How Iran war may accelerate the fall of US empire

For more than two decades, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been circling a single horizon.

He has warned about it, lobbied for it, and dramatised it at podiums from Washington to the United Nations. Now it is here.

The war he long argued was inevitable has arrived: a direct clash with Iran, carried not by Israel alone, but by the full military weight of the United States.

This is neither a limited strike nor a calibrated show of force. It is the most dangerous and reckless confrontation of its kind; a war not born of American necessity, not compelled by imminent threat, not sanctioned by Congress or the United Nations, but driven by an Israeli vision of regional remaking.

For years, Netanyahu and his circle have spoken openly of reshaping the Middle East. In their imagination, borders are not fixed. The region is a chessboard to be rearranged according to Israel’s strategic and ideological desires.

The language of “Greater Israel” has crept from the fringes into mainstream political discourse. Israeli officials – and many American voices echoing them – speak unabashedly of confronting “Shia extremism” today and “Sunni extremism” tomorrow, as if the entire Muslim world were merely a sequence of targets awaiting their turn.

And now, with US firepower behind him, Netanyahu believes history can be forced.

Same old script

We are told this war is about missiles, nuclear bombs and American national security. US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeat the talking points with rehearsed certainty: Iran is on the verge, Iran is a threat, Iran must be stopped.

We have heard this before. We heard it from former US President George W Bush and his British counterpart, Tony Blair, about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”. We watched as Iraq was invaded, destroyed and fractured – only to discover that the central pretext for war was a fabrication.

The consequences were not theoretical. They were measured in hundreds of thousands of lives, regional chaos, and a permanent stain on western credibility.

Now the script has been dusted off and repurposed. Negotiating in Oman and Geneva, Iran signalled flexibility: a readiness to lower uranium enrichment and accept comprehensive oversight. There was space for de-escalation.

Instead, negotiations became theatre. While diplomats spoke of compromise, fleets moved quietly through the Indian Ocean and Gulf waters. Mobilisation unfolded under the cover of dialogue. The choreography was familiar: talk peace, prepare war.

Then came the strike: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei assassinated, political and military leaders targeted, sovereign territory bombed, cities shaken. And yet, in the dominant western narrative, Iran is cast as the aggressor.

For decades, Israel has cultivated the image of military invincibility, a state that repeatedly defeated Arab armies in conventional war. But the historical record tells a far more complicated story.

Fighting alone

In 1948, the so-called Arab coalition was neither unified nor sovereign in any meaningful sense. Much of the Arab world was still emerging from direct European colonial rule.

The same British Empire that had administered Palestine had trained, armed and effectively commanded Transjordan’s Arab Legion. Its commander was a British officer, Glubb Pasha. The most capable Arab army in the field was not operating under an independent, unified Arab command structure.

King Abdullah of Jordan was focused less on defending Palestine in its entirety than on securing control over the West Bank. His political calculations shaped the limits of engagement.

Jordan’s army was constrained and redirected even while holding ground against Zionist forces, its battlefield momentum subordinated to territorial ambition, rather than deployed in a coordinated Arab strategy.

Egypt’s performance in 1948 was shaped by dysfunction at the highest levels. Under King Farouk, the Egyptian army entered the war poorly prepared, with confused command structures and inadequate coordination.

The infamous “defective weapons” scandal later rocked Cairo, with allegations that soldiers had been supplied with faulty ammunition and unusable arms – a controversy that fuelled public outrage and helped pave the way for the Free Officers’ coup in 1952.

Meanwhile, Palestinian fighters faced an even harsher reality. Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, leading irregular forces around Jerusalem, pleaded repeatedly for weapons and reinforcements that never arrived. Before the Battle of al-Qastal in April 1948, he sent urgent appeals for ammunition.

Two days before his death, he wrote to the secretary general of the Arab League: “I hold you responsible after you have left my soldiers at the height of their victories without support or weapons.”

He and his men fought to the last bullet. He was killed in combat. His forces were not backed by a unified Arab command; they were fighting largely alone.

Israeli myth

There was no coordinated, sovereign, unified Arab conventional war machine in 1948. There were fragmented states, rival monarchies, colonial entanglements, competing ambitions, and uneven military capacity.

Israel did not defeat a cohesive pan-Arab army. It emerged in an Arab world still under the shadow – and often the direct influence – of European colonial power structures, while benefitting from superior organisation and international support.

The myth of having “defeated the Arab armies” was later polished into a national legend.

In 1967, Israel’s decisive advantage came from a pre-emptive air strike that destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground within hours. Once air supremacy was secured, the outcome was largely predetermined. It was not a prolonged, balanced clash between evenly matched armies; it was a paralysing blow delivered before full conventional engagement could unfold.

The 1973 war complicates the myth further. In October of that year, the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal, breached the Bar Lev Line, and advanced into Sinai, in a surprise offensive that stunned the Israeli command and punctured the aura of invincibility established in 1967.

