Behind the Iran War and All the Wars in the Middle East: Oil

Charlotte Dennett

April 3, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

One month into the war in Iran, journalists and politicians, Democrats and Republicans, leftist, rightists, and independents should no longer be asking what this war is all about.

Sasan Fayazmanesh, in his March 13th piece in Counterpunch, made a convincing (and brave) argument that It’s Israel, Stupid. He just didn’t go far enough.

He rightly begins by posing the questions that seemed to have no coherent answer:

Is it because negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program were not progressing? Is it because Iran was close to developing nuclear weapons? Is it because Iranian ballistic missiles were going to reach the US soon? Is it because Israel was going to attack Iran and the US took pre-emptive measures to ensure the safety of Americans? Is it because the Iranian government was violating human rights? Or is it something else?

He posits

The US attacked Iran for one reason and one reason only: Israel. Israel, created by the US and Europeans, has been urging the US for decades to wage a destructive war against Iran.”

Why? To achieve the Zionist goal of achieving a Greater Israel. But she omits Israel’s thirst for getting and controlling oil, harkening back to the presidency of George W. Bush and a revelation made to former NATO commander Wesley Clark immediately after 911. As I documented in my book, Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil, Clark in 2007 stated that a Pentagon official revealed to him in 2001 a plan to “attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,” starting with Iraq and moving on to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan [all oil -related conflicts] and Iran. While on a book tour, Clark stated further that the Bush strategy was shaped around gaining control of Middle East oil resources, based on a plan by his neoconservative backers [some with dual US-Israeli citizenship] to “use US troops to secure access to these energy supplies abroad.”

Today Iran is the third largest owner of oil reserves in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. This simple fact has not been adequately addressed by the media, which has focused on the dangers of blockading the Strait of Hormuz and seizing Kharg Island, resulting in the increase in the price of oil, and chronicling how both sides have bombed the others’ oil installations –without explaining the hidden context of competing petro powers seeking to command and control oil to adequately supply their militaries — and most recently, to use natural gas to power AI data centers.

Now, at last, Trump has let the cat out of the bag. Last week, amidst a throng of journalists assembled at a press conference following Trump’s meeting with his cabinet, one reporter raised his hand high and asked the forbidden question: “Do you want to control Iran’s oil?”

“That’s an option,” Trump replied. “But I wouldn’t talk about it.” For the next couple of days, he adhered to the traditional playbook of hiding any oil connection to US war plans, then spilled it out over the weekend, telling the Financial Times he could “take the oil in Iran” and seize the energy export hub of Kharg Island.

The fact is, aside from Israel’s territorial ambitions, oil has always been the cause of all the wars in the Middle East since the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Location, Location

There is even an oil connection to the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917 with the British supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was actually a simple letter by Lord Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary, to Walter de Rothschild of Europe’s huge oil and banking dynasty. This small but significant detail is often absent from historical accounts on the founding of Israel, whose location, bordering the Eastern Mediterranean, made it a perfect terminal point for a pipeline carrying oil from Iraq. Provided, that is, European Jews could be relied on to protect the pipeline.

Why don’t people know this? Because the oil connection to war has been rigorously suppressed by all the nations that are, or aspire to be, great powers. They learned a big lesson from Germany’s defeat in World War I and World War II: its military ran out of gas.

Oil was, and still is, the fuel of the military, which makes it the most coveted resource on earth. Even if Country A has enough of it (as Trump is now arguing about US reserves) it has to worry about Enemy Country B (Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, the BRICS alliance) getting other rich, untapped reserves. I call it The Great Game for Oil, and it’s getting more vicious than ever now that huge quantities of natural gas are being sought after to power AI data centers.

President Trump, no student of history, likely knows this fact because he talks to his oil donors frequently, assuring them he will make good on the millions they donated to his campaigns by going to war. He may try to disguise his true ambitions: beyond his moniker Drill Baby Drill, he strives to make billions while serving as Commander in Chief, bent on conquering the oil lands of the world.

