Appeared on Substack on April 7, 2026: https://anandanandalingam649613.substack.com/p/the-us-may-have-lost-the-plot-in?r=o7w77
There is currently a crescendo of voices around the world very critical of President Trump and this “illegal” war “of choice” against Iran. There is a consensus among moderate intellectuals and much of the western media that the United States has become stuck in a quagmire that will likely lead the world to economic chaos. The Straits of Hormuz has been blocked by Iran in response to the relentless bombing of the country by Israel and the United States, and its impact on oil, natural gas and fertilizer etc. seems to have reached catastrophic proportions. Trump threatens to escalate the war every day and has threatened to bomb the infrastructure and power plants in Iran, and “an end to a civilization”. Much of West Asia is bracing for the Iranian response that could attack the oil depots and water desalination plants in those countries that could totally compromise them. Destruction and chaos all around, and to what end? The United States could well get caught in another pointless military campaign without an articulation of an exit strategy by President Trump. Has the United States lost the plot, yet again?
All of this hand wringing and animated critical commentary about the stupidity of Donald Trump and his coterie of advisors misses the point. In my opinion, the entire discourse in western countries, not only the U.S. but also in Europe, critical of the current world disorder created by the U.S. is a red herring. There is a country with a clear strategy, and it is actually winning: Israel.
It is in Israel’s interest to leave a chaotic and devastated Iran weakened and unable to attack it directly or through its many proxies. One hears that it has been Netanyahu’s project over the past forty years to bomb and devastate Iran, and previous U.S. Presidents had stopped him from doing so. In interviews, Anthony Blinken, the former Secretary of State under Biden has explained this at length; just google him on YouTube and you will hear him articulate this point. Former Secretary of State John Kerry also knew about the Israeli project of destroying neighboring countries starting with Palestine, and on his way out pleaded with the world to fully support a two-state solution for the Palestinians to prevent Israel from creating chaos.
In fact, every time there is a foolhardy military operation by the United States against a country in West Asia (i.e. “Middle East” to use a colonial term for it), the intellectuals and the media first fully support it and then when things go wrong, question the objectives and the reasons for the campaign. The support generally comes from demonizing the leadership of the country, the terrorist (sic) religion Islam, cultural practices and positing against the “liberal democracies”, especially the United States where “freedom reigns”. The next step is to find some sinister motive that the country has engaged in, usually manufacturing the evidence about this activity. Once the country is socialized into the good versus evil narrative, the U.S. goes to war starting with a massive bombing campaign. Liberal intellectuals, especially talking heads on television and the pseudo-intellectuals in print media, also follow this path to military campaigns. Not one person questions the role of Israel in either promoting these wars nor the calamity left behind for both the United States, Europe and the country being attacked.
Take the Iraq war for example. Today, most people know what happened. The United States presented to the United Nations evidence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”, evidence later found to have been manufactured. There was also the claim that Iraq supported al-Queda, the main perpetrator of the 9-11 bombing of the World Trade Center twin towers in New York, which was 180 degrees away from the truth: there was actually enmity between these two entities! From all counts, the Iraq war led to between 300,000 and a million deaths, including between 100,00 and 300,000 civilians. The war had lasting geopolitical effects, including the emergence of the extremist Islamic State, and eventually settled into elected Iraqi governments that had close connections to Iran because the population was majority Shia Muslims. What was a secular country under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni leader, where women had rights like western democracies has moved backward in polity and culture. The war damaged the international reputation of the U.S. and even led to the resignation of the UK prime minister Tony Blair.
The war against Iraq prosecuted by the United States did not come us a surprise to me. Soon after moving into a suburb in Washington DC in 1998, my wife and I were invited to dinner by a neighbor who eventually joined the Defense Department under George W. Bush. At dinner, he went on a rant about Saddam Hussein and was critical of Bill Clinton, President of the U.S. at the time, who apparently was too stupid to appreciate the danger Saddam posed to the region. This person’s pet peeve was that Iraq hosted the leadership of Hamas and Abu Nidal which were evil and posed an existential threat to Israel. I got the impression that there was a general consensus among those who were called the “neo-cons” that a stable Iraq under Saddam Hussein could host Palestinian “terrorists”, and it was important to change the status quo by hook or by crook. The chaos that followed was better for Israel even though the U.S. was left holding the proverbial “bag”.
