For a barrel of smoke and mirrors

The lavish expenses of the Department of Defense last September (6.9 million dollars on lobster, 15.1 million on beef ribs, 2 million on Alaskan king crabs) would have been enough in a different time to see any government official removed from office and tarred and feathered. One can easily imagine that the 6 million Americans (including 1.8 million children) who are on the verge of losing access to basic food assistance (SNAP) would have seen it as a form of justice.

But that was without counting on a war that refuses to bear its name: at a cost of 37 million dollars per hour for the first 100 hours, the Operation Epic Fury against Iran represents a peak. A peak of inconsistencies, incompetence, and improvisation. How else can one describe going to war in the Gulf region, convinced that a flick of the finger could undo a regional multi-faceted power? Or playing in the Strait of Hormuz without checking the status of strategic reserves? Or parading a “booted democracy,” as the neoconservatives did a quarter century ago, imagining (despite political science showing it as a chimera) a regime change through bombs?

By rewriting history—provoking oppositions and diasporas to rise up, by announcing aid only to retract it later, like in Hungary (1956), Iraq (1991), Syria (after 2011)—and this time too, in anticipation of massacres and the regime’s consolidation to intervene. Without planning. From afar. In the air. Too late.

In the image of an old rubber band, it is tempting to assume, reflexively, that the rationality of the intervention is rooted in a state logic: after all, the Constitution has made the presidential institution the depository of authority by default in foreign policy. The latter has always been transactional by nature, integrating processes to separate the interest of all from that of negotiators. But under this president’s rule, everything is reversed: the Oval Office is him; Washington is him; national interest is his personal interest.

To ensure this, the government has orchestrated, according to professors Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein, an assault against the state, with the firing of watchdogs, dismantling of regulatory safeguards, and obliteration of anticorruption norms. It has shattered the institutional triangle that shaped foreign policy, relying on the theory of unitary executive, marginalizing even more Congress, and eviscerating competent bureaucracies (Departments of Defense and State, CIA, DIA, ODNI, NSC), depriving them of their experts, resources, memories, and contradictory—imperfect but existing—spaces.

This translates, explain professors Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, into practices of “transactional clustering”: “conflict resolution, economic negotiations, and private deals” are deliberately amalgamated into complex mega-deals difficult to unravel. Thus, a coterie devoid of diplomatic experience, vested with titles that grant power but exempt them from declaring potential conflicts of interest, ends up bartering deals—under the guise of negotiating peace agreements that do not stand the test of time. In the Middle East, Ukraine, or Congo, every move in international relations seems to be accompanied by an option on resources, a series of investments that yield state gains and private transactions (mining, banking, real estate) benefiting a nebula where the president’s family (his sons, his son-in-law, his daughters’ fathers-in-law), his friend Witkoff, or foreign magnates linked to the presidential empire orbit.

Foreign policy is now a matter of yes-men (reduced to wearing the shoes their boss offers to avoid angering him), spineless individuals driving the world into an avoidable war (having carefully avoided serving under the flag all their lives), and kleptocrats eager to both vampirize the globe’s resources and profit from the instability they generate. Unrestrained.

When the guns fall silent, as societies try to heal their wounds, the tectonic plates of world geopolitics will continue to move, and the specter of dark clouds hovering over the region will linger for a long time. The fine soot that settled on Tehran after the explosion of the Shahran and Shahr-e oil deposits, the smoke escaping from tankers hit in the strait will continue to pollute, deform, and disfigure. Like the city of Fallujah, marked for two decades by the health and environmental consequences of another American “intervention” (Operation Phantom Fury), the pounded territories of the region will remain deeply scarred, and the environmental contamination from the combination of ammunition used and destruction of infrastructure will further exacerbate their vulnerability and “livability” in the face of climate change.

But that matters little to the warmongers, because it was never truly about peace, democracy, or security. You didn’t have to be the drunkest cowboy in the Oval saloon to see how many empires have crumbled in history somewhere between Mount Lebanon and Lake Hamun, and to gauge the futility of the enterprise, which truly revolves around three axes.

Firstly, a massive distraction operation that benefits war leaders. From Tel Aviv to Washington, the two war chiefs want to consolidate their power in an election year, while facing legal troubles—from corruption to sexual assault—that could come back to bite them. Then, the intoxication of power, which, like that of the summits, has deprived them of oxygen and led them to believe that they are masters of the region, masters of the world…