On February 28, “Operation Epic Fury” brought war to Tehran’s doorstep. With Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reportedly killed and Iran striking back with missiles and drones against Israel and U.S. bases, the Middle East hurtled toward conflagration.
Beneath the Trump administration’s stated commitment to “national security” and “strategic competition” lies a more complex approach: the reconfiguration of both Middle Eastern geopolitics and the global balance of power. The operation that removed Venezuela’s president in January and the strikes now raining down on Tehran are not random interventions. They are expressions of a multilayered path.
Washington’s Multidimensional Play Against Beijing
The unlawful capture of President Nicolás Maduro on January 3 was underpinned by a clear geostrategic calculus: securing direct access to Venezuela’s vast energy reserves, which constitute roughly 17 per cent of the world’s proven oil. A bilateral deal concluded just four days later, committing $2 billion in Venezuelan oil exports to the United States, effectively sought to reorient these resources away from China and dismantle the preferential pricing Beijing has long enjoyed.
The attack on Iran is not only a regional security operation; it should also be read as a multidimensional strategy that was planned in the context of global energy markets and major-power rivalry. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical energy artery, carrying roughly 20 per cent of the oil and liquefied gas that flows out of the Persian Gulf, with a large portion of this supply moving directly to Asian markets, especially China. As the conflict escalated, Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, or the possibility of disrupting shipments, pushed prices sharply higher in global energy markets and intensified fears over supply. Brent crude rose by more than 13 per cent and climbed to monthly highs.
This supply shock generates two critical strategic vulnerabilities for China. First, Iran, a leading producer possessing significant energy reserves, has long served as a cornerstone of Beijing’s low-cost oil supply chain. With approximately 1.6 million barrels exported daily, the vast majority destined for China, this vital conduit now confronts profound uncertainty. Second, any disruption to the Strait of Hormuz, whether through outright closure or sustained shipping delays, would directly undermine China’s energy security architecture, which has historically depended upon the uninterrupted flow of oil sustained by regional stability.
Washington is moving with full awareness of this dynamic: it seeks to pressure Beijing’s energy diversification strategy and to make China’s global economic stability more fragile by applying pressure on Iran’s energy lines and on global supply corridors. In this way, the United States aims to increase its capacity to use China’s energy security as a lever, while also constraining China’s strategic flexibility through the economic uncertainty that market fragility produces. In other words, the U.S. defence and foreign policy move on Iran involves not only Tehran’s nuclear capacity but also a direct intervention into the mechanics of China’s energy supply.
The Theopolitical Drivers of U.S.-Israel Strategic Alignment
However, any assessment of U.S. strategic calculus remains incomplete without accounting for the domestic and ideological dimensions shaping Washington’s posture in the Middle East. While securing energy supply lines and intensifying strategic competition with China offer rationalist justifications intelligible to policymakers, they do not fully explain the depth of U.S. alignment with Israeli military objectives, nor the conspicuous public discourse surrounding the Epstein documents. Beneath the surface of realpolitik lies a more structural dynamic: the convergence of a captured foreign policy apparatus in Washington with Israel’s long-standing historical and theological project of territorial expansion. In this reading, the United States functions not merely as an ally, but as an enabler of a vision whose drivers transcend conventional strategic logic.
Defining Israel’s current military theatre only as a “security” or “defence” corridor means ignoring a structural transformation in modern Israeli politics. The current strategy has evolved into a paradigm of “construction” rather than a reactive defence, and this paradigm involves redefined borders grounded in theopolitical references. In this framework, the ultimate goal of operations is not only the elimination of threats; it is also the gradual realisation of a geographic vision that entered the literature as “Arz-ı Mev’ud” (the Promised Lands).
Modern Israeli politics is acting through an expansionist drive that rests on “theological determinism,” rather than through secular security concerns. This reflects not so much a rational state strategy as the military forcing of a historical mission. The radical right, represented by figures such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir in Netanyahu’s cabinet, defends goals such as the annexation of the West Bank and the reopening of Gaza for resettlement not as “security needs” but as religious necessities. The “Greater Israel” (Eretz Yisrael) vision grafts mythological borders that run from the Nile to the Euphrates onto modern state policy, and this move turns the liquidation of all centres of resistance in the region, including Iran and its allies, into more than a strategic requirement. It becomes a theological “cleansing” stage. Therefore, the attacks on Iran function as a geopolitical move that represents the outermost ring of this doctrinal construction.
