The U.S. Empire is Retrenching, Bringing Imperialism Home
The US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding may be signed already. If it is, 60 days of retrenchment, rejuvenation and rest may be on tap. Donald Trump certainly needs it, and so does the world.
The latest US war – for Israel, as admitted by Trump, Rubio and Hegseth – has truly changed the Middle East, but not in the way Israel intended, nor the United States. The national security states in both the US and Israel no doubt had different expectations. For Israel, accelerating its ongoing genocide in Gaza, further fracturing the West Bank, and expand the northern “border” to the Litani River, seizing a fifth of Lebanon’s territory and permanently displacing a quarter of the Lebanese population, were among them. For the United States, perhaps the fundamental objective was nothing more than please let this be the last time we have to fight a war for Israel.
On the surface, this latest episode of Bomb Iran! served Israel’s territorial ambition more than Washington’s. The US lost as many as 14 bases in the Gulf region, located and funded by former allies Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. As these bases were heavily targeted and damaged by Iranian counterfire, the real damage was done to US credibility among her heavily cultivated Arab financiers and hosts, who were unceremoniously reminded on February 28th and beyond exactly how much the United States government holds them in contempt.
Our military footprint in the Gulf and the region has contracted; this will continue. What we just watched over the past 100 days was an unusually vivid moment in the long slow collapse of the US military and financial empire.
Conversely, tiny Israel saw its fluid borders expand in all four directions. The cover of this war coincided with new bases in Somaliland, new gas fields through occupation of southern Lebanon and Gaza, massive Israeli expansion through land and political purchase in Greece, Cyprus, and Albania, and the exponential erasure of Gazans, Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians.
If war is politics by other means, the US and Israel both lost because their military forces – an all-draft army of rapists and racists with the help of an all-volunteer combatant force of increasingly discombobulated airmen, seaman, soldiers, Marines and Guardians – proved intermittently hapless, brutal, and deceitful. Despite self-serving agitprop of “most moral army” and “the best in everything,” the whole world – and the average Israeli and American citizen – now sees and admits something very different.
Politically speaking, the US spent twenty years of warfare and over $3 trillion, to jump-start the Taliban-eliminated Afghan opium trade and then replace the Taliban with the Taliban. Historians of the future will explain that a Zionist White House desperate to appear better than the previous Zionist administration had a “hold my beer” moment, after which they initiated an illegal unpopular war on Iran, leaving the latter with increased nuclear enrichment capability, and more motivation than ever to join the nuclear arms race. The US will restore seized and long-frozen assets to Iran, and Washington discovered to its dismay that narrow straits may be legally subject to anti-imperial sovereignty. The whole world now cheers Iran, in a zero sum game that leaves all the ridicule and all the disrespect for the US-Israel duopoly.
From this fiasco, paradigmatic and strategic changes to America’s parasitic national security state are coming. These changes are buoyed by a deep negative societal reaction to this latest war for Israel, and propelled by $40 trillion federal debt growing at 6% annually, with more and more Americans dependent on federal checks, and fewer and fewer global buyers of US debt. A truly defensive military and intelligence apparatus, at a fifth or even a tenth of what we spend today, as well as a structural jettisoning of special alliances that animate the current defense budget and focus, including but not limited to Israel, are now within reach for the US, in part because of what happened over the past 100 days. The empire will oppose any changes in this direction, but our dry shell of an empire has few choices.
In a strange way Trump will bring the troops home, and end US wars of choice, and like the captain of the Titanic, he will ride the ship, damaged by arrogance and overreach, into the deep.
But before the empire fades, it retrenches, and global war-mongering becomes totalitarianism at home, national intelligence becomes domestic surveillance, AI looks inward to identify potential enemies of the state, and maps their communities for decimation or economic lockdown. Critics of government policies, as we saw in Lincoln’s time, in Wilson’s time, and in our time, are labeled traitors. Natural rights are openly ignored by the state, any Constitution shredded and past assumptions of citizen roles and state duties cast aside.
Today, we are in the midst of the collapse of two empires, one tiny and vicious, the other lumbering and lazy. These two empires suffer different illusions, but Israel, under fascist Zionism, has dibs on discipline and seeks to rule. Hence we have at least five constructs proposing IDF-Pentagon integration via the FY 2027 NDAA legiuslation this year. All are intended to unite two disparate governments, in the hopes one of the two survives the 21st century.
Israeli polices and practices are already widely codified into US law. The popular “secure borders” meme Trump electrified in his campaigns is the exact language of a country that admits no legal borders, uses border security to steal land and resources in all directions, and seeks successfully to erase the former inhabitants. ICE and its SWAT-like attitude has been criticized by most Americans, and rejected in many communities, but not a brow would be raised if it were operating in the West Bank, Gaza or south Lebanon. Congress continues to propose legislation that makes criticism of Zionism illegal. With Israel and Ukraine as testing grounds, and Israeli lobbying, technology and media influence, the Pentagon seeks new ways to target and subdue whole populations. Key to the morality that may exist inside the Pentagon machine is removing the moral human from both target and decision loops. Every state prefers deniability in the war crimes arena, yet increasingly the US government seems to admire public sociopaths like Israel’s current Minister of Security Ben-Gvir, who wears a hangman’s noose and calls for the kidnap and torture of the wives and children of opposing armies. Israel currently enhances its drone warfare with sounds of children screaming and women calling for help for more efficient extermination of their relatives. This too will come to our shores, as our empire panics at its decay.
In Israel, those who have betrayed America’s secrets are hailed and platformed, while in America, the slightest criticism of Zionist practices and agendas is cause for deplatforming, debanking and deportation. Almost two-thirds of US states have passed laws requiring some kind of allegiance to Israel, and requiring the purchase or engagement of Israeli companies for state funded contracts or employment. Federal and state aid may hinge on pro-Israel compliance for average Americans and their local governments. Israel bonds offer investment vehicles for states, municipalities and individual investors at rates of return on par with US bonds, but the Israeli economy is war-driven and dependent on diaspora charity. Most investors would pass, but for local and state governments, it is a mandatory tax paid by a secular republican state to an ethno-fascist one.
US imperial retrenchment has been happening under our very noses, slowly at first with our devalued currency and never-ending wars, but the pace is quickening. In this 250th year after the Declaration of Independence, every American needs to be prepared for war at home.
https://karenkwiatkowski.substack.com/p/the-us-empire-is-retrenching-bringing