global geopolitics

Why every election promises change and every administration delivers the same wars

“Elections do not interrupt the agenda they are designed to legitimate, and the polocy documents that reveal that agenda are public, predictive and yet almost entirely unread”

Opinion Analysis | November 2026

The vice-president’s post-election diagnosis attributed the Republican defeat to the war with Iran, the cost of living and the relationship with Israel, and those were precisely the themes on which the administration had campaigned and on which it had governed in the opposite direction (BBC News, 2026). The observation that the same promises are recycled after every electoral setback is not a comment on the sincerity of any particular politician but a description of a structural feature of the political system. Campaign promises function as a mechanism for securing investment in a process whose outcomes are determined elsewhere, and the recycling of those promises after defeat functions to secure renewed investment in the same process. The question that follows is not whether the promises were sincere but why the same promises recur across administrations that pursue identical policies, and the answer is to be found in the documents that specify those policies before any candidate has been selected to sell them.

The Brookings Institution published *Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran* in 2009, and the volume’s first chapter, “An Offer Iran Shouldn’t Refuse: Persuasion,” recommended presenting “a package of positive inducements so enticing that the Iranian citizenry would support the deal only to have the regime reject it” (Brookings Institution, 2009, p. 29). The chapter reasoned that “the best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support, however grudging or covert, is to strike only when there is widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer” (Brookings Institution, 2009, p. 29). The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed in 2015, followed that template with considerable precision, and its subsequent abandonment by the United States in 2018 provided the pretext that the paper had anticipated. The sequence was documented before it occurred, in a publication that remains freely available and that almost nobody in the relevant publics has read.

The fifth chapter of the same volume bears the title “Leave It to Bibi: Allowing or Encouraging an Israeli Military Strike,” and it recommended that the United States “encourage and perhaps even assist the Israelis in conducting the strikes themselves, in the expectation that both international criticism and Iranian retaliation would be deflected away from the United States and onto Israel” (Brookings Institution, 2009, p. 125). The paper further suggested that the United States could portray its operation as “taken in sorrow, not anger,” and that “at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians brought it upon themselves by refusing a very good deal” (Brookings Institution, 2009, p. 128). The chapter is an explicit statement of a blame-shifting strategy, published by a centrist institution whose donors include JPMorgan Chase, whose $15.5 million contribution is the largest by a private corporation in the institution’s history (New York Times, 2016).

The RAND Corporation’s 2019 report *Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground* contains a chapter on economic measures that lists “hinder petroleum exports,” “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions” and “impose sanctions,” and a chapter on geopolitical measures whose first item is “provide lethal aid to Ukraine” (Dobbins et al., 2019). The report was published five years before Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and three years before the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, and its recommendations were implemented in sequence: lethal aid began under the Trump administration in 2017 and 2019, sanctions were imposed and expanded, and the pipelines were destroyed in 2022 (BBC News, 2026). The RAND report did not command these actions, and it did not need to, because the institutions that fund RAND and the institutions that staff the executive branch share a common understanding of the strategic objectives that the report articulated.

The Naval War College’s 2018 analysis of a maritime oil blockade against China identified a distant blockade as the most viable option and specified that such a blockade “would need to interdict the Myanmar-China oil pipeline, which eventually could move as much as 440 kbd of crude oil from Kyaukpyu in coastal Myanmar to Yunnan Province” (Collins, 2018, p. 7). The paper added that “if the Myanmar authorities failed to comply the facility could be disabled via air strikes, aerial mining, or other kinetic action” (Collins, 2018, p. 7). Armed groups subsequently attacked the pipeline’s control stations in Kyaukme Township and elsewhere in Myanmar, and the attacks were attributed to the Three Brotherhood Alliance and associated forces (Asia News Network, 2023). The paper did not specify which forces would carry out the interdiction, and the forces that did so were the forces that the United States has backed in the region for decades.

