Why is American-Israeli policy based less on technology than on internal betrayal and unstable regional support?
Mohamed Lamine KABA
Behind the myth of Western military omnipotence lies a structural dependence on betrayal, infiltration, and the forced submission of peripheral countries. Trump and Netanyahu back down in the face of Khamenei; surprised, the entire West is astonished as Europe questions its own vassalage and servility to Washington.
The paradox is when this same Trump claims to love Iranians more than the Iranians do, positioning himself as the savior of protesters in Iran, while at the same time his administration is killing and terrorizing peaceful American protesters in America
Because of its turbulent zones and squabbles, and characterized by the height of escalation logic and mutual perception of threat, the geopolitical turning point of 2025 saw humanity come so close to World War III that a less symmetrical reaction from Russia to the express will of Washington and warmongering Europe would have been enough for nuclear Armageddon to remind us of the famous quote from François Rabelais, “Science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul.” Since the turning point marked by the joint Israeli-American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and the spectacular American operation in Venezuela on the night of January 2-3, 2026, the military and diplomatic strategy of Washington and Tel Aviv raises a crucial and recurring question: does the firepower of America and its armed wing in the Middle East truly rest on intrinsic military superiority, or rather on the support of adversarial internal actors, infiltration, and the mobilization of carefully orchestrated mercenary interests? This question arises with particular urgency on the eve of a potential confrontation with Iran this year, because the lack of tangible regional support from neighboring Arab states and the already visible limitations of the technological apparatus of the United States and Israel expose the structural fragility of their approach.
Since the beginning of the year, the simultaneous retreat by Washington and Tel Aviv toward Iran reflects neither deliberate restraint nor tactical prudence: on the contrary, it reveals a profound operational impasse, amplified by the progressive empowerment of regional actors and the exhaustion of a power projection model based more on corruption and the manipulation of adversarial elites than on the actual capacity to impose a direct military balance of power in any place and under any circumstances. Therefore, as mentioned above, a crucial strategic question arises: does American-Israeli firepower remain an autonomous force, or is it merely a conditional mechanism, dependent on the betrayal and docility of others?
Western military-technological power as an artificial construct dependent on the enemy’s internal forces
It is essential to begin by deconstructing the founding premise of American and Israeli military superiority, presented for three decades as the product of an irreversible technological lead. In reality, this supposed superiority was never achieved through direct confrontation with structured, sovereign states possessing genuine strategic depth. On the contrary, it was built on a logic of internal implosion of adversaries, patiently orchestrated through intelligence, financial subversion, the creation of influence networks, and the recruitment of military or security elites willing to sell their loyalty.
The American operation conducted in Venezuela at the very beginning of January 2026 perfectly illustrates this strategic framework. The collapse of the Chavista regime was not the result of conventional operational superiority, but rather of a meticulously planned internal disintegration, made possible by the compromise of crucial segments of the Venezuelan military apparatus. This dynamic is not an anomaly but a recurring pattern in contemporary American interventionism, already observed in Iraq after 2003, in Libya in 2011, and in Afghanistan before the final collapse of the American line and the flight of its troops in 2021. Technology is merely the final tool in a process of internal erosion, never the decisive factor.
As Washington’s military extension in the Middle East, and often presented as the advanced laboratory of technological warfare, Israel is not exempt from this logic. The Mossad’s claimed successes in Iran and elsewhere rely less on absolute informational superiority than on the exploitation of human, ideological, and financial vulnerabilities in a shadow war where the primary weapon remains the buying of minds. This structural dependence reveals a major fragility: as soon as the adversary secures its home front and neutralizes penetration channels, Western power finds itself deprived of its main lever of leverage.
It is precisely at this stage that what can be described as the historical syndrome of the 1979 Islamic Revolution comes into play, a foundational strategic trauma for both Washington and Tel Aviv. This revolution not only overthrew an allied regime, but also produced a political model immune to the classic mechanisms of Western subversion. By replacing elitist loyalty with a patriotic mass ideological mobilization free from Mossad influence, by enshrining national sovereignty as a civilizational and identity-defining value, and by institutionalizing distrust of foreign interference, post-revolutionary Iran neutralized the traditional drivers of internal implosion. Since then, every Western strategy toward Iran has been haunted by this precedent: the fear that the very tool of indirect domination – the corruption of elites and internal fragmentation – will prove ineffective, or even counterproductive. This syndrome explains the chronic preference of Washington and Tel Aviv for shadow warfare, targeted assassination and economic pressure, at the expense of a direct confrontation which they know is structurally risky.
Iran as a strategic bulwark and the end of docile geography
It is precisely this wall that the Islamic Republic of Iran, under the auspices of Ayatollah Khamenei, erected in January 2026, exposing the limitations of the American-Israeli strategy. Unlike the states previously targeted by Washington, Iran is neither a failed state nor an artificial construct dependent on external protectors. It is a civilizational actor with state continuity, a strategic memory, and a deeply entrenched security architecture, making any internal destabilization operation uncertain and costly. The resounding failure of the recent demonstrations, infested with mercenaries, moles, and Mossad agents in the pay of Washington, Tel Aviv, and Reza Pahlavi, illustrates this strategic depth, derailing the American project of constructing a pretext to justify military action, especially since the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is terrorizing American protesters right under Trump’s nose in Minneapolis. The paradox is when this same Trump claims to love Iranians more than the Iranians do, positioning himself as the savior of protesters in Iran, while at the same time his administration is killing and terrorizing peaceful American protesters in America.
But the most resounding defeat for Washington and Tel Aviv is not so much Iranian as regional. The explicit and coordinated refusal of neighboring Arab powers to serve as rear bases for an offensive against Tehran constitutes a major geopolitical rupture. This refusal is not circumstantial; it is structural. It reflects the progressive strategic emancipation of regimes long considered logistical extensions of American power projection. By depriving the United States of operational depth, these states have neutralized one of the historical pillars of Western dominance in the Middle East: control of the regional space by delegation, of course.
