The joint U.S.-Israeli killing of Iranian leaders on Feb. 28 marked the second time in a year that the United States had used negotiations as a decoy for a surprise attack. On the pattern of Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, our own invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. under President Trump has indeed launched a criminal war of aggression. The run-up to the war, however, followed a discernible pattern. Throughout the months preceding it, the Trump administration was testing the American public’s tolerance for just such an adventure.
First came the drone killings of alleged “narco-terrorists” on boats in the Caribbean Sea; then, the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela; and finally, the seizure of oil tankers said to originate from Venezuela (an act of piracy by any other name). Now, with the attack on Iran, the message to the world should be considered unmistakable. Nations concerned for their own survival, if they aren’t already U.S. vassal-states, are likely to avoid negotiations with the Trump administration. And what else could be expected? Its behavior leaves no room for the common trust on which diplomacy depends. There are only two choices: surrender or strengthen your military in anticipation of war.
The United States is now widely judged to be the most dangerous country in the world. Machiavelli in The Prince advised all aspirants to the leadership of a state that it is good to be feared, but he added: take care that you are not more hated than feared.
We may already have crossed that line.
What, in all our history, could have led us to fall so far? The disaster of the Vietnam War offered a decade-long glimpse into such possibilities, but the last stage of this country’s descent began with the invasion of Iraq. In early 2003, President George W. Bush told UN inspectors to leave that country because our bombing was about to begin. Had they been allowed to complete their search for supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, they would have established that such weaponry, the pretext for our invasion, was nonexistent.
Such actions have consequences. When an international Gallup poll in 2013 asked which country was the greatest threat to world peace, the United States finished in first place. (Iran and Israel were tied for fourth.) The question has not been asked again, but in view of the wars that followed, including NATO’s regime-change bombing of Libya, a CIA-sponsored insurgency in Syria, U.S. bombing campaigns in Somalia, Sudan, and Nigeria, Washington’s support for the destruction and mass killings in Gaza, and now the assault upon Iran, the answer to that poll today would probably be the same.
Lawless with new laws
Imperial expansion generally comes with a loss of liberty at home. In the United States, the Patriot Act began that process in October 2001. Passed by Congress as an apparent response to the fears of a terrified populace just a month after the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., it was a remarkably comprehensive document to have been written so fast. The enhanced surveillance and security measures of the Patriot Act would, however, turn out to be just the opening chapter in a long series of abridgments of rights and anti-constitutional innovations for which the Global War on Terror served as an excuse. Nor were the tools of that war laid aside by later presidents, even when they struck a different posture.
Presidents of both parties extended the reach of our global war by reducing its visibility. Drone assassinations of presumed enemies, for instance, became a remarkably routine tactic of the Obama administration. And in Donald Trump’s second term, ICE agents in American cities have brought the War on Terror home. The arrests may still be largely limited to non-naturalized immigrants and their more vociferous supporters, but nothing in the history of empire would lead one to suppose that such repressive measures (demanded in the name of “national unity”) will cease to gather force. Contempt for legality is not just an international but a national tenet of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Latent in the presidency itself has always been a risk of dictatorship. The capabilities associated with the office by its most distinguished advocate, Alexander Hamilton, are instructive here: activity, energy, dispatch, and secrecy. There have in truth been just three presidents in 250 years, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, for whom most Americans can still feel an honest admiration. Coincidentally, they led the country during three of the very few American wars that could be justified without embarrassment. But even in the War of Independence, the Civil War, and the Second World War, the cost to civil liberties always proved high. Those wars were invariably used to justify an expansion of state power that would open the way for wars of choice.
Of course, the sovereign branch of government under the Constitution was clearly meant to be Congress, not the presidency, but for the last 85 years, in one fashion or another, Congress has continually abdicated its responsibility to approve and oversee the wars that America conducts—wars that were meant to be launched only in self-defense. Defaulting to the president on the decision to go to war is by now a deeply ingrained habit of congressional cowardice.
