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joe kent
Mega Media, MAGA Lies
Corporate media consolidation amplifies Trump regime propaganda.
Mar 17, 2026
“The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better!”
So said war-addicted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at a Pentagon press briefing last week as he complained about news outlets—specifically CNN—not covering the death and destruction of the war on Iran with the elated positivity Hegseth feels it so clearly deserves.
It was the latest example of the Trump regime demanding not merely a pliant news media, but an entirely servile industry that functions as its propaganda arm. While this fascist worldview has been most dramatically displayed in President Donald Trump’s brazen attempts to censor and cancel late-night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert for their anti-Trump commentaries, ruling elites in Trump’s orbit have long pursued a dangerous realignment and consolidation of media power to serve their right-wing agenda.
Hegseth’s outburst directed at CNN reflects the Trump regime’s ploy to concentrate more corporate news networks under the command of David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance and son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison.
The growth of the Ellison father-son empire is based on refashioning the American press—or what’s left of it—into the palm of Trump’s hand.
Last year, Trump cleared the way for Paramount’s merger with Ellison’s Skydance Media after Paramount paid a $16 million lawsuit filed by Trump against Paramount’s CBS News. Now Paramount Skydance is on the verge of acquiring an even larger legacy media giant, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN.
“One family, the right-wing Trump-aligned Ellisons, will soon control: TikTok, CBS, CNN, HBO, Discovery Channel, BET, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, DC Studios, Fandango, Miramax, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount, PlutoTV, Showtime, TBS, The CW, TNT, Warner Bros., and more,” US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) warned. “This is oligarchy.”
David’s father, Larry, is a staunch Zionist and the sixth richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of more than $198 billion. He is also one of Trump’s closest allies. The growth of the Ellison father-son empire is based on refashioning the American press—or what’s left of it—into the palm of Trump’s hand.
But it isn’t merely one family’s broadcast news juggernaut that rules this age of media monopoly power.
Censorship and MAGA’s Mouthpiece
Over the weekend, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr issued new Orwellian threats against unnamed networks running “fake news” (i.e., reporting that lacks the government’s deliriously upbeat spin) on the Iran war. Carr suggested he would revoke or refuse to renew the broadcasting licenses of networks that don’t “correct course.” While the reactions against Carr’s threats were swift, Trump wholly endorsed the FCC edict on Sunday while deriding media organizations as “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic.”
But outside of media mergers and acquisitions, a wider net of news outlets has been pulled closer into the Trump regime’s hold. This includes the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, with its newly stated commitment to “personal liberties and free markets” along with editorials that reveal its increasing fealty to Trump.
The New York Times, while seemingly less beholden to the Trump regime, continues to churn out a steady stream of poorly disguised Zionist propaganda and breathless coverage of Trump’s imperialist military interventions. The so-called newspaper of record is so steeped in the machinery of empire that screaming prejudice drips from its discriminate use of language, as demonstrated by its passive headlines on Israeli atrocities against Palestinians that obscure Israel’s role versus its matter-of-fact reporting on recent Iranian strikes targeting Israel.
CBS News, however, proves that the Ellison media empire buys more consistent right-wing editorial leadership and allegiance to Trump.
Bari Weiss, spawned from the journalistic cesspool of the Times to later found the hilariously named website The Free Press, has been catapulted to unearned heights of the Ellison empire. While she possesses no experience as a reporter, her hard-line Zionism and anti-woke politics made her a perfect editor in chief to lead CBS News aggressively to the right.
“The mega rich have always been willing to hire, promote, and fund people willing to unquestioningly run interference for their interests while making them feel like their near-pathological selfishness, hoarding of money and power, and total disregard for the public interest is somehow morally justifiable. CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss is simply another in a long line of feckless water carriers for the one percent,” Elizabeth Spiers wrote in The Nation last December.
“[Weiss] has shown she’s not merely stupendously unqualified—she’s ideologically opposed to the practice of good journalism,” Spiers added.
Since Trump led the US empire into its unprovoked war on Iran last month, Weiss’ CBS has featured an infinite lineup of pro-war commentators, leading CBS’s own staffers to describe the network’s war coverage as a “propaganda-palooza.” Of course, such propagandizing isn’t exclusive to Trump’s newfound love of foreign wars. This was made clear in December when Weiss—who doesn’t hide her cringeworthy fawning over Trump—abruptly pulled a "60 Minutes" story on the notorious El Salvadoran prison camp where the Trump regime has sent many deportees in its ruthless war on immigrants. Since Weiss’ takeover, there’s also been a decline in CBS coverage on climate change.
