March 19, 2026 – The political, intellectual, and media elites of the Atlantic world never cease to amaze with their intellectual shallowness and political immorality, but their responses to the war launched against Iran and the perpetration of genocide in Gaza undoubtedly mark the irrefutable turning point in the refounding of Western modern and late-modern politics, as demonstrated by their crude and vulgar use of the tropes of terrorism (aren’t Hamas and Hezbollah truly terrorist organizations?) and anti-Semitism (can the Palestinian genocide be turned into a pro-Zionist educational topic?) as the only notions to explain the complexity of what happened in Iran and Palestine and the magnitude of their own crimes.

The war of aggression perpetrated by the declining American power and the Israeli terrorist state against Iran and the genocide of the Palestinian people bring with them countless lessons about the theory of capitalism, class domination, the crisis of the systemic cycle of American capital accumulation, the imperial and colonial nature of the capitalist social structure and the functioning of the ruling classes and the Atlantic power blocs, as well as about the functioning of ideology in current societies. Regarding the latter, the incredible responses of the highest European leaders, accusing the victim of the aggressor’s crimes, their inability to read this sequence of events within the context of the systemic crisis of historical capitalism beyond the mere enumeration of the facts presented in binary terms of a simply idiotic simplicity, and the profound racism, coloniality, and ethno-racial, religious, and cultural supremacism with respect to the societies of the Middle East are as shameful, disgraceful, and evil as the immorality, intrinsic violence, and incompetence of these ruling elites to govern the states they preside over, who only know how to produce death, misery, and pain in the communities with which they are fatally associated.

Operation Epic Fury was launched on February 28th amidst a barrage of contradictory objectives and justifications, after the Pentagon had warned that the United States was not materially prepared to wage war with Iran (as has been demonstrated ) and that the Iranian government could retaliate regionally and close the Strait of Hormuz (as it has done). The US government told us that Iran was an imminent threat, or that Trump “had a feeling” it was about to attack the United States, or that it was two weeks away from having nuclear weapons, or that it was one week away from having the materials to manufacture bombs, or that it would have thirty or forty bombs within a year, or that it was about to attack US bases in retaliation for an imminent Israeli attack, or that the country had simply overstepped its bounds by maintaining an anti-American stance for too long.

The objective was, once again, to destroy Iran’s nuclear program—Trump had insisted that last summer’s bombings had “annihilated” it, but apparently now it had to be “totally annihilated again”—or to overthrow the Islamic Republic, or to trigger a popular uprising, or to handpick a more compliant head of state, or to destroy Iran’s military capabilities, from its navy to its capacity to manufacture improvised explosive devices, effectively denying its existence as a sovereign state. (Israel’s objective, for its part, was easier to discern: nothing less than the destruction of the Islamic Republic. As Israeli analyst Danny Citrinowicz noted , Israel’s view is: “coup, great […] people in the streets, great […] civil war, great.” Israel “doesn’t care in the slightest about the future” or “stability of Iran.”)

Such was the chaos, so empty and unhinged were the pronouncements of Trump and his “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, that the decision to go to war could be better interpreted in etiological rather than strategic terms. That is to say, after the easy victory in Venezuela, Trump felt he was “on a roll,” as one of his administration officials put it , and yielded to the coordinated pressure from Netanyahu and Senator Lindsey Graham to bomb Iran , because he thought it would be another grand demonstration of American power exercised in his name, the immediate consequence of which would be the imposition of a more compliant ruling group at the head of the country. Furthermore, Trump needlessly entangled himself in a mess by publicly disparaging diplomacy, openly speaking of regime change, and deploying aircraft carriers, warships, refueling ships, stealth fighters, and guided-missile destroyers to the Persian Gulf, as well as moving Patriot and THAAD missile defense batteries to bases in the Gulf. At that point, regardless of the negotiations, Trump was already committed to war.

Beyond all this, the offensive against Iran could be interpreted as a violent act of displacement by a declining empire, confronted by a rival center of capital accumulation in the Pacific against which it seems incapable of taking any rational or constructive action. It is a symptom of secular decline, of the degradation of the political authority of the American bourgeoisie, of the political capabilities of the state as a permanent structure, and of the intellectual caliber of its leaders. The United States now finds itself in what Robert Pape calls the escalation trap : it cannot achieve its stated objectives through air warfare, but declaring victory and withdrawing would be a clear strategic defeat.

