The Fracture of Empire: How Untamed Patriotism and Miscalculated Aggression Could Unravel the American Century

Sisay Hishe RCIC-IRB
Toronto, Canada

There is a pattern in history that repeats itself with an almost mechanical regularity, and yet each generation of powerful men believes itself immune to the consequences that consumed its predecessors. The United States of America and Israel now stand at the edge of a precipice that has swallowed empires far older and far more convinced of their own permanence. The prospect of military action against Iran is not merely a question of geopolitical strategy or national security. It is, in its deepest sense, a question of whether two nations led by men intoxicated with power will drag their own people and half the world into a catastrophe from which there may be no return. The conversation that should be happening in Washington and Tel Aviv is not about tonnage of ordnance or the penetration depth of bunker-busting bombs. It should be about whether the leaders of these nations have the wisdom, the restraint, and the honesty to pursue negotiation and mediation before the irreversible is set in motion.

The relationship between the United States and Iran did not begin in hostility. In 1953, when the Central Intelligence Agency and British intelligence orchestrated the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, they planted a seed of resentment that has grown for seven decades. Mosaddegh’s crime, in the eyes of Washington and London, was the nationalization of Iranian oil, which threatened the profits of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The coup restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to absolute power, and for twenty-six years the Shah ruled with the blessing and the weapons of the United States, while his secret police, the SAVAK, tortured and disappeared those who dissented. When the Iranian Revolution of 1979 erupted, it did not come from nowhere. It came from compressed decades of humiliation, cultural imposition, and political suppression carried out under the patronage of the very nation that now speaks of bringing democracy to the Middle East. The revolution was not an overnight event. It was the slow, invisible accumulation of a people’s refusal to accept values and systems of governance forced upon them by foreign hands.

This is the fundamental truth that the architects of American and Israeli foreign policy have failed, repeatedly and catastrophically, to understand. When you try to maintain your culture and religious values without interfering in the values of others, there will always be those who misjudge your position and advance to force you to change your values to match theirs. The assumption behind such force is that the imposer’s civilization, religion, or political system is inherently superior and that the recipient should be grateful for the correction. But values, by their nature, are not commodities to be shipped across borders at gunpoint. They are inherited, debated, refined, and chosen. Your ancestors teach you values, but they do not impose them on you. A father tells his son the stories of his people; he does not chain the boy to a chair and beat him until he recites them. This is the natural methodology that fits human nature and respects the sense of independence and the dignity of the self. When that methodology is violated, when outsiders advance to impose their untested values on a people, the inevitable consequence is revolt.

It is essential to distinguish between rioting and revolution, for the confusion of the two has led many powerful states to underestimate the forces gathering against them. A riot is a spasm of frustration; it burns itself out. A revolution is something altogether different. Revolution starts when every alternative solution has been suspended against the will of the public. When diplomacy is refused, when grievances are mocked, when petitions are answered with sanctions and sanctions are followed by bombs, the people do not simply accept their condition. They transform. Any compressed emotion, when it finally finds its release, explodes with a force louder and more powerful than any weapon manufactured in the factories of the oppressor. It does not merely damage the feared power; it destroys it until it becomes nonexistent. The French Revolution did not simply change the government of France. It annihilated an entire aristocratic order that had ruled for centuries and believed itself ordained by God. The Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804 did not merely free the enslaved; it defeated the army of Napoleon Bonaparte, the most formidable military force in Europe, and established the first Black republic in history. The Russian Revolution of 1917 did not just remove the Tsar; it dismantled an empire that had endured for three hundred years and reshaped the political map of the entire twentieth century.

