The War Against Iran as an Event That Ends an Empire
The failure of the United States and Israel to defeat Iran after nearly 40 days of continuous bombing, utilizing the full conventional offensive potential of two of the world’s largest and most modern air forces, is more than merely a military humiliation. The defeat of American-Israeli hegemon by Iran has caused consequences that extend far beyond the geographical boundaries of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East — the collapse of confidence in the transatlantic NATO alliance and the de facto economic and political elimination of crucial Asian alliances. Combined with the effective dismantling of the American military architecture that has underpinned security in the Persian Gulf for decades, this signals the end of the American empire that has ruled the world since the end of World War II.
The United States National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2025 formed a blueprint for the new American empire as defined by Donald Trump. The document served as clear evidence of the arrogance and ignorance that together defined the national security stance of Trump’s America. It began with the stated intention to “recruit, train, equip, and deploy the most powerful, deadliest, and technologically advanced military force in the world,” which would deter wars or “win them quickly and decisively, with as few casualties as possible on our side.” Subsequently, the document declared the desire for “next-generation missile defense — including a Golden Dome for the American homeland — to protect the American people, American assets abroad, and American allies.” Trump’s NSS described a world that existed more in the realm of fantasy than reality, and projected a narrative that ultimately proved to be the exact opposite of what happened during the current fighting between the American-Israeli hegemon and Iran, writes Scott Ritter .
Nothing was deterred, and the combined American and Israeli forces proved unable to impose their will on the battlefield, while advanced Iranian missiles and drones made a mockery of the missile defenses of the US, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states. Arrogance and ignorance together lead to assessments that are far removed from reality, and nowhere was that clearer than in the Trump administration’s assumptions regarding Iran and the Middle East as set out in the NSS of 2025.
Although it was noted that “conflict remains the most problematic dynamic in the Middle East,” the 2025 NSS subsequently stated that Iran — which was described as “the main destabilizing force in the region” — had been weakened by American and Israeli actions since October 2023. Trump’s basic document stated that keeping the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea open to shipping was a top priority for the United States, as was the security of Israel.
But according to the NSS, these concerns had become easily manageable thanks to a new reality created by President Trump’s leadership. “The days when the Middle East dominated American foreign policy, both in long-term planning and in daily execution, are fortunately over,” the document states, and instead the region had transformed into “a place of partnership, friendship, and investment — a trend that should be welcomed and encouraged.”
Looking at the Middle East today, one must acknowledge how far off the mark the NSS of 2025 was regarding Iran and the Middle East.
The core of the failure of American policy toward Iran lies in the contradiction between the stated “core values” of the Trump administration and the way those “values” were applied in practice. The NSS of 2025 declared that the U.S. wanted to “prevent a hostile power from dominating the Middle East, the oil and gas reserves, and the strategic passages through which those flows,” while simultaneously seeking to avoid the “perpetual wars” that had drawn the U.S. into that region at great cost. All of this was to occur within a non-interventionist policy that acknowledged that war “is bad for American interests.” According to the NSS of 2025, the United States viewed “peaceful trade relations with the countries of the world, without imposing democratic or other social changes that deviate significantly from their traditions and history” as the new American norm. It was stated that President Trump would use “unconventional diplomacy, American military power, and economic influence” to “surgically extinguish smoldering conflicts between nuclear powers and violent wars caused by centuries-old hatred.”
This calculation, however, appeared to fail to take into account the reality of the dominant influence the State of Israel exerts on the foreign and national security policy of the United States. Nothing in the NSS of 2025 suggests that the President of the United States would embrace a policy line presented to him in isolation by an Israeli Prime Minister and an Israeli intelligence chief, and subsequently disregard the consensus of his own cabinet and military advisors to start a voluntarily chosen war against Iran that violated every principle ostensibly defended by the NSS of 2025.
And no one had logically thought that “unconventional diplomacy” would entail multiple acts of betrayal by the United States, in which diplomatic consultations were used as a cover to enable surprise attacks on the Iranian leadership, with the aim of bringing about precisely the kind of regime change that non-interventionism, based on respect for sovereign differences, should have excluded.
Instead of peace and prosperity, Trump’s policies—stemmed from Israeli interests that deviated significantly from the officially formulated goals of the 2025 NSS—have left the Persian Gulf region in a state of devastating violence. The region’s energy production capacity was severely damaged by attacks on critical infrastructure and by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The military bases on which the US relied to project its power lie in ruins, and key Arab Gulf allies feel betrayed and abandoned now that decades of American security guarantees and promises have collapsed due to the reality of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, which proved far more effective than the US-supplied missile defense systems purchased and deployed at high cost.
The American failure, however, had consequences that extended far beyond the Middle East. The fragility of US-European relations, already strained by the perception that Europe was benefiting from American protection and by the failed proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, was pushed to the breaking point. European opposition to American action against Iran clashed with the American strategic conviction that the European part of NATO allies had to respond to American requests for assistance, even when the conflict fell outside the logical geographical boundaries of the transatlantic alliance.
As the situation stands now, the NATO alliance lies in ruins, likely irreparably damaged, driven to this state by the American defeat against Iran.
The Pacific region was designated as being of special importance to the United States in Trump’s 2025 NSS. In that regard, the Trump administration relied not only on the military capacity of the US itself to challenge China around Taiwan and in the Indo-Pacific region, but also on a network of alliances, including a Tripartite Pact with Japan and South Korea, the AUKUS Alliance (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US), and the “Quad” Security Framework between the US, Japan, India, and Australia.
The combined impact of American capabilities and the troops that could be deployed through these alliances and partnerships was intended to create a “military superiority” over China.
Today, this system of alliances and partnerships lies in ruins, destroyed by the demonstrated powerlessness of the U.S. military against China, the unreliability of American security guarantees, and the economic consequences of the failed U.S. policy toward Iran.
Missile defense networks, which formed the basis of the idea of “military superiority” against China, proved ineffective against the Iranian missile threat. Moreover, when one ally—Israel—needed additional missile defense, the US actually removed the missile defense structure it had built up in Asia to protect its allies, without seeking permission or even consulting it beforehand.
In addition, the inability of the US to prevent Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz, or the Houthis in Yemen from blocking shipping routes in the Red Sea, meant a disaster for the economies of all American allies in the Pacific.
The fact that the failure of American policy was so quickly turned into economic disaster as a result of energy uncertainty exposed the Achilles’ heel of American foreign and military policy under Donald Trump: ultimately, the US consisted mostly of big words and few deeds.
Or as they say in Texas: “Much hat, no cattle.”
In short: the American Dog does not hunt.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, empires die.
The war between the US and Iran will go down in history books as a massive defeat for the US and Israel at the hands of Iran.
But it is much more than that.
The American defeat is an event that ends an empire.
The farewell could take decades, or the collapse could occur rapidly in the coming months and years.
But the crux of the matter is this: the world Donald Trump envisioned in his 2025 National Security Strategy no longer exists — if it ever existed at all.
We are entering a courageous new world in which global hegemon has been replaced by emerging regional powers that will have to find a better way to live together than the path the United States has chosen.