At least Senator Ed Marke of Massachusetts revealed on March 27 that the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz had made billions for oil companies, causing their stocks to skyrocket.On March 27, he sent a letter to the CEOs of at five of the largest oil and gas companies — ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and BP — demanding that “big oil and gas companies refrain from awarding executives profits generated from rising oil prices during Trump’s illegal war in Iran.”

But even he missed a central fact. What wife or mother would accept sending her loved ones into harm’s way if an underlying purpose was to enrich oil companies and their government allies? This, and the need to fuel the military, is where pretexts come into play.

And here’s how Time Magazine, under the ownership of arch-conservative Henry Luce, demonized Iranian President Mohammed Mosadegh in 1952 before the CIA coup that overthrew him in 1953. His “crime” was nationalizing Iran’s oil.

The Iranian people have a long memory of this travesty, which brought the Shah onto the Peacock Throne. Who benefited from the coup? Nelson and David Rockefeller (see my previous substack on Iran)

WWI: When oil first reigned supreme

Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the British Admiralty, made the fateful decision in 1911 to change his navy’s fuel from coal (of which Britain had plenty) to faster, more efficient, and cheaper oil (of which she had none). Britain, Churchill said ruefully, had no choice but to fight “on a sea of troubles” to get the oil Britian needed, but didn’t have.

That’s why seizing the oil of Iraq became Britain’s “first class war aim” during World War I. Once achieved, the next challenge was moving the oil to where it was needed. The victors of World War I knew how to do it: by pipeline.

The best route? Piping it to a terminal point on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, where warships could fuel up and tankers could transport it to European ports. The perfect location: Haifa, Palestine. Israeli scholar Bernard Aishai, author of The Tragedy of Zionism, has noted that “Haifa was an ideal port — and the natural place for a pipeline terminal bringing oil from the east.” Haifa was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews, but eventually would become primarily Jewish-controlled. What better way to ensure a pipeline’s safety than to colonize Palestine with European Jews who could be trusted to protect it against Muslim infidels?

The Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline. Built in 1934 but conceived after WWI. It was decomissioned in 1948 follow the creation of the state of Israel. Benjamin Netanyabu hoped to reopen it following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, bragging “Soon the oil will flow to Haifa.” But it hasn’t due to ongoing hostilities in the region. Source: Wikipedia

Trust me on this: My father’s mission, as head of U.S. counter-intelligence for the OSS and later CIG (Central Intelligence Group, both precursors of the CIA) )in the Middle East during WWII, wrote in 1943 that his most important mission was “to control the oil at all costs.” That was Saudi Oil, America’s prize possession, that was also going to be piped to the Eastern Mediterranean — either to Israel or Lebanon — by the Trans-Arabian pipeline. As the New York Times wrote on May 2, 1947, two weeks before my father died in a mysterious plane crash, “protection of that investment and its military and economic security that it represents inevitably will become one of the prime objectives of American foreign policy in this area, which has already become a pivot point of world politics and one of the main focal points of rivalry between East and West” –East meaning Russia.

This map, based on the 1947 New York Times article and map, shows the dotted projected route of the Trans-Arabian pipeline. It would end up in southern Lebanon instead of northern Lebanon, as pictured here. The solid pipelines were conceived after WWI, with the French controlling the nothern branch ending up in northern Lebanon and the British controlling the southern branch, terminating in Haifa, Palestine.

This game is still going on: Protection of oil at all costs. And at what cost in human lives and treasure?

Billions of dollars have poured into Israel over nearly eight decades to ensure the secure flow of oil — from Iraq and from Saudi Arabia — to the world. And although Netanyahu is now getting his way for his own expansionist schemes due to his close relationship with Trump, Trump will call the ultimate shots, because Big Oil trumps everything.

A few more nuggets from history

Traditional histories of the immediate post WWI period describe how France and England, the primary victors of their war to seize the oil of Turkey’s defeated Ottoman Empire, divided the rectangle of former Ottoman land stretching from Syria and Palestine through Mesopotamia (Iraq). Their 1920 agreement would come to be known as the San Remo Agreement. In those days, however, State Department documents more accurately termed it the San Remo Agreement on Oil. The reference would subsequently disappear from public discourse, as would 1920 references to U.S. foreign policy as “oleaginous diplomacy.”