The pattern is identical in every case. The oppressor, having established dominance, relaxes. He believes the matter is settled. He enjoys his apparent success, builds monuments to it, writes histories that celebrate it. Meanwhile, the one who has been forced into submission does not forget. The victim plays the character of a defeated person, but only until the right time and the right conditions emerge to retaliate. The so-called winner, having no more homework to do, grows complacent. And while he relaxes and celebrates his counterfeit victory, the victim prepares in discretion, accumulating capacity that exceeds what the oppressor ever imagined. When the triggering factor finally arrives, things change with a speed and totality that leaves the former master bewildered. This is how the ancient kingdoms vanished. The Roman Empire did not collapse in a single battle. It decayed from within over centuries, its leadership deviating further and further from the principles that had built it, until the accumulated rot made the structure impossible to sustain. The British Empire, upon which the sun supposedly never set, was dismantled not by a single revolution but by dozens of independence movements across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, each one fueled by the same refusal to accept imposed values and imposed rule. The elements of leadership deviation take root step by step, often invisible to those in power, and they lead finally to irreversible failure.

The United States now exhibits every symptom of a great power in the advanced stages of this deviation. Under the leadership of Donald no Trump, a man whose understanding of international relations appears to extend no further than the transactional logic of a real estate negotiation, the country has systematically alienated the allies who once formed the foundation of American global influence. The abrupt imposition of tariffs against Canada, the European Union, Japan, and South Korea was not an act of strategic calculation. It was the gesture of a man who sees other nations not as partners in a shared international order but as subordinates who should be grateful for American protection and willing to pay whatever price is demanded for it. The money-minded president opened unwanted conversations by declaring unacceptable tariffs against states that had stood with the United States through the Cold War, through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and through countless diplomatic crises. The result has been predictable. Allies have begun to reject the premise that cooperation with the United States requires submission to it. France, under Emmanuel Macron, has spoken openly of European strategic autonomy. Germany has accelerated efforts to reduce dependence on American military infrastructure. Canada, traditionally the closest and most reliable of American allies, has been treated with a contempt that has generated a backlash across the Canadian political spectrum. The repetitive bullying leadership style that once cowed smaller nations into compliance has begun to produce the opposite effect.

And it is in this context of crumbling alliances and self-inflicted diplomatic isolation that the United States and Israel contemplate military action against Iran. The recklessness of this proposition cannot be overstated. Iran is not Iraq, a country weakened by a decade of sanctions and internal division when American forces invaded in 2003. Iran is not Libya, a state whose military capacity had been hollowed out long before NATO intervened in 2011. Iran is a nation of over eighty-eight million people with a sophisticated military, a network of allied militias stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, and a geography that makes occupation a logistical impossibility. The Zagros Mountains alone would make any ground campaign a nightmare that would dwarf the difficulties encountered in Afghanistan. More critically, Iran sits at the throat of the Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately twenty percent of the world’s oil supply passes daily. A war with Iran would not be a contained, surgical operation. It would be a regional conflagration with global economic consequences.

Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political career has been sustained by the perpetual invocation of existential threat, has been the most persistent advocate for confrontation with Iran. But Netanyahu’s interests and the interests of the Israeli people are not the same thing, just as Trump’s interests and the interests of the American people diverge at nearly every meaningful point. Netanyahu has faced corruption charges, has presided over the deepening fracture of Israeli society, and has pursued policies in Gaza and the West Bank that have isolated Israel internationally to a degree not seen since the country’s founding. His advocacy for striking Iran serves his political survival far more than it serves the security of ordinary Israelis who would bear the consequences of Iranian retaliation. Leaders afflicted with a kind of political rabies, a madness that makes them bite everything within reach, do not calculate consequences for their people. They calculate consequences for themselves.

The Israeli people and the American people are not the villains in this trajectory. They are, in many respects, its potential victims. The ordinary citizen of Haifa or Houston has no quarrel with the ordinary citizen of Tehran or Isfahan. The enmities that define their nations’ foreign policies are constructed by leaders, maintained by propaganda, and funded by industries that profit from perpetual conflict. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man who knew war more intimately than any of the current advocates for military action, warned in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, about the military-industrial complex and its capacity to distort national priorities. His warning has been vindicated so thoroughly that it now reads less like prophecy and more like a clinical diagnosis. The United States has spent, by conservative estimates from the Costs of War Project at Brown University, over eight trillion dollars on post-9/11 military operations. That figure represents not just money but opportunity, the schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and scientific research that were never funded because the money was consumed by wars that achieved none of their stated objectives.

