Each week I look at one major international event and try to explain the structures of power behind it — the actors, ideologies and assumptions shaping events.

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The US and Israeli attacks on Iran are only possible because of their vast military superiority. Israeli military power — both its scale and technology — is itself a function of US power.

The United States can strike any point on Earth within hours, with negligible risk to its own forces. It can deploy overwhelming air power in any region. This awesome power alone helps explain the propensity to use force: the more dominant a state’s military power, the lower the perceived cost of using it — and the more likely it is to be used.

But there’s something more. This military power often fails to translate into political success. Yet the US persists in choosing this tool. Why? The reasons are often obscure.

The Event

US and Israeli military dominance over Iran is extraordinary. Within a few days, these countries had established total air superiority, destroying any meaningful resistance to their air attacks. The scale of the attacks is also remarkable.

Iran is a weak opponent, already in economic disarray thanks to sanctions and with an almost non-existent air force and a limited navy, though it does possess large stocks of domestically-manufactured ballistic missiles and drones. Were the US to take on a stronger opponent, in particular China, the results would look very different. Indeed, some modelling suggests that the US would lose such a confrontation.

Meanwhile, the Iran war may have made conflict with China more likely and undermined the defence of Ukraine, thereby helping spread and perpetuate war. According to The Economist, the Iran campaign has reduced America’s stocks of precision-guided missiles for the rest of the decade, thus altering China’s calculus of the potential success of an invasion of Taiwan. The profligate expenditure of air defence missiles against Iran’s thousands of cheap drones means fewer are available to defend Ukraine’s power stations and cities.

Inside the System

US military dominance (which in turn enables Israeli dominance) has two main components: scale and technology. The US spends roughly 3.5% of its GDP on the military — a smaller share than during the Cold War, but still translating into vastly greater absolute spending than anyone else: roughly 40% of global military expenditure.

This expenditure of nearly $1 trillion per year enables massive investment in technological advantage, including capabilities that we do not even know about (the US for instance has for several years deployed a reusable space ‘plane whose purpose remains totally unknown).

These two factors — scale and technology — have granted the US unprecedented capability, far outmatching any country in history. But the incredible extent of American capabilities may be under-appreciated.

The US can strike any point on Earth within hours, with pinpoint accuracy and with almost no fear of suffering loss - the only aircraft so far lost in the current campaign were shot down by ‘friendly fire’. The US air force can destroy most countries’ air defences within days, allowing it subsequently to bomb any target at will and repeatedly and with large volumes of munitions, as it and Israel are now doing in Iran. The only country which might withstand such attack is China, but its military capabilities are largely untested and its military personnel have little or no recent combat experience.

The US alone is able to project massive force globally through its eleven carrier battle groups, two of which are currently engaged in the bombing of Iran, each capable of launching fifty attack aircraft, themselves capable of scores of sorties every day: the equivalent of the air force of a medium-sized country (the next most capable country has one carrier battle group, carrying many fewer and less capable aircraft). The US can also deploy thousands of troops across great distances, thanks to unequalled and massive airlift capability and large landing ships carrying thousands of marines. It is reportedly considering despatching thousands of paratroops to capture Kharg Island, adjacent to Iran’s coast.

These capabilities are delivered at exceptionally low risk to US personnel, and as unmanned systems proliferate, that risk will decline further. In a conflict that has taken over 1500 Iranian lives, the US has so far lost 6 service members. Soon, manned American bombers will not need to risk entering enemy airspace at all — they will be accompanied by swarms of drones which will fly ahead to attack, coordinated by AI. The same capacity is under development for ground and naval forces. Such vehicles are already in use in Ukraine.

Inevitably, awareness of these capabilities suffuses the US military and political system. The impression created is of overwhelming power that can be used with limited domestic consequence. The massive financial costs are invisible to the taxpayer. All service personnel are now volunteers rather than conscripts — a major difference from Vietnam, when conscription drove opposition to the war. Moreover, recruits are disproportionately drawn from poorer backgrounds, thereby reducing their political power and ability to stop wars.

