The Axis of Chaos

Iranian drones and missiles struck an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia and liquified natural gas (LNG) facilities in Qatar, forcing the sites to halt operations, as well as several other ports and energy facilities across the Gulf. Amazon cloud-computing data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were also hit, and the IRGC threatened to ​“set ablaze” all shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint for global energy, prompting calls for an international force to prevent a blockade that could upend the global economy.

Meanwhile, the war’s military dimension is already spreading beyond the Middle East, with Hezbollah drones hitting a British Royal Air Force base in Cyprus and a U.S. submarine sinking an Iranian warship in international waters off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, killing scores of sailors. As political commentator Séamus Malekafzali has suggested, Iran is employing guerrilla tactics with the military might of a state.

Trump has voiced surprise at Iran’s willingness to regionalize the war, despite the fact that his administration, in keeping with predecessors, has lambasted Iran’s theocratic regime as a destabilizing force. But such incoherence is par for the course for a president who has variously forecast that the conflict may continue for days, weeks or months — qualified by his claim that the United States could fight ​“forever.”

Trump’s rationale for starting the war has likewise oscillated wildly: from compelling Iran to fully ​“capitulate” over its nuclear program, to triggering popular uprising and regime change, to stopping Iran from exporting its revolution through regional proxies like Hezbollah, to even the grandiose claim that Iran’s regime had to be toppled because it had ​“waged war against civilization itself.” Trump has also mused about deploying the ​“Venezuelan” option of replacing the country’s rulers, while simultaneously acknowledging that U.S. attacks had ​“knocked out most of the candidates” to assume new leadership. 

“It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead,” Trump said. ​“Second or third place is dead.” 

In the face of such absurdity, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has argued that what appears incoherent is actually strategic genius, allowing Trump to ​“look for opportunities and off ramps and escalations for the United States that creates [sic] new opportunities to execute what we need on our own timeline.” Couldn’t be clearer. 

What’s beyond doubt is that the wellbeing and future of Iran’s people count for nothing in the U.S.-Israeli calculus. As scholar Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, a former death row inmate in Iran, pointedly noted, the attack on the regime, including Khamenei’s killing, is part of a ​“package,” wherein ​“the assassination of the Iranian supreme leader is also part of the killing of Iranian schoolchildren. It’s also part of the killing of Iranian innocent people. It’s also part of the attack on Iranian hospitals.” 

Where Trump and his administration appear afflicted by a kind of imperial attention deficit disorder, Israel has laid its objectives bare. On March 1, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said U.S. involvement in the war ​“allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years — to deliver a crushing blow to the terror regime.” Since his December meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Netanyahu has worked strenuously to ensure negotiations with Iran did not succeed, and thereby scupper his wish to break the Islamic Republic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to acknowledge as much, telling reporters, ​“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

Whether the global economic pain inflicted by Iran’s retaliation will lead Trump to wind down the war remains to be seen, as does the question of whether the war will in fact bring down the Iranian regime. As scholar Robert Pape has argued, ​“It would be a historical first” for an aerial bombing campaign to trigger regime change, even as those campaigns inflict tremendous civilian suffering. For all their homilies about nation-building, the U.S. neocons who advocated for regime change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya did not shy away from nation-breaking, leading to various forms of state collapse that devastated those countries’ populations.

Similarly, for all of Israel’s direct appeals to the Iranian people — including a March 1 video in which Netanyahu called on them to break the ​“chains of tyranny” — it’s evident that its goal is less regime change than state collapse and fragmentation. This, after all, is the policy Israel has carried out with regards to Syria, a historical adversary whose territory it can now occupy with impunity. It also defines its repeated aggressions against Lebanon, whose territory it has once again invaded.

In partnership with the United States, Israel is continuing its policy of supporting separatist movements among Iran’s ethno-national minorities, demonstrating its willingness to be surrounded by shattered and hollowed-out states as long as that weakens any challenge to its oppression of Palestinian people and its bid for regional dominance. According to Danny Citrinowicz of Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies, Israel’s view is, “’If we can have a civil war, great.’ [It] couldn’t care less about the future…[or] the stability of Iran.” This horizon of state collapse perfectly complements the colonial-theocratic ideology of Greater Israel that animates many in Netanyahu’s cabinet and which was recently endorsed by the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who believes Israeli borders were established by God and recorded in the Bible.

Despite recent frictions over Greenland and hollow invocations of international law, NATO allies have stepped in line. Canadian PM Mark Carney, who only recently made headlines with his Davos speech about the end of the rules-based international order, has voiced his support of this illegal war ​“with regret,” while France, Germany and the United Kingdom have committed to take ​“defensive action” against Iran. The only European country to stand out from the chorus of enablers has been Spain, whose Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez forbade the United States from employing its Spanish bases to attack Iran. In response, Trump — once again showing how little he regards the sovereignty of putative allies — vowed he could use the bases if he wanted to and threatened to immediately cut off all trade with Spain.

After the Iraq war, economist Giovanni Arrighi defined late-stage U.S. imperialism as grounded in ​“dominance without hegemony” — that is, its willingness to wield overwhelming military and economic force without even attempting to persuade allies that its superpower was to their benefit. As the United States further yokes itself to Israel’s project to dismantle its neighbors’ sovereign statehood, U.S. policy is growing increasingly nihilistic, as though the scope of its military power and its imagined immunity from repercussions gives it license to destroy and destabilize at will.

Given that, it’s difficult to see how the U.S.-Israeli war machine can be stayed by any political opposition, whether international or domestic, despite the profound unpopularity of the conflict in the United States already. Whether ratcheting economic chaos can have an impact where politics and law do not is an open question and it’s hard to imagine Israel pulling back from its long-held goal to break the Iranian state.

Whatever trajectory the war takes, all we know is that its damage will be lasting— compounding all the disasters that U.S. imperialism, Israeli colonialism and homegrown autocracy have already wrought on the region.