Breaking the Fascist Echo Chamber
Against this grim backdrop of the decaying “Fourth Estate” of American “democracy,” there remains the ever-exploding and unwieldy landscape of independent media and social platforms. Oligarchs and authoritarians like Trump have struggled to exert control over the endlessly diverse and expanding universe of information and narratives exponentially building itself on these platforms.
Not that they haven’t tried.
Right-wing elites have successfully pushed the Meta platforms of Facebook and Instagram as well as Google’s YouTube to censor pro-Palestinian content. Trump launched his own social platform, Truth Social, in reaction to perceived anti-conservative biases in Twitter’s algorithm—which is now run by Trump’s favorite Big Tech billionaire sociopath, Elon Musk, who renamed it “X” and has proudly moved the platform’s algorithmic biases decidedly to the right. And, of course, we cannot forget TikTok, whose new US owned operation is now controlled by an investor group led by none other than Larry Ellison.
Now, as Trump oversees the final stages of a decades-long merger of corporate power and the state, his regime expects media organizations to serve not just Wall Street but the White House as well.
As is true of most pernicious policies from the Trump regime, right-wing designs on big media did not begin with Trump. Corporate media has long been an industry rife with monopolization and abuse of anti-trust laws to amass market dominance, from the Disney-ABC merger in the mid-90s to the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group’s ongoing vast control over local news outlets reaching more than 40% of US households.
But alongside the Trump regime’s growing media machine, which is designed to shield it from public scrutiny, is also the inverse agenda of strengthening the regime’s ability to scrutinize the public through domestic surveillance technology. Led by Hegseth and Trump’s resident villainous creep Stephen Miller, the regime is pushing AI companies to hand over unrestricted use of their technology to spy on Americans and urging Congress to expand government surveillance powers.
If it seems that warnings about Trump’s right-wing media takeover are sensationalist or overstated, Trump himself is quite clear about it. The despot shared an infographic over the weekend illustrating how “President Trump Is Reshaping the Media,” celebrating the defunding of NPR, the departure of prominent news anchors from major networks, and mass layoffs at the Washington Post.
Corporate media consolidation has always been about serving the interests of the elite and their capitalist system of endless personal profit. Now, as Trump oversees the final stages of a decades-long merger of corporate power and the state, his regime expects media organizations to serve not just Wall Street but the White House as well.
The good news is that the public is not powerless against this slide toward state-controlled media. If viewers can pressure a corporation as powerful as Disney with the threat of canceling their subscriptions until it spurns government bullying, as in the case of Kimmel’s show, such collective action can be replicated and broadened to other forms of economic pressure by the masses. In the same way, news worker unions like The NewsGuild CWA, WGAE, and others can work to mobilize newsrooms against the fascist media coup.
The Trump regime’s right-wing media echo chamber can and must be broken through collective people power, both in the form of boycotts and by supporting independent media that answer to no politicians, no government masters, and no corporate overlords.
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Long Iran War Would Hurt Consumers, But That’s the ‘Last of Our Concerns’: Trump Economic Adviser
"Republicans don’t give a damn about the American people and will continue to make your life more expensive," said House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) in response.
Mar 17, 2026
White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett caused a stir on Tuesday when he indicated that the prospect of US consumers getting hurt by a protracted conflict with Iran was not of particular concern to the administration.
During an interview on CNBC, Hassett dismissed concerns about the Iran war, which is now in its third week, dragging on indefinitely.
"The US economy is fundamentally sound," Hassett claimed. "And if [the war] were to be extended, it wouldn't really disrupt the US economy much at all. It would hurt consumers, and we'd have to think about, you know, if that continued, what we would have to do about that, but that's, like, really the last of our concerns right now... because we're very confident that this thing is going ahead of schedule."
Hassett: "If the war were to be extended, it wouldn't really disrupt the US economy very much at all. It would hurt consumers, and we'd have to think about what we'd have to do about that, but that's really the last of our concerns right now." pic.twitter.com/PVr63QO9Iv
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 17, 2026
In fact, US consumers are already hurting financially from the effects of the Iran war, which has caused the price of both oil and gasoline to skyrocket. Petroleum industry analyst Patrick De Haan reported on Tuesday that the average price of gas in the US has reached $3.80 per gallon, while the average price for diesel fuel has reached $5.03 per gallon.
The war's impact on oil and gas prices has been exacerbated by Iran closing down the Strait of Hormuz to shipping, and so far there is no indication that it will be reopening anytime soon.