The corporate funding of the institutions that produce these documents is a matter of public record. Brookings’s donors include JPMorgan Chase, ExxonMobil and the LEGO Foundation, among many others, and its board has included executives from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Facebook and State Farm (Brookings Institution, 2008). RAND’s supporters include ExxonMobil, Pfizer, Alcoa, Allstate, State Farm and the Chubb Corporation, and its board has been populated by figures who move between the corporation, the think tank and the state (RAND Corporation, 2024). Corporate lobbying reached $3.7 billion in 2024, accounting for 86.3 per cent of the $4.4 billion spent on federal lobbying that year, and the sectors that spend the most are the sectors whose interests the policy papers advance (OpenSecrets, 2024). The think tanks serve as the forum in which those interests arrive at a consensus, the papers serve as the codification of that consensus, and the lobbyists and lawyers serve as the mechanism through which it becomes legislation.

The electoral spectacle performs a function that is not captured by the language of choice or accountability. It invites the public to invest its hopes in a candidate, to interpret the outcome as a decision about policy, and to attribute the subsequent divergence between promise and outcome to the failings of an individual rather than to the structure that constrained him. The vice-president’s post-election statement that the party lost because of the war performs the same function in reverse, because it attributes the loss to a policy that the public opposed rather than to the structure that produced the policy irrespective of public opposition. The statement is accurate as a description of public sentiment and misleading as an explanation of the political system, because the system is designed to produce the policy regardless of which party wins.

The class analysis of this arrangement begins with the ownership of the institutions that produce the documents. The corporations that fund Brookings and RAND are not disinterested philanthropists; they are the defence contractors, energy majors, banks and pharmaceutical companies whose revenues depend on the policies that the papers recommend. Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman have reported record backlogs across the period of the Ukraine and Middle East wars, and ExxonMobil and its peers have benefited from the energy price volatility that the wars have produced (SIPRI, 2024). The banks have benefited from the preservation of dollar-denominated energy settlement, and the pharmaceutical companies have benefited from the public health expenditure that wars and their aftermath generate. The class that owns these corporations is the class that funds the think tanks, and the think tanks produce the papers that the politicians implement.

The victim-centred analysis begins with the populations that bear the costs. Iranian civilians have experienced sanctions that restrict access to medicines, the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 with 290 deaths, the assassination of scientists, cyberattacks on nuclear infrastructure and the collapse of the nuclear agreement that was designed to fail (International Crisis Group, 2023). Ukrainian civilians have experienced a proxy war that has killed and displaced hundreds of thousands and devastated the country’s infrastructure. Russian civilians have experienced mobilisation, casualties and the destruction of the economic relationships on which their livelihoods depended. American civilians have experienced the diversion of public resources from health care, education and infrastructure to a military budget that exceeds $900 billion, and the erosion of democratic accountability as decisions of war and peace are made outside the electoral process. European civilians have experienced the energy price shock that followed the pipeline sabotage and the fiscal burden of rearmament.

The anti-imperial framework requires that the analysis be applied consistently. The United States is not the only state that uses proxies and policy papers to advance its interests. The difference that matters is that the United States operates a global system of bases, sanctions and payment channels that no other state possesses, and the policy papers analysed here are documents of a hegemonic power managing the terms of global exchange. The record of American military action since 1945 is not a record of occasional error corrected by subsequent restraint but m a record of sustained and repeated violence, conducted through a permanent infrastructure of more than seven hundred and fifty overseas bases, special operations deployments in roughly eighty countries, and sanctions regimes that at their peak covered a third of humanity. The post-9/11 wars directly killed as per Watson Institute’s Costs of War project figure, approximately 929,000 people, of whom more than 430,000 were civilians, and the indirect deaths from disease, displacement and the destruction of health infrastructure are estimated in the millions (Watson Institute, 2023). The sanctions on Iraq between 1990 and 2003 were estimated by from a 1995–96 estimate cited in the May 1996 60 Minutes interview, to have contributed to the deaths of approximately 500,000 children, a figure that Madeleine Albright did not dispute when it was put to her on national television (60 Minutes, 1996). The Vietnam War killed approximately three million people across Indochina, and the bombing campaigns against Laos and Cambodia were conducted at a scale that the Pentagon’s own data record. The interventions in Central America in the 1980s, the support for death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, the destruction of Libyan state capacity in 2011 and the ongoing complicity in the destruction of Gaza form a continuous record rather than a series of aberrations. A state that maintains this capability and exercises it at this scale and with this consistency has produced a pattern whose description does not require any claim about national character and whose moral status does not depend on the intentions of any individual official. The pattern is the evidence, and the pattern is what the framework requires us to name. This capability is exercised through a system that manufactures consent at home while imposing costs abroad.

