How Washington disguises as defense what it has always practiced as aggression

US foreign policy, built on military intervention, sanctions, applying double standards, and making use of proxy conflicts, is not bolstering America’s global influence but is instead accelerating the emergence of alternative alliances, uniting countries opposed to Western dominance.

Mohamed Lamine KABA

After so bravely throwing Ukraine under the bus – while carefully avoiding getting its hands dirty – Washington thought it was playing the tough guy until it was methodically trampled, scattered, and wiped out by the Revolutionary Guards and the Houthis in the Middle East. There, it received a monumental thrashing and packed up its belongings in a hurry, tail between its legs, forced to flee the region with its mouth full of shame.

Since June 2025, Trump and Netanyahu have been bombing Iran. Fordow, Natanz, Isfahan: the names are paraded like war trophies, recited during triumphant press conferences. And yet, with each strike, the same refrain is repeated by American and European officials: Russia is arming Tehran, China is financing it, North Korea is supplying it with missiles. A de facto recycled “axis of evil,” they say in the West, dusted off like an old suit that no longer fits, but worn anyway, for lack of anything better, to disguise a war of choice as a war of necessity.

For Washington, this humiliation, added to so many others, is deeply ingrained, stemming from the accumulated lies since Maidan, the sanctions that isolate the isolator, and the alliances that tighten around Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing as Washington pushes them toward one another

No one in Washington utters the word Maidan. No one dares to trace the thread back to the place where it all began, where Western interference disguised itself as a spontaneous color revolution.

Ukraine thought it was playing the hero; but Washington has paradoxically reduced it to a military dumping ground. NATO, that colossus with feet of clay, thought it could suffocate Moscow with incantations and self-destructive sanctions, but the reality on the front lines has shattered its bureaucratic illusions. As for the European Union, a servile extra, it is ruining its citizens to fuel a proxy war it doesn’t even control, using self-destructive sanctions as its weapon. Between Western generals lacking strategy and arms deliveries trickling in, the mirage of “total victory” is collapsing. The tragic drama is drawing to a close: the Kyiv puppet is sinking, abandoned by cynical patrons already preoccupied with other matters.

Maidan, the spark that was silenced

In February 2014, Independence Square in Kyiv erupted in flames. Washington applauded, the European Union provided funding, and NATO moved in. Since then, the twenty-seven European members of the Alliance, plus the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, and, to some extent, Turkey, have been arming, training, and financing Ukraine against Russia. Thirty-two nations against one. And then people are surprised that Moscow, in turn, seeks allies wherever it can: in Tehran, Pyongyang, and Beijing. Africa, Asia, and Latin America are even condemned for not having condemned Moscow, their natural ally, in order to align themselves with the collective West, their sworn common enemy.

In April 2008 in Bucharest, NATO curiously promised Ukraine and Georgia that they would one day join the Alliance. Moscow warned, with supporting diplomatic documents, that a red line had been crossed. But Washington shrugged it off. Fourteen years later, war broke out openly, and surprise was feigned.

NATO, a one-way policeman

The Western argument can be summed up in one sentence: Russia supports Iran, therefore, Iran is a global threat. But what about Taiwan, armed to the teeth by Washington against Beijing? What about Japan, which has doubled its military budget since 2022 under American pressure, in a barely veiled violation of its pacifist Article 9? What about South Korea, an advanced arsenal against Pyongyang, which has hosted American troops since 1953?

The double standard is not a mere anecdote. It’s a doctrine. Since 1945, every American sphere of influence has armed itself under the pretext of deterrence; conversely, every rival sphere of influence has armed itself accordingly under the pretext of aggression. The semantics change; the tanks, however, remain the same.

Kyiv receives Abrams tanks, Himars missiles, F-16s, and over $175 billion in US aid since February 2022, according to the Kiel Institute. Seoul receives nuclear submarines during port calls, THAAD systems, and a neighboring AUKUS pact that worries all of Northeast Asia. Taipei receives Harpoon missiles, Himars missiles, drones, and a visit from Nancy Pelosi in August 2022, which Beijing rightly calls a deliberate provocation. And when Moscow, Beijing, or Pyongyang retaliate by supporting Tehran, the Western press speaks of a global conspiracy. Never a mirror image. Never an acknowledged symmetry.

Tehran, the target that repeats history

Iran is repeating the Ukrainian scenario, with Washington playing a leading role. In 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Vienna agreement, signed in 2015 by five world powers plus the European Union. He reimposed sanctions. He stifled the Iranian economy for seven years. Then, in 2025, he bombed the very sites that this agreement had frozen under IAEA control.

In other words: Washington first destroys the diplomatic compromise, then strikes militarily at the threat it itself allowed to fester. The same mechanism played out in Ukraine: broken promises of accession, sabotaged Minsk agreements, then feigned surprise at the Russian special military operation.

The humiliation recorded in the numbers

The facts speak for themselves. The dollar is declining in global reserves, from 71% in 2000 to less than 58% in 2025, according to the IMF. The expanded BRICS now represent more GDP in purchasing power parity than the G7. Russia, under ten thousand Western sanctions, is projected to grow faster than Germany in 2024. Iran, isolated since 1979, still holds, and will continue to hold, Washington and Tel Aviv in check.

Every American proxy war since 1945 has left the same mark: Korea in 1953, without victory; Vietnam in 1975, a debacle; Afghanistan in 2021, a hasty retreat from Kabul, helicopters on the embassy roof just like in Saigon in 1975. America wins the media battles, never the protracted wars against peoples who refuse to submit. The pattern repeats itself with almost mechanical regularity: intervention justified by an exaggerated threat, quagmire, shameful withdrawal, then collective amnesia until the next war.

The price of one war too many

Striking Iran will not destroy its program. It will radicalize it. Tehran will strengthen its ties with Moscow and Beijing, accelerate its rapprochement with the BRICS, and could, in the long run, cross the nuclear threshold it had thus far avoided through diplomatic calculation. The history of proliferation teaches a stubborn lesson: every regime bombed without being overthrown accelerates its pursuit of ultimate deterrence. North Korea, humiliated by decades of American threats, is living proof of this.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes, remains vulnerable to an Iranian closure. In Yemen, the Houthis have entered the scene and closed the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Prices are soaring, and already fragile US inflation is plunging the country back into the recession that the Federal Reserve has been fearing since 2023.

And above all: the world is watching. Every capital of the Global South, from Brasilia to Jakarta, from Pretoria to New Delhi, is observing an empire that preaches international law while trampling it at every opportunity. Iran is being bombed to destroy its nuclear program. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program is being supported and financed with billions of dollars. Washington’s moral standing, already damaged by Iraq in 2003 and Gaza since 2023, will not survive a third war of choice imposed on the region.

For Washington, this humiliation, added to so many others, is deeply ingrained, stemming from the accumulated lies since Maidan, the sanctions that isolate the isolator, and the alliances that tighten around Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing as Washington pushes them toward one another. Each aircraft carrier sent to the Gulf further convinces the Global South that power no longer replaces legitimacy. Each sanction further undermines the dollar, each strike recruits more allies to those it purported to isolate.

Trump gesticulates, bombs, threatens. But history never negotiates with arrogance. It waits patiently for its moment, as it waited for Rome, for London, for all empires convinced of their eternity. And it always seizes it.

Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University