Fast Forward to 1944. when Jewish survivors of the Holocaust managed to escape to Palestine. They were the first to hold aloft signs saying “No Blood for Oil,” protesting the Roosevelt Administration’s delay in rescuing Jews so as not to alienate King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, who objected to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and threatened the US’s exclusive and very lucrative oil concession.

Five years later, in 1949, the CIA overthrew Syria’s nationalist leader Shukri Quwatly, who opposed the Trans-Arabian pipeline traversing Syrian territory and terminating in Israel, (The pipeline would terminate in southern Lebanon, some 100 miles north of Israel.)

The daughter of a CIA spy, Anne Tazewell, takes us into Egypt and the mid 1950s in her book, A Good Spy Leaves No Trace: Big OIL:CIA Secrets and a Spy Daughter’s Reckoning. She uncovers a document likely by her father, that states “Our policy in the Middle East has been directed toward retaining the area within the free world, developing the oil resources.”

To be fair, the CIA in 2003 put President George W. Bush on notice that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq did not pose an imminent threat requiring an invasion, which Bush (junior oilman that he was) ignored. Same thing happened with Trump: US intelligence warning him that Iran did not pose an imminent threat. Generals also warned Trump about Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz.

But now Trump is so locked-in, that he has now ordered over 10,000 American troups to the Middle East.

Yemen and the alternative to the Strait of Hormuz

Not addressed by media accounts is Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen against the Houthis with US backing. The Saudi plan: to build a Trans-Yemen pipeline that would avoid the Strait of Hormuz and carry Saudi oil down through southern Yemen terminating in the Gulf of Aden near the Arabian Sea.

The dotted line represents the projected Trans-Yemen pipeline, still projected, that would avoid the Strait of Hormuz on the east and the Bab al Mandab chokehold in the west. Apologies: for some reason the countries are not identified in this or the Saudi Trans-Arabian pipeline map, but they are in my book, Follow the Pipelines, published by Chelsea Green.

Trump, in 2019, vetoed a Yemen War Powers Act that would have ended US military involvement aimed at subduing the Houthis in this devastating war that caused an acute humanitarian crisis, including mass starvation in Yemen. As of March, 2025, the Saudis have been “insisting that the land the pipeline crosses be considered Saudi territory — a demand that local tribes have rejected.”

At the time of writing, Trump is now threatening to “obliterate” Iranian electric installations and Kharg Island if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz. And Israel is expanding its bombing of Southern Lebanon, killing UN peacekeepers and three journalists. More than 1,200 people have been killed, including 120 children, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry and UNICEF, while more than 1.2 million people have been forced out of their homes across the country.

And yes, there is an oil and gas connection to these incursions, as Netanyahu strives to establish an energy corridor along the entire eastern Mediterranean, tapping into $5 billion in oil and natural gas off the coast of Gaza, Israel, Lebanon and Syria. Stay tuned.

This first appeared on Charlotte Dennett’s Substack page, Cui Bono?

Charlotte Dennett is an investigative journalist. Her most recent book, now out in paperback, is Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil.

War Becomes Spectacle in Trump’s Horrific Propaganda Promoting War in Iran

The White House has circulated videos that fuse footage of bombing raids with visuals from video games and action films.

By Henry A. Giroux ,

Truthout

March 21, 2026

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised to be an antiwar candidate, boasting that, unlike his predecessors, he would end endless wars and keep the United States out of new military conflicts. Yet the trajectory of his presidency has unfolded in the opposite direction. From expanding military confrontations in the Caribbean to the escalating war with Iran, launched through large-scale strikes that risk igniting a wider regional catastrophe, Trump’s rule has increasingly relied on the language and machinery of war. As Zachary Basu points out in Axios, “he has attacked seven nations [and] authorized more individual air strikes in 2025 than President Biden did in four years.”

What makes this moment particularly disturbing is not only the violence itself, but also the way it is staged and celebrated. As the conflict with Iran intensified, the White House circulated promotional videos that fused real footage of bombing raids with visuals drawn from video games and action films, transforming acts of destruction into a spectacle of national triumph. In such images, war appears not as tragedy or political catastrophe but as thrilling display, inviting viewers to admire the technological performance of power while remaining detached from the human suffering it produces. These spectacles are more than crude propaganda. They reveal a deeper shift in political culture in which violence is aestheticized, cruelty normalized, and militarism staged as entertainment, training the public to experience domination not as a catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of power.