While the United States and its allies, primarily the U.K., continue to lament their involvement with what is considered a “disastrous” campaign against Iraq between 2003 and 2011, most of the objectives of Israel were fulfilled. The Hamas and Abu Nidal lost a sponsor in Saddam Hussein, and Iraq went from a stable country with a reasonably good economy to a chaotic country that was more focused on its own survival and unable to play any role in the geopolitics of the Middle East. One unintended consequence, that even those pushing the Israel agenda did not foresee, was that the majority Shia Muslim country became closer to Iran.
While Iran and Iraq are the most recent manifestations of the U.S. and western Europe supporting Israel’s objectives, there is a long history of this happening. And in each case, and the media and western intellectuals redirected the discussions and discourse to alternate realities. The theme is more or less the same – Israel is under existential threat, and we need to support it and fight against the aggression by Iraq, Iran, Hamas, the Palestinians, Hezbollah, you name it.
Today most people in the western world would consider the 1982 Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon as being a reaction to Hezbollah. The reality is that Hezbollah was founded in 1982 by Lebanese clerics in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. At the time, Israel said that it invaded Lebanon to neutralize the terrorist block, connected to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) that tried to assassinate their ambassador to London. The truth was that the assassination attempt was by a group called Abu Nidal that was opposed to the PLO and the Israel government knew that. As the PLO was getting more prominent on the global stage and the Palestinians rights were becoming front and center in global discourse, Israel decided to find ways to undermine the organization. The invasion of southern Lebanon was aimed at PLO and the assassination attempt was just an excuse. However, the western media simply bought the story generated by Israel about the mortal danger to it and to the Jewish people.
It is well known today that in order to undermine Yasir Arafat, the PLO leader, the Israeli government began providing support in the 1970s to Ahmed Yassin, a Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood leader who controlled a network of Islamic schools, mosques, and clubs, as an alternate in Gaza to the PLO. Israel continued to encourage the expansion of Yassin’s network during the first year and a half of the First Intifada, as the network re-organized into Hamas. Israeli strategy was to have the two parts of Palestine being led by people opposed to each other. This conflict would ensure that Israel could exploit the enmity and control the entire region. The support lasted until 1989, when Hamas launched its first attacks on Israelis, leading to a significant crackdown against the organization.
Let us take one of the most prominent military actions by the Israelis, the “Six Day War” in 1967. The narrative that is widely accepted in the world, especially the western world, is that Egypt, Jordan and Syria were about to invade Israel, and the little country fought back heroically. The liberal intellectuals and the western media portrayed Israel as under existential threat and had no choice but to strike first. The whole world looked in admiration when Israel won the Six Day War beating large formidable (sic) foes. Of course, the war was fully supported by armaments from the U.S. and the western European countries.
According to reports from well-placed Israelis that came out several years after the war, the truth was very different from everyone’s beliefs. It was true that Egypt under their President Gamal Abdel Nasser had expanded the troop presence in the Sinai. However, in a speech in 1968 by the general who led the Israeli army, Yitzhak Rabin (who became Prime Minister of Israel in 1974), he said “I do not believe Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it”. Even Menachim Begin, the very hawkish Israeli Prime Minister in an address at the National Defense College on 8th August 1982 said that “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentration in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” Mordechai Bentov, a Israeli journalist and politician and one of the signatories of the Israeli declaration of independence went further, “the whole story about the threat of extermination was totally contrived and then elaborated upon a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territories”.
In fact, the aggressive stance of Israel in the “Six Day War” against Egypt, Jordan and Syria provided a great bounty to Israel. It acquired the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, none of which has been returned to the countries after the war ended. And as I write this piece, Israel has gone deep into Southern Lebanon and has told publicly that it will not go back – justified as an existential necessity.
The thesis that Israel is reaching its objectives with every war and military action in the Middle East should not come as a surprise to anyone. Once a people have experienced genocide and ethnic cleansing and have come together in a nation with a primary objective of survival at all costs, perhaps it feels that its actions don’t need to be justified. At one level, one could truly admire that Israel, a small nation of 9.5 million people with 7 million Jews, becoming the most influential geopolitical player in the Middle East, perhaps the world. However, at another level, the United States and European nations should be clear eyed about being pawns in fulfilling Israel’s goals, strategies and tactics when they engage in conflictual situations that emerge around the world in which military actions and tremendous loss of lives seem necessary.
Just focusing on the potential foibles of the gullible American Presidents might make American and European media and intellectuals feel good about their own democracies and the freedom to criticize their leaders. This self-congratulation totally misses the point or, in the worst case, is complicit in being supportive of Israel in its territorial ambitions and in achieving its geopolitical goals. The U.S. and Trump may seem to be floundering in Iran without a clear vision, but the country is being devastated and made impotent. Israel is certainly reaching its objectives and winning.
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