The dependency dimension of the analysis concerns the relationship between the core and the periphery of the global political economy. The policy papers describe a strategy for controlling the energy resources of West Asia and the pipeline routes of Central Asia, and that strategy preserves the centre–periphery relationship through which the core extracts resources and rents from the periphery. Iran’s offence is not that it threatens the United States but that it refuses the terms on which the centre proposes to manage the region, and the war programme is the enforcement mechanism for those terms. Ukraine’s offence is that it provides the territory through which the centre can bleed Russia, and the proxy war is the mechanism through which that bleeding is administered.

The republican dimension concerns the removal of self-determination from the populations that are acted upon. The Iranian population has not been consulted about the sanctions that restrict its access to medicine or the strikes that kill its citizens. The Ukrainian population has not been consulted about the proxy war that has devastated its country. The American population has not been consulted about the wars that are conducted in its name, because the decisions are classified and the parties that contest elections do not contest the policy. The consent that elections are supposed to manufacture is not consent to the policy but consent to the system that produces the policy, and the distinction is the difference between a democracy and a managed spectacle.

The trajectory most consistent with the evidence involves the continuation of the policy programme regardless of which party holds office, punctuated by electoral episodes that generate the appearance of change and the reality of continuity. The policy papers will continue to be written, the think tanks will continue to be funded, the lobbyists will continue to translate the papers into legislation, and the media will continue to report the spectacle rather than the documents. The counter-strategy available to the populations that bear the costs is the one that the vice-president’s critics have identified: to read the papers, to trace the funding, to name the class interests that the policy serves, and to build the organised capacity to refuse the consent that the system requires. The papers are a crystal ball, and the crystal ball is sitting in plain sight, and the only thing that prevents the public from seeing the future is the spectacle that is designed to keep it looking elsewhere.

Authored By: Global GeoPolitics

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References

Asia News Network (2023) ‘Myanmar-China oil pipeline control station invaded and wrecked by armed groups: official’, Asia News Network, 27 November.

BBC News (2026) ‘Vance says Republicans lost big because of Iran war: “Everyone knows why we lost”’, BBC News, 4 November.

Brookings Institution (2008) Support for Brookings: Annual Report 2008. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Brookings Institution (2009) Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Collins, G. (2018) ‘A maritime oil blockade against China, tactically tempting but strategically flawed’, Naval War College Review, 71(2), Article 6.

Dobbins, J., Cohen, R. S., Chandler, N., Frederick, B., Geist, E., Harris, D., Howard, J., Kagan, F. W., Levin, M., Lynch, C., Martini, J., O’Mahony, A., Paille, P., Rooney, B. and Shatz, H. J. (2019) Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation.

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

New York Times (2016) ‘How think tanks amplify corporate America’s influence’, New York Times, 7 August.

OpenSecrets (2024) Federal Lobbying Database. Washington, DC: Center for Responsive Politics.

RAND Corporation (2024) Supporters and Board of Trustees. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation.

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

Berletic, B. (2024) Top Ukrainian commander admits defeat is near and why nothing will change after US elections. The New Atlas, 27 July. Available at: https://podcastaddict.com/the-new-atlas-previously-land-destroyer/episode/178752849 (Accessed: 13 November 2026).

Berletic, B. (2026a) ‘JD Vance recycles 2024 campaign lies for continuity of agenda following 2026 elections’, TheAltWorld, 7 November. Available at: https://thealtworld.com/anthony_cartalucci/jd-vance-recycles-2024-campaign-lies-for-continuity-of-agenda-following-2026-elections (Accessed: 13 November 2026).

Berletic, B. (2026b) ‘US policy papers: crystal balls seeing into the future’, Sovereignista, 8 November. Available at: https://sovereignista.com/2026/11/08/brian-berletic-us-policy-papers-crystal-balls-seeing-into-the-future/ (Accessed: 13 November 2026).