What Everyone Is Getting Wrong

But despite this extraordinary investment, there is little correlation between military superiority and political success. The obvious example is Afghanistan, where the US deployed overwhelming force for nearly two decades at a cost of over $1 trillion — and was ultimately defeated.

Yet American military interventions persist. The question is why.

One answer lies in the sheer weight and momentum of the military itself. Military institutions possess intelligence resources, analytical capacity and organisational power far beyond other parts of government; in any crisis, they are by far the dominant institutional actor, creating what might be called an ‘epistemological presence’: it defines the terms of debate and the space of possible action. As I noted in last week’s post, government itself embodies a consciousness of military possibility that is barely visible from the outside. Government is logistically and psychologically militarised in a way that the non-governmental realm simply is not.

When policy choices are proposed to leaders, the military options are neatly and precisely defined – to attack target X with assets Y, leading to outcome Z - in contrast to the inevitable messiness and uncertainty of political or diplomatic avenues, which depend on unpredictable humans rather than the predictable, known capabilities of missiles or bombers. This pretence of tidy choices and outcomes is of course the very opposite of what really happens.

This inherent bias is now exacerbated by the incredible capabilities of modern intelligence gathering where vast amounts of electronic data can be integrated in real time into what appears to be a comprehensive depiction of reality, a capability which now also encompasses prediction - the AI-generated assessment of the enemy’s likely actions.

This integration capability is provided by Palantir, whose rapid growth, rocketing share price and enormous profits point to the force of the political economy of warmaking. Defence companies distribute production across congressional districts, creating strong political incentives to sustain spending. One example: the US airforce has repeatedly said it doesn’t need or want the A-10 attack aircraft, a sixty-year-old design. But the A-10 continues to be funded and deployed, including today in the Gulf, because of congressional pressure.

As in all capitalist environments, defence companies are required to maximise profit or risk collapse or takeover (these profits also permit the enormous pay packets of senior executives). But the defence sector is effectively a semi-nationalised industry, whose profits are protected in ‘cost plus’ contracts, de facto monopoly supply (for instance of ships) and the self-dealing of the Pentagon officials and ex-officers who decide weapons purchases then pass through the ‘revolving door’ into well paid industry positions. The losses of the industry, and waste of ill designed projects (of which there are many), are of course borne by the taxpayer. The ‘military industrial complex’, of which Eisenhower first warned, remains in full operation.

A further factor is national myth. Since the Second World War, US interventions have often if not always been framed as the defence of democracy. This narrative is reinforced through politics, education and culture from Band of Brothers to Star Wars. It creates a self-image of the US as the sole and indispensable global guardian of order and liberty, whatever the actual consequences - or true motives - of its military campaigns.

These factors are reinforced by the aesthetics of modern warfare. The public sees only the video of the crosshairs, the explosion, the apparent precision. The human consequences remain largely invisible. This sustains the illusion of low-cost, controlled violence. Of the hundreds of thousands of deaths following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, how many did you actually witness, outside of Hollywood depictions (American Sniper, The Hurt Locker)? The only actual killings I observed were those shown in the ‘collateral murder’ video released by Wikileaks. The gap between the reality - of human blood, dismemberment and pain - and perception is profound.

Semantics as ever applies in parallel to semiotics. Just as the term ‘collateral damage’ became a euphemism for civilian death, today the word ‘kinetic’ is often used by experts and commentators to indicate the use of violence itself - bombs, bullets, missiles. The reality of war is again obscured.

So policymakers come to believe that force can be applied quickly, cheaply and effectively, while the public is kept ignorant of war’s true costs and consequences. Little wonder that it becomes the default option rather than the last resort.

The Deeper Current

The propensity to war is exacerbated by several further, concealed factors.

