Recent leaks and military reports emerging from Washington paint an increasingly chaotic picture of an administration considering direct military action against Iran. Public threats, combined with White House briefings regarding expanded strike packages and potential land options, suggest a calculation that Washington can force Tehran’s total submission through sheer military weight.

​However, for a United States that had seen its strategic objectives collapse across virtually every conflict since World War II, such an undertaking promises nothing short of a total strategic failure. This has proven particularly true over the past quarter of a century, where every major intervention from the open invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan to the covert, engineered regime changes in Libya and Syria ended in defeat or disaster.

​The most direct examples of this failed modern military intervention came in Iraq and Afghanistan, where in both cases, the United States operated as an undisputed hegemonic power. It possessed vast fiscal surpluses, deep weapon stockpiles, domestic political momentum, and complete access to regional bases. Yet, despite total air supremacy and trillions of dollars expended over two decades, both campaigns ended in strategic failure and eventual retreat.

​As a result, in the years following these failed campaigns and despite persistent claims of dominance, America’s economic and military superiority eroded significantly. From conventional weapon inventories suffering severe depletion, partially due to providing arms to Israel for its war on Gaza and Ukraine’s war with Russia, to a thirty-nine-trillion-dollar national debt, to a domestic electorate with zero appetite for overseas entanglements, the United States’s ability to survive, let alone win a conflict, significantly diminished.

Yet, despite this reality, the Trump administration appears to be convinced that a land invasion of Iran is not only possible, but that it could achieve what the U.S. failed to accomplish in Iraq. That mindset, however, ignores numerous fundamental operational realities that make any ground campaign in Iran not only a physical impossibility, but a death trap not seen since Vietnam.

To begin with, the breakdown of American military supply lines and industrial capacity presents an insurmountable challenge to any ground action. Washington, due to twenty-five years of direct or continuous conflict, no longer possesses the defense industrial base or maritime transport capacity to support an expeditionary force of that scale over oceanic distances. Furthermore, years of proxy funding and stockpile depletion have drained precision-guided munitions and air defense interceptors to dangerously low levels.

However, the shortage of critical supplies is only part of the problem; the other is the manufacturing chain itself. That is, because U.S, defense contractors operate on slow, peacetime-production schedules that can take years to scale up, while remaining dangerously dependent on Chinese raw materials, microchips, and rare-earth materials, American factories cannot simply manufacture replacement weapons for a high-intensity conflict within the required time frame.

Furthermore, as it has been devastatingly proven that the regional ports and forward bases needed to receive and stage necessary supplies, such as Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, are neither safe nor operational against Iran’s strike capabilities, the United States cannot sustain or resupply an advancing ground force. Thereby, guaranteeing a total logistical collapse within weeks, if not sooner, of stepping ashore.

​Beyond this industrial crisis, pure human math presents an even more daunting hurdle to a land invasion. Particularly when attempting to launch a new war simply to retroactively justify one that was already lost, all while ignoring the stark contrast between the Iraq of 2003 and Iran of 2026.

In Iraq, for example, the United States fought across flat desert terrain against a shattered military, in a country of 25 million where a large segment of the population favored the removal of the regime of Saddam Hussein. Yet, despite these immense advances, the United States ultimately failed by becoming trapped in a costly, decades-long bloody counterinsurgency.

Iran, on the other hand, presents the exact opposite: it is a territory nearly four times the size of Iraq, defined by complex mountainous topography and a population exceeding 90 million people who have already unified behind their government against foreign invaders. A point that became clear following the assassination of the Iranian leader, when tens of millions of Iranians flooded the streets for weeks mourning his death.

Therefore, if the U.S. military failed so completely in achieving its goals in Iraq despite ideal conditions, then attempting a ground campaign through Iran’s mountainous terrain against a unified population and a well-trained adversary will be both bloody and catastrophic. This is especially true when considering that a ground campaign in Iran would require a minimum of 300,000 to 500,000 troops, numbers that Washington simply does not have available.

​Compounding these industrial and manpower limitations is the sheer brutality of Iran’s geography. Iran is effectively a vast natural fortress, shielded by high-altitude mountain chains and surrounded by borders that offer virtually no viable path for a ground campaign.

To the West, the towering Zagros Mountains form an almost impenetrable wall against any thrust from the Persian Gulf or Iraq, funneling advancing forces into narrow passes that serve as ideal defensive choke points.

To the Northwest, launching an assault is a political impossibility, given Ankara’s continuous unwillingness to allow the use of its soil or airspace as a launchpad for American operations.

To the North, even where the strategic access from Azerbaijan might exist, it offers zero utility, given that the border terrain consists of narrow mountain passes where armored columns would face immediate bottlenecking.

To the East, the vast, rugged frontier with Afghanistan represents a logistical dead-end controlled by a hostile Taliban regime with direct military and political ties to Iran. Finally, to the South, any attempt at an amphibious assault through the Persian Gulf forces American ships directly into the saturated firing radius of Iran’s coastal missile batteries and drone networks.

​Hence, when looking at the entire map, it becomes glaringly clear that a land invasion would be a disastrous impossibility. Washington can try to alter this reality by falling back on its default option: a massive, sustained air and missile campaign. However, this strategy relies on a fundamental fallacy that airpower alone can force Iran into submission. However, if air power alone were capable of delivering victory on its own, a ground invasion would not even be under discussion.

Ultimately, it has become clear to all that the United States has already lost this war both militarily and economically. Any further escalation on land or in the air will not alter the outcome; it will only deepen an unwinnable trap of Washington’s own making.

​

When the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy recently declared that U.S. Central Command naval units were under total surveillance and rapidly approaching “zero hour,” it was not a mere empty theatrical rhetoric. It was a cold statement of operational reality: America’s naval presence, thanks to constant Iranian attacks, had not only been significantly neutralized but, more importantly, trapped in a box of Iran’s choosing.

​As I have consistently argued in my previous work, Washington’s partial reason for finding itself in such a situation stems from its underestimation of the Iranian strategy of attrition and Washington being blinded by the myth of its own permanent hegemonic power. It would be that arrogance that would lead the United States into a multi-tiered war of attrition trap where Iran and its allies, through asymmetric actions, would weaken Washington’s defensive architecture.

