The military operation against Iran is increasingly turning into far more than just another Washington campaign in the Middle East. It is becoming a historical dividing line. American dominance in world politics is drawing to a close. This failed war, launched by Trump at a moment of relative American weakness, will most likely remain in history not as a minor episode in yet another geopolitical clash, but as the final act of the age of undisputed American supremacy.
It is said that one day a king ordered Attar of Nishapur - the Persian poet, mystic, and theologian of the twelfth century - to utter words that would make the cheerful grieve and the grieving take heart. Attar answered simply: “This too shall pass.” For a historian or an analyst, that phrase contains far too little precision. But as a formula for the transience of all earthly things, it is flawless.
At the moment of writing, it is still not entirely clear why we are once again waging war against one of the most beautiful countries on earth, one of the oldest, most intricate, and most historically rich civilizations in the world. Iran is poetry, architecture, cuisine, and above all tahzib - refinement elevated into a cultural norm. For now, only one thing is certain: with frightening determination, we are prepared to reduce this country to rubble, like barbarians who came not to a civilization, but to a heap of stone. And it becomes harder and harder to reconcile oneself to the knowledge that one has ended up on the side of naked cruelty while continuing to speak in the language of high civilization.
Yes, this too shall pass. But the failed war against Iran, launched by an empire at the very moment of its declining relative power - an empire that also found itself being towed along by a reckless protectorate - a war that on its very first day claimed the lives of around 160 schoolgirls, will remain in history not as a sequence of military bulletins, but as a symbol of the end of the age of undisputed American supremacy.
An Empire in Its Final Phase
I am, of course, no Attar of Nishapur, and historians are not supposed to play prophets. But recognizing trends is their direct obligation. And if we speak plainly, without diplomatic ornament, the war with Iran may well become the last war of the age of American unipolar dominance.
That does not mean America will wake up tomorrow powerless and exhausted. On the contrary, it is precisely such a conflict that may finally force it to understand that prudent restraint and reduced ambitions are not signs of weakness, but necessary conditions for survival. Yet the structural processes that began in the era of the Great White Fleet and stretched all the way to the final battles of the Global War on Terror point in one direction only: the American century is nearing its end - even if outstanding military technology, operational speed, and tactical superiority remain intact.
It is already clear that the United States is incapable of waging an intense two-front war against even mid-level states without painlessly stripping resources from other theaters. And from this follows a conclusion Washington prefers not to say out loud: the American war machine, American industrial logic, and American strategic culture are designed for short, high-tech confrontations and for the functions of imperial policing, not for the long industrial meat grinder that becomes inevitable in conflicts among serious powers.
A Short-Distance Superpower
But war is not only about technology, logistics, and the number of munitions. War is also a question of trust, reputation, resilience, and predictability. And the perception of America as an internally fragmented, politically jittery, and strategically inconsistent state - torn apart by partisan hostility and sharp policy reversals - has already eroded allied confidence.
Large, poorly calculated wars almost never remain confined to one region. At a minimum, they force every other country to revise its own assumptions. China and Turkey, for example, are watching the present conflict with the utmost attention, measuring not only the expenditure of American resources, but also the distribution of strategic attention inside Washington itself.
European leaders have spent years arguing about strategic autonomy - about the right and the ability of the continent to defend its own interests without an American crutch. But alongside that debate, old European contradictions are resurfacing. This is especially visible in relations between France, which traditionally insists on a strong and independent European defense under French political leadership, and Europe’s actual economic hegemon, Germany. Berlin has already made it clear that by 2030 it intends to become the continent’s unquestioned leader in military spending. At the same time, projects for tighter coordination within the Anglosphere core - above all in the CANZUK format - will accelerate.
When Allies Begin Counting Without Washington
America will most likely remain first among equals. Its fundamental structural advantages have not disappeared. The American economy is still the strongest in the world, thanks to technological innovation, global financial networks, and the richest consumer market in history. Washington’s military ambitions may become more restrained, but to treat the United States as a dying military power would be absurd.
