Clinging to a Scheme

The United States is finally, at last, at war with Iran. There has perhaps never been a conflict anticipated by American and Israeli warmongers in this degree of detail, or for longer. As long as there has been an Islamic Republic, the United States has fantasized about deposing it, and as long as there has been anything like an Iranian nuclear infrastructure, Israel has thought about bombing it. It is within reason to assume that the current joint operations against Iran—dubbed Epic Fury—are one of the maximalist options from a long series of both individual and joint war plans whose specific pedigree go back to at least the 1990s. Some targets struck in the early days of the war were probably chosen by planners when the pilots who actually dropped the bombs were children.

All states plan for a bewildering number of possible military conflicts—who knows, for instance, if Trump is dusting off the 1930s plans for an invasion of Canada. It is a good way to keep officers busy in peacetime, and militaries find formulating plans to be a valuable training tool. The twentieth century was replete with anticipated wars: the system of interlocking European great power alliances in the early 1900s contained at its core a set of hyper-rigid mobilization plans that once enacted inevitably set the continent on the path to mass slaughter. During the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact and NATO endlessly prepared to funnel millions of troops into a general war that everyone accepted would become global, then nuclear, leading to the death of hundreds of millions. The two blocs built secret communication systems and bunker networks and classified continuity of government plans to keep up the fighting even after the collapse of human civilization. For close to twenty years, Chiang Kai-shek seriously planned a quixotic re-invasion of mainland China—which only succeeded in killing hundreds of Taiwanese soldiers in preparatory missions before being called off. Britain actively trained for war with Guatemala well into the 1970s. Plans abound.

What’s different with the war in Iran is that it lacks substantial buy-in from most every corner of society. It is an exercise of pure militarism and the individual decisions of a handful of people, not of social movements or the demands of big money. Outside of the defense contractors, no major firms are rejoicing at the increasingly likely prospect of a protracted conflict; the majority of Americans oppose it. What is happening in Iran right now, what is tearing through schools and hospitals and human beings, is the defining morbid system of an undead American empire. That is to say, political motives and accepted courses of action that lack any public support or buy-in but amble forward, animated by tiny cliques of elite opinion and inherited institutional capacity that has been aggregated over decades to the point where it lacks the ability to do anything else.

Plans for World War I and II were constituted atop a certain economic order of high capitalist imperialism and industrial production; the systems that emerged from the ruins of the latter—NATO and the Warsaw Pact—were no different in this regard. Their militarisms were expressions of sweeping social and economic systems. Bretton Woods, Actually Existing Socialism in Eastern Europe, the project of Atlanticism, and multiple rival military-industrial complexes all found an expression in the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that were built and programmed but thankfully never fired. Anticipated conflict had worldviews and associated politicians that advocated for it, diplomats and spies and experts who trained themselves to work within it, and even an associated corpus of literature and cultural expression.

For a long time a similar apparatus grew in order to push for war with Iran. What carried America to this point was an entire political-military ecosystem surrounding an American attack: pro-war think tanks like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; parallel lobbying efforts helmed by dubious experts, all with their own specific sources of patronage; university studies programs; and thought-terminating journalistic clichés like the characterization of any Shi’a-majority movement as “Iranian proxies.” As the Cold War faded, the ecology of Kremlinologists were replaced by Iran watchers and the cold warrior career niches of senators like John Stennis and Scoop Jackson were filled by a younger crop of hawks like Lindsey Graham, who gleefully aimed the old machinery on a new enemy.

Defense companies managed to keep assembly lines running after the last Cold War orders dried up in the 2000s with the insistence that the Gulf states had to be armed against the Iranian threat. Even when mass social support for war in the Middle East started to fade in the 2010s following the U.S. pullout from Iraq, the new hawks still managed to manufacture fear about Iran among decision-makers: that the “Axis of Resistance” were all Iranian agents (it was a loose alliance at best); that the Iranian nuclear program was barreling toward a bomb as fast as possible (immediate warhead production was not the goal); that the Islamic Republic had a fanatical and ideological foreign policy (they have operated out of national self-interest for decades). Obama’s chief negotiator Wendy Sherman sat down to deal with the Iranians but she had internalized this way of thinking deeply enough to state that “deception is part of [their] DNA.”

The machinery of going war to with Iran has many fathers and has grown out of a synergy that for a long time did have a genuine base of support. For years the social force of American Zionism found itself in pleasant convergence with U.S. economic interests in securing Persian Gulf Oil supplies. Global war on terror hawks, Israel lobbyists, and the Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari establishments collectively demanded not just consensus but the capability to go to war with Iran. This includes both propaganda and a physical network of American military installations in the region with missile defenses and arms depots: it is both asserting for twenty years that Iran is six months away from a nuclear weapon and spending hundreds of millions of dollars on building a tiny number of the specialist GBU-57 bombs for the sole purpose of destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Because of this existing infrastructure, it simply became easier for the Trump administration to go to war with Iran than to not go to war with Iran. But the moment Trump gave the order and the bombs started falling, something unexpected happened. The constellation of think tanks, regional experts, military planners, diplomatic staffers, and intelligence analysts suddenly decided that this long-imagined war should not be happening. They have their stated reasons: the confused motives coming out of the White House, the complete lack of any signs of regime collapse, depleted stockpiles of smart munitions, a shaky coalition of allies. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs spent the last days before the war desperately trying to convince Trump this wouldn’t be easy. Just a week into the war a Foundation for Defense of Democracies staffer tweeted at an Israeli politician begging them to pick up the phone and stop bombing Iranian petrochemical infrastructure. Yet it is happening. Making the plan perhaps grants a feeling of control, but enacting the plan introduces chaos.