​To understand how the United States fell into this trap, however, one must look at the essence of Iran’s grand strategic goal: to place Washington in a dilemma where it would either go bankrupt by staying in and lose, or leave the theater completely, humiliated but financially, though weaker, intact. This strategy was based on a dual track of economic and military attrition where the intertwined relationship of the two would not only ensure the collapse of American hegemony in the region but also shift the regional balance of power from the American-Israeli-Arab alignment directly towards the Asian-Islamic power.

​In the case of economic attrition, the strategy began with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, where the maritime blockade would paralyze the world’s most critical energy chokepoint. The shockwaves, including spiking oil prices and exploding war risk insurance premiums that effectively halted commercial shipping lanes, rippled instantly across the global markets. Washington quickly found itself in a situation where its mere presence in the waters of the Persian Gulf exacerbated the very economic crisis it was attempting to eliminate.

​To deal with this problem, however, Washington did exactly what Iran had anticipated: it relied on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as a macroeconomic numbing agent to hide the inflation from the public. However, by manipulating the market, Washington severely wounded its own long-term economic security. That is, it was forced to deplete the SPR to an unprecedented, dangerously low level, completely exhausting its domestic insulation while the crisis raged on.

​Yet, controlling the Strait of Hormuz was only one facet of Iran’s long-term strategy. The potential closure of Bab el-Mandeb by the Houthis served as an additional lever, deliberately employed to systematically choke off the remaining regional trade routes. Through this coordinated economic squeeze, Iran inflicted pressure on global markets that the United States could simply not absorb.

​In the case of military attrition, the systematic dismantling of the web began by ​Iran saturating the entire theater with waves of low-cost, mass-produced drones, which forced the American destroyers and Patriot missile arrays to exhaust their multi-million-dollar interceptor stockpiles completely. Weapons that would take years for the United States to manufacture and replace.

​This calculated strategy, however, also served as the exact mechanism to expose the vital organs of America’s network. That is, by continuously striking regional installations, the Iranians were able to tear apart the very fuel needed to sustain American air supremacy.

From striking the “brain” in Qatar to paralyze Central Command to choking the logistical “arms” in Kuwait by destroying critical desalination, power grids, and runways to shattering the “wings” via the runways in Jordan, and to crushing the missile defense “shields” across Saudi Arabia, the Iranians neutralized any major tactical threat from those installations.

This localized collapse, in turn, reduced Washington largely to a total reliance on long-range B-52 bombers flying from distant strategic hubs outside the theater. Yet even though these heavy bombers were able to hit some targets from the sky, they could not compensate for a shattered regional network that was once essential to American air superiority and military hegemony.

Furthermore, as ground support vanished, the bombers themselves faced extreme operational risks without a secure regional safety net. Therefore, Washington’s distant airstrikes provided only a fleeting, temporary impact before being forced to shift the burden of defense out to the sea, effectively setting the stage for the next and most likely final phase of the military conflict: the inescapable naval warfare.

Long recognized as the undisputed master of global blue-water dominance, the United States finds its position challenged for the first time. ​Stranded in the confined waters of the Persian Gulf without fuel or a secure land lifeline, the fleet is effectively immobilized in a box of Iran’s choosing as it executes a highly coordinated dual strategy to dismantle the American naval power both beneath the surface and upon it.

Beneath the surface, the tactical imbalance is striking. While the United States might rotate only a half-dozen or so submarines through the broader region, Iran commands an asymmetric fleet of dozens of purpose-built coastal and midget submarines, such as the Ghadir, and Fateh classes, engineered for shallow, narrow waters of the Gulf.

In addition, Iran operates subsurface weaponry, like the high-speed Hoot supercavitating torpedoes, which in turn creates a lethal underwater perimeter that neutralizes traditional American defenses.

For Washington, this underwater saturation directly compounds the vulnerabilities waiting on the surface where American warships face strict limitations, particularly the finite interceptor magazines. That is, because these ships rely on defensive missiles that cannot be replenished at sea without secure land bases, a continuous series of attacks rapidly depletes both their defensive and offensive capabilities. Furthermore, because the American Navy platforms, particularly its crown jewels, the USS Abraham Lincoln and Gerald Ford, are massive 20^th-century ships not designed for shallow green-waters of the Persian Gulf, their greatest assets become their ultimate vulnerability.

​A single strategic strike to a flight deck, delivered by Iran’s advanced surface-strike arsenal, including Khalij Fars anti-ship ballistic missiles and low-flying Qader cruise missiles, for example, can instantly paralyze the carrier’s entire launch-and-recovery system.

It is this simultaneous combination of underwater saturation and surface-level vulnerability that turns the multi-billion-dollar carrier into an ineffective floating platform, transforming America’s mismatch blue-water dominance into an inescapable naval defeat.

Ultimately, this maritime trap is far more than a tactical defeat for a stranded strike group. It is a structural collapse of American power projection in the Middle East. By systematically dismantling regional networks and turning the Persian Gulf into an asymmetric bottleneck, Iran has broken the foundational formula of Washington’s unchallengeable hegemony.

Thus, as the conflict shifts from paralyzed ground installations to a trapped sea, the balance of power irreversibly changes, closing a historic chapter and leaving American strategy adrift in waters it can no longer control.

If the collapse of American military dominance across the Middle East marked a major tactical retreat, the economic fallout has proved far more devastating. While Washington has stayed focused on daily territorial exchanges, the real crisis has materialized through the rapid financial exhaustion of the United States.

​This exhaustion is partially driven by a massive daily burn rate estimated at $1.5 billion. Forced to utilize a $2 million missile to intercept a $20,000 missile from Iran, for example, the American economy is finding itself trapped in an unwinnable circular war where the stockpiles are disappearing faster than the industrial base can physically replace them.

To make matters worse, the baseline cost of replacing these munitions has surged significantly since the cost of building new equipment carries a massively inflated price tag. Ensuring every new order has led to further financial hemorrhage.

​​This financial hemorrhage expanded rapidly as the crisis moved into the Strait of Hormuz. By targeting the primary artery of global energy liquidity, Iran successfully choked the transit of oil and commercial goods. As a result, maritime insurance rates surged to unpayable levels, thereby forcing major shipping lines to pull their fleets from the corridor entirely. The few commercial vessels that chose to navigate the waters were hit with a massive premium penalty, which in turn led to millions of additional dollars to the cost of a single voyage.

