On cue, the next chapter in the long-running Middle Eastern drama has opened. Last week, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, “preemptively” striking dozens of targets across Iran — nuclear facilities at Natanz and Fordow, missile sites, a military-linked television station, and even aging F‑14 Tomcats stationed near Tehran. Iran responded with more than 370 ballistic missiles and swarms of Shahed-136 drones aimed at Israeli territory, prompting U.S. military aircraft and warships to intervene in intercept operations.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump — once hailed as an anti-war maverick — pledged unconditional support for Israel, ordered Tehran residents to “evacuate immediately,” abruptly departed the G7 summit, and now oversees the deployment of Carrier Strike Groups and supporting assets to the region.
Both the mainstream and the “mainstream alternative” media have erupted into a familiar chorus of fearmongering, pipeline graphics, official soundbites, and a moral imperative to “stand with our allies.” The spectacle is flawless in its familiarity.
Narratives are flooding the information space, such as:
“Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons!” — a refrain now older than most of the reporters reciting it, built on the claim that Tehran has been “weeks away” from the bomb since the 1990s.
“Zionists control America!” — a conspiratorial mirror image, now adorned with references to still-sealed Epstein files and yet-to-be exposed and prosecuted occult cabals.
But what if it’s neither accident nor “committee”-approved policy? What if what we’re seeing is merely the surface agitation of something older, deeper, and far less conscious?
Not a state. Not a strategy. But a system whose anatomy stretches across markets, militaries, and media — one that doesn’t even govern so much as it metabolizes. Seen this way, these latest developments, as alarming as they are, are not signs of crisis. They’re symptoms of stability — a confirmation that the system is alive and well.
Not many in the conservative camp expected Donald Trump to be this way. He entered national politics as a wrecking ball hurled at the rotting scaffolding of bipartisan status quo. His apparent disdain for NATO, ridicule of regime-change wars, and critique of globalism energized a public weary of interventionism.
Speaking in Saudi Arabia on May 14, he was still performing the part — declaring the end of the “neocon era,” and, once again, promising to be the “president of peace.”
Fast-forward to today, and Trump publicly praises Israel’s strike on Iran — calling it “excellent” and “very successful” — while warning there was “more to come.”
This endorsement wasn’t improvised. It followed months of material backing. Between his inauguration and March 1, Trump’s administration approved more than $12 billion in military aid to Israel, including shipments of 2,000-pound bombs capable of leveling entire city blocks.
As under Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden, Israel remained the single largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid — its primacy untouched regardless of party, platform, or public opinion.
Meanwhile, as he follows the same foreign-policy trajectory, Trump is advancing a record-breaking military budget tucked into the “one big, beautiful bill.”
It’s tempting to trace the force behind recent events to familiar culprits: “the neocons,” “the Zionists,” “the CIA,” “evil corporations.” Each explanation holds a fragment of truth, but the real structure is more complex — and more banal.
What operates behind the scenes is not an ideology or even a conspiracy, but a system — technocratic, transnational, and self-perpetuating. It is overt in function but covert in form, embedded in procedures so routine they rarely invite suspicion. Its muscle is military. Its nervous system is digital infrastructure. Global finance, trade routes, and logistics networks are its bloodstream.
Its voice is the media, which distills complexity into digestible slogans, manufactures consent at scale, and fosters division by simplifying thought and narrowing the boundaries of discourse. The political class, rotating in and out of office, serves as the empire’s public face — administering continuity beneath the illusion of change.
It operates without democratic accountability, national loyalty, or legal constraint. It is not rooted in any single capital. Its nodes are embedded across states, markets, treaties, and algorithms — everywhere and nowhere at once.
Its goal, however, is simple: to expand by assuming control over people, territory, and information. Not in service of peace, justice, or order, but because expansion is the only thing it knows how to do.
Like a living organism, it survives by growing, consuming, and neutralizing resistance.
To understand the empire’s logic, one must strip away the deliberately confusing media narratives and observe the pattern.
Growth: The system cannot stay still. It must expand — militarily, economically, digitally. It builds new markets, new dependencies, and new surveillance tools. Finally, it justifies each with language tailored to its audience: “democracy promotion,” “global stability,” “national security,” “economic/political competitiveness,” “efficiency.”
Consumption: The system feeds on crisis. Conflict drives investment. Polarization drives engagement. Fear drives compliance. All fuel is useful, from public outrage to bipartisan consensus. Further, it consumes labor, data, capital, and time — redirecting minds into ideological trench warfare, budgets into weapons and surveillance, and resources into reconstruction and control. Each crisis licenses new powers. Even dissent is digested and repackaged as branded outrage. Nothing goes to waste.
Self-preservation: Any resistance must be neutralized — not necessarily violently, but definitively. Citizens who dissent are algorithmically downgraded, censored, or politically marginalized. Sometimes they are debanked, deplatformed, and imprisoned — or worse. The system does not require uniformity.
The only thing it cannot tolerate is autonomy.
The Israel-Iran conflict — and the Trump administration’s conduct — serves as the latest reminder that the United States was never meant to be an empire. Under its founding principles, the federal government was to be limited, accountable, and restrained. War powers resided with Congress. Foreign entanglements were to be avoided. Civil liberties were sacrosanct. Power was dispersed — across states, across branches, and most critically, across the citizenry.
The Constitution was not a launchpad for expansion. It was a bulwark against it. It bound government to law, presumed liberty as the natural state, and made sovereignty a local, not imperial, matter.
That design was never repealed; it was simply bypassed.
Today, declarations of war are relics. Surveillance is routine. Budgets are infinite. Policy is set not through deliberation, but by inertia — pushed forward by contractors, lobbies, and transnational entanglements. The state no longer governs, it manages and coordinates.
We still perform the rituals of republicanism — elections, hearings, press briefings — but the structure beneath has shifted. What we now inhabit is not a constitutional order, but a permanent state of emergency, administered by a managerial class whose authority flows not from consent, but from “necessity.”
The sooner patriots recognize the stagecraft for what it is — and stop mistaking simulation for sovereignty — the sooner the system behind it can be meaningfully challenged.
Related:
Keep Us Out: Why America Must Not Be Dragged Into the Israel-Iran Inferno