For the first time since Israel’s founding, an Arab army demonstrated planning, coordination, and battlefield competence on a scale that forced Israel onto the defensive. Yet the military momentum was not converted into a strategic transformation.

A massive American airlift replenished Israeli losses and stabilised its position, altering the balance once more. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, eager to pivot towards Washington and secure a political settlement, moved quickly into negotiations.

What began as a military shock evolved into a diplomatic realignment, culminating in the Camp David Accords.

Shared pattern

Since then, Israel’s principal confrontations have been with non-state actors. In Lebanon, it faced Hezbollah and was forced to withdraw.

In Gaza, despite immense US backing and overwhelming firepower, it has not eliminated Hamas. Hostages were recovered through negotiated deals, not decisive battlefield annihilation.

Israel has grown accustomed to aerial bombardment against fragmented opponents, not sustained, attritional warfare against a large, organised army backed by unified political leadership.

The US shares this pattern. In 2003, Iraq was already crippled, hollowed out by years of sanctions; its military was degraded, its infrastructure was battered, and its society was exhausted. Afghanistan pitted American forces against insurgents. Libya, Somalia and Syria involved fragmented theatres and fractured actors.

Washington grew comfortable fighting weakened regimes or decentralised movements. Its playbook became familiar: rapid intervention, overwhelming force, and declaration of victory.

This is different. For the first time in decades, Israel and the US are confronting a properly organised military force, fully integrated within a political system capable of continuity and regeneration. Iran is not Iraq in 2003. It is not Afghanistan in 2001.

It possesses geographic depth, demographic weight, entrenched military institutions, and one of the region’s largest missile arsenals. It has invested decades into domestic weapons industries, drone technology and defensive infrastructure – all under sanctions meant to suffocate it.

Iran is the product of a revolution forged in profound anti-colonial sentiment: nationalist and ideological, fiercely independent. It overthrew a western-backed monarch. It has spent decades building autonomy under siege. It manufactures its own weapons. It forges its own alliances.

To dismiss its leadership casually as “the mullahs” is not analysis; it is a shallow caricature, emblematic of a broader American tendency to underestimate societies it does not understand.

Rhetoric and reality

That caricature was on display at the Pentagon news conference where Hegseth described the Iranian regime as “crazy” and “hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions”. Rubio, meanwhile, declared that Iran is led by “radical clerics” who make decisions not on geopolitics but on “apocalyptic” theology.

This is from an administration aligned with Christian Zionists and a far-right Israeli government steeped in biblical entitlement; one whose ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, routinely invokes scripture and divine promise as grounds for territorial claims.

But beyond the rhetoric lies a more consequential reality: Iran isn’t merely fighting Israel. It is confronting the entire American system of power in the region: the patron, the supplier, and the guarantor of Israeli dominance.

Tehran does not see Israel as an isolated adversary, but as the most fortified node in a broader structure of US hegemony. The line of force does not stop at Tel Aviv; it leads straight to the network of American bases that sustain Washington’s military reach, from Bahrain to Kuwait, the UAE, Iraq, and beyond.

This is no accidental escalation. Iran’s retaliation has deliberately targeted US assets and Gulf states hosting American forces, signalling that Tehran understands its enemy not as a single army, but as a global strategic system anchored in American logistical and military supremacy.

Iran is not engaged in a mirror-image conventional war. It is executing an asymmetric strategy: threatening Gulf infrastructure, energy flows, and strategic sea lanes that underpin global capitalism and the US-led financial order, particularly the petro-dollar system that fuels Wall Street and Washington alike.

Should the Gulf destabilise, the ripple effects would extend into energy and currency markets, and the financial architecture upon which American power depends.

Washington’s Suez

This may yet prove to be Washington’s most perilous adventure, undertaken by one of its most reckless presidents.

It may not lead to the birth of a new Middle East in Israel’s image. It may instead follow a far more familiar pattern: the classic story of a superpower overreaching.

Empires at the height of their confidence begin to believe their own mythology. They mistake military superiority for strategic wisdom. They convince themselves that force can reorder history.

But empires rarely fall because they are weak. They falter because they overestimate their strength. They fall not from a scarcity of power, but from an excess of confidence – from hubris.

Britain learned this lesson in 1956. Convinced of its enduring authority, certain it could still dictate events beyond its shores, London embarked on the Suez adventure: a display of force meant to discipline a defiant regional actor and restore imperial prestige.

Instead, it revealed the limits of British power. Financial pressure mounted. International opposition hardened. The illusion of control dissolved. What was intended as a show of strength became the start of a strategic retreat.

Suez did not end the British Empire overnight. But it exposed something fatal: that military capability without political legitimacy and force without restraint accelerate decline rather than prevent it.

History rarely repeats itself in detail. But it does repeat its logic.

Iran may yet prove to be Washington’s Suez.