{"id":327090,"date":"2026-05-17T06:09:52","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T06:09:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=327090"},"modified":"2026-05-19T06:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T06:32:11","slug":"israels-war-to-the-root-may-unravel-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=327090","title":{"rendered":"Israel\u2019s \u2018war to the root\u2019 may unravel America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alastair Crooke \u2013 Strategic Culture May 16, 2026<\/strong><\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

Both Trump\u2019s Iran war and the closely connected Israeli war for Jewish hegemony across the Middle East (termed \u2018Permanent Security\u2019 in Israeli military vernacular<\/a>) are unravelling fast.<\/p>\n

Iran is standing defiant<\/a> in the face of Trump and Israel\u2019s threats, leaving Trump gambling the entire U.S. economy and its global strategic standing on conjuring up a decisive \u2018win\u2019 over Iran \u2014 however deceitful and Pyrrhic that \u2018win\u2019 might prove to be.<\/p>\n

Trump has now arrived for the summit in China (reportedly with little groundwork preparation ahead of the visit). Possibly he relies on his usual hubristic notion \u2014 that China needs<\/em> the U.S. more than the U.S. needs China \u2014 and he will tell Beijing that \u2018you (Xi) have to instruct Iran\u2019 that time is moving on, and that it should capitulate to the U.S..<\/p>\n

Well that\u2019s not going to happen. China supports Iran\u2019s fight for sovereignty and shares with Russia the Iranian objective of seeing the U.S. gone from the Middle East. They want instead a Gulf-led<\/em> security architecture to replace the American one. Moscow concurs.<\/p>\n

Maybe Xi \u2014 in politest of language, of course \u2014 will tell Trump, rather, that it is Washington that should concede to Iran. The longer he delays, the harder any U.S. course correction will prove to be.<\/p>\n

In any event, despite the innate Trumpian hubris, the U.S. President arrives in Beijing bereft of \u2018big wins\u2019 (if Venezuela is counted as a gimmick, rather than a strategic victory). Contrarily and more significantly, Beijing understands that the U.S. hovers at the brink of an economic inflationary catastrophe, whereas China largely is insulated from the coming global energy shock and is in price deflation, rather than experiencing inflation.<\/p>\n

Put bluntly, there is almost nothing that Xi wants from the U.S., but in the interests of harmony, they may buy some soya beans (to save U.S. farmers) and perhaps some airplanes. (Even though soya beans are not really required by China which has been purchasing them easily from Brazil).<\/p>\n

Trump has taken with him to China an entourage of U.S. oligarchs \u2014 presumably in the expectation that China will give him business valued in several \u2018billions\u2019; but China\u2019s response may be somewhat scant. They are angry, reportedly, at the games the U.S. Treasury Secretary has been playing with sanctions on Chinese firms, the seizure of Chinese oil tankers, and the obvious attempt by Trump to squeeze China out from the Western Hemisphere.<\/p>\n

What looms in the backdrop however, is darker: America\u2019s collapsing standing as the unipolar hegemon \u2014 and the consequential global instability. The Iran war has provided the world with an object lesson of a major world power stuck in a conceptual rut from the Cold War era. One that refused to see the writing on the wall of a tectonic change that required it to \u2018move on\u2019 from its \u2018end of history\u2019 complacency, though all the signs of a shift to another \u2018way of war\u2019 had been present since early this century.<\/p>\n

The turning point came with the abundance of cheap and easily available tech components.<\/p>\n

The U.S., as the Cold War began, chose a strategy of outspending the USSR \u2013 by going for high-end, high-cost weaponry \u2013 with a main focus being on air-power and mass aerial bombardment.<\/p>\n

That approach, at the time, had seemed justified by the subsequent Soviet implosion. This collapse was presumed to have been triggered by the American maximal spend that had over-stretched the USSR (though the collapse is now well understood to have been more a matter of a more complex internal corrosion from within).<\/p>\n

The paradigm of western reliance on a preponderance of air power delivered by hugely expensive airframes has been blown apart and demonstrated to be ineffective by Iran\u2019s asymmetric missile and naval warfare using weapons costing a few hundred dollars versus U.S. defence interceptors costing tens of millions.<\/p>\n

The entire world can see the main lessons emerging from the Iran war: Firstly, that the western defence posture is as outdated as the dodo. The Establishment fell asleep, believing that the ever more billions of dollars ploughed into the Military Industrial Complex would give the U.S. a military edge that crucially<\/em> would also provide the underpinning to its dollar hegemony to print more money for more weapons.<\/p>\n

In practice however, it yielded massive corporate corruption and functionally poor, yet hugely expensive, armaments.<\/p>\n

Of course, it is horses for courses \u2014 but up against more revolutionary adversaries, it is the latter who are out-innovating and out-manoeuvring western powers. All can see it, and are already adjusting.<\/p>\n

China can see how small, fleeter Iranian naval assets ran rings around the large lumbering naval vessels of the U.S. Navy. The lessons naturally will be applied to Taiwan, should the U.S. seek to exert naval pressure on China in the Taiwan context.<\/p>\n

Russia too will have noticed how a carefully graduated and selectively targeted missile offensive provided Iran with deterrence vis-\u00e0-vis Israel. Moscow likely will be thinking in these terms in respect to missiles of British, French and German origin that have been striking deep into Russia, whilst using NATO airspace and intelligence facilitation.<\/p>\n

The accelerating global perception of the U.S.\u2019 decline however, rests on more than just its failure to adapt to Iran\u2019s asymmetrical war. More significant even than the sense of cognitive dissonance reigning in the White House is the perception that Trump is a full partner to Israel\u2019s predations across the region.<\/p>\n

