The Geopolitical Paradox of the Gulf War

A crucial misunderstanding of the current Middle East crisis is the belief that the US is "failing" because its military is overextended. And in this sense, both the symbolic and the material military picture for the US is deteriorating. At the same time, energy consolidation is happening, as well. The military depletion and energy consolidation are happening through each other.

The war itself is the instrument.

The US ruling strata’s strategy is fragmenting competitors' energy sovereignty, deepening allied dependency, and extracting monopoly rents from engineered scarcity. (On a broader level, weakening BRICS connectivity, and Iran, itself is another goal without a doubt.)

European Capture is unfolding in real-time now: With Qatari LNG under force majeure and Russian gas banned, Europe is structurally locked into expensive US LNG. The $750 billion energy purchasing agreement Europe recently signed means continued subordination. A deindustrialized Europe, hollowed out and entirely dependent on American energy, is a much more compliant vassal than a prosperous Europe with cheap pipeline gas. The potential rival order of Eurasia through a cooperation between Europe and Russia is out of the way.

The US energy weapon works on allies and adversaries simultaneously, just through different mechanisms: forced dependency for allies (Europe), forced deprivation for adversaries (China, Russia, Iran), and pricing out the Global South.

But how does a state justify degrading its own military and economy to achieve this?

To understand it, you have to separate the US as a territory from the US as a class structure.

Iran’s military resistance, closing the Strait of Hormuz, hitting bases, demonstrating air defense superiority, is precisely what creates the global energy disruption that US LNG and defense monopolies need to lock in these new dependency structures. The US doesn't need to "win" the war in the conventional sense. They just need the chaos to persist long enough to lock in the contracts. (Not to say that Iran capitulating would make anything better in any way.)

The US military as a forward-deployed force is being degraded. But the US rentier class, energy companies, and defense contractors are extracting maximum profit from this temporal window. Stock are surging while Marines take casualties. They are the exact same fact viewed from different positions in the class structure.

The war is the instrument through which the strategy (fragmenting competitors' energy sovereignty, deepening allied dependency, and extracting monopoly rents from engineered scarcity) is executed.

At the end, the temporal window of consolidation enriches the US ruling strata while depleting the state's material capacity, which is itself a form of the self-defeating logic.

(I’m currently working on a larger article on the topic within the context of what I call the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy.)