America just bombed a nation of eighty-eight million people, with a modern missile arsenal, a domestic arms industry capable of producing drones, ballistic missiles, and radar systems, and regional proxies stretching from Beirut to Sana’a. Its nuclear facilities are buried beneath mountains. Its population is young and unites reflexively when threatened. This is not a brittle dictatorship or a failing state ripe for regime change. It is, by every material measure, the most powerful nation the United States has fought since Imperial Japan.
Iran’s military has over half a million active personnel. Its missile program is the largest in the Middle East. Its drones have been exported and tested in multiple warzones. Its factories produce centrifuges, tanks, and radar systems despite decades of sanctions. It controls the entrance to the Persian Gulf—and can blow up any tanker that tries to navigate the Strait of Hormuz. It commands a vast and mountainous interior, and has withstood economic warfare, assassinations, and sabotage without collapsing. Iran is a tough opponent, tougher than North Vietnam.
Why are we fighting?
Not to defend American lives. Not to avenge an attack. Iran did not strike us. We bombed Iran because it is enriching uranium—and because Israel will not tolerate nuclear parity. That’s the real reason, and we all know it. This wasn’t about America’s security. It was about preserving Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly.
In 1947, the logic of Zionism required removing Palestinian nationalists from what would become Israel. For the past 78 years, it has required keeping them out by any means necessary. This means keeping displaced Palestinians helpless and supine, and killing any undomesticated Palestinians who dare to resist. In the 1960s, Ariel Sharon—who led massacres of Arabs during the Nakba—became prime minister. In the past 18 months, Israeli forces have killed 36,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, many of them children.
Gaza is the hell that Zionism created. The logic of Zionism demanded either Gaza or wholesale massacre. Gaza is a place to put the people who were expelled—without reintegrating them, without granting them rights, without slaughtering them outright. Israel chose containment over genocide, and now rules by siege, surveillance, and periodic bombardment. Gaza is the Nakba, still smoldering, as it nears its ninth decade. It is becoming a 21st-century concentration camp.
As U.S. bombers lit up Iranian nuclear sites, Gaza lay in ruins. As of mid-2025, more than 36,000 Palestinians—mostly civilians, many of them children—have been killed, and tens of thousands more maimed or displaced. Entire neighborhoods flattened. Hospitals and bakeries bombed. Children buried under rubble. No clean water, no power, no refuge. And all of it in service of the Zionist imperative: to carve out a Jewish ethnostate, unchallenged, unthreatened, and permanently dominant in a region that will never forget the Nakba and its victims. Iran supports Palestinian resistance, so Iran must be punished—strategically, symbolically, and now militarily. Gaza is not a sideshow. It is an essential, load-bearing part of the Zionist edifice. Every bomb dropped on Iran extends the logic that governs Gaza: total security for one people, permanent submission for their neighbors.
The U.S. has no significant material interests in Israel. In 2023, total U.S.–Israel trade amounted to less than our trade with Chile—a country of 19 million on the far edge of South America. There are no vital resources, no irreplaceable markets, no national interest at stake. And yet we send billions in aid, veto U.N. resolutions, and now risk regional war on their behalf. This is not an alliance based on shared prosperity or mutual restraint. This is strategic capture of American institutions by American Zionists.
And we’re doing this while China has four times our population, produces ten times more steel, and controls over 230 times more shipbuilding capacity than the United States. At the same time, over half a million people have died in the Russia–Ukraine war, and our industrial plant can’t even produce enough shells to keep Ukraine supplied. Instead of consolidating strength, we’re striking a third match in a powder room—all so a foreign government can feel more secure in its blood-soaked dominance.
American foreign policy is as decadent as British foreign policy in 1936—posturing without strategy, bluffing without leverage. Does anyone really think the American people want to take on Iran, Russia, and China all at once? That kind of foreign policy would demand mobilization—and yet the American people demand 6% deficits to finance immediate affluence. Unlike Chamberlain, Trump isn’t preserving peace; he’s lunging toward war to make a point on Israel’s behalf. He bombed hardened nuclear facilities in a nation of eighty-eight million—not to protect Americans, but to enforce Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly. Not out of strategy, but because his thin majority depends on committed Zionists, and because his party is beholden to wealthy Zionist donors. This isn’t realpolitik, it’s weaponized decadence.
Well written. But I think the title might limit your audience.
Good points but I would definitely make some changes with some of your statistics, for example, it has been reported that over 54,000 Palestinians have been massacred and that is an understatement, it's more closer to 100,000.
But this point is well taken, IMO.
"This isn’t realpolitik, it’s weaponized decadence."