We live in an age of monsters. More than two centuries ago, Francisco Goya captured such a moment in his haunting 1799 etching, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” an image that now reads less like a relic of the Enlightenment than a prophecy of our own time. The Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci described moments like this as periods of historical crisis, writing that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Our present moment bears all the marks of such an interregnum.

We inhabit a time in which the promise of democracy has been kidnapped, stripped of its moral language, and cast into the abyss of authoritarian rule. Reason, once the fragile guardian of justice and collective responsibility, now suffocates beneath what Jeffrey Edward Green describes as an ocular politics of lies, corruption, and organized cruelty. It has been subordinated to a visual culture that “sparks deep emotional responses” while deriding solidarity, democratic values, and informed judgment. Justice itself has been weaponized, transformed into an instrument of state terror wielded by an army of thugs who abduct, assault, and kill protesters, migrants, and people of color. Hope is mocked as naïveté, memory is erased, and historical consciousness is censored in a political culture where resistance itself is treated as a crime.

Authoritarianism rarely arrives all at once. It does not begin with tanks rolling through the streets or the abrupt suspension of rights. It emerges more gradually through the corrosion of language, the collapse of civic trust, and the steady normalization of cruelty. In such moments, culture becomes a decisive battleground. Images, spectacles, and staged performances reorganize how people see the world, training the public to experience domination as thrilling, cruelty as justified, and violence as spectacle. In a media-saturated culture where entertainment and politics increasingly merge, war itself becomes a staged performance, packaged and circulated as if it were simply another form of digital entertainment. Under such circumstances, memory is corroded and violence is no longer relegated to the fringes of culture; under the Trump regime, violence is openly celebrated. Language has succumbed to the spectacle and become a crucial instrument in the microphysics of power. Drained of any substance, it has become a crucial element in the acceleration of violence in the United States. As Jonathan V. Crary reminds us, we live in a historical moment in which the misuse of language and history has become complicitous with the production of new technologies, modes of consciousness, identities, and values that are “complicit in the perpetuation of violence on a mass scale.”


Trump Has Made the US War Machine a Spectacle – and It’s Spectacularly Unpopular
Trump has brought the full extent of the war machine out into the open. Let’s channel public anger into organizing. By Khury Petersen-Smith & Azadeh Shahshahani , Truthout/InTheseTimes March 3, 2026

The Trump administration’s horrific Iran propaganda videos provide a striking example of how this aesthetic logic operates in contemporary political culture.

During a recent segment on The Lead, Jake Tapper questioned why the Trump administration was circulating a promotional video celebrating U.S. strikes on Iran. The video, a single and particularly egregious example of the administration’s war propaganda, stitched together real footage of bombing raids with stylized graphics resembling video games and scenes lifted from action films. Explosions were presented through cinematic cuts, dramatic music, and digital overlays that mimicked the visual language of gaming culture, collapsing the boundary between real warfare and entertainment. The segment highlighted how this montage blended authentic combat imagery with the grammar of digital spectacle, prompting widespread concern that the White House was effectively turning war into a form of entertainment. This episode illustrates how contemporary propaganda operates less through argument than through the visual seductions of spectacle.

The controversy surrounding the video is not simply about tone or political messaging

What the montage reveals is something far more troubling about the evolving culture of authoritarian politics. The imagery does not present war as a grave event demanding reflection or democratic deliberation. Instead, it transforms geopolitical violence into a stylized performance of national power. Explosions flash across the screen with cinematic precision, targets vanish in bursts of light, and the sequence unfolds with the rhythm of a digital combat game.

Such imagery signals a broader transformation in political culture. Violence is no longer justified through argument or strategic explanation; it is aestheticized, and destruction becomes a visual performance designed to excite audiences and affirm national power. As Guy Debord, John Berger, and Susan Sontag have variously suggested, we increasingly inhabit a culture shaped by the spectacle, one that invites viewers to identify emotionally with displays of domination while remaining detached from the human suffering such violence produces. In the age of social media, this spectacle circulates with unprecedented speed, amplified by algorithms designed to privilege images that provoke outrage, fascination, and emotional intensity over reflection or critical judgment.