There are two defining dynamics to the second Trump administration: the degree of harm they have managed to self-inflict on American hegemony and society and the fact that they have put minimal effort into building any administrative capacity or institutional initiative on their own beyond governing by executive order. From the strong-arming of the Federal Reserve to the floundering attempts to surge deportation numbers (or failing that, unleash ICE as a domestic paramilitary), they have not built new organizations (outside of DOGE), or given themselves fundamentally new powers. They are using the tools that have been left lying about by their predecessors.

Of course, some parasitic and opportunistic groupings within the state wholeheartedly throw themselves into whatever institutional murder-suicide has become overdetermined in their given purview. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations branch, Border Patrol’s pocket special forces unit BORTAC, Special Operations Command of Fort Bragg infamy within the military, and the MAGA ideological cadre created by the Ben Franklin Fellowship within the State Department are all basically cannibalistic arms of the state demanding, in classic fascist style, action for the sake of action and to secure more bureaucratic turf for themselves. They have done that not by breaking new ground or embarking on crazy adventurism but merely by activating the more maximalist and extreme powers and premade plans that already existed within their organization.

From the legally unassailable Muslim Ban 2.0, which now applies to dozens of countries, to the brazen kidnapping of the president of Venezuela to the abduction of people off the streets of Minneapolis, there is a clear thread running through how U.S. institutions—political, diplomatic, and military—have been behaving over the past year. It’s not that there is “no plan”; there is in fact only one plan, only one set of assumptions, and only one set of capabilities to be put to work—even if the generals and agency directors, ambassadors, and other experts know it won’t work. The assumptions they’ve built their careers around, and the world they’ve created over the last thirty years, doesn’t allow for anything else. The Trumpist crisis is not a breach—it’s an acceleration of what American systems were already sliding toward.

On day one, the war with Iran was less popular than Vietnam or Iraq were in their immediate aftermaths. Americans do not want this, but they weren’t asked—not in a mechanistic legal sense (no congressional authorization took place, as if that matters) or in the wider social sense of seeking public approval. There was no media run-up. There was no effort to cultivate fear or hatred of an “enemy” or to channel social contradictions outward. The Trump administration did not need to manufacture consent; they just needed drone pilots and bombs, and they certainly have enough of those.

This isn’t by mistake, and the notion of American incompetence has to be deconstructed at a moment when military developments seem to be drifting toward an attritional struggle the United States cannot win. What has been evident since the war began is in fact that the U.S. military is actually hyper-competent in executing its own self-defined tasks and is probably exceeding its own tactical expectations in terms of leaders killed and major targets destroyed. The United States is fighting an air campaign on the rough scale of 1991’s Operation Desert Storm, with a smaller force of jets and taking fewer losses. The military fired off $5.6 billion worth of smart munitions in the first two days. And yet, there is no obvious solution to Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz with cheap drones or even simpler naval mines, a capability that can both crash the global economy and survive under the most punishing high-tech air assault.

All this technical capacity just isn’t attached to anything. There is no clear central policy goal articulated by the administration. There isn’t any planning from outside the scope of CENTCOM’s premade war plans, which in all likelihood only prepare for a few weeks of fighting and only contain general political conclusions. Nobody made sure, for instance, that America’s strategic petroleum reserve was full before acting. Nobody at the State Department bothered to start planning for a regional evacuation of U.S. citizens until the bombs were falling. That isn’t trying to do something and failing; it’s just some parts of the state lurching forward while others don’t.

Consider other aspects of the undead state: The political and logistical apparatus for a conflict with China. Most chillingly for the average U.S. citizen, cold war continuity of government and “plenary authority” executive legal theory are coalescing with MAGA self-radicalization into what could be a framework for a domestic state of emergency. America’s ideological partner in the war on Iran, Zionism, is itself in the process of becoming undead; it is a generationally spent force among the American general public and even within the U.S. Jewish population itself. The Israeli settler colony is hemorrhaging its better educated population, in economic freefall when it comes to any commercial activity that isn’t war, and incapable of sustaining its own endless violence without a constant American infusion of money and bombs. But the weapons have already been delivered, the billions of dollars sent over the years have been transformed into vast arms depots. The walls and the drones and the settler neighborhoods and the eliminationist slogans were willed into existence by generations prior.

The misgivings of the military officials and diplomats, their reluctance, is not really a push against what’s happening but a final acquiescence to the inevitable. Their execution of the plan is not nearly as important as their construction of it. The fact that the United States doesn’t know what it is doing will be the excuse used by those who built this structure brick-by-brick to insist that they had always been against it. The job of the warmonger and the imperialist is not to egg the machine on. It never has been; that has always been the provenance of whichever carnival barker happens to be in front of a camera when the time comes.

When it comes to Iran, there is no predicting what lies ahead because the hands that built this machinery could only agree on starting the war, not on any specific outcome. This war is not really a means to one end, and the stated objectives—regime change, regime collapse, disassembly of Iran’s missile force, an end to uranium enrichment—read more like a list of things that might take place more than something people want. This incoherence will in the future be turned around by the people who put this war in motion; well, if we had only known what we had wanted. That was our one flaw. The denial of the machinery’s intentions is the capstone of its construction. As the inevitable happens the expert looks at the logical endpoint of their life’s work and says if only it had gone differently as the machine lumbers forward. This gives them permission to build the next one.