Democracy, when it is genuine, is the most resilient form of governance yet devised by human beings. But democracy captured by oligarchs is something else entirely. It is a performance of democracy, a stage play in which the rituals of elections and legislatures continue while the actual decisions are made by those whose wealth insulates them from the consequences of those decisions. The Princeton study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, published in 2014, concluded that the preferences of average American citizens have a near-zero impact on policy outcomes, while the preferences of economic elites and organized business groups have a substantial and statistically significant influence. A democracy of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, and for the oligarchs cannot sustain a republic. It can only sustain the appearance of one, and even that appearance has begun to crack under the weight of inequality, political polarization, and the visible contempt of the governing class for the governed.

A war with Iran, launched under these conditions, would not strengthen the United States. It would accelerate every fracture already spreading through the structure of American power. The economic consequences alone could be devastating. A closure or even a significant disruption of the Strait of Hormuz would send oil prices to levels that would trigger recession across the global economy. The United States, already carrying a national debt exceeding thirty-four trillion dollars, would be financing yet another war on borrowed money, much of it borrowed from nations like China and Japan that have their own strategic calculations about American power. The geopolitical consequences would be equally severe. A unilateral or near-unilateral American attack on Iran would complete the alienation of European allies, accelerate the consolidation of the BRICS bloc as an alternative to Western-dominated institutions, and provide China and Russia with a strategic opportunity they could scarcely have manufactured on their own. The shift of global power from the United States to a more multipolar arrangement is already underway. A war with Iran would not reverse that shift. It would hasten it beyond any reasonable projection.

And then there is the question of what happens inside the countries that are attacked and inside the countries that do the attacking. Revolution, as history demonstrates, is contagious. The Arab Spring of 2011, whatever its ultimate outcomes, showed that a single act of defiance in Tunisia could ignite movements across an entire region within weeks. A war with Iran would radicalize populations across the Middle East, Central Asia, and beyond. It would confirm, in the minds of billions of people, that the Western rhetoric of human rights and international law is a mask for imperial ambition. It would generate not just resistance in Iran but solidarity movements in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, and across the Muslim world. The blowback would not be limited to the immediate theater of conflict. It would manifest in economic boycotts, in the accelerated de-dollarization of international trade, in the strengthening of every political movement that defines itself in opposition to American hegemony. The respected people of Israel and America could face catastrophic failure, not because their cultures lack value or their contributions to human civilization are unworthy, but because untamed patriotism and miscalculated aggression have a way of consuming the very nations they claim to defend.

The world, for all its suffering, is in a better shape today than at many points in history, precisely because there are conscious states that have rejected the temptation to immerse their hands in the blood of innocents. Nations like Norway, Costa Rica, New Zealand, and others have demonstrated that a country’s influence and security can be built on diplomacy, development, and the consistent application of international law rather than on the projection of military force. These nations are not naive. They are, in a practical sense, more realistic than the war planners in Washington and Tel Aviv, because they understand a truth that empires perpetually forget: lasting security comes from being trusted, not from being feared.

It is still not too late. That sentence deserves to stand on its own because it contains the only hope that matters. It is still not too late to remove leaders whose judgment has been consumed by personal ambition and ideological madness. It is still not too late to treat allies with respect and adversaries with the basic dignity that negotiation requires. It is still not too late to recognize that there is no natural enemy of any state, that the relationships between nations are inspired by their leaders and that those leaders can choose friendship as easily as they choose animosity. The people of the United States and the people of Israel are capable of extraordinary generosity, creativity, and moral courage. They have demonstrated these qualities throughout their histories. But those qualities are betrayed, not served, by leaders who mistake aggression for strength and who confuse the silence of the intimidated with the consent of the governed. The path forward is not through the skies over Tehran. It is through the patient, unglamorous, and profoundly difficult work of diplomacy, the work that does not make for dramatic television but that has, time and again, proven to be the only reliable foundation for a peace that endures.

The writer can be reached at : merigetah@yahoo.ca

Editor’s Note : Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com  

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