President Trump’s wars, however, have been new in one obvious way. Unlike any of his predecessors, he gloats over his killed or kidnapped victims. But the outlandish quality of the man can be a distraction. In truth, imperial hubris had set in and diplomacy had already faded from view before the end of Joe Biden’s presidency. With Trump having already pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—or JCPOA, also known as “the Iran nuclear deal”—in his first term in office, President Biden was content to let it go unrevived. And no sooner had Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022 than Biden all but abandoned diplomacy and, in the three years that followed, never lifted the phone to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin. To judge by the record of his presidential travels, Biden came to believe that his real job description was President of NATO.
As for Iran, it has long since acquired for Americans the status of a myth rather than an actual nation and continues to occupy a twisted place in the national psyche. All 52 of the hostages taken in that country’s 1979 revolution were, in fact, released on President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration day in 1981. For him, that was a valuable piece of theater, supplied by the very people we were still calling terrorists. By 1986, when the Iran-Contra scandal broke—the illegal trade of arms to Iran organized by senior officials in the Reagan administration in exchange for money to finance a U.S.-backed insurgency in Nicaragua—it became hard to avoid the inference drawn by Gary Sick, the Persian Gulf adviser to President Jimmy Carter, that U.S. and Iranian arms-for-money hustlers in both governments enjoyed mutual confidence because they had dealt with each other before. As thoroughly forgotten as the Iran-Contra affair were the CIA’s overthrow of the democratic government of Iran in 1953 and American support for Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein during the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-1988, in which Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian civilians. (The recent poisonous smoke from the Israeli bombing of civilian oil depots in Tehran may be evidence of a comparable war crime.)
What Americans so easily forget, the world sometimes remembers, and the perception of the United States today in Africa, Asia, and Latin America differs markedly from our perception of ourselves. Worse yet, we are led to misjudge our stature by the encouragement we receive from subordinate members of NATO, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, descendants of defunct empires whose servility to Washington is now almost total. As surely as their representatives trooped into the Oval Office by twos and threes to plead with President Trump for a gentler deal on tariffs, they have also offered military support—an aircraft carrier here or there—to assist with the challenges that confront Washington in its latest war. Feeble though such gestures may be, the North Atlantic commercial democracies are more than ever dependent on American protection and largesse. As a result, in line with Trump administration propaganda, they portray the new conflict with Iran as an episode in a clash of civilizations that was always bound to happen.
But how inevitable was any of this? Thanks to a story in the Washington Post by John Hudson and Warren Strobel, we now know that a week before the joint Israeli-U.S. attack, President Trump received a report from the National Intelligence Council informing him that a full-scale war on Iran would likely fail to bring down the government.
Washington’s determination to annihilate Iran, however, is nothing new. It has, in fact, been more constant and obsessive than most people realize. Back in 2007, a shipload of British sailors was captured in the territorial waters of Iran. Negotiations between the two countries were already underway when then-Vice President Dick Cheney pushed to convert the incident into a cause for war. He had earlier registered his displeasure when that year’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iran gave no grounds for believing that country was close to having a nuclear weapon. In short, there was no pretext for the war that would have lived up to the neoconservative motto, “Boys go to Baghdad, real men go to Tehran!” Still, courageous resistance from the head of CENTCOM, Admiral William J. Fallon, at that moment actually stopped the Bush-Cheney administration from getting into their third Middle Eastern war in five years. There has been no one like Fallon within a country mile of the Trump administration.
The Cold War legacy from hell
During his first term in office, in the relaxed usage casually deployed on the American left, Trump was often called a fascist. But the immobilizing speed with which each of his transgressions has succeeded the last does prompt a comparison with German foreign policy in the 1930s. A violent lunge and jolt, followed by another and yet another, too fast for his opponents to catch their breath: that’s the drill. After massive DOGE cuts and further selective purges of government workers, as well as ICE raids in Democrat-run cities and those assaults on Venezuela and Iran, what might come next? One possibility certainly is Cuba. Trump has long been fascinated with Cuba, and he’s hardly alone. That annoying island, 90 miles off the Florida coast, has troubled violent minds in the United States even longer than Iran. And on March 7, Trump promised: “Cuba is going to fall soon.”