The theoretical foundations for understanding this transformation were articulated long ago. Walter Benjamin warned that fascist movements seek to aestheticize politics. Rather than encouraging citizens to deliberate collectively about power, they mobilize sensation, spectacle, and emotional intensity. Politics becomes theater, and war becomes the ultimate aesthetic experience, a demonstration of technological beauty and national vitality meant to overwhelm reflection and judgment.

Benjamin’s insight resonates powerfully with the Iran montage. The video does not attempt persuasion through argument or evidence. Instead, it overwhelms viewers through visual intensity. Rapid editing, dramatic explosions, and cinematic framing create a spectacle designed to short-circuit critical distance and immerse the viewer in the intoxicating thrill of power.

Richard Etlin’s work on culture under the Third Reich deepens this analysis by revealing the moral sensibility embedded in fascist aesthetics. Etlin emphasizes that fascist culture normalized cruelty through what he calls the politics of the “sneer.” The sneer is not simply an expression of contempt. It signals that certain groups are considered disposable. It communicates the assumption that those outside the national community are inferior beings whose suffering is irrelevant.

In Nazi cultural production this contempt was reinforced through the depiction of enemies as degraded cultural and biological “types.” Jews, dissidents, and other targeted groups were portrayed through caricature and stereotype as morally corrupt, physically degenerate, and fundamentally alien to the national body. By reducing individuals to abstract types, fascist imagery made it easier for the public to accept their persecution and elimination. The aesthetics of contempt prepared the psychological conditions for political violence.

The Iran montage echoes this logic of disposability. The targets of the bombing appear not as human beings but as abstract coordinates. Explosions resemble cinematic effects rather than catastrophic acts of destruction. The viewer is invited to identify with technological power while remaining detached from the human lives that vanish behind the screen. Images of war, shattered cities, and dead children are stripped of the horror they convey. War is rendered as a video game, while the suffering it produces disappears beneath the seductive veneer of entertainment. What emerges is a form of brutal cruelty forged in the toxic fusion of technology, power, social media, and everyday life.

The sneer, in this sense, has migrated into the digital age. It appears not only in gestures of open contempt but also in aesthetic frameworks that render the suffering of others invisible. When violence is packaged as entertainment, the victims of that violence effectively vanish from moral consideration.

Susan Sontag anticipated this danger in her reflections on photography and war imagery. Sontag argued that modern visual culture has the capacity to transform suffering into a spectacle. Images that depict violence may initially provoke shock or anger, but repeated exposure can produce a form of moral anesthesia. The viewer becomes fascinated by the visual power of the image itself while the suffering it represents recedes into abstraction.

The Iran video exemplifies this transformation with disturbing clarity. By merging real bombing footage with the visual language of gaming and cinematic action sequences, it dissolves the boundary between war and entertainment. Explosions appear as cinematic effects, targets as digital objects, and violence itself becomes a consumable spectacle. In such representations, destruction is no longer experienced as tragedy or political catastrophe but instead as visual performance, inviting viewers to admire the display of power while remaining detached from its human consequences. Étienne Balibar’s analysis of cruelty further clarifies the political stakes of this spectacle. Balibar argues that contemporary forms of power increasingly operate through the public staging of violence. In such contexts, violence becomes not only a tool of domination but also a form of political theater that reinforces systems of power sustained by militarism, nationalism, and the brutal inequalities of contemporary capitalism.

For Balibar, cruelty in such contexts is not simply the imposition of suffering. It is a form of extreme violence that threatens the very foundation of democratic politics. When societies become accustomed to watching violence as spectacle, the ethical and civic sensibilities necessary for democratic life begin to erode. Citizens are transformed into spectators who consume images of domination rather than participants capable of judging power.

The Iran montage illustrates this transformation vividly. The spectacle does not invite democratic debate about the moral consequences of war. Instead, it mobilizes fascination with technological power and national triumph. The viewer is positioned not as a citizen deliberating violence but as an audience applauding it.