True to form, the Democrats immediately signaled their willingness to fund the war, provided there was a guarantee of a “plan.” As Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin put it , “We’re in on it.” The Democrats had no fundamental disagreement with the war, given their own complicity in the Gaza genocide; all they offered were musings on the process and tactics. And why not? The Democrats had long since assimilated the lines of Trump’s foreign policy implemented during his first term regarding China and the Middle East. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies vied to appear more hawkish than Trump in the Iran negotiations: ” No side deals ,” they insisted. The Democrats passed Trump’s gargantuan military spending bill, giving him a standing ovation for his bellicose threats against Iran in the State of the Union address. There was also a thread of quiet admiration running through the Democratic establishment , openly expressed by Hillary Clinton, for the way Trump had bullied European vassals into increasing their spending on NATO.

Whatever reservations America’s vassals might have had about the war, they clearly hoped that unity of purpose against an old enemy might somewhat mitigate Trump’s disdain for former allies. NATO chief Mark Rutte, seeing an opportunity, once again bowed down to “Daddy,” heaping praise on the air campaign—“I really commend what is happening in Iran”—and reminding the White House that NATO is a “platform for the United States to project its power on the world stage.” Britain, France, and Germany issued a statement  on February 28 condemning not the US-Israeli attack, but Iran’s self-defense. Canadian Mark Carney, who had won the applause of liberals for declaring the end of American hegemony weeks earlier on the Davos stage, followed suit, refusing to rule out Canadian involvement. In the UK, the specters of zombie Atlanticism expressed astonishment that Keir Starmer had hesitated, for less than a day, before allowing the United States to use British military bases. Tony Blair emerged from the shadows to protest , arguing that Starmer “should have backed the US from the outset.” Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI5, complained that Starmer had “stand back and stood by.” Tim Shipman, in an article published in The Spectator , relayed the view of “security sources” that Labour pacifists were sabotaging the special relationship between his country and the United States.

The Trump administration, for its part, had barely bothered to defend the war in the weeks leading up to its launch. Consequently, it enjoys the support of only 27 percent of American voters, most of them members or supporters of the Republican Party. Overall, the war unites the left against it and divides the right. And what about the select group of experts? The emptiness of the casus belli and the lack of any attempt to form a coalition or any legal justification alarmed the media, which had been reliably bellicose regarding Iraq and, more recently, Ukraine. The Economist , which had lobbied for the 2003 invasion, explaining to readers “Why war would be justified,” called the offensive against Iran “A war without a strategy”; The Washington Post , which once warned the George W. Bush administration not to “sneer again from decisive action in Iraq,” now expressed utter astonishment at the Iranian “gamble.” Although the newspaper agreed with its supposed moral and political foundations, and obediently demonized the enemy, it did not trust in war.

Further to the right, Fox News , The New York Post , and The Wall Street Journal all fell in unison to praise Trump’s genius. More telling were the usual Trump critics who made an exception for the war-torn president. The warmonger Thomas Friedman of The New York Times argued that even if Trump and Netanyahu didn’t completely topple the regime, they might at least usher in “an Islamic Republic 2.0 far less threatening to its people and its neighbors”; somehow, an air war could accomplish what air wars never do. The low-level provocateur Bret Stephens had even fewer doubts. Trump was simply ending a war waged by Iran “against the United States since 1979.” Iran, Stephens continued, was a “key member of the axis of autocracies,” which “threatens the democratic world at large,” so what could possibly be wrong with bombing it? David Boies, the vice president’s lead lawyer in the Bush v. Gore case , turned to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to defend bipartisan warmongering against the “isolationist wing of the Republican Party and the pacifist wing of the Democratic Party,” who, it seems, “hate Israel and the Jews so much that they oppose any action to neutralize Israel’s enemies.”

Only a pedant would ask whether the Gulf dictatorships from which US attacks are launched can also be called “autocracies,” or would raise the question of whether seizing an embassy, ​​arming Lebanese militants, or attempting to assassinate John Bolton constitute acts of war. If the answer were yes, then Operation Ajax, organized to overthrow Mosaddegh, should also be considered acts of war, as should the Iraqi invasion of Iran, the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, which killed all 290 civilian passengers on board, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani (whose death prompted the retaliatory attempt on Bolton), the murder of Iranian nuclear scientists, and the decades-long, draconian sanctions imposed on Iran. Stephens might well have said that this war is the latest culminating episode in the war waged by the United States against Iran since 1953.