However, if limiting the ability to transit goods was a major economic dilemma for the U.S. and the world economy, the physical reality of preventing the export of oil to the global market was a catastrophic disaster.

With oil supplies being choked at the source, the Strait of Hormuz, global oil prices skyrocketed, creating a massive inflationary shock that the American domestic economy was not prepared to handle. From rising costs of food to clothing to commercial supplies to everything in between, the United States found itself trapped in an inflationary spiral that immediately broke its economic stability and exposed the deep vulnerability of its debt-driven system.

​To stave off an immediate industrial shock caused by the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, Washington ordered the aggressive depletion of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. However, this emergency mechanism not only failed to permanently stabilize the market, but in reality, it exposed a finite safety net that was running dry. Indicating that Washington’s heavy reliance on the strategic reserve has backfired, thereby leaving the entire system vulnerable to a prolonged blockade.

​However, if the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz is an economic disaster, the potential closure of the Bab-el-Mandeb by the Iranians and their ally, the Houthis, would be a total catastrophe. A threat made strikingly clear by Russian official Dmitry Medvedev, who warned that Western escalation would inevitably drive Tehran to shut down shipping through the Bab-el-Mandeb next, effectively giving Iran a second choke point with leverage comparable to a “nuclear weapon.”

To understand the impact of such a threat, one would only have to look at the global shipping maps. Today, roughly 12% of total global trade and 30% or so of all global container traffic must pass through the Bab-el-Mandeb to reach Western markets. Thus, with the Strait of Hormuz mainly closed, a parallel blockade at the Bab-el-Mandeb would effectively neutralize the Suez Canal, thereby impacting global trade in ways previously unimaginable.

​For Washington, the problem has become even more acute when China decided to apply its own leverage against the United States. From restricting critical rare earth materials to its current retaliatory measures following the U.S. attack on the railroad infrastructure in northern Iran, Beijing has effectively positioned itself to choke the flow of critical goods directly at the source. When combined with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and a compromise at Bab-el-Mandeb, the U.S. has now found itself in a synchronized global supply chain crisis that it is entirely unequipped to handle.

​Yet, despite the catastrophic fallout of these naval blockades, nothing is creating a greater crisis for the United States perhaps than a $39 trillion national debt that has fundamentally consumed the greater part of its fiscal policy.

Today, Washington is spending nearly $1 trillion a year solely to cover the interest on what it owes. A daunting reality for a nation whose reputation as a global safe haven is now being severely tested as international investors increasingly become reluctant to finance America’s unsustainable deficit.

​Ultimately, this catastrophic convergence reveals the true nature of this conflict: a war of economic attrition by Iran to bankrupt the U.S. into submission. For Washington, that strategy has borne fruit, despite its continuous military bombing campaign. From a ballooning national debt to a weakening dollar to high oil prices, just to name a few, Washington can no longer sustain its hegemony in the region, since it simply can no longer afford it.

Under the crushing weight of this compounding crisis, it would appear that Iran’s campaign of asymmetric attrition is achieving exactly what it set out to do.

As the world watches another escalating exchange between the United States and Iran, the region holds its breath. Yet this cat-and-mouse game, despite Washington’s constant projection of military dominance, signals something more permanent: the decline of America as a regional hegemon. For the first time in more than half a century, the United States not only does not dictate the terms but, more importantly, it is being pinned down and dismantled by a heavily sanctioned regional adversary.

To understand how the United States reached this point, one has to look at Iran and its allies, China and Russia’s war of attrition, where Washington fell directly into the trap laid by the trio. By relying on low-cost drones and mass-produced weapons, Iran was able to force the United States to expand the use of its multi-million-dollar, not easily replaced interceptors as a form of defense.

In addition, because the U.S. treated every localized flashpoint as a standalone tactical battle to be won, it routinely exhausted its most sophisticated capabilities just to secure forward bases that had become static liabilities. As a result, not only did Washington actively drain its resources with every military strike, but more importantly, it accelerated its own structural decline since it found itself in a circular motion of continuous response.

​The physical reality of this breakdown was exposed on Wednesday, July 8, and Thursday, July 9, 2026, when the brief ceasefire collapsed, and the United States widened its targeting parameters to civilian infrastructure. In a dual-pronged strike, American cruise missiles hit two distinct railway bridges in northern Iran simultaneously. On Thursday morning, the first strike destroyed the Aq-Tappeh Khan (Ogtay Khan) bridge in northeastern Golestan province.

This specific bridge, which forms a critical junction on the transcontinental rail corridor connecting Iran directly to Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and China, served as Tehran’s vital overland pipeline to bypass the U.S. naval blockade. Simultaneously, the second strike targeted a vital domestic rail bridge located 55 kilometers outside the holy city of Mashhad. This paralyzed passenger networks right as millions of mourners gathered for the funeral ceremony of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

​By targeting this shared transcontinental infrastructure, however, Washington’s military strategy backfired, as it was immediately faced with a material warfare response from Beijing. Within hours of the bridge strikes, Beijing activated its administrative and customs apparatus to transform Washington’s tactical choice into an immediate strategic disaster for its defense industrial base.

​On July 10, 2026, the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs jointly imposed a temporary export prohibition on Helium with immediate effect. Thereby, choking off the primary gas required for temperature control during advanced semiconductor fabrication.

​In addition, because Beijing had already banned the direct export of critical semiconductor and defense materials such as gallium, germanium, and antimony to the United States, it tightened the vise by cutting off the remaining global leakage. Customs authorities at major export gateways like Shanghai and Shenzhen immediately implemented slow-rolling, aggressive end-user screening, and anti-smuggling enforcement, ensuring that no trace of subcomponents or refined rare earth elements could be rerouted to Western defense primes.

With no viable domestic alternatives to bridge the gap, this material bottleneck hit the United States right as it fell into a devastating tactical trap. This became clear over the last three days, when Washington’s continuous attacks on coastal cities like Bandar Abbas and Chabahar, not only failed to yield strategic return but, worse, wasted the resources desperately needed for such a war.