Such spectacles also play a crucial role in shaping what might be called the fascist subject. Authoritarian regimes do not rely solely on coercion. They cultivate specific modes of perception and emotional response. Through repeated exposure to spectacles of domination, individuals learn to admire power, distrust empathy, and view violence as both natural and exhilarating. As Mabel Berezin argues in Making the Fascist Self, fascist regimes actively sought to produce citizens whose identities were forged through public rituals, mass spectacles, and emotional identification with the nation rather than through democratic deliberation. Politics was staged as a series of dramatic performances that fused belonging, authority, and spectacle, encouraging individuals to experience power collectively rather than question it critically.

Within such environments, individuals are gradually educated to experience domination as affirmation and to interpret cruelty not as a moral failure but as evidence of strength, discipline, and national vitality. Within this formative pedagogical culture, fascist narratives circulating through social and digital media become powerful instruments for shaping subjects who identify with domination rather than question it. The deeper danger of such spectacles lies not only in the violence they display but also in the moral sensibilities they cultivate.

The fascist subject emerges gradually within this cultural environment. Images of cruelty train viewers to identify with authority rather than with those who suffer. Emotional responses such as compassion or solidarity are replaced by fascination with strength and domination. The capacity to recognize the humanity of others begins to erode.

Primo Levi warned that the seeds of fascism often take root long before they appear in the form of overt political regimes. They germinate in everyday attitudes, in climates of contempt, indifference, and the willingness to treat others as less than human. Fascism begins to grow when humiliation and cruelty become ordinary features of public life, when violence is normalized and empathy stripped of its moral force. In such conditions, authoritarian politics no longer appears as a shocking rupture but as the logical outcome of a society already accustomed to contempt, exclusion, and disposability. Writing in 1974, Levi captured the enduring danger with chilling clarity:


Every age has its own fascism, and we see the warning signs wherever the concentration of power denies citizens the possibility and the means of expressing and acting on their own free will. There are many ways of reaching this point, and not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned, and where the security of a privileged few depends on the forced labor and the forced silence of the many.

The aestheticization of violence contributes directly to this moral climate. When destruction becomes entertainment, and when suffering disappears behind the spectacle, the ethical sensibilities necessary for democratic life begin to weaken.

This aesthetic logic does not remain confined to the representation of war. It migrates across the broader culture of authoritarian politics, shaping how cruelty is staged, circulated, and normalized across multiple arenas of public life. The spectacle that glorifies violence abroad also prepares the public to accept repression at home, where migrants, protesters, and dissenters are increasingly cast as enemies to be subdued rather than people with rights.

Immigration enforcement provides one of the clearest examples. Images of detention centers, deportation raids, and militarized borders are staged as demonstrations of strength. Public officials pose before razor wire and prison walls while celebrating the supposed restoration of national order. The suffering of migrants becomes the backdrop against which state power performs itself.

Political figures themselves increasingly embody this aesthetic logic. Carefully choreographed images of militarized patriotism, hyper-stylized public appearances, and theatrical displays of authority function as visual markers of loyalty to the authoritarian project. Governance becomes inseparable from spectacle.

Under the Trump regime, morality collapses in the celebration of power. When New York Times reporter Katie Rogers asked Trump whether he saw “any checks” to his “power on the world stage,” he answered: “There is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.” In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, echoed the fascist belief in raw power and brute force as the ultimate arbiter of politics. He stated without the slightest embarrassment: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

As the editors of Equator magazine note, under the Trump regime and its allied Western governments, the adoration of force has become a ruling passion. Due process is ignored, opponents are abducted or threatened, world leaders are intimidated, and military violence is carried out with little regard for international law or human life. From the bombing of migrants and refugees at sea to the massive flow of weapons that have enabled Israel’s assault on Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the abandonment of restraint has become increasingly visible. War, both abroad and at home, is a defining feature of contemporary politics that increasingly threatens to become the organizing principle of society itself. As Equator’s editors observe:


Under the current regime, the United States has little left to offer the world but a shameless display of coercion and destruction. Trump and his lieutenants appear intoxicated by their own impunity, indifferent to international law and uninterested in manufacturing consent. Instead, they practice a form of political gangsterism marked by intimidation, abductions, and the open threat or removal of rival heads of state.

