipe them all out.

Israel is overextended and exhausted. It cannot, as America does, indefinitely hide from its past. It will eventually have to reckon with what it has done. Following World War II, Germany salvaged a replacement narrative built around the notion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the “struggle of overcoming the past”. Israel will not be able to generate a new unifying mystique. How could they, when their nation is so conspicuously built on stolen land? When a person’s Symbolic Order collapses, they turn schizophrenic. What happens to a nation?

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