“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
– Attributed to various sources.
“One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.”
– Zhou En-lai (cited by William Blum)
There is no irreducible answer to this query. There are multiple factors driving US-Israeli aggression in that country, and the rest of the Middle East. Most visibly, US officials and their propaganda organs in the media and in government align with Israel’s cold-blooded, supremacist hostility toward Iran and other Muslim countries.
American ruling circles, with few exceptions, appear incapable of understanding that the humiliation Iran in 1979 (the “hostage crisis”) inflicted on the US was of America’s own making. The state/media establishment has produced no useful propaganda to offset this recurring reality.
There is a second order of explanation that looks to the dark influence of Israel on US Middle East policy. Israeli propaganda depicts the Zionist state as a victim of Tehran by virtue of the material support it gives to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in their backing of the Palestinian cause and blocking Israeli territorial expansion. The US mainstream power structures have wholly bought into this narrative, portraying the allies of Palestinian freedom, including Iran, as “terrorist” state organizations.
If nothing else, the Israeli propaganda machinery has until recently been masterful at manipulating public opinion through a well-coordinated state project known as Hasbara. But Hasbara is not only about planting stories in the press and TV news of key allied states, such as the US, UK, and France.
It also provides free trips to Israel for foreign politicians, finances their election campaigns, especially in the US and UK, arranges overseas tours for Israeli celebrities, recruits speakers at university events, and constantly renews and instrumentalizes public memory of the Holocaust, such as by actively collaborating with the American film and TV industries to produce sympathetic films on the theme of Jewish suffering and the Zionist project.
Israel also maintains an organization, Camera, which surveils Israel’s image in the US and other countries, ready to pounce on factual public representations of the condition of the Palestinian people. Until the recent slaughter in Gaza, Israeli propaganda was quite successful at flipping the meaning of victimhood, in effect turning the Holocaust upside down.
The racist apartheid Jewish state now seeks a final solution for non-Jews living in their midst and lebensraum for their land-hungry settlers in the occupied territories of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. For more than 75 years, the Zionists have been either exterminating Palestinians or expelling them from their villages. This reality has been redacted from the information channels in North America and Europe. It is only social media that have revised the popular perception of Israel.
The well-known “realist” political theorist, John Mearsheimer is puzzled by the lack of pragmatism in US foreign policy in the Middle East, which he can only explain by the power of the Israel lobby. Here he refers mainly to Jewish billionaires who fund organizations such as AIPAC, which openly took credit for helping elect 322 American politicians in the 2024 election cycle.
These organizations either contribute to pro-Israel PACs or directly fund the campaign expenses of politicians in their camp. One of the major donors is Miriam Adelson, who gave Donald Trump $106 billion for his 2024 campaign and offered $250 billion, according to Trump, if he (illegally) runs for a third term. The Israel lobby has been extremely well represented in both the Trump and Biden governments.
Although Mearsheimer and his Harvard colleague Stephen Walt were certainly courageous in exposing the power of the lobby and corrupting influence in American politics, their analysis falls short in the way they assume that states operate on a rational calculus of national self-interest, without reference to the composition of the state itself. Among the realists, however, Mearsheimer in particular does see the US as having acted very aggressively over the centuries in its foreign policy objectives.
He fails, however, to consider that the violence perpetrated by the US always redounded to the benefit of organized, wealthy business interests, especially the arms industries, banking, and in the Middle East, the oil interests, and was not, contrary to his view, acting out of irrational motives. Moreover, if Israel never existed, the US would still be blasting its way “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” – and Tehran.
That said, the Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu and the head of Israeli foreign intelligence (Mossad), David Barnea, convinced the mentally challenged US president that Iran faced an imminent collapse and needed only a quick decapitation of the Supreme Leader and other key officials to end the regime. Trump dismissed the national intelligence estimate of 18 agencies under director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that informed him that Iran had no plans to develop a nuclear weapon. Doing foreign policy on his instincts, Trump was outwitted by a nation that enjoyed a unique geopolitical configuration, mountain ranges, the Strait of Hormuz, and advanced military hardware, which neither the Americans nor the Israelis had tactically or intelligently considered.