In Europe, of course, Bernard-Henri Lévy was in favor of war before he even knew it was happening. He had seen the US navy amassing in the Gulf and pleaded with Trump to bomb Iran. All the old arguments were trotted out: the just war theory, the “imminent threat,” the exhaustion of diplomacy (exhausted only by the Iranian side), the existential danger to Israel, even though it is Israel that has repeatedly started wars with Iran. The Springer press also preemptively endorsed the attack. In an article published in Die Welt , Ahmad Mansour, a Palestinian exile who has proclaimed himself a leader in the fight against antisemitism (based on what appears to be a fictional backstory), clamored for war: “Every day that the mullahs’ regime is not attacked is another day that the Iranian people are oppressed, deprived of their rights, murdered, and tortured. The United States must not hesitate any longer.” The only thing that had stood in the way of liberating Iran’s 93 million people was the Hamlet-like indecisiveness of the United States. Why worry about the casus belli , much less consider the bloody, smoldering wreckage left behind by past “humanitarian interventions”?

However, the belligerents soon had reason to back down. Within days, Iran had burned through at least $5.6 billion invested by the attackers in US interceptors and munitions, attacked radars essential to the Patriot and THAAD systems, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and triggered force majeure across the Gulf, causing oil and gas prices to soar as contractual obligations could not be met. In addition to its thousands of ballistic missiles and mobile launchers that the US and Israel are fighting to destroy, Iran had invested in ultra-cheap but effective drones to attack US military bases, energy infrastructure, ships, and tankers. Those who had supported the war now risked sharing responsibility for the regional chaos, the soaring costs of energy and food, and a debacle that could only weaken the United States and its allies, regardless of the damage inflicted on the people of Iran and, according to Friedman, its ” Islamofascist rulers .”

Macron then aligned himself with Pedro Sánchez’s Spanish government, which, it must be acknowledged, had denounced the war as illegal, although France stopped short of denying the United States’ use of its military bases in the region. Carney began to insist that he only supported the war “reluctantly” and, yielding to domestic pressure, confirmed that Canada would “never participate” in the attacks. Merz harbored serious doubts about the existence of a “joint plan” to end the conflict quickly and convincingly. Starmer, who was still participating “defensively” in the war—which meant, among other things, that large, long-range US bombers were using the RAF bases at Fairford and Diego Garcia— criticized Trump for having “plunged” the Middle East into “chaos.” Having refused beforehand to form a coalition for the war, Trump has so far been unable to convince his allies to embark on a dangerous, costly, and likely ineffective naval mission to open the Strait of Hormuz.

Those experts who maintained some contact with reality either remained silent or lowered their bellicose expectations. For Friedman, the risk of escalation was suddenly too high. The regime had to be broken “from above,” which, it now seemed, could only happen after a ceasefire , though he praised Trump and Netanyahu for having “reduced Iran’s nuclear capabilities and its ability to project power,” a criterion vague enough to declare victory for either side in any war. Stephens, instead of backing down, suggested that seizing Kharg Island, the nerve center of Iran’s oil exports located in the Strait of Hormuz, would be the “most realistic path to victory at the lowest plausible cost” rather than the path to faster escalation, deeper economic shock, and a protracted ground battle to retain the island. The editorial board of The New York Times , while praising the “tactical successes” and remaining hopeful that a naval coalition could still force access to the Strait of Hormuz, deplored the Trump administration’s undiplomatic recklessness and its “ego-driven” whim.

One striking aspect of this war is how little effort has been made to sell it, to rhetorically dignify it, to provide it with moral justification, or to place it within any context of shared Western interests. While cultured warmongers repeat hackneyed arguments about armed liberation, Pete Hegseth elaborates lyrically on “death and destruction raining down from the sky all day long”; while they talk about de-escalation, Trump demands ” unconditional surrender “; where they seek intelligibility, the US government offers blatant lies, evasions, contradictions, and grandiloquence. Of course, since the Gaza genocide, in which Washington led a global coalition following the extermination campaign cheered on by the far right, while liberal apologists cultivated a studied attitude of amnesia, cultured warmongers have perfected their capacity for cognitive dissonance. But the situation has changed. They may have been useful two decades ago to a violent, adventurous, right-wing government that was launching itself into war, but they are no longer so. The right no longer listens to or needs its liberal scrutinizers. They cling to them only out of habit.

(Sidecar via Diario Red)