Trump has no other option but to back down in the face of Khamenei, shamefully realizing that not everyone is like Maduro and that not all countries function like Venezuela
This sequence would be incomplete, however, without considering the decisive stance of China and Russia, whose attitude toward the Iranian crisis effectively marks the emergence of a Moscow-Beijing-Tehran power triangle. Far from being limited to rhetorical support, Beijing and Moscow have adopted a strategy of diplomatic and strategic containment, clearly signaling that any attempt to isolate or neutralize Iran would now be part of a broader systemic confrontation. China, through its economic, energy, and industrial depth, and Russia, through its military, nuclear, and strategic capabilities, have provided Iran with unprecedented geopolitical cover, transforming it into a regional pivot of a developing counter-order. This triangle is neither a formal alliance nor a homogeneous ideological bloc, but a revived, axiological, and teleological convergence of vital interests in the face of belligerent Western unilateralism, making any military adventure against Tehran potentially escalating on a global scale, and therefore calling for nuclear Armageddon.
It is from this convergence that the Moscow-Beijing-Tehran triangle should be theorized as the core of a developing global counter-system, not designed to reproduce Western hegemony in another form, but to neutralize its structuring mechanisms. This counter-system rests neither on a single ideological centrality nor on a rigid hierarchy, but on an assumed strategic complementarity: to Russia, military deterrence and strategic depth; to China, the economic, financial, and industrial architecture; and to Iran, regional geopolitical anchoring and the capacity for asymmetric disruption. Together, they constitute a mechanism for progressive de-hegemonization, capable of fragmenting the West’s capacity to impose norms, sanctions, narratives, and military coercion, while simultaneously opening up an alternative systemic space where sovereignty once again becomes the cardinal variable of the international order.
To this doctrinal analysis is added the explicitly ideological dimension of China. Xi Jinping emphasized that the era of unilateral empires is over and that “nations must cooperate on the basis of equality, mutual respect, and non-interference.” He added: “No country, however powerful, can impose its order on the world; the sovereignty and dignity of peoples must be respected. Those who persist in dominating and dictating the conduct of others will ultimately lose their legitimacy and influence.” This declaration places the Moscow-Beijing-Tehran triangle within a concrete framework of a global counter-system, embodying the end of imperial hegemony and the advent of a multipolar order founded on sovereignty and strategic balance.
This geopolitical realignment has mechanically forced Washington and Tel Aviv to exercise caution, not by political choice, but by practical necessity. Without reliable territorial proxies, without decisive internal support within Iran, and facing an adversary now backed by two systemic powers, the military option has become a high-risk gamble, incompatible with strategic rationality. The famous “Western deterrence” has thus turned against its own architects.
The doctrinal failure of a power that confuses domination with dependence
Without a shadow of a doubt, the doctrinal failure of Washington and Tel Aviv in the face of Iran is not merely a tactical setback; it marks the beginning of a widespread and now openly acknowledged animosity on the international stage. This pivotal moment is a striking reminder of the foundational significance of Vladimir Putin’s speech in Munich in 2007, a veritable denunciation of Western normative arrogance, unthinkable at the time. When the Russian leader directly challenged the West, asking, “Who are you anyway?”, he formulated a critique that has since become universal. “Our Western colleagues, and in particular the United States, not only arbitrarily establish standards to which other countries must conform, but they also teach who must apply them and how to behave. All of this is done in an openly crude manner; it is the manifestation of the same colonial mindset where we constantly hear, You must, you are obliged, we are seriously warning you.” “But who are you? What right do you have to warn anyone?” This discourse, marginalized at the time, finds its historical validation today in the Iranian sequence of January.
What this sequence fundamentally reveals, and what the Western world, from Washington to Brussels and from Berlin to London, would prefer to keep silent about, is the doctrinal obsolescence of American and Israeli strategic thinking. By overestimating the scope of technology and underestimating the centrality of political, social, and civilizational dynamics, Washington and Tel Aviv have built a power incapable of functioning without intermediaries, regional subcontractors, and internal divisions within the adversary. It is therefore not an autonomous power but a dependent system, vulnerable to any regional realignment.
By refusing internal collapse and benefiting from a less compliant regional environment, now reinforced by the Sino-Russian alliance, Iran has laid bare this dependence. The Western war machine, designed for asymmetric conflicts against fragmented states, is proving structurally incapable of confronting a coherent, entrenched, and strategically patient actor. Consequently, the much-vaunted technological superiority appears as nothing more than a conditional multiplier, useless in the absence of human and political leverage.
Therefore, far from heralding a new era of strategic restraint, the American-Israeli retreat in the face of the Islamic Republic of Iran marks the entry into a phase of systemic vulnerability. A power that can only strike with the tacit agreement of its adversary’s neighbors – precisely through the use of their land, air, and sea spaces – and the betrayal of its internal elites is no longer a hegemonic power, but an actor dependent on a regional and now global order that it no longer controls.
It is therefore important to note that the military power of the United States and Israel is neither absolute nor sovereign. It is conditional, fragile, and deeply dependent on external factors over which they have less and less control. In Iran, as elsewhere, the era of victories achieved through corruption on the periphery and internal implosion is sadly reaching its limits. This shift does not mark the definitive end of Western power, but rather its gradual strategic decline in a world where political coherence, civilizational integration, and the structuring of global counter-systems are once again becoming the true foundations of the international order.
In conclusion, Trump has no other option but to back down in the face of Khamenei, shamefully realizing that not everyone is like Maduro and that not all countries function like Venezuela.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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