Anti-communism was a potent drug, and we are still getting high on its fumes. It outlasted the Cold War but gathered a deeper plausibility from an older model. The sentiment that we’re doing it for their own good goes back to that American favorite among world-conquering powers, the British empire of the nineteenth century. The British always claimed that they ruled their imperial subjects for their sake—that is, to advance them to the next stage of civilization.
Now, Washington has taken up, as Rudyard Kipling once put it, “the savage wars of peace” and, “cold edged” as we are “with dear-bought wisdom,” we will carry on until the final war is done. From the days of the Roman empire (so the imperialist story ran), the growth of civilization followed a path along which every society could theoretically progress. Nineteenth-century England stood at its happy terminus, but given the right training, any country could arrive there eventually. Rome was cruel by comparison since only Romans were full citizens of that empire and exempt from the most humiliating punishments. The British commonwealth had a more generous presentation and was less keen on wars. (In this regard, America’s rulers are the disciples of Rome.)
But the United States has added something new to the relationship between the imperial center and the outlands. We have long admitted refugees from the countries we opposed and supported their inveterate hatred of the regimes they fled. If a Cuban wants the U.S. to bomb Cuba, that rates a cheer of solidarity from many Americans. The same goes for the Polish emigré clamoring for NATO to destroy Russia or the Iranian who cheers the death cloud lately oozing over Tehran from U.S. and Israeli attacks on civilian oil depots in that city.
But there is something odd about this pattern of vicarious hatred: very few of those refugees intend to go back to their native lands. They prefer the United States. By their unquenched thirst for revenge—not just the destruction of the bad Islamist or Communist government in their former home, but a legacy of further suffering for the people who remain—they are exhibiting a horrific side of human nature. But as empire builders, we are expected to empathize and never say a word against the miserable fate, including bombs and sanctions, that our leaders have been all too happy to impose on the actual inhabitants of Cuba or Iran.
In a speech delivered in 2017, former President George W. Bush expressed regret over a weakening American determination to spread our kind of democracy and markets globally. For 70 years, he said, “the presidents of both parties believed that American security and prosperity were directly tied to the success of freedom in the world. And they knew that the success depended, in large part, on U.S. leadership.” The world thus owed its stability to the portability of “the DNA of American idealism.” This was the language of the Berlin Airlift at the very start of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Three generations later, we still speak that language even as, in our recent actions, we repeat the collective self-hypnosis that drew us into Vietnam. We are “winning” in Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has claimed, “decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy.”
Stop a moment at that last phrase—without mercy. It betrays a thought that American soldiers are not supposed to think, or at least not say aloud. Such strutting brutality lowers general morale by proudly displaying a failure of self-discipline. There is such a thing, in foreign policy, as lacking the standing to make certain claims. Since the Biden and Trump administrations threw this country’s weight behind the Israeli destruction of Gaza, we now lack the standing to claim a role as the benefactor of any other nation in that region, including Iran.
The worst of empire is this: that it requires conquest for its self-definition, which means it has no permanent self. Yet to the eye of the empire builder, war is an adequate substitute, an acceptable second best. Our absorption in what we believe we are doing for others stops us from thinking about what we are doing to ourselves. Giving up empire would mean detaching ourselves from the conceit that the world wants to have our way of life and that it is our moral duty, even at the point of a gun or a drone, to give the world’s people what we imagine they are asking for.
We will go on being the most dangerous country in the world, as well as an empire in free fall, until we stop supposing that we know other nations better than they know themselves. But the crisis we are now in also requires an inward look. Recalling the state of German society in the mid-1930s, in her extraordinary essay “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” Hannah Arendt offered a startling reflection: “It was as though morality, at the very moment of its total collapse within an old and highly civilized nation, stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, of customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with no more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of a whole people.” At home and abroad, how close are we coming to just such a change?
Read Tom Dispatch’s response here.
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