The U.S. bequeathed Israel the same doctrine of air war dominance, underpinned by ultra expensive U.S. air frames that were intended to give Israel a \u2018qualitative edge<\/a>\u2019 in maintaining its regional primacy. Israel\u2019s failure in Iran<\/a>, of its flailing conflict<\/a> with Hizbullah, and of the unfinished war in Gaza, are the evidence of the failure of the approach \u2014 not of success.<\/p>\n

It is worth noting that before the Israeli shift toward the U.S. \u2018way of war\u2019, the founder of the Israeli state and its first PM, Ben Gurion\u2019s defence doctrine for Israel was different.<\/p>\n

Ben Gurion emphasised that Israel was geographically a small state; with a small population and limited economic resources. In such circumstances, it would not be able to afford a large standing professional army. It would need a small professional army, supported when necessary by a large cadre of reservists.<\/p>\n

Ben Gurion grounded his argument on the need for Israel to have, as well as a defence force, a strong economy to provide for the community and the state \u2014 all of which reinforced the need for a small army. He also assumed the Clausewitzian stance that \u2018war is the continuation of politics by other means\u2019 and not an end in itself, but a part of the political game.<\/p>\n

In Israel, since 7 October 2023 however, as Israel military strategist Colonel Udi Evental, in a series of posts<\/a>, has underlined \u2013 \u201cthe link between politics and war reversed itself by 180 degrees [since Ben Gurion\u2019s time]\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cPeace has vanished from the lexicon and become a term for weakness ahead of Election Day. The prime minister and his coalition, each for their own reasons, are digging in their heels in the hope that Trump will allow them to return to war in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, in order to continue \u201cstriking,\u201d \u201cdestroying,\u201d and \u201ccrushing\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe threshold of paranoia was crossed on 7 October\u201d<\/em>. Professor Omer Bartov has said<\/a> \u201cthat Hamas\u2019s attack, framed as a Holocaust-like act \u2026 gradually [became] the glue binding Israeli society. A historical event transformed into an imminent threat: Hamas are Nazis. [And] criticizing Israel\u2019s [military responses] is antisemitic\u201d. <\/em><\/p>\n

Bartov argues that 7 October caused Israelis to understand the Holocaust not<\/em> just<\/em> as something that happened in the past, but as \u201csomething always at the threshold; that here will be another Holocaust if [Israel] doesn\u2019t meet every threat with full force and <\/em>destroy it at the root<\/em><\/strong>\u201d. <\/em><\/p>\n

Israeli professor Professor Idan Landau elaborates<\/a> that by adopting a stance of \u2018Permanent War\u2019,<\/p>\n

\u201cthere is no end game; the Enemy is an undifferentiated mass of [various] Guises of Amalek. The Gaza genocide has set a shocking new standard of indifference to civilian casualties: All targets are criminalized by association to your favourite Amalek (currently the IRGC), and we stopped bothering about substantiating this association with actual facts; declaring it so \u2013 makes it so\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWithin Israeli security thinking, there has always been a latent current seeking to expand Israel\u2019s security borders. To a large extent, the pre-emptive approach is an operational expression of this concept. Thus, a security-ideological coalition has now emerged in Israel, which utilises a defensive-preventive narrative to realise a messianic agenda of \u2018Greater Israel\u2019<\/em>\u201d, Col. Evantal explains.<\/p>\n

This frank account of Israel\u2019s current policy lies at the heart of the greater catastrophe facing America \u2014 one extending well beyond the reputational loss from a botched, war of deliberate choice against Iran:<\/p>\n

For Trump has partnered and closely associate<\/a>d the U.S.<\/a> with a genocidal and ultimately messianic Israeli-formulated \u2018way of war\u2019 to destroy Iran and the Resistance, and to consolidate the Israeli government\u2019s ambition to displace or \u2018destroy at root\u2019 native populations. Its perpetration disgusts the \u2018world majority\u2019. This represents the greater cloud looming over America\u2019s global reputation. Trump is responsible. \u2018Permanent war\u2019 is a form of war crime.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu, in recent days, told<\/a> 60 Minutes<\/em> that the (permanent) war is not over, and that it must continue:<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI think [we] accomplished a great deal, but it\u2019s not over because there\u2019s still nuclear material, enriched Uranium that has to be taken out of Iran. There are still enrichment sites that need to be dismantled, there are still proxies that Iran supports, ballistic missiles they still want to produce. Now we\u2019ve degraded a lot of it, but all that is still there and there\u2019s work to be done\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu doesn\u2019t care for the consequences for the U.S. economy (apparently neither<\/a> does Trump), nor for the political instability in the U.S. that may result. He does not care either, for the Gulf States that will suffer and perhaps be destroyed if the U.S. resumes the war in a massive way.<\/p>\n

He cares only for a Hebraic hegemony (and his political survival) \u2014 even if (Gentile) America pays the burden of reputational and economic price.<\/p>\n

The posts by Colonel Evental went viral in the Hebrew-speaking sphere. Evantal argues that the only way to save Israel is to return to the Ben Gurion original formula \u2014 Israel must live within<\/em> its borders and must understand that military action should be adjunct to finding political solutions.<\/p>\n

Source\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Both Trump\u2019s Iran war and the closely connected Israeli war for Jewish hegemony across the Middle East are unravelling fast<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[118,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-327090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-7-10-gaza-war","category-Israel_Anti-Semitism_Zionism_and_US-UK_allies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=327090"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":327092,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327090\/revisions\/327092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=327090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=327090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=327090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}