global geopolitics

Washington rushes troops into the Middle East and raises embassy security as preparations intensify for another confrontation with Tehran

“A dissident-sounding narrative that attributes American war plans to Israeli pressure performs a laundering function for the principal that possesses both the capability and the interest“

Editorial Analysis | November 2026

American military deployments to West Asia have increased in recent months, according to statements from Israeli diplomatic officials briefed on the movements, and those statements have been accompanied by reports that Washington warned its ally to prepare for a further round of full-scale hostilities against Iran. Discourse within the security establishments of both states has begun to include references to nuclear weapons, which represents a significant escalation in the terms of debate rather than a technical adjustment. The immediate question for analysis concerns not whether such a war is likely but which narrative will accompany it and whose responsibility that narrative will assign. A particular framing has circulated widely across alternative and heterodox media in recent years, and that framing holds that Israel is manoeuvring the United States into a conflict that Washington would otherwise avoid. The framing deserves examination as a genre rather than as an individual intervention, because its structural features recur across numerous platforms and because those features serve identifiable interests regardless of the intentions of any particular broadcaster.

The material position of the United States within the global security order contradicts the framing at its foundation. American forces operate across every inhabited continent, maintain roughly seven hundred and fifty overseas bases, and conduct counter-terrorism, advisory, training and combat operations in dozens of countries simultaneously (Vine, 2015). The proposition that West Asia constitutes the single region in which Washington has no independent interest, and that it would enter that region only under external pressure, cannot survive contact with the documented pattern of American intervention across the past three decades. The Strait of Hormuz carries approximately twenty million barrels of oil per day together with a substantial share of global liquefied natural gas, and the Energy Information Administration identifies it as the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint (US Energy Information Administration, 2024). Chinese, Indian, Japanese and South Korean importers depend on that transit, which means that control over the chokepoint confers leverage over the industrial centres of Asia.

The strategy of containing Chinese industrial capacity through the control of energy flows and maritime chokepoints is documented in American strategic literature and in successive national security strategies. The 2017 National Security Strategy identified the Indo-Pacific as the priority theatre and described the maintenance of favourable regional balances of power as a core objective (White House, 2017). Subsequent strategy documents have extended that framework to the Gulf and to the maritime approaches through which Asian energy supplies pass. A regional war that disrupted Iranian production and constrained Chinese access to Gulf energy would serve those objectives irrespective of Israeli preferences, and it would do so under a narrative that assigned responsibility elsewhere.

The structural relationship between the United States and Israel exhibits a dependency that runs in one direction on every dimension that matters for military operations. American intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities are integral to Israeli targeting cycles, and Israeli operations against Iran in 2024, 2025 and 2026 relied on American aerial refuelling, munitions resupply and targeting support (Congressional Research Service, 2025). The April 2024 Israeli strike on the Iranian consular compound in Damascus, the October 2024 strikes on Iranian military infrastructure and the June 2025 campaign that included direct American strikes on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan each required capabilities that Israel does not itself possess (Cooper, 2025). A counterfactual clarifies the direction of dependence, because the withdrawal of American support would threaten Israeli military capacity in ways that no plausible Israeli withdrawal of support would threaten American capacity. The entire apparatus of American power projection in West Asia would continue to function in the absence of Israel, and that asymmetry establishes which party holds the principal position.

Documented policy analysis confirms that the use of Israel as a blame-absorbing instrument has been considered and recommended within mainstream American foreign policy institutions. The Brookings Institution published *Which Path to Persia?* in 2009, and the fifth chapter of that volume bears the title “Leave It to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike” (Pollack et al., 2009). The chapter reasons that Washington could encourage and perhaps assist Israeli strikes in the expectation that international criticism and Iranian retaliation would be deflected away from the United States and onto Israel. The volume is a policy analysis rather than a statement of adopted policy, and its existence nonetheless establishes that the strategy was formulated within the institutions that supply personnel and ideas to American administrations. The subsequent sequence of strikes against Iran across three administrations indicates that the option was exercised rather than merely catalogued.

The laundering function identified in that chapter has a precedent that illustrates how defectors and proxies absorb responsibility for claims the principal wishes to advance. The Iraqi defector codenamed Curveball supplied fabricated intelligence about mobile biological weapons laboratories, and that intelligence featured prominently in the February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council (Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2005). German intelligence had warned that the source was unreliable, and analysts within the American system disputed his claims internally while the public case relied upon them. The institutional lesson concerns not the existence of deception but the mechanism through which deception is attributed to a surrogate whose unreliability can later be acknowledged without implicating the principal. That mechanism is available whenever a client, defector or proxy can be positioned as the source of a claim that the principal wishes to make.