Yet it would be just as absurd to imagine that anyone else is ready, in the near future, to seize America’s place in one sudden leap. Russia has a formidable army, but a narrow economic base and severe demographic pressure. China has colossal productive power, but it lacks both allied loyalty and the political willingness for large-scale military deployment beyond its own region, even where it has real interests - whether in Afghanistan, Panama, or Africa.
In other words, there is currently no power on the world stage capable of quickly and fully replacing American hegemony. The world will sink ever deeper into disorder, rivalry, and fragmentation, but the place of the sole hegemon will remain empty.
First Among Equals, but No Longer the Only One
Within the United States itself, the debate over the future trap of alliances will only intensify. This is Israel’s war, just as Ukraine is a European war. That has been said directly or indirectly by the president, the secretary of state, the recently departed counterterrorism director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and many others - both in public and behind closed doors.
Israel gives America nothing that Washington could not do without on its own: neither irreplaceable intelligence, nor unique scientific data, nor strike capabilities that the United States does not already possess. But it is precisely the war with Iran that reveals the essential point: no matter how much America tries to reduce its presence in the Middle East, no matter how often it speaks of wanting to leave the region, as long as Washington remains Israel’s insurer, its leadership has no incentive to restrain its own military appetites.
Without direct American guarantees, Israel’s ability to project force would very quickly run into far harsher limits, risks, and consequences. These unique “special relations” have long become a political shield protecting Israel from many of the natural consequences of its own actions. They largely explain America’s current political isolation and strategic disorientation. These ties create immunity in diplomacy, politics, economics, and the military sphere, allowing Israeli maximalists to act with near impunity. By supporting Israel unconditionally, Washington deprives it of any real incentive for serious compromise or for any stable coexistence with the Palestinians and neighboring states.
An Ally That Became a Strategic Trap
But it would be both foolish and cowardly to explain everything exclusively through outside influence. The main chain of causes lies inside America itself. This war is the result of a collision between two deep social and cultural processes in the United States. The first is the dominance of grassroots conservative believers from the lower middle class over the Protestantism of the upper ecclesiastical layer and the major denominations. The second is the deep Huntingtonian reflex rooted within the first process and shaping its view of the world.
A War That Grew Out of America Itself
At the core of almost every populist movement lies at least one noble lie repeated with obsessive insistence: that people are by nature against war. History, of course, testifies to the opposite. If there is any book that captures with perfect precision the worldview of today’s American civilizationalists and populists, it is the now nearly forgotten work by Michelle Malkin, In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror. It is telling enough that it appeared at the start of another long Middle Eastern war.
Its arguments will sound painfully familiar to anyone waving flags today in support of a new conflict. Strip away the verbal polish, and the message is brutally simple: hit them there, lock them up here - that is supposedly how civilization is defended.
Many supported the Iraq war with evangelical fervor and something close to crusading zeal, only to repent twenty years later and admit they had been wrong. Yes, serious scholars and foreign-policy realists opposed Iraq, just as today they oppose war with Iran. But the masses - then and now - remain easy prey. In a two-party democracy, the majority will almost always rally behind “their own” out of the habit of tribal loyalty.
And the ultimate fate of all recent efforts to resist interventionism will depend on what the Iranian conflict becomes. If it drags on or spreads across the region, it may nullify previous attempts to revise America’s course. But the main lesson is already obvious: Kissingerian realism survives poorly in an age of mass democracy overheated by social media, demagoguery, and political hysteria.
How the Crowd Fell in Love with the Crusade Again
War with Iran will almost inevitably intensify pressure on social media. In Europe, that process has already begun, and very soon the wave will reach American shores as well. Social platforms have radically changed the speed, scale, and temperature of how information moves. Political leaders now fall into a new trap: they are forced to respond immediately to viral stories, emotional appeals, and digital eruptions of public anger - even when the information has not yet been verified, remains incomplete, or is entirely false.