First, it is far easier for a president or prime minister to launch a war than it is to carry out complex domestic policy, say healthcare reform or lowering the cost of living. Launching a war is the sole prerogative of the executive - one man, one decision. The requirement for congressional approval has been ignored in the current case, as it has in many previous conflicts.

Secondly, the justification for war is often very vague, yet is unquestioned. Thanks to Trump’s bizarre and random utterances about US goals in Iran, for once the justification is coming under scrutiny. But very often it is not. The concept of “national security” is defined broadly enough to justify almost any intervention. With Iran, threats to US military bases in the region are framed as threats to US national security, despite those bases themselves being instruments of force projection. The US mainland has rarely been directly threatened, yet military action is justified in terms of distant or abstract risks.

As domestic support for Trump’s needless war crumbles, it is helpful to him that Iran is reported to have fired long range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia. There is no independent verification of this attack - all the information, dutifully repeated in the media, originates from the government. Strikingly (so to speak), no missile reached its supposed target, thereby obviating the need for material evidence of such an attack.

There is also a circularity to the logic of ‘threat’ to the US or its ‘interests’. US military presence generates countervailing military build-ups, which are then used to justify further expansion. China’s growing capabilities, for instance, are in part a response to longstanding US military activity in its region, such as provocative naval patrols next to China’s maritime boundaries — capabilities which in turn are used as justification for further American spending. This cycle was very much in evidence during the Cold War when the US and Soviet Union engaged in an arms race of ever greater and eventually huge numbers of weapons, solely because of the perceived - and in fact vastly exaggerated - capability of the other. This appears to be happening again with China.

It helps that public and press allow themselves a kind of learned ignorance in these matters, above all that ‘security’ is the responsibility of the state and, most insidiously, that the state/government knows things that the rest of us do not or cannot know.

In the current case, Trump has claimed that Iran had not made sufficient concessions in talks about its nuclear program thus necessitating the war, but the vast majority of press commentators (with the noble exception of The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour) have chosen to ignore the clear evidence that this was not true, that in fact Iran had offered terms that arguably equalled or improved upon those agreed in the so-called JCPOA agreement, which the Obama administration and the P5 countries plus Germany negotiated with Iran in 2015. Iran’s most recent concessions reportedly included the offer that its infamous 440kg of enriched uranium be transported from Iran to safe storage in a neutral country. Instead, the media today report the possibility that the US may send in ground forces to ‘secure’ this stockpile, an extraordinarily difficult and risky venture as the uranium is not only dispersed but also apparently heavily guarded and buried beneath rubble deep inside a mountain that is impenetrable to even the largest bombs.

One counter to the state’s impulse toward war therefore is to become more literate in its language, systems and capabilities - ‘national security’, ‘kinetic’, but also the capabilities of the B-1 bombers now stationed in England (and the baseless claim by the government that these aircraft are used ‘defensively’), Iranian drones and, especially in this case, how to build nuclear bombs (something Steve Witkoff, Trump’s chief negotiator, seems not to know).

This information is now much easier to access. Military blogs are an excellent source of unfiltered, expert information. Simply put, you cannot understand geopolitics without understanding the military element, including the intrinsic factors that drive war itself.

Conclusion

The United States possesses a level of military power unprecedented in history. That power is not neutral. It shapes how problems are understood and what solutions are considered. It should be regarded as a decision-making factor and pervasive context in its own right.

Other subterranean intellectual and political biases - the structures, concepts, words and images - also reinforce the tendency to war. When force is readily available, appears low-cost, and is supported by powerful institutions and narratives, it becomes more likely to be used.

The result is not necessarily strategic success. As Afghanistan demonstrated, overwhelming military superiority does not guarantee political victory. But the easy availability of force — and the systems that sustain that availability — continue to drive its use.

Understanding this dynamic is essential. War is not only the product of threats or crises. It is also the product of systems — of incentives, capabilities and beliefs.

The structures of power that enable war also make it more likely.