Endless wars, two Americas, one failing machine: The real stakes of US involvement in Iran–Israel

At the heart of this uncertainty lies a simple but devastating truth: the U.S. is no longer a unified geopolitical actor. It is a fragmented entity, split between a corrupt, inertia-driven military-industrial complex and a political outsider in Donald Trump who is openly attempting to dismantle that very machine. These two factions not only pursue different goals—they operate from entirely different paradigms. And nowhere is this more consequential than in the Middle East.

Trump’s vision, for all its contradictions, is largely inward-looking. He seeks to re-centre American political life around domestic repair: consolidating a fractured union, decoupling from unsustainable global entanglements, and, perhaps most critically, preventing the use of nuclear weapons, whether in Ukraine or Iran. Trump understands, however crudely, that a single nuclear incident would not trigger a “regional escalation,” but a global existential collapse. And with no escape plan to Mars yet, this is not a bluff.

The corrupt U.S. military-industrial establishment, by contrast, thrives on perpetual motion. Conflict is not a failure of diplomacy—it is the business model: a profit-driven ecosystem fed by dollar dominance, endless war cycles abroad, and technological intimidation. Today’s warfare has become a lucrative multi-sector enterprise, spanning semiconductors, satellite constellations, and private security, with contractors and mercenary firms now plugging battlefield gaps in real time. At its core lies the U.S. dollar’s “exorbitant privilege,” allowing the system to borrow cheaply and spend endlessly, sustaining a machinery that now runs largely on autopilot. Add to this a revolving door between Pentagon officials and defence firms, and a constant inflation of threats to justify spending, and the result is clear: even absurd provocations are greenlit, not from necessity but from momentum. As Iran’s leadership put it with cutting clarity, the U.S. is no longer striking strategic targets— it is striking at mere smoke.

The enduring lie is that the nuclear threat itself, once the U.S. deep state’s ultimate trump card, is rapidly losing meaning. In an era of advanced non-nuclear weaponry, from Russia’s hypersonic arsenal to Iran’s drone precision—the deterrence logic that shaped the Cold War no longer applies. Why deploy weapons that guarantee mutual annihilation when conventional strikes can now deliver scalpel-like precision and massive strategic disruption, disabling satellites, air defenses, or command grids, without radioactive fallout or indiscriminate civilian destruction? Yet the old guard clings to outdated myths, and with them, the dangerous illusion of control.

In this light, any state that still pursues collective punishment under the guise of deterrence is not defending itself. It is exposing itself. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the U.S.–Israel doctrine, where obsolete logic now conceals deliberate brutality.

But while the old powers cling to fading myths, other states are undergoing a different kind of reckoning. Iran, too, is divided, but its fracture line runs differently. On one side are patriotic factions seeking strategic sovereignty and civilisational dignity; on the other are compromised elements aligned with foreign interests. Tehran just demonstrated this: state security forces recently arrested alleged Mossad-linked operatives, including those reportedly tasked with supplying missile targeting data. Unlike the U.S., Iran’s internal war is now being clarified. The recent escalation has acted as a national x-ray, revealing who responds to national imperatives and who follows imported scripts, as explored by EMIR Research in “Deterrence Unscripted: What the Iran–Israel Escalation Really Revealed.” In this sense, the war is not just defensive. It is diagnostic. A purge of illusion.

What, then, does it mean if the U.S. formally escalates?

First, it will accelerate its own internal collapse. A direct war with Iran would expose the incoherence of U.S. foreign policy: a country unable to honour treaties across administrations or restrain its war machine, even under a president who consistently and publicly opposes full-scale conflict. The contradiction only makes sense once it’s clear he is not leading a unified state, but wrestling with a system that wages war on autopilot.

Second, it will consolidate Iran’s internal unity, transforming fragmented command into a war-forged coherence.

Third, it will push global audiences, especially in the Global South, into open narrative opposition against American-led coalitions. The U.S. will not lose only militarily. It will lose morally, discursively, civilisationally.

And finally, Israel—whose political time is already expiring—may find itself truly alone. Once buffered by U.S. impunity, it now stands exposed. No longer the centre of moral gravity, it has become a symbol of collapse. The Zionist project, as argued by EMIR Research in “Zionism at the Edge: The Terminal Overreach of a Fading Project”, has entered its final, unsustainable phase. Its survival, once premised on external support, now hinges on a system: the U.S. war engine, itself in terminal entropy.

Ironically, Trump’s current strategy may be to delay rather than confront. Let the deep state drain its ammunition, burn its credibility, and reveal its own dysfunction. From this vantage, Iran becomes not a threat, but a mirror — exposing the limits of empire and the rise of a world no longer beholden to it. China and Russia quietly benefit. So, too, does Trump — whose own domestic restoration relies on exposing the very system that seeks endless war.

Some now expect Russia or China to intervene directly. But that outcome is unlikely and deeply dangerous. Both powers understand that open escalation would trigger cascading consequences on the scale of a nuclear event, drawing the entire world into catastrophe. Russia, in particular, has demonstrated a different doctrine under Putin: limited, ground-based intervention aimed at specific strategic objectives, as it did in Syria against ISIS. But that model is neither necessary nor appropriate here. Iran is holding the line. The message has already landed. There is no need for the world to start shooting at itself.

What this moment reveals is not merely a geopolitical contest. It is a struggle over meaning itself, between those rewriting the story of power, and those clinging to a script that no longer fits the stage.

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Dr Rais Hussin is the Founder of EMIR Research, a think tank focused on strategic policy recommendations based on rigorous research.