Because Iran’s missile and drone architecture is mostly mobile, Iran has been able to constantly shift its position across the terrain. This, in turn, forced the U.S. to continually bomb mostly empty pads, while at the same time burning through the very interceptors and defense resources it desperately needs to protect its forward lines.

​This material depletion left Washington’s forward positions completely exposed to a massive regional counter-offensive. In a synchronized multi-phase operation, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC, launched heavy missile and drone volleys directly targeting critical U.S. hubs across the region. In Jordan, for example, the strikes targeted, among others, Prince Hassan Air Base, setting fire to vital fuel depots and ammunition storage facilities despite localized air defense interceptions.

​In Kuwait, the Iranians continued their attacks by hammering primary American operating installations such as Ali Al-Salem Air Base, where they heavily damaged critical fuel tanks and active Patriot air defense batteries. They also targeted Ahmed Al-Jaber Air Base, knocking out a strategic FPS radar facility and neutralizing HIMARS, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, that served as Washington’s primary long-range precision strike weapon.

The loss of these primary strike weapons, however, made it clear what was already known in the military theater: the United States was operating on a hollowed-out foundation. From expending almost half of its global THAAD inventory, to losing nearly 40% of its prewar stockpile of Patriot interceptors, to the relocation of its operational command center from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar to South Carolina, it became evident that Washington could no longer sustain its military air superiority.

This air collapse also extended to the naval domain, where the U.S. Navy ordered a total withdrawal of major surface vessels from its historic headquarters at Naval Support Activity Bahrain. However, by moving its fleet from Bahrain, the U.S. inadvertently sailed directly into the teeth of Iran’s advanced underwater strike system. Be it Iran’s Ghadir-class midget submarines, the ultra-fast Hoot torpedoes, Jask-2 cruise missile, or Maham or Sadaf smart-mines, Washington was suddenly forced to confront a massive simultaneous volume of subsurface hits.

Even the deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford, hailed as the pinnacle of twenty-first-century power projection, and repeatedly cycled back into the conflict packed with refreshed missile inventories, could not alter the final calculation. For Washington and its great Armada, one or even two super carriers could not change the mathematical reality of overwhelming, multi-axis sub-saturation threats.

As the daily exchanges between Washington and Tehran continue without reprieve, the United States finds itself in an unsustainable and unwinnable cycle. By exhausting its finite, high-end stockpiles in a localized war of attrition against Iran, Washington has effectively ensured its own military defeat. Furthermore, by trying to isolate Iran militarily, Washington has inadvertently isolated its own military-industrial complex from the very materials it needs to survive. A massive strategic mistake that not only helps Iran but also its ally, China.

In the upcoming conclusion, we will shift focus to the broader maritime arena, analyzing the closure of the Persian Gulf and the possible closing of the Bab al-Mandeb by the Houthis, and the devastating economic impact it has on the global stage.

For decades, the Strait of Hormuz stood as the maritime pillar of American power in the Middle East, with Washington seen as the primary guarantor of economic security for global trade. However, the recent Iranian military and economic response to the American-Israeli-led attack on its soil has fundamentally shattered this role, as Washington can no longer secure the maritime architecture it once claimed to command.

Yet, while the world remains fixed on the fallout within the Persian Gulf, a more permanent collapse of American authority is unfolding across Iraq. One where Washington’s ability to influence internal sociopolitical and economic dynamics is being replaced by the very actors the U.S. needed to sustain its presence in the nation. This is nowhere more apparent than in Baghdad’s Green Zone, where the U.S. presence has been reduced to a localized and increasingly isolated retreat.

​To understand how this collapse was engineered, one must look at the financial infrastructure that once tethered Iraq to Washington. For years, the Iraqi state was forced to circulate its oil wealth through U.S.-monitored correspondent banking channels. The system acted as a financial cage, turning Iraq into a mere administrative arm of the U.S. Treasury and granting Washington the power to track, sanction, or freeze the nation’s revenues at will.

This leverage turned the Iraqi state into a mere administrative arm of the U.S. Treasury, effectively trapping it within a financial cage. It also became an intense source of friction between Iraq ​and Washington as Baghdad’s political elite increasingly chafed under the oversight and began to search for measures that would bypass the system entirely.

The result was the creation of what is now known as the ‘Black Box,’ a sovereign digital framework that would replace the U.S.-managed architecture with a closed, internal settlement grid. Thus, by shifting national capital flows onto this independent, closed-looped ledger, specifically m-Bridge, Baghdad effectively decoupled its economic sovereignty from the dollar-based surveillance system that once enforced its dependency.

​This mechanism was simple yet revolutionary. While the U.S. continued to monitor the nominal price of assets in dollars, the actual movement of value occurred in a parallel, private ledger. By the time Washington attempted to track the funds, the settlement had already been finalized. As a result, the U.S. was left holding only the symbol of power, while the actual movement of capital had transitioned into a closed system that answered only to Baghdad. ​

This shift, in turn, rendered the existing network of officials and fixers, those who had long operated as conduit for American interests, largely obsolete. As Baghdad continued to consolidate its control over this economic grid, it systematically began to dismantle the very infrastructure Washington needed to maintain its power in Iraq.

For the United States, this was not merely economic loss; it was the total collapse of its political and military leverage. By cutting Washington out of the ledger, Baghdad didn’t just reclaim its money; it opened the door for fundamental realignment. That realignment, in turn, cleared the path for Iran, Washington’s arch-rival, and its regional partners to effectively end America’s ability to dictate the political, economic, and military security of Iraq.

The reality of this new alignment became undeniable as the internal dynamics of the Iraqi state transformed. This was perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the sudden shift regarding the Kurdish region, which had long served as the primary anchor for U.S. influence. By tying all regional budget disbursements to the new centralized digital ledger, Baghdad gained the ability to monitor and restrict the flow of funds in real-time. By neutralizing the region’s independent alignment, Baghdad forced fiscal compliance on the Kurdish region that Washington could no longer easily counter or bypass.

​This was not to say that Washington no longer exercised influence within the halls of power, particularly given its persistent military footprint in the Kurdish region. Nonetheless, this financial shift fundamentally weakened Washington’s grip on the political and security sector in Iraq.