This intoxication with force is not simply a matter of policy; it is also staged and circulated through images that normalize domination and train the public to accept cruelty as a legitimate expression of power. These images share a common structure. They transform violence into visual affirmation. The public is encouraged to identify with the power being displayed rather than question its consequences. Cruelty becomes normalized through repetition and the spectacle rather than through argument.

The Iran video stands as a particularly stark example of this cultural logic. It demonstrates how easily digital media can convert acts of war into consumable entertainment. In doing so it reveals the deeper transformation of political culture in an era dominated by the spectacle.

Resisting such politics requires more than opposing specific policies. It requires confronting the aesthetic regimes that normalize cruelty and desensitize the public to suffering. Authoritarian power operates not only through laws and institutions but through images, narratives, and emotional appeals that shape how people perceive the world.

The Iran video is more than a piece of militaristic propaganda; it signals the emergence of a political culture in which destruction is aestheticized, domination becomes pleasurable, and war itself is staged as a spectacle. The spectacle is reinforced by a deeper ideological current circulating within parts of the Trump coalition. Reports from military watchdog groups indicate that some commanders framed the conflict with Iran as “part of God’s divine plan,” invoking biblical imagery of Armageddon and the imminent return of Christ. Such rhetoric reveals how militarism can fuse with apocalyptic religious narratives, transforming war not merely into spectacle but into a sacred drama in which violence becomes the instrument of divine destiny.

The obscenity of this spectacle becomes even clearer when one considers the reality it conceals. Behind the cinematic explosions and video-game imagery lie acts of devastating human violence. Among the most horrific was the U.S. bombing of an elementary school in Iran in which 175 people were killed, most of them children. Such atrocities expose the grotesque gap between the spectacle of technological triumph circulating through White House propaganda videos and the human devastation those images erase.

Meanwhile, within parts of the Trump coalition, the war has been framed not merely as strategic necessity but as a sacred mission. Political figures including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Sen. Lindsey Graham, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and current ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee have invoked biblical language suggesting that the conflict with Iran carries the meaning of a holy war. Hegseth has quoted scripture in military briefings and, in his own writing, boasted about ignoring the constraints of international law, further collapsing the fragile boundary between religion and the conduct of war. At the same time Trump surrounds himself with figures associated with militant Christian nationalism, including Pastor Paula White-Cain, whose apocalyptic rhetoric and speaking in tongues have led even a conservative commentator to describe her as a doomsday cultist. In such a climate, militarism fuses with religious fanaticism to produce a political theology of violence in which bombing raids can be framed as instruments of divine destiny.

History teaches that authoritarianism rarely begins with dramatic ruptures. It often begins with subtle shifts in sensibility. Democracy depends on citizens’ capability of recognizing the humanity of others and judging power critically. When contempt becomes ordinary, when suffering is turned into a spectacle, and when cruelty becomes a source of entertainment, the moral foundations of democracy begin to erode.

These developments are what Antonio Gramsci described as the “morbid symptoms” of an interregnum, moments when democratic institutions weaken and spectacles of cruelty and militarism rush in to fill the vacuum of a collapsing political order.

A society that learns to watch war as if it were a video game risks losing the capacity to recognize the humanity that disappears behind the screen. The danger lies not only in the violence such spectacles celebrate but also in the sensibility they cultivate, one that numbs moral judgment and prepares the ground for authoritarian rule. Resisting this culture of cruelty demands more than outrage or cosmetic reform. It requires a broad democratic awakening capable of confronting the economic and political system that feeds on war and inequality.

The spectacle of domination now circulating through digital culture is inseparable from a form of gangster capitalism that feeds on militarism, racialized exclusion, and the erosion of public life. Challenging this order will require mass movements willing not simply to temper its excesses but to dismantle the structures that sustain it. The struggle ahead is therefore not only to defend democracy from authoritarianism but also to build a democratic socialist society in which human dignity, shared prosperity, and collective freedom replace the brutal logics of profit, disposability, and permanent war.


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Henry A. Giroux
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.