Statistical arguments deployed in support of the pressure thesis rely on a measurement that is accurate within its own terms and misleading in its implications. OpenSecrets records total American lobbying expenditure at approximately four billion dollars annually, and direct pro-Israel lobbying expenditure falls below one per cent of that total (OpenSecrets, 2024). The calculation is arithmetically correct and it excludes precisely the channels through which the organisation concerned has exercised its most visible influence. Campaign contributions, leadership political action committees, independent expenditure campaigns and bundled donations constitute the mechanisms through which electoral pressure is applied, and the 2024 cycle demonstrated the effectiveness of those mechanisms in primary contests (OpenSecrets, 2024). A statistic that measures direct lobbying while excluding campaign finance functions as a rhetorical instrument rather than as an analytical finding, and its deployment in dissident media reproduces the laundering architecture that the documented strategy describes.

The concept of cognitive infiltration offers a framework for understanding how heterodox media can transmit establishment positions while appearing to challenge them. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule proposed that governments could infiltrate groups holding contested beliefs in order to introduce cognitive diversity and undermine unfounded convictions (Sunstein and Vermeule, 2008). The proposal concerned infiltration of existing groups and it has been extended in popular usage to describe the cultivation of pseudo-dissident platforms that build audiences by affirming prior suspicions and then reintroduce official framing at moments of consequence. The sociology of the heterodox media entrepreneur is relevant here, because the commercial logic of the alternative platform rewards the construction of a persona that combines genuine criticism of establishment conduct with selective accommodation of establishment positions. Such a persona can function effectively as a transmission channel for narratives that would be rejected if advanced by official sources, and its effectiveness increases with the authenticity of its criticisms of lesser matters.

A victim-centred framework reverses the analytical starting point and begins with the societies that have been acted upon rather than with the justifications offered by the actors. Iranian society has experienced four decades of sanctions, the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes with two hundred and ninety deaths in 1988, the assassination of scientists, cyberattacks on nuclear infrastructure, and the collapse of the 2015 nuclear agreement after the American withdrawal in 2018 (International Crisis Group, 2023). The subsequent maximum pressure campaign restricted access to medicines and food imports in ways that humanitarian organisations documented as harmful to civilian welfare. The strikes of 2024, 2025 and 2026 killed military personnel and civilians, including residents of residential buildings in Tehran, and they narrowed the space within which Iranian society could pursue independent development. Palestinian society has experienced occupation, blockade, bombardment and displacement across decades, and the war in Gaza produced casualty figures exceeding sixty thousand according to health ministry reporting compiled by United Nations agencies (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2025). Whilst the study by Dr Richard Hil and Professor Gideon Polya, published 11 July 2025, titled “Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead”  puts the estimated death toll at 680,000 Palestinians as of 25 April 2025. Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian and Yemeni populations have experienced related forms of violence across the same period.

The class analysis of the war programme identifies the beneficiaries with some precision because defence procurement is a matter of public record. Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Palantir have reported record backlogs and increased revenues across the period of the Ukraine and Gaza wars, and the replenishment of depleted munitions stocks constitutes a multi-year revenue stream funded by taxation (SIPRI, 2024). The energy majors benefit from the containment of Iranian production and from the risk premium that regional instability adds to their realisations. Financial institutions benefit from the preservation of dollar-denominated energy settlement, because any successful challenge to that arrangement would reduce the demand for dollar assets that sustains American borrowing costs. The political classes in both countries benefit from external confrontation as a means of consolidating domestic authority and of displacing domestic discontent onto foreign adversaries. The costs of the programme fall upon the populations of the region, upon American service members and their families, upon Israeli households exposed to retaliation, and upon European consumers and taxpayers who absorb the energy and fiscal consequences.

The Gramscian dimension of the analysis concerns the manufacture of common sense regarding which actors are understood to possess agency and which are understood to be instruments. The narrative that attributes American wars to Israeli pressure concedes agency to a client state while denying agency to the principal, and that distribution of agency is the opposite of what the structural evidence supports. The narrative that presents Iran as an existential threat requiring management reproduces the Orientalist construction that Said identified, in which the societies of the region appear as objects of policy rather than as political communities with legitimate claims (Said, 1978). Both narratives converge on a single outcome, which is the removal of the affected populations from the domain of self-determination and the placement of their futures in the hands of external decision-makers.