Nor had US foreign policy professionals but for a very few given serious thought to the strength of Iranian nationalism, its technological sophistication, and sense of self-determination. The 1979 Iranian revolution made little impression on Foggy Bottom, which continued in the next few years to pursue regime change in vulnerable states throughout the world: Nicaragua, Grenada, Afghanistan, Panama, Poland, and the Philippines, among others, an old habit that was rejuvenated by the fall of the Soviet Union and the Wolfowitz Doctrine’s call for unipolar American hegemony.
In the case of Iran, any serious student of foreign policy, including those who cover it in the mainstream media, should understand that the US overthrew a vibrant democracy in that country in 1953 and replaced it with a 26-year dictatorship under Shah Pahlavi. That action, undertaken as a joint US-UK initiative, was designed to overturn the secular liberal nationalist Mossadegh government’s nationalization of the oil industry and to eliminate the growing influence of the communist Tudeh Party in Iranian politics.
Following the 1979 revolution, the Carter administration illegally placed sanctions on Iran, a policy that has been maintained by every Democrat and Republican administration. During his presidency, Joe Biden (2021-2025) made no effort to restore the JCPOA agreement on nuclear non-proliferation that President Obama, with the help of the Russians, had signed with the Rouhani government in 2016, but which Trump unilaterally canceled two years later.
The International Atomic Energy Agency stipulated at the time that Iran was in full compliance with the JCPOA accords, but expressed no concern that Trump had used false claims of violations to justify his attack on that country. Nor did the IAEA publicly defend the principle that each country has the sovereign right to develop a nuclear program.
In the economic sphere, the US-Israel military-industrial complex is interwoven with a shared supply chain and technical collaboration. Apart from genocidal and racial motivations for their joint aggression in the Middle East, the attacks on Arab and Persian peoples in the region provide the imperialist and sub-imperialist states with data on the usefulness and flaws of their weapons systems, information with which they can further militarize their foreign engagements.
The threat of Iran is its opposition to US-Israeli hegemony. As Nancy Fraser sardonically notes, “Epic Fury,” a theater of massive violence launched upon civilians in Iran modeled on the reign of terror deployed in Gaza, sounds like a title drawn from Marvel Comics.
For the CEOs of Boeing, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians registers as $275 billion in windfall profits from 2025 to early 2026 and counting. Israeli defense industries get a share of the ten-year $38 billion aid package due to expire in 2028. As profit-hungry as they are, the M-I-C can’t seem to produce bombs fast enough to fully annihilate the Middle East.
Conclusion: Trump the trombenik
A trombenik is a Yiddish expression, which means, among other things, stupid blowhard, a fake, and a loser. That’s who’s bringing down the richest and most expansive imperium in human history.
As commentator Patrick Henningsen has pointed out, not only has Trump reduced foreign policy to the craven language of deal-making, he’s also influenced the mainstream media to cover international news within that paradigm. The norms of diplomacy, including the establishment of treaties, have vanished from international relations. Deals are not permanent fixtures lodged in the protocols of binding international law, they are ephemeral and easily undone by later governments.
It is not just Israel that is influencing Trump’s annihilationist rhetoric toward Iran but also those among his foreign policy advisers who are part of the Zionist lobby. Drawn from the real estate market and without any diplomatic or foreign policy training, but with the support of the Israel, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, along with Witkoff’s adviser, Israel lobbyist Nick Stewart, were chosen to “negotiate” with Iran. Stewart had earlier made clear that he was firmly opposed to negotiating with any Iranian officials. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, never has the status of state diplomacy been so violated.
Up until now, Trump has acted like putty in the hands of Netanyahu, leading many to speculate that Mossad has the goods on him. Each day, one wonders which Trump will show up. With Israel’s attachment to genocide and the total destruction of Iran, a policy backed by 93% of Israelis and materially backed by the US, America’s support for the neo-fascist state has accelerated America’s own decline on the world stage and its standing as a global hegemon. In the end, the US, having failed to achieve quick regime change in Iran, has lost all sense of purpose, and has brought to light the “banality of evil” of the US-Israel neo-fascist alliance.
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