Democratic lawmakers quickly pounced on Hassett's admission that pain for US consumers was "the last of our concerns right now."
"The Trump administration is saying the quiet part out loud," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), "the higher costs you're paying are the LAST of their concern."
"Trump's team of Epstein class advisors says it out loud more often than you’d think: 'consumers are the last of our concern right now,'" commented Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).
"Well I’m not some sort of political expert but this feels like an unhelpful thing to say," remarked Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).
"Trump economic advisor says consumer pain is the last of their concerns," commented Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). "Tell that to Americans paying almost twice as much for gas as they were a month ago."
"The Trump administration has once again said the quiet part out loud," said House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). "Republicans don’t give a damn about the American people and will continue to make your life more expensive. You deserve better."
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Average US Electric Bill Up $110—or 6.4%—Under Trump in 2025
"American families don't need a report to tell them that the president has broken his campaign promise to slash energy costs."
Mar 17, 2026
Over two weeks into President Donald Trump and Israel's illegal war on Iran, which is driving up oil prices around the world, Democrats on the congressional Joint Economic Committee revealed Tuesday that the average US electric bill increased by $110, or 6.4%, last year.
The Democratic JEC staff compared monthly data from the federal Energy Information Administration for 2024, when Trump was campaigning to return to office against then-Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, and 2025, when the Republican returned to power, having repeatedly promised to cut electric bills in half.
The JEC report highlights that last year's national average was "even higher than the increase the committee projected last November," plus "annual electricity costs were higher in 2025 in nearly every state, and were at least 10% higher in 12 states and DC."
The states with the highest bills were Connecticut and Hawaii, which each had an average of $2,490 for 2025. They were followed by Alabama at $2,230, Maryland at $2,220, Massachusetts at $2,190, Texas at $2,080, and Florida at $2,010.
In terms of the largest increases last year, the District of Columbia saw the biggest jump: a 23.5% rise from $1,360 to $1,680. New Jersey led all states with a 16.9% hike from $1,540 to $1,800, followed by Illinois at 15.9%, Pennsylvania at 12.1%, Kentucky at 11.8%, Maryland and Tennessee at 11.6%, New York at 11.4%, Ohio at 11.1%, and Missouri at 11%.
"American families don't need a report to tell them that the president has broken his campaign promise to slash energy costs; they already feel the impact of President Trump's actions every single day," said Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), the panel's ranking member. "But this report is yet another indication that sky-high costs are continuing to rise—and are continuing to hurt American families."
Throughout last year, lawmakers and other experts warned of various policies expected to drive up utility bills, including the Republican budget package, or so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which eliminated tax credits for solar and wind energy.
"Trump and Republicans are accelerating their self-inflicted energy crisis with continued project cancellations," the group Climate Power declared in a December report that blamed the administration for hurting "projects that would have produced enough electricity to power the equivalent of 13 million homes."
The Trump administration is also advocating for the construction of artificial intelligence data centers, despite warnings that the unregulated buildup of such facilities is causing local electricity costs to soar, plus threatening nearby communities and the global climate.
There's also US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, which are not only exacerbating the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency but also pushing up energy prices for Americans, as Public Citizen detailed in a December report. The watchdog noted that "1 in 6 Americans—21 million households—are behind on their energy bills," which "are rising at twice the rate of inflation."
"Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have acted as global gas salesmen, traveling to Europe to push exports and gut European methane regulations while attacking mainstream climate science," Tyson Slocum, report author and director of the Public Citizen's Energy Program, said at the time. "Meanwhile, Trump has done nothing to keep prices down at home."
The report preceded Big Oil-backed Trump launching a war on Iran without congressional authorization. While causing oil prices to skyrocket, his Operation Epic Fury is expected to boost the US LNG industry, with one expert projecting earlier this month that American companies could see up to $20 billion per month in windfall profits if the global market is deprived of Qatari gas until the summer.
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Is Trump's Iran War the US Version of the Suez Crisis?
The crisis saw Britain's aura of imperial power had evaporated, and its global empire headed for extinction. Trump may have similarly hastened US decline.
Mar 17, 2026
In the first chapter of his 1874 novel The Gilded Age, Mark Twain offered a telling observation about the connection between past and present: “History never repeats itself, but the… present often seems to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”
Among the “antique legends” most helpful in understanding the likely outcome of the current US intervention in Iran is the Suez Crisis of 1956, which I describe in my new book Cold War on Five Continents. After Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956, a joint British-French armada of six aircraft carriers destroyed Egypt’s air force, while Israeli troops smashed Egyptian tanks in the sands of the Sinai Peninsula. Within less than a week of war, Nasser had lost his strategic forces and Egypt seemed helpless before the overwhelming might of that massive imperial juggernaut.