Algorithms systematically feed people exactly what provokes the strongest emotional reaction. Foreign states, overseas lobbying structures, and coordinated networks of influence instantly exploit these mechanisms for propaganda and for the manipulation of public debate. In the fifteenth century, the printing press triggered a remarkably similar controversy - over foreign influence, corruption, and religious fanaticism. The new technology was denounced by all kinds of people, from the humanist Niccolo Perotti to the monk Filippo de Strata and the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, who banned printing altogether under penalty of death.
The balance between freedom of expression and the protection of public discourse from manipulation will become one of the central dilemmas of functionally post-democratic societies. Any attempt to impose order on digital platforms will provoke cries of censorship. But to leave those platforms entirely without rules is to hand over the space of public opinion to foreign interference, emotional exploitation, and organized waves of disinformation.
Algorithms of Escalation
And yet behind the arguments over war with Iran lies an even deeper question: how should international politics be understood at all? Realism places geography, material power, the relative balance of forces, and strategic calculation at the center. An alternative approach proposes viewing the world through the prism of civilizations and identities. In that optic, conflicts grow out of deep cultural fault lines between religious, historical, or civilizational communities.
Politicians eagerly resort to precisely that language because it strikes directly at the emotions of a domestic audience and turns complex geopolitics into a convenient, intelligible, and aggressive picture. But that is exactly where the chief danger of civilizational narratives lies: they transform a local conflict into an existential battle. When war is described as a clash of entire cultures, compromise begins to look like disgrace, while escalation starts to seem like a moral duty. Such rhetoric quickly mobilizes supporters, but just as quickly plants hostility for generations to come.
Realist analysis does not abolish war, but it at least restrains the temptation to declare every quarrel a cosmic confrontation between good and evil. The war with Iran once again exposes the unbroken struggle between these two ways of seeing the world. And the civilizational frame is especially seductive to simple minds precisely because it is binary, ahistorical, and always pushes toward a new crusade.
Geopolitics Against Religious Myth
In the social sciences, it is not hard to build a clear correlation: here are those who voted for the Iraq war, here is their worldview, and here are those now pushing for a new conflict, along with their commitment to “civilizational” politics in the United States. And along that line it is already clear that much has shifted. This includes, among other things, the decline of Christian Zionism and the gradual weakening of low-church evangelical power in America.
For much of the early twenty-first century, U.S. Middle East policy was effectively carried on the shoulders of precisely this powerful ideological coalition - almost a theological anomaly - which somehow managed to overpower the high-church establishment of the WASP elites, the anti-interventionist left, atheists, nationalists, and secular liberals alike. Neoconservatives argued that American power had to be put to use - to remake the world order, destroy hostile regimes, and implant liberal systems abroad. These ideas entered into alliance with evangelicals for whom fanatical support for the modern State of Israel, presented as biblical Israel in defiance of historical reality, was almost a religious axiom bound up with expectations of Judgment Day. All of this was accompanied by moralistic rhetoric about the need to remake authoritarian societies in the name of a higher good.
The Decline of the Theology That Ruled Foreign Policy
Even during the Iraq war in 2003, many politicians sincerely believed that American military superiority and political influence made it possible to redraw entire regions with little real risk. Twenty years of failure in Iraq and Afghanistan did not destroy that worldview completely, but they did plant doubt among the generations that grew up in the shadow of the Global War on Terror - doubt about the cost, the meaning, and the feasibility of such projects.
The war with Iran is beginning precisely at the moment when the political coalitions that sustained the interventionist strategy are already undergoing an irreversible transformation. That is why it may well become one of the last triumphalist victories of the old interventionist consensus. Whether America wins in Iran or loses, it is unlikely that after this it will once again set out with the same old self-confidence to remake foreign states on a grand scale.
After Iraq, After Afghanistan, Before the Finale
For a historian, it is always especially interesting to watch how historical memory deals with empire - how it either preserves complexity or mutilates it into a primitive symbol. The British Empire, probably the most liberal of all historical empires, is remembered by postcolonial peoples not for eradicating slavery, not for fighting sati, not for abolishing jizya, and not for technological breakthroughs from the steamship to the telegraph, naval cartography, and modern medicine. It is remembered through Jallianwala Bagh and the Bengal famine.