Under the leadership of Hamid al-Shatri, the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) Director, for example, Baghdad began an aggressive decoupling operation, moving away from acting as an extension of U.S. intelligence and toward a model of sovereign autonomy. The recalibration of the state’s security posture became evident during the recent internal corruption purge led by Hamid al-Shatri. Through ‘Operation Dawn Strikes,’ the Iraqi security apparatus targeted corruption networks previously considered untouchable. By detaining numerous figures within the Green Zone who had long operated under the U.S.-backed frameworks, al-Shatri signaled that the old order had been discarded and was now obsolete.

Furthermore, by issuing mandates requiring all factions, including those previously labeled illegitimate by Washington, to surrender their weapons to state control, Baghdad effectively transformed these groups into formal elements of the Iraqi security apparatus. Thereby, denying the United States the ability to act against these factions as ‘independent militias.’ Also, by absorbing them into the state, Baghdad ensured that its national security priorities, rather than American demand, dictated the country’s internal order.

For the United States and the region as a whole, this shift, from a security apparatus that functioned as an extension of American oversight to one of sovereign autonomy, became the practical proof that the American era in Iraq had been dismantled.

Ultimately, this new reality was reaffirmed by the decision to hold state funeral processions for the late Supreme Leader through the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. By placing these ceremonies within the sacred geography that has defined Shiite political authority for more than a millennium, Baghdad sent a massive political and theological message: a permanent realignment and total integration of the two states.

It also reconfirmed that Iraq has transitioned from a U.S.-led client into a cornerstone of a new, sovereign-led order. One where the authority to dictate the future of Iraq no longer originates in Washington, but within a regional gravity that has decisively moved on.

I want to start by saying a sincere thank you to all of my subscribers. Whether you have been a long-time subscriber or a new voice in the comments section, I truly appreciate your response and comments.

Many of you have asked if I would ever teach a live class. While I do teach a separate, ongoing course for adults, I have been thinking about how to bring that same interactive experience to this incredible nd lively community.

So, I have decided to open up a few spots for an upcoming six-week seminar on domestic and international affairs.

Please note:

1. This is an interactive class for adults that already includes approximately two dozen participants from various professional backgrounds, including law, military, and intelligence. I am excited to open up fewer than 10 seats specifically for this Substack community to join this ongoing group.

2. We will meet weekly on Tuesdays, from June 30th through August 11th. While the sessions are scheduled for an hour and a half, we may occasionally run a little longer if the conversation is flowing well!

3. I want to be clear about the tone: this is not a “politically correct” class.

   We will be diving into complex domestic and international issues, and I encourage everyone to bring their own perspective, a sense of humor, and a thick skin. So, you can’t and shouldn’t take anything said here personally.

4. Because we have a diverse audience with such different backgrounds, including law, diplomacy, and intelligence, and with most participants being over 40, we will certainly have unique and interesting perspectives.

Details:

· Duration: 6 weeks

· Schedule: Tuesdays, June 30 – August 11

Time: 10:30 am-12: pm

· Cost: $120 for the full course

· Registration:

Since I am only opening a small number of seats from Substack to join this group, they are very limited. If you would like to join, please send your payment of $120 via my secure link here: paypal.me/mitraraheb

Once the payment notification is received, you will receive a Zoom invitation within 24 hours.

I am really looking forward to seeing if this format works for us.

If it goes well, we can certainly look at doing more of these in the future. Thank you again for being part of this, and I hope to see you in class.

Best regards, and thank you again for subscribing and allowing me to express my views.

Dr. Mitra Raheb

Several days ago, the world witnessed an event that would have been dismissed by most Western analysts, particularly those who pushed for the war with Iran, as a strategic impossibility: an unprecedented, direct bilateral memorandum between the United States and Iran. It was a temporary transactional agreement designed to reopen maritime shipping lanes and relieve the immediate economic pressures mounting on both Washington and Tehran.

Yet, this unprecedented memorandum immediately faced fierce bipartisan criticism. From the halls of Congress to the capitals of its regional allies, critics condemned the deal as an official abandonment of American security architecture. A concession that prioritized a short-term survival strategy over a regional order that was, until several days ago, considered non-negotiable.

​Yet, for Washington, the decision to formalize the agreement was not a matter of choice, but rather a response to a strategic reality that made it clear that its regional policy was no longer sustainable: Washington simply lacked the economic or military capabilities to sustain an ongoing conflict.

Economically, the war was costing a billion and a half dollars a day at a time when the government was actively gutting public resources, including funds for education, health, and essential social needs. Furthermore, the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz had triggered a sharp rise in inflation at a time when the U.S. economy was being compounded by a $39 trillion national debt.

​Militarily, the outcome was equally definitive, as the regional bases that once allowed the United States to project power were significantly compromised within the first three weeks of the conflict. By successfully penetrating regional air defense grids and destroying high-value assets, including more than three dozen various aircraft and one-third of the American THAAD systems globally, the Iranians had been able to eliminate the very architecture that guaranteed American hegemony in the region.

​Politically, the damage was even more profound as the United States found itself, for the first time, virtually isolated on the global stage. Decades of military intervention, paired with a glaring double standard in its policy toward Israel, had stripped away American international support and exposed its behavior to global scrutiny.

Yet, this was not merely a loss of diplomatic capital but the total evaporation of the American triad of influence. By failing to secure the regional architecture militarily and proving unable to maintain the economic flow that fueled the status quo, Washington was effectively forced to forfeit its responsibility of defending the very regimes it had long pretended to protect. For the regimes in the region, which had staked their entire existence on the permanence of the American umbrella, finding themselves abandoned to a new, non-Arab-American-Israeli reality, left them exposed to forces they could no longer manage.

​Nowhere was this more precarious than in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and its King, King Abdullah. For decades, the Kingdom functioned as a pro-Western anchor, held together by a sacred, unwritten covenant between the throne and the East Bank tribes, notably the Bani Hassan. A sacred covenant in which the tribes provided the military and domestic muscle to secure the Kingdom, while the monarchy guaranteed their economic protection and tribal status.

​The U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, however, shattered this contract by destroying the two pillars that sustained the relationship between the monarchy and the tribes. By initiating a conflict that drew a massive Iranian response, the king effectively voided his primary responsibility to protect the soil from foreign-provoked chaos. Furthermore, with the Persian Gulf closed and the total halt of financial inflows, the monarchy also broke the economic pillar that sustained its commitment to the tribes. With both security and economic guarantees nullified, the covenant between the King and the tribes was effectively dead.