The dependency tradition clarifies the structural position of the region within the global political economy. Galtung’s model of structural imperialism describes how centres establish bridgeheads within peripheries and maintain relationships of dominance across economic, political, military, communicative and cultural dimensions (Galtung, 1971). The American security architecture in the Gulf performs precisely that function, because it preserves access to energy on terms set by the centre and it ensures that peripheral states cannot accumulate sufficient capacity to set their own terms. Iran’s offence within that framework consists in its refusal to accept the terms, and the sanction and strike campaign constitutes the enforcement mechanism. The same framework explains why the blame-shifting narrative matters, because a centre that is seen to compel its periphery invites resistance, while a centre that appears to act under the influence of another periphery preserves its legitimacy.

The republican tradition provides the normative standard against which the war programme and its accompanying narrative can be assessed. Arendt’s account of the public realm requires that decisions of consequence be subject to deliberation by those who bear them, and the classification of intelligence, the bipartisan consensus on Iran and the marginalisation of dissenting voices foreclose that deliberation in the United States (Arendt, 1958). Rousseau’s account of the general will requires that law bind those who author it, and no population in the region has authorised the arrangements under which it lives. Nkrumah’s account of neo-colonialism requires that formal sovereignty be accompanied by practical control over economic and political decisions, and the sanctions architecture, the military presence and the intelligence relationships that structure the region deny that control to the states concerned (Nkrumah, 1965).

The trajectory that follows from the evidence involves continued escalation punctuated by negotiated pauses that do not address the underlying structure. The nuclear dimension will become more salient as Iranian enrichment capacity advances and as Israeli and American officials discuss thresholds publicly, and the risk of inadvertent escalation through miscalculation will increase accordingly. The laundering narrative will be deployed with greater intensity as the costs of war become visible to the publics that finance it, and its effectiveness will depend on the continued willingness of heterodox platforms to transmit it. The counter-strategy available to anti-imperial analysts consists in the patient reconstruction of the principal’s agency from documentary sources, in the insistence that the societies of the region be treated as political communities rather than as objects of policy, and in the refusal to accept any narrative that assigns responsibility to the weaker party in a relationship of structural dependence. The war programme will not be defeated by correct analysis alone, and correct analysis remains a precondition for any politics capable of opposing it.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

Thank you for visiting. This is a reader-supported publication. If you believe journalism should serve the public, not the powerful, and you’re in a position to help, becoming a PAID SUBSCRIBER truly makes a difference. Alternatively you can support by way of a cup of coffee:

https://buymeacoffee.com/ggtv |

https://ko-fi.com/globalgeopolitics |

Bitcoin: 3NiK8BoRZnkwJSHZSekuXKFizGPopkE7

References

Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (2005) Report to the President of the United States. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.

Congressional Research Service (2025) U.S.–Israel Military Cooperation and Security Assistance. Washington, DC: CRS.

Cooper, H. (2025) ‘American support proved critical to Israel’s strikes on Iran’, New York Times, 14 June.

Galtung, J. (1971) ‘A structural theory of imperialism’, Journal of Peace Research, 8(2), pp. 81–117.

International Crisis Group (2023) The Iran Nuclear Deal and Its Collapse. Brussels: ICG.

Nkrumah, K. (1965) Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Thomas Nelson.

OpenSecrets (2024) Lobbying Database and Campaign Finance Data. Washington, DC: Center for Responsive Politics.

Pollack, K. M., Byman, D. L., Indyk, M. S., Maloney, S., O’Hanlon, M. E. and Riedel, B. (2009) Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Said, E. W. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.

SIPRI (2024) Trends in International Arms Transfers and Military Expenditure. Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Sunstein, C. R. and Vermeule, A. (2008) ‘Conspiracy theories: Causes and cures’, Journal of Political Philosophy, 17(2), pp. 202–227.

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (2025) Gaza Humanitarian Situation Reports. New York: OCHA.

US Energy Information Administration (2024) World Oil Transit Chokepoints. Washington, DC: EIA.

Vine, D. (2015) Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. New York: Metropolitan Books.

White House (2017) National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Washington, DC: The White House.

Hil, R. and Polya, G. (2025) ‘Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead’, Arena Online, 11 July. Available at: https://arena.org.au/politics-of-counting-gazas-dead/  (Accessed: 13 November 2026).