Is America Even Capable of Decisive Victory?

If the United States backs down from Iran without achieving its long-term objectives, then those objectives will not merely be called into question. America’s ability to enforce them, and the rationale behind them, will also be called into question in the future.

We have moved from asking whether American actions make sense to asking whether America can enforce anything at all.

An empire must be built like a good business. It needs economic logic. America has such a logic, and it is tied to oil, currency, and military power.

That is the holy trinity. There is no way around it.

Every era requires the preservation of these core assets. That is why the war against Iran is, in effect, necessary for preserving the movement of oil, backed by military force, which in turn preserves the value of the dollar. This is no less important to America than Amazon or Google.

American imperialism may still be concerned with natural resources, but in the post-colonial era it gives up direct control of territory. That was Bush’s mistake in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Kennedy’s mistake in Vietnam. Instead, American power converts territorial control into control over trade routes.

The confusion among many fools between a naval war, an air war, or a limited ground campaign, and a full-scale invasion and occupation, shows a basic inability to distinguish between the fundamental categories of colonial war in the post-colonial age.

From here we arrive at a different business question: what is the model, and for what time horizon?

I believe the model must always be backed by the potential for aggression, as Trump demonstrates; by a willingness to do business, as Trump also demonstrates; but above all, by resolve.

As the engineer Yoav Netzer argues, ideology is a determined business model. This is where we must recognize that the willingness to pull out the wallet, or the sword that comes before it, is structurally and necessarily tied not only to self-defense, but also, within the framework of global hegemony, to the preservation of expansionist interests.

That is the American condition.

And therefore, the neoconservatives, unfortunately, were right. They simply did not understand how to manage their own correctness.

Now back to Israel.

Like the United States, Israel also has interests, regional rather than global, though it does not have America’s proven ability to influence the entire world.

What the two countries share is their inability to fight and win decisively.

Why?

Because the conflict with the Muslim world in the post-colonial era is different.

On the surface, there was no logic to occupying the lands of Iraq and Afghanistan in an age of softer power. But what is astonishing is that with Muslim states, if you did not occupy, you did not really do anything. So, in theory only, there actually was logic to those occupations.

This creates a paradoxical situation: the only thing that would truly mean the defeat of radical Islamic ideology is the very thing the West fears most: territorial conquest.

And the thing the West values most, life, is precisely the thing radical Islam values least in a world that sanctifies martyrdom.

Therefore, because of the fear of losing lives, the fear of killing enemies, and the fear of occupation, everything America and Israel do amounts to degrading the enemy’s capabilities, not uprooting him.

That is still something.

The only problem?

Anyone who does not understand how the American global business model works, as we now see among Democrats and growing numbers of Republicans, will not even settle for that.

The decline is already here.