​Seeing the state’s failure to maintain the covenant that had defined the tribes for more than a millennium, major tribal confederations, specifically the Bani Hassan, Bani Sakher, Howeitat, and Bani Ahmad, took direct, systematic actions designed to enforce the agreement.

They began by controlling the borders, which halted the transit of goods to Saudi Arabia and Israel, restricted access to electricity, water, and other vital utilities, and acted as the eyes and ears for Iranian interests along the Jordanian-Iraqi border. Effectively demonstrating to the King that the Palace’s authority was no longer absolute or accepted.

Consequently, the palace was unable to suppress tribal actions because the state’s security apparatus was not a monolith. Rather, two distinctive entities under the same system. One being, the Special Royal Guard, an elite force of 25,000 traditionally drawn from non-Arab minorities like the Circassians to ensure loyalty to the throne. The other, the Jordan Arab Army, made up of 115,000 soldiers who are the very sons of the tribes challenging the palace.

​With the conventional military and state structure largely neutralized by its own tribal composition, the confederation began to galvanize around Prince Hamzah, King Abdullah’s half-brother and former Crown Prince. Bearing a remarkable resemblance to his father, the adored King Hussain, the tribes saw in Hamza a return to the soil and a restoration of the tribal pact that King Abdullah had squandered.

​This pivot toward a legitimate successor, a direct challenge to the Palace’s fading authority, was strengthened and codified by the recent U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). For the tribes, who had long viewed the American military footprint as a foreign intrusion and a threat to their cultural and political status, the MOU ironically was not necessarily a setback but rather a profound vindication. It proved that King Abdullah had traded internal security for a Western security architecture that Washington had now actively abandoned.

Today, the Palace, once the impenetrable anchor of American influence in the region, is now tethered to a fading patron while attempting to navigate a relationship with a rising hegemon.

Consequently, King Abdullah finds himself standing at the end of an era where the path forward offers very little room for his survival. With both pillars of his rule, the American security umbrella and unequivocal tribal support, no longer in existence, the ultimate geopolitical question is no longer about the durability of the Hashemite throne, but rather, the fate of King Abdullah II himself.

The situation on the ground, however, presents a far more pragmatic reality. The framework under negotiation represents neither a historic triumph nor a sudden alignment of shared strategic goals. Rather, it is a calculated tactical pause driven by a cold, inescapable reality: Washington’s desperate, urgent need to stop its own fiscal hemorrhaging.

​For the United States, the ongoing war with Iran has been an economic catastrophe: a relentless and punishing drain on the American treasury. This bleeding, however, reached a critical point when Tehran weaponized its geographic advantage.

By leveraging the Strait of Hormuz, Tehran was able to engineer a multi-billion-dollar shockwave that devastated not only the American economy but also the world. Through a combination of surging crude oil prices and an inflationary grip on the American domestic market, Iran successfully implemented a war of economic attrition that sapped the United States at a staggering pace of a billion and a half dollars a day. Factoring in a $39 trillion national debt, where the annual interest alone surpassed the entire defense budget, Washington finally hit a wall of pure financial exhaustion, which in turn sent it to the negotiating table out of pure self-preservation.

​The core of this proposed memorandum, however, hinges on a sixty-day ceasefire, a condition designed specifically to reopen maritime shipping lanes and relieve that immense economic pressure. For the U.S., however, this reliance on such a transactional arrangement exposes a permanent fracture in its regional security architecture.

​For decades, American defense strategy in the Middle East relied on a ‘managed outpost model,’ where host nations provided the secure logistics, political compliance, and stable local infrastructure necessary to project American military power.

​That system, however, collapsed with the massive military damage inflicted by Iran on American bases in the region. By successfully penetrating regional air defense grids to cripple advanced assets such as the THAAD and AWACS early-warning systems, the Iranians proved to the host nations that their military hardware provided by the United States could no longer guarantee regional security.

​States such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain, for example, watched the superpower struggle to shield its own hardware, an observation that completely altered their internal stability. In Bahrain, for example, the Shiite majority became the eyes and ears for the resistance. In Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the impact was even more severe when the local tribes actively halted the transit of goods across their lands. Recognizing that the American security umbrella was no longer a reliable guarantee and witnessing Washington prioritize its own survival above all else, the local populace ensured that the American presence was effectively cut off and paralyzed.

​With its regional bases physically paralyzed and its domestic economy bleeding daily, Washington has been forced to navigate Tehran’s non-negotiable demands. From the unfreezing of twenty-four billion dollars in Iranian assets to the comprehensive removal of sanctions to the financial reimbursement for the costs of the war, it has become clear to the United States and the world at large that Iran holds sufficient maritime and military leverage to secure most of its objectives. Tehran, thanks to the war, has emerged as the clear economic and military powerhouse, forcing the superpower to negotiate on its own terms.

​That became clear today when President Trump declared that a deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran was “now complete.” However, the reality is that the deal is not complete, because what currently exists is a finalized memorandum of understanding, and not a settled peace. Yet, even if a formal peace were eventually to be signed, it would not change the fact that Tehran has not only won the conflict but also established a new order.

By damaging the structural pillars that have historically allowed the United States to project power, regional military bases, strategic reputation, and economic hegemony, Iran, backed by its strategic allies, China and Russia, ultimately was able to dictate the terms of the negotiation with a superpower. Demonstrating a feat that very few actors on the global stage possess.

That being said, if the President can finalize this agreement and open up formal negotiations, it would mark the first time in 48 years that an American president has established a direct, bilateral framework with Iran. A historical geopolitical pivot that was forced entirely by the urgent need to salvage the domestic economy, and one that ironically left a dominant Iran with a direct role in determining American security in the region.

Over the past 72 hours, the United States launched a series of high-intensity airstrikes against Iranian targets. The official pretext was retaliation for the downing of an Apache helicopter, an incident that the international intelligence community viewed as a manufactured casus belli, as the details did not add up. Nonetheless, using this as justification, American forces struck radar, air defenses, and civilian infrastructure, including Qeshm Island’s water desalination facilities.

​However, these American strikes, despite their potency, exposed a dark reality: that the United States had already lost the conventional military war in this theater. To understand the sheer magnitude of this reality, one needs only to examine this conflict through the lens of strategic planning.