Although both of those events were the result either of individual failure or of structural incompetence rather than of a conscious imperial program, they are the ones burned into collective memory. That selectiveness is, to a significant extent, the product of a century of Marxist and decolonial historiography, rooted in and promoted by both Soviet and American academic environments. It bears little resemblance to a full historical account. Such episodes do not exhaust the essence of empire, nor do they explain why many of its contemporaries genuinely perceived it as a positive force, as confirmed by written testimony from the time.
How Empires Lose Not Only Wars, but Memory
The American Empire will likely meet a similar fate in time. This is not an iron law of history, but even the partial decline of a great power is almost never merciful to its image in the memory of posterity. Historical memory is not eternal, of course, but for those living in the present, that is scant comfort. The Germanic peoples who hated Roman rule in the fifth century would have been astonished to learn of the revival of Rome’s allure in the twenty-first. In much the same way, supporters of comparatively liberal Ottoman rule in parts of Eastern Europe in the sixteenth century would scarcely have believed what the memory of the Turks would become centuries later.
What Will Remain After the Hegemon
Already now, one can be certain that attempts will begin to construct a new narrative around American intervention in Iran - a narrative in which the main conclusion will sound painfully familiar: America needs even more allies, even more commitments, even more guarantees, even more involvement. But if the chief lesson of yet another voluntary war is reduced to the need to expand alliances and generate new obligations, that conclusion will miss the essence of the matter.
It will fail to see the structural causes that trapped the United States in simultaneous obligations - in both Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Broad alliance networks have historically been not only instruments of influence, but also mechanisms for pulling the United States into regional conflicts that did not always align with its core strategic interests. Any new call to expand alliances risks only deepening the same patterns of overextension that have already brought Washington to its present strategic dilemma. A more sustainable approach requires the opposite: the deliberate reduction of secondary commitments and the redistribution of limited political, economic, and military resources toward those priorities dictated by geography and material capability.
The Dangerous Illusion of New Commitments
Whatever one may think of it, populist movements have never managed to create a genuine counter-elite - which is hardly surprising for a movement philosophically hostile to the very idea of elite rule. The war with Iran is generating massive disillusionment with ideological crusades, strategic miscalculations, social-media manipulation, and the general collapse of standards of truth and fact. Against that backdrop, voters and politicians may well rediscover the appeal of a more restrained, less democratic, and more elite-driven way of conducting foreign policy.
The current “civilizational” religious wars, which began in 2003 and have still not ended, will almost inevitably lead to urgent social and international recalibration - above all to further regulation of social media and to an even greater centralization of diplomacy in the hands of elites, rather than a foreign policy inflamed by capricious and impulsive public opinion.
The Return of Closed Diplomacy
The United States will survive - thanks to favorable geography, technological power, and its economic base. But hegemonic transitions rarely spare protectorates. Least of all the protectorate that history may one day judge to have been the ultimate cause of the weakening of the hegemon’s own relative power.
The Hegemon Will Survive, the Protectorate - Not Necessarily
And finally, all of this will probably also mark the end of the age of evangelicals in power in the United States, and the end of bipartisan support for Israel in the form it had existed since Truman. A fanatical worldview with no serious social or cultural pedigree beneath it, but one that remained in power for three decades under different names and in different forms, ultimately proved to be exactly what it had always been: a mixture of crusading zeal, dogmatism, and strategic short-sightedness.
History will remember it as the ideology that led the empire into its last unipolar war and accelerated the world’s transition to multipolarity. And in the memory of this era, two final figures will likely remain: Benjamin Netanyahu - with his speeches about a great Israeli regional empire - and Donald Trump - visibly exhausted, yet determined to ensure the fulfillment of Israel’s maximalist impulses, despite the fact that it was his own domestic and foreign-policy legacy that was first welcomed and then destroyed.
Trump created, and then squandered, a multiracial coalition that appears only once in a generation, and he missed the chance to transform a great power for the next 250 years. Instead of economic growth, cultural consolidation, and social unity, his administration chose shock crusades against real and imagined civilizational enemies - from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area to the mountains of Iran.