But by the time Anglo-French forces came storming ashore at the north end of the Suez Canal, Nasser had executed a geopolitical masterstroke by sinking dozens of rusting ships filled with rocks at the canal’s northern entrance. In doing so, he automatically cut off Europe’s lifeline to its oil fields in the Persian Gulf. By the time British forces retreated in defeat from Suez, Britain had been sanctioned at the United Nations, its currency was at the brink of collapse, its aura of imperial power had evaporated, and its global empire was heading for extinction.
Historians now refer to the phenomenon of a dying empire launching a desperate military intervention to recover its fading imperial glory as “micro-militarism.” And coming in the wake of imperial Washington’s receding influence over the broad Eurasian land mass, the recent US military assault on Iran is starting to look like an American version of just such micro-militarism.
Washington’s fading influence across Eurasia will undoubtedly prove catalytic for the emergence of a new world order, which is likely to move far beyond the old order of US global hegemony.
Even if history never truly repeats itself, right now it seems all too appropriate to wonder whether the current US intervention in Iran might indeed be America’s version of the Suez Crisis. And should Washington’s attempt at regime change in Tehran somehow “succeed,” don’t for a second think that the result will be a successfully stable new government that will be able to serve its people well.
70 Years of Regime Change
Let’s return to the historical record to uncover the likely consequences of regime change in Iran. Over the past 70 years, Washington has made repeated attempts at regime change across the span of five continents—initially via CIA covert action during the 44 years of the Cold War and, in the decades since the end of that global conflict, through conventional military operations. Although the methods have changed, the results—plunging the affected societies into decades of searing social conflict and incessant political instability—have been sadly similar. This pattern can be seen in a few of the CIA’s most famous covert interventions during the Cold War.
In 1953, Iran’s new parliament decided to nationalize the British imperial oil concession there to fund social services for its emerging democracy. In response, a joint CIA-MI6 coup ousted the reformist prime minister and installed the son of the long-deposed former Shah in power. Unfortunately for the Iranian people, he proved to be a strikingly inept leader who transformed his country’s oil wealth into mass poverty—thereby precipitating Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.
By 1954, Guatemala was implementing an historic land reform program that was investing its mostly Mayan Indigenous population with the requisites for full citizenship. Unfortunately, a CIA-sponsored invasion installed a brutal military dictatorship, plunging the country into 30 years of civil war that left 200,000 people dead in a population of only 5 million.
External intervention, whether covert or open, seems to invariably be the equivalent of hitting an antique pocket watch with a hammer and then trying to squeeze all its gears and springs back into place.
Similarly, in 1960, the Congo had emerged from a century of brutal Belgian colonial rule by electing a charismatic leader, Patrice Lumumba. But the CIA soon ousted him from power, replacing him with Joseph Mobutu, a military dictator whose 30 years of kleptocracy precipitated violence that led to the deaths of more than 5 million people in the Second Congo War (1998-2003) and continues to take a toll to this day.
In more recent decades, there have been similarly dismal outcomes from Washington’s attempts at regime change via conventional military operations. After the September 2001 terrorist attacks, US forces toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Over the next 20 years, Washington spent $2.3 trillion—and no, that “trillion” is not a misprint!—in a failed nation-building effort that was swept away when the resurgent Taliban captured the capital, Kabul, in August 2021, plunging the country into a mix of harsh patriarchy and mass privation.
In 2003, Washington invaded Iraq in search of nonexistent nuclear weapons and sank into the quagmire of a 15-year war that led to the slaughter of a million people and left behind an autocratic government that became little more than an Iranian client state. And in 2011, the US led a NATO air campaign that toppled Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s radical regime in Libya, precipitating seven years of civil war and ultimately leaving that country divided between two antagonistic failed states.
When Washington’s attempts at regime change fail, as they did in Cuba in 1961 and in Venezuela last year, that failure often leaves autocratic regimes even more entrenched, with their control over the country’s secret police strengthened and an ever-tighter death grip on the country’s economy.
Why, you might wonder, do such US interventions invariably seem to produce such dismal results? For societies struggling to achieve a fragile social stability amid volatile political change, external intervention, whether covert or open, seems to invariably be the equivalent of hitting an antique pocket watch with a hammer and then trying to squeeze all its gears and springs back into place.