The unlimited support that the United States provides to this theopolitical expansion strategy is directly linked to the structural continuity of the “Neocon” doctrine in Washington. The “Greater Middle East Project,” presented during the George W. Bush era under the guise of “exporting democracy,” continues to view the region as a static arena in which American hegemony is reinforced through military interventions rather than through rational balances of power.
Corridors of Power
Beyond such a shared geopolitical project, the visible face of this unwavering support for Israel in American politics is a chain of financial dependency. More than $260 billion in aid transferred to Israel since World War II demonstrates that this state has been turned into an inseparable component of U.S. strategic doctrine. Lobbies such as AIPAC, JFNA, and ADL acted not only as financial actors during the 2024 election cycle but also as gatekeepers of political life.
AIPAC’s donations exceeded $50 million in 2024, and 361 out of 365 candidates it supported won, providing numerical evidence of American democracy’s submission to lobbying interests. This financial pressure leads to the marginalisation of every voice in Congress that criticises Israel and causes such criticism to be labelled as “political suicide”. The “revolving door” mechanism, formed when figures such as former CIA Director James Woolsey or former Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta took positions in pro-Israel think tanks after leaving office, has institutionally embedded loyalty within the American security bureaucracy.
The Politics of Blackmail
While lobbying persuades, a far darker mechanism, the politics of blackmail, produces “obedience.” The concept of “The Sovereignty of Blackmail” offers the most critical answer to why Washington acts against rational state interests today. The return of the Jeffrey Epstein file to the global agenda through a Netflix documentary in 2024 was not an ordinary media success; it was a “reminder” operation aimed at Washington’s decision-making mechanisms. The appearance of names such as Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Ehud Barak side by side in the documents strengthens claims that Epstein was not only a criminal but also an operator of an “intelligence honeytrap.” The claims from former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe regarding Mossad links to Epstein and to Robert Maxwell suggest that this dark archive was designed to “control” global leaders through blackmail.
The Biden administration entered office pledging a strategic “Pivot to Asia,” yet found itself rapidly ensnared in military operations against Yemen’s mountainous terrain. Coincidence, or the logical outcome of a foreign policy held hostage; its strategic autonomy compromised by the Epstein kompromat archive and subordinated to Israel’s expansionist priorities?
The Hidden Architecture Behind the Iran Strike
Every missile fired toward Iran today functions as a smoke screen that covers dark secrets that remain hidden in Washington’s corridors. Two years later, after the U.S. Department of Justice released more than three million documents to the public at the beginning of 2026, the Epstein file initiated a new period in which Western elites, politicians, and global power mechanisms returned to public debate, far beyond the boundaries of an ordinary criminal case. Once the names in the files are considered, it becomes impossible for decision-makers in critical roles within the U.S. system to refuse the demands of blackmail actors. In other words, Washington’s operation against Iran is not only a strategic necessity that must be carried out for some frameworks; it is also the outcome of a diplomacy that has been taken hostage.
In the end, the military escalation in Iran’s skies today is not only the latest link in a chain of regional conflict; it is a stress test that shows how 21st-century power politics works. The role that Washington has assumed in this operation points to a multilayered decision architecture that intertwines global energy competition, a strategy to contain China, domestic political pressures, and alliance commitments. Within this architecture, military intervention appears to have become less a choice and more a systemic reflex. Yet the cost of this reflex will not remain limited to Iran or the Middle East; it has the potential to affect a wide range, from global energy markets to the credibility of the dollar, and from U.S. diplomatic legitimacy to the international legal order.
If a superpower begins to produce foreign policy not through strategic calculations but at the intersection of alliance dependencies, domestic political pressures, and unseen influence networks, it not only weakens its rivals; it also makes its own system fragile. Historical examples show that empires often collapse not because of external enemies but because of directional deviations generated by their internal mechanisms. This is the risk Washington faces today: the Iran operation may deliver short-term deterrence, yet it can erode the normative superiority that sustains U.S. global leadership in the long term.
The question is no longer about oil, Iranian enrichment or Israeli deterrence. It is about the soul of American statecraft. If foreign policy is forged not in the light of strategic debate but in the shadows of compromised networks, then every bomb dropped is also a blow to the legitimacy of the global architecture. The Iran confrontation is therefore not a conventional conflict. It is a diagnostic—a test of whether Washington can still act with independent strategic reason, or has become the executor of a will not its own.
