Imperial systems historically fall by the weight of their insatiable greed, reckless wastefulness and institutional hubris. Today, the United States stands as the sole imperial power, with Israel – the last remaining colonizing state – serving as its vanguard in West Asia. Both are showing the first signs of fundamental decline.
A single miscalculation can forge a new reality. Driven by imperious delusions, the US and Israel launched deadly wars of choice against Iran in June 2025 and again in February 2026. The folly of their acts was believing that Iran, a civilizational nation, could be easily defeated. Instead of a swift victory, the flawed assumption has triggered a wider regional quagmire and undermined America’s global power and credibility.
After eight months of military and economic turmoil, the ongoing war is an existential crisis for both Iran and the United States.
For 47 years, the United States and Israel have been a threat to Iran. Tehran is mindful that Washington and Tel Aviv are bent on destroying the country, and that the war is an existential fight it must win. The start of Operation Epic Fury, on February 28, was the Islamic Republic’s 9-11.
Iran also knows that it cannot continue to live with America’s threatening regional presence (40,000 to 50,000 U.S. soldiers stationed across at least 19 bases) and with the crippling economic sanctions that have hindered development.
In addition, after a long track-record of betrayals, Iranian leaders are keenly aware that the U.S. is not interested in honest negotiations or peaceful coexistence. By starting an unprovoked war that violated international law, destroyed vital infrastructure, and killed 3,468 Iranians – including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, members of his family and senior leadership – Washington proved it cannot be trusted.
Concurrently, the United States is desperately trying to hold onto its military and economic supremacy. Both Washington and Tel Aviv had little idea when they started the war that they had set in motion a revolutionary shift, regionally and globally. The unrestrained devastation has shattered the illusion of U.S.-Israeli political, economic and military invincibility, that has remained unchallenged for 81 years.
Since emerging as the strongest economy following World War II, the American empire has maintained its prosperity and hegemony through resource exploitation, global militarization, strategic partnerships with merciless regimes, the promise of trickle-down wealth and subtlety-managed domestic indoctrination.
American supremacy has relied heavily on dollar hegemony. By making the U.S. dollar the default currency for global commerce, Washington secured an exaggerated structural advantage that has underpinned its wider geopolitical leverage.
This is particularly true in West Asia, where the dollar, pegged to petroleum – the currency used worldwide in the oil trade since the 1970s – has been employed to exert control over countries in the region.
In July 1944, at Bretton Woods, a new international financial system, centered around the dollar, was established by the United States. Countries agreed to
link the value of their currency to the greenback, and institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were created under U.S. leadership, governance and control.
Because financial transactions are typically processed through U.S-dominated institutions, like SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), an electronic interbank payment platform, dollar dominance gives Washington expansive power to impose far-reaching sanctions against other countries and to freeze them out of the global economy.
The United States has weaponized its currency by imposing sanctions and blocking perceived adversaries, like Iran, from SWIFT, using economic isolation to achieve economically what it has failed to do militarily.
As the U.S. and Israel witness their historic chokehold over global resources and defense capabilities slip away, they have reacted with fierce ruthlessness against Palestinian resistance, Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansar Allah in Yemen, who are fearlessly contesting their hegemony.
For decades, the United States has preserved its global power through unholy alliances with Israel and through military and economic partnerships with authoritarian Arab regimes, tasked with containing regional opposition.
The Zionist colony was originally embedded in West Asia to protect British imperial interests. Following Britain’s decline, Israel secured another willing benefactor. It has served America as a projection of U.S. power in the region for decades.
Paradoxically, Tel Aviv’s long-sought war against Iran might actually trigger its own ruin, topple Arab dictators, and shatter America’s regional and global supremacy.
The coordinated U.S.and Israeli attacks on Iran set off long-standing anti-imperialist sentiments across the region. These revolutionary undercurrents emerged in 1979 when Iran rejected foreign domination, overthrew the U.S.-backed Pahlavi monarchy, and asserted its independent sovereignty.
For 47 years, the U.S. has been conducting economic warfare against the Islamic Republic through comprehensive economically destructive sanctions.
In 2008, Iran was cut off from CHIPS (Clearing House Interbank Payments System); and in 2012, all Iranian banks were disconnected from SWIFT. To counter the devastating effects of being cut off from the international financial network, Iran has been forced to change strategies and to seek alternative partners, specifically Russia and China.
In an effort to overcome the impact of U.S. sanctions, Iran became a full member of China-led BRICS, joining Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa in January 2024. Tehran has been urging the bloc to adopt alternative payment systems and national currency settlements to bypass the U.S. dollar and mitigate Western sanctions.
The U.S.-Israel plan for reshaping the region was laid out long ago. In a 1996 policy document titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” senior national security officials, neoconservative hardliners, argued that Israel’s security would be best served, not through the pursuit of peace, but through “regime” change in surrounding countries, starting with Iraq, then Syria and finally Iran.
The enduring geopolitical campaign to restructure West Asia by crushing resistance and establishing absolute U.S. and Israeli dominance finally reached its peak in 2026 with the Iran war.
The urgency of “securing the realm” was reflected in a nativist speech by Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered in the shadow of the Parthenon in Athens; significantly on October 7 (anniversary of the Palestinian rebellion in Gaza). In addition to extolling its virtues, Rubio stated that Western civilization was at a critical “inflection point” in which the U.S. and Europe must rediscover the values of exploration and conquest that once drove centuries of expansion or face decline or irrelevance.
One passage in particular reveals the jingoistic and arrogant path the United States has been on in West Asia for decades:
“And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Because the next decade and the decision we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude or decline. We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all….We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains (translated as the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and Bab al-Mandeb in the Red Sea), to reindustrialize our economy…to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.”
The U.S. and Israel have chosen the “unapologetic pursuit of national power” in the resource-rich region. Only now have they met their asymmetrical military match in the Islamic Republic, Ansar Allah and Hezbollah, and in the determination of Palestinians to resist subjugation.
The United States has demonstrated that it is incapable of equality; of being one nation among many. It irrationally insists on “maintaining its place at the head of the world,” no matter the cost in lives and treasure.
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