Historically, any comprehensive campaign relies on land, air, and sea power. In the case of land, Washington has long known that a land invasion is a strategic impossibility due to a lack of manpower, rugged geography, and hostile neighbors. Therefore, the United States was forced to rely exclusively on air and sea supremacy, both of which have collapsed.

​The first sign of this collapse became clear when American land bases across the region were left exposed. This vulnerability was the direct result of a six-week war of attrition where Iranian saturation attacks successfully dismantled American advanced defense networks. By targeting and destroying multiple THAAD installations, E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft, and critical early-warning radars in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the Iranians effectively stripped away the bases’ protective umbrella. Without these sensors, the remaining bases were left structurally blind and defenseless against the subsequent barrages.

​Over the past four days, that blindness proved fatal. Constant Iranian retaliatory barrages pulverized installations that the US could no longer protect. The Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, for example, was isolated by kinetic strikes and an increasingly hostile local population, while critical airpower at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan was rendered mostly non-operational. All indicating once again that the U.S.’s ability to sustain its power via its regional bases was no longer possible.

​The other critical sign of American systemic collapse, however, was the total disintegration of regional socio-political architecture. For decades, the U.S. footprint relied on an “spider web” of compliant monarchies and pacified tribal networks. Today, that web is broken as indigenous tribes, particularly in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have risen against their Western-aligned rulers and are working in tandem with the Axis of Resistance.

​At Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, for example, non-cooperative tribes now control the roads, water, and supply lines, creating a silent blockade. Concurrently, the Jordanian-Iraqi border is entirely porous, used by Iraqi resistance factions with the assistance of sympathetic border tribes. The US didn’t just lose the airspace; it lost the ground.

With Gulf and Jordanian runways damaged or blocked, the U.S., out of desperation, has been forced to shift most of its air operational hub to Israel and the Eastern Mediterranean. The shift, however, has failed to resolve the underlying crisis because not only does Israel lack the massive infrastructure of the bases, but due to its distance, it is just as vulnerable to saturation strikes as the ones that fell to the bases.

​For Washington, the current reality confirms a bitter truth; in that, the era of projecting power through regional land bases has ended. This was clear when, yesterday, as part of its strikes on Iran, the U.S. relied heavily on sea-and submarine-launched cruise missiles. By burning through these finite inventories of stand-off munitions to compensate for the loss of land-based air power, the U.S. has openly admitted that its regional networks were no longer functional enough to sustain conventional air campaigns.

​With land-based power neutralized, the sea has become Washington’s final option. Yet, the reliance on naval power has led the United States directly into a geographic trap. A trap defined by a ruthless math of attrition where the U.S. Navy’s traditional advantage in scale and technology has become a disadvantage. The USS Abraham Lincoln, for example, may be a multi-billion-dollar technical triumph designed to dominate the vast, open oceans, but in the narrow, restricted waters of the Persian Gulf, its size makes it an easy target for low-cost missiles and swarming drones.

It is this vulnerability that sits at the cornerstone of Iran’s naval doctrine. It is a doctrine not built to sink every U.S. vessel, but to force a confrontation that Washington cannot afford to maintain. For every billion-dollar U.S. asset deployed, for instance, Iran can flood the zone with hundreds of mass-produced, low-cost submarines, swarm drones, and anti-ship missiles that effectively constrain American maneuverability

This, in turn, has forced the U.S. Navy into a high-tempo defensive posture, where the cost of sustaining power projection in the Gulf is now dwarfing the mission’s original intent.

The recent, desperate scrambling of P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft to hunt for a hidden underwater threat is evidence that the U.S. Navy has lost the luxury of commanding these waters. By forcing Washington to burn through its most sophisticated sensors and limited operational hours just to react to ubiquitous, inexpensive threats, Iran has fundamentally altered the strategic landscape. In other words, by applying the same method to the sea that it applied to erode U.S. air dominance, Iran is forcing the U.S. into a war of attrition that the U.S. is not designed to win.

​​For the U.S., the loss of its air and naval supremacy implies that it is trapped in an unwinnable situation. Washington’s recent threats to seize Kharg Islands from Iran illustrate this point perfectly. Rather than a sign of strength, this threat is a glaring admission of a disastrous gamble: by attempting to achieve a ‘decisive’ victory to escape the grind, Washington is handing Iran a perfect way to keep the grind going indefinitely. By moving the U.S. from a contained naval struggle into a static, ground-based quagmire, Ian ensures that the U.S. presence remains mathematically unsustainable.

​Ultimately, for the U.S., its era of unquestioned power projection is closed. It must now decide whether to persist in a theater where it can no longer dictate the terms of engagement, or accept the cost of maintaining a global order that has finally outpaced its capacity to pay. The math in the Middle East is no longer on the side of the superpower; it belongs to the one who can endure the longest.

​Financially, the current military posture is devastating. The United States is spending nearly $1 trillion a year on defense while paying $970 billion in annual interest on the national debt; a combined expenditure that hollows out the federal budget and preempts all other national priorities.

For the U.S., this trajectory is simply unsustainable. Unlike the post-9/11 era, when the U.S. could borrow heavily to fund its war in Iraq and Afghanistan, often relying on foreign creditors like China to finance those ambitions, the current fiscal environment has fundamentally shifted.

Today, following more than two decades of American military ventures, the global appetite for U.S. debt has evaporated and has been replaced by a strategic preference for alternatives to the dollar. Consequently, the United States no longer possesses the luxury of borrowing at scale without risking its currency or eroding its global creditworthiness.

Yet, the United States, driven by long-standing political and military aspirations, continues to fund a massive global footprint that its economy, in many ways, can no longer sustain. Furthermore, because it refuses to accept the current military and economic realities on the ground, the U.S. is forced to cannibalize its own resources to maintain these legacy commitments. As a result, the U.S. is effectively hollowing out its future for the present that it has already lost.

For the United States, this economic attrition has bled into the domestic political sphere, where the significant majority of Americans, tired of decades of military ventures and declining economic conditions, are demanding an end to the war with Iran and America’s exit from the region. This pervasive discontent has, in turn, triggered a deepening political crisis, as the administration insists on maintaining a regional strategy that stands in direct opposition to the will of the electorate. For the administration, as economic conditions worsen, the domestic rift will only widen, thereby creating an unsustainable environment where its refusal to pivot only intensifies the public backlash that will ultimately force an American exit from the region.