The Iran War’s Geopolitical Consequences
By exploring the geopolitical implications of Washington’s latest intervention in Iran, it’s possible to imagine how President Donald Trump’s war of choice might well become Washington’s very own version of the Suez crisis.
Just as Egypt snatched a diplomatic victory from the jaws of military defeat in 1956 by shutting the Suez Canal, so Iran has now closed off the Middle East’s other critical choke point by firing its Shahed drones at five freighters in the Straits of Hormuz (through which 20% of global crude oil and natural gas regularly passes) and at petroleum refineries on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf. Iran’s drone strikes have blocked more than 90% of tanker departures from the Persian Gulf and shut down the massive Qatari refineries that produce 20% of the world supply of liquafied natural gas, sending natural gas prices soaring by 50% in much of the world and by 91% in Asia—with the price of gasoline in the US heading for $4 a gallon and the cost of oil likely to reach a staggering $150 per barrel in the near future. Moreover, through the conversion of natural gas to fertilizer, the Persian Gulf is the source for nearly half the world’s agricultural nutrients, with prices soaring by 37% for urea fertilizer in markets like Egypt and threatening both spring planting in the Northern Hemisphere and food security in the Global South.
The extraordinary concentration of petroleum production, international shipping, and capital investment in the Persian Gulf makes the Straits of Hormuz not only a choke point for the flow of oil and natural gas but also for the movement of capital for the entire global economy. To begin with the basics, the Persian Gulf holds about 50% of the world’s proven oil reserves, estimated at 859 billion barrels or, at current prices, about $86 trillion.
Time is not on Washington’s side if this war drags on for more than a few weeks.
To give you an idea of the scale of capital concentration in the region’s infrastructure, the national oil companies of the Gulf Cooperation Council invested $125 billion in their production facilities in 2025 alone, with plans to continue at that rate for the foreseeable future. To keep the global oil tanker fleet of 7,500 vessels that largely serves the Persian Gulf afloat, it costs nearly $100 million for a single large “Suezmax” tanker—of which there are about 900 normally on the high seas, worth a combined $90 billion (with frequent replacements required by the corrosion of steel in harsh maritime conditions). Moreover, Dubai has the world’s busiest international airport at the center of a global network with 450,000 flights annually—now shut down by Iranian drone strikes.
Despite all the White House media hype about the terrible swift sword of America’s recent airstrikes, the 3,000 US-Israeli bombing runs against Iran (which is two-thirds the size of Western Europe) in the war’s first week pale before the 1,400,000 bombing sorties over Europe during World War II. The striking contrast between those numbers makes the current US air attacks on Iran seem, from a strategic perspective, like shooting at an elephant with a BB gun.
Moreover, the US has limited stocks of about 4,000 interceptor missiles, which cost up to $12 million each and can’t be rapidly mass-produced. By contrast, Iran has an almost limitless supply of some 80,000 Shahed drones, 10,000 of which it can produce each month for only $20,000 each. In effect, time is not on Washington’s side if this war drags on for more than a few weeks.
Indeed, in a recent interview, pressed about the possibility that Iran’s vast flotilla of slow, low-flying Shahed drones might soon exhaust the US supply of sophisticated interceptor missiles, Pentagon leader General Dan Caine was surprisingly evasive, saying only, “I don’t want to be talking about quantities.”
Whose Boots on the Ground?
While economic and military pressures build for a shorter war, Washington is trying to avoid sending troops ashore by mobilizing Iran’s ethnic minorities, who make up about 40% of that country’s population. As the Pentagon is silently but painfully aware, US ground forces would face formidable resistance from a million-strong Basij militia, 150,000 Revolutionary Guards (who are well-trained for asymmetric guerrilla warfare), and Iran’s 350,000 regular army troops.
With other ethnic groups (like the Azeris in the north) unwilling or (like the Baloch tribes in the southeast, far from the capital) unable to attack Tehran, Washington is desperate to play its Kurdish card, just as it has done for the past 50 years. With a population of 10 million astride the highland borders of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the Middle East without their own state. As such, they have long been forced to play the imperial Great Game, making them a surprisingly sensitive bellwether for larger changes in imperial influence.
Since the rise of Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy in 2016, major and medium powers along that entire Eurasian rimland have been actively disengaging from US influence.
Although President Trump made personal calls to the top leaders in Iraq’s Kurdistan region during the first week of the latest war, offering them “extensive US aircover” for an attack on Iran, and the US even has a military airbase at Erbil, Kurdistan’s capital, the Kurds are so far proving uncharacteristically cautious.
Indeed, Washington has a long history of using and abusing Kurdish fighters, dating back to the days of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who turned their betrayal into a diplomatic art form. After he ordered the CIA to stop aiding the Iraqi Kurdish resistance to Saddam Hussein in 1975, Kissinger told an aide, “Promise them anything, give them what they get, and f… them if they can’t take a joke.”
As Iraqi forces fought their way into Kurdistan, killing helpless Kurds by the hundreds, their legendary leader Mustafa Barzani, grandfather of the current head of Iraqi Kurdistan, pleaded with Kissinger, saying, “Your Excellency, the United States has a moral and political responsibility to our people.” Kissinger did not even dignify that desperate plea with a reply and instead told Congress, “Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”
Last January, in an amazingly ill-timed decision, the Trump White House betrayed the Kurds one time too many, breaking Washington’s decade-long alliance with the Syrian Kurds by forcing them to give up 80% of their occupied territory. In southeastern Turkey, the radical Kurdish PKK Party has made a deal with Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan and is actually disarming, while Iraq’s Kurdistan region is staying out of the war by respecting a 2023 diplomatic entente with Tehran for a peaceful Iran-Iraq border. President Trump has called at least one leader of the Iranian Kurds, who constitute about 10% of Iran’s population, to encourage an armed uprising. But most Iranian Kurds seem more interested in regional autonomy than regime change.
As Trump’s calls upon the Kurds to attack and the Iranian people to rise up are met with an eloquent silence, Washington is likely to end this war with Iran’s Islamic regime only furthe
r entrenched, showing the world that America is not just a disruptive power, but a fading one that other nations can do without. Over the past 100-plus years, the Iranian people have mobilized six times in attempts to establish a real democracy. At this point, though, it seems as if any seventh attempt will come long after the current US naval armada has left the Arabian Sea.
From the Granular to the Geopolitical
If we move beyond this granular view of Iran’s ethnic politics to a broader geo-strategic perspective on the Iran war, Washington’s waning influence in the hills of Kurdistan seems to reflect its fading geopolitical influence across the vast Eurasian land mass, which remains today the epicenter of geopolitical power, as it has been for the past 500 years.
For nearly 80 years, the United States has maintained its global hegemony by controlling the axial ends of Eurasia through its NATO alliance in Western Europe and four bilateral defense pacts along the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia. But now, as Washington focuses more of its foreign policy on the Western Hemisphere, US influence is fading fast along the vast arc of Eurasia stretching from Poland, through the Middle East to Korea that scholars of geopolitics like Sir Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman once dubbed the “rimland” or “the zone of conflict.” As Spykman put it succinctly once upon a time, “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia; who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.”
Just as Sir Anthony Eden is remembered ruefully today in the United Kingdom as the inept prime minister who destroyed the British Empire at Suez, so future historians may see Donald Trump as the president who degraded US international influence.
Since the rise of Donald Trump’s America First foreign policy in 2016, major and medium powers along that entire Eurasian rimland have been actively disengaging from US influence—including Europe (by rearming), Russia (by challenging the West in Ukraine), Turkey (by remaining neutral in the present war), Pakistan (by allying with China), India (by breaking with Washington’s Quad alliance), and Japan (by rearming to create an autonomous defense policy). That ongoing disengagement is manifest in the lack of support for the Iran intervention, even from once-close European and Asian allies—a striking contrast with the broad coalitions that joined US forces in the 1991 Gulf War and the occupation of Afghanistan in 2002. With Trump’s micro-militarism in Iran inadvertently but clearly exposing the limits of American power, Washington’s fading influence across Eurasia will undoubtedly prove catalytic for the emergence of a new world order, which is likely to move far beyond the old order of US global hegemony.
Just as Sir Anthony Eden is remembered ruefully today in the United Kingdom as the inept prime minister who destroyed the British Empire at Suez, so future historians may see Donald Trump as the president who degraded US international influence with, among other things, his micro-military misadventure in the Middle East. As empires rise and fall, such geopolitics clearly remains a constant factor in shaping their fate–a lesson I try to teach in Cold War on Five Continents.
In difficult times like these, when events seem both confused and confusing, Mark Twain’s “broken fragments of antique legends” can remind us of historical analogies like the collapse of the power and influence of Great Britain or of the Soviet Union that can help us understand how the past often whispers to the present—as it indeed seems to be doing these days in the Straits of Hormuz.
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