Beyond this domestic instability, the strategic foundation of American global authority will also erode significantly. The credibility of the United States, already under massive strain, will face deeper damage as the cost of failing regional strategy is passed onto allies. This became clear recently when Germany’s recent bid for the rotating seat on the UN Security Council was rejected. A development that would have been unthinkable in the post-WWII era, or even just five years ago.

For the world, this rejection was not merely a diplomatic shuffle; it was a targeted rebuke of Germany’s unwavering and increasingly isolated support for U.S. regional policies. By forcing its allies to share in the diplomatic fallout of this failing strategy, Washington has ensured that its partners are punished alongside it, and Washington’s clinging to an outdated hegemonic model is leaving the entire Western bloc increasingly isolated.

​Today, Washington finds itself shouting into a void where its historical weight no longer commands the same gravity, forcing the establishment to confront a reality: it must either adapt to a multipolar environment or accept an accelerated, and potentially irreversible, decline in global standing.

​If Washington continues to ignore these realities, the transition will not be managed; it will be forced. History shows that empires that fail to recognize their limits do not get to choose their exit. By refusing to initiate a controlled transition, Washington risks transforming a manageable strategic realignment into a total loss of the economic and geopolitical autonomy it seeks to preserve. The final tragedy is not the loss of a region, but the loss of the ability to dictate an economic future because the focus remained on fighting a war that had already been lost.

Part 1 of a two-part series on the structural end of American and Western hegemony.

As the world watches ceasefire negotiations stall once again and waits with bated breath for renewed talks between the United States and Iran, Washington finds itself in a no-exit scenario driven by the decline of its regional leverage. This erosion of power in the region has left the United States trapped in a strategic deadlock in which every choice will exact a severe price. That is, if Washington decides to stay, it faces a slow, grinding bankruptcy. If, on the other hand, it decides to leave, it risks destroying the complex yet fragile network of influences that has sustained its power for over a century.

​The question becomes, how did Washington trap itself in such a situation? How did the great American empire find itself in a no-win scenario where it is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t? That question can be partially answered by examining an outdated strategic mindset deeply rooted in a post-World War II mentality.

For decades, the American political establishment operated under the illusion that conventional military superiority automatically translated into geopolitical control. A fallacy laid bare when the overwhelming air and military power in Libya and Iraq failed to secure stable political outcomes.

By carrying the same mindset into its current standoff with Iran, Washington assumed its presence would always guarantee regional dominance. Instead, that persistence transformed what were once seen as symbols of strength, exposed forward bases and naval assets, into major liabilities. These forces now sit largely isolated, serving as static, easily tracked targets for an adversary that has mastered modern containment.

​In addition to its outdated mindset, America’s inability to grasp the mechanics of the modern war of attrition also led to this chaotic no-win scenario. Nowhere was this more evident than when Iran masterfully weaponized the concept of attrition by deploying swarms of mass-produced, low-cost drones and missiles that significantly damaged exposed regional bases and forced Washington to respond with multi-million-dollar interceptors. By “pitting” cheap munitions against expensive American defense systems, Tehran engineered a ruinous military and financial ratio where the United States spent two million dollars for every twenty thousand dollars spent by Iran.

The impact of this strategy, however, wasn’t strictly military; it was also economic. By blocking the Straits of Hormuz, Iran was able to disrupt the very entities, specifically the flow of oil and global trade, that directly dictated America’s domestic conditions. For the United States, already burdened with a $39 trillion debt, adding these severe financial pressures meant Washington would find it very costly to stay in the region.

Faced with this stark reality, where Iran’s war of attrition has become both economically and strategically unviable, the question for the United States is no longer how to win, but how to execute a strategic realignment that preserves its core strength. Though difficult to achieve, Washington could succeed if it follows three necessary vital steps.

The first step, though a severe blow to Washington’s imperial prestige, demands a radical strategic retrenchment. This option would require pulling American forces back from exposed, vulnerable forward outposts and lily pads across the region.

For decades, these small, isolated positions were treated as a symbol of American power and regional commitment. In a modern war of attrition, however, they ceased to be strategic assets and became largely static, defenseless targets that served only as liabilities, thereby inviting perpetual attacks that Washington could no longer afford to defend or ignore. By withdrawing from these outposts, Washington removes the physical bait that an adversary, such as Iran, can use to force the United States into a continuous, costly defensive engagement.

The second step requires an immediate abandonment of the mindset rooted in the air superiority fallacy. For too long, Washington operated under the convenient belief that absolute command of the skies was the ultimate arbiter of political stability. This conviction was tested in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where, despite absolute air superiority, the U.S. failed to stabilize either nation or secure a lasting political outcome.

For Washington, these past failures, combined with Iran’s current strategy of missile attrition, make it clear that conventional air power and a heavy bombing campaign can no longer force the regional outcome Washington desires. Furthermore, this reliance on air superiority becomes a critical strategic liability when considering that critical interceptor inventories cannot be replenished before 2029.

For the United States, however, if the first two steps are difficult, the third is the most vital, and arguably the most unpopular. To sustain a viable regional presence, the United States must either seek a comprehensive, strategic, and realistic accommodation with Iran, including the dismantling of economic sanctions, the cessation of maritime blockades, and the release of Iranian funds, or accept the necessity of a total military exit from the region.

In short, the U.S. must either strike a deal with Iran where it accepts the Iranian regional dominance in exchange for a continued, limited American presence or admit it no longer has the power to dictate terms and thus begin a full, managed withdrawal from the region.

There is no middle ground. Attempting to maintain the status quo, ignoring Iranian concerns while clinging to outdated hegemonic attitudes, is a structural dead-end that will ultimately force a total American expulsion from the Middle East.

Ultimately, Washington can no longer rely on an outdated post-World War II playbook to project power in an evolving global order. As history has repeatedly shown, clinging to a broken imperial model guarantees defeat for any power.

In the subsequent installment of this series, the article will examine the exact cost of this denial, detailing the geopolitical fallout and the domestic economic crisis that will follow if the United States refuses to accept this strategic shift.