Wave of Domination

What this weekend’s strikes on Iran clarify is that the post-Oct. 7 period has marked the terminal phase of the liberal international order (LIO). For eight decades since the end of World War II, the set of economic, political, diplomatic and legal arrangements that make up the LIO have functioned to prevent the emergence, on one hand, of another world war and, on the other, of threats to U.S. global dominance.

Though the LIO formally prioritized multilateralism, free trade, territorial sovereignty and the rule of law to govern armed conflicts, in practice these principles have been flexible, even freewheeling, when it’s come to accommodating the defense of U.S. national interests (taken by imperial stewards in Washington axiomatically to be global interests). The contradiction between principles and application has long been an uncomfortable one, particularly for those states on the receiving end of U.S. enforcement actions throughout the Cold War and the global war on terror. Nevertheless, even the neoconservatives of the Bush administration, which pushed hard in the direction of unilateralism, felt compelled to justify their military adventures on legal terms, drawing on old U.N. Security Council resolutions to authorize the disastrous invasion of Iraq.

But even that spectacular degree of flexibility is insufficient for what the U.S. now deems necessary. Increasingly, sovereignty appears to be a privilege limited by the caprices of the world hegemon. Despite some soft protestations about respecting territorial integrity in the first few weeks after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks the U.S. has been unremitting in its sponsorship of an open-ended Israeli genocide in Gaza carried out through bombardment and forced starvation. As Israel has systematically destroyed the Strip and accelerated its annexation of the West Bank — both actions rebuked by the International Court of Justice — the U.S. hasn’t wavered in its diplomatic and military support. It has also permitted Israeli territorial expansion into Lebanon and Syria, two ostensibly sovereign nations, where Israeli forces have established permanent or quasi-permanent outposts. Under both then-President Joe Biden and current President Donald Trump, the U.S. has used mediated negotiations as deception campaigns, buying time for further military expansion at the cost of rapidly eroding diplomatic trust.

All the while, Israel has acted with a free hand to exterminate, assassinate and expand without concern for borders and without the real threat of any accountability mechanism from the LIO. When the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, the US opined that it was “nonbinding” and Israel ignored it. When the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for top Israeli political and military leadership, the U.S. condemned and even moved to sanction the Court. And when — following the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and the suspiciously seamless march to power of the Turkish-backed and U.S.-friendly Salafist group HTS — Israel unilaterally destroyed by air the entirety of Syria’s national defense infrastructure, no one said or did much of anything at all. Syria, though, is a country devastated by more than a decade of civil war and foreign intrusion, whose claim on sovereignty was in practice quite weak. Iran is a different story entirely.

Israel’s campaign of reaction against Iran — which the U.S. joined directly on Saturday evening after two weeks of political and logistical support — has been nominally focused on the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program through a combination of kinetic force and geopolitical disruption of U.S.-Iranian diplomacy. But what is clearly at stake is Iranian statehood as such. Contra Trump’s amped-up activity on Truth Social, what the crusaders are threatening is not really regime change, whereby state institutions are captured and handed over to less adversarial and more compliant leadership. The goal, instead, is total regime destruction: the elimination of all national defensive infrastructure necessary for the exercise of sovereignty and self-determination.

Before the U.S.’s attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, amid a quickening drumroll for American entry into the war, critics of military adventurism from the left and the right frequently drew a comparison to the post–Sept. 11 bloodlust for the Iraq War. While there are strong rhetorical resonances with that moment — a manufactured panic over nuclear weapons, delusional fantasies about being greeted as liberators — a more apt comparison is the 2011 NATO military intervention into Libya. Unlike Iraq, Libya did not see a major ground invasion; instead, the U.S.-led NATO coalition used a combination of overwhelming air power and special-ops missions to destroy the country’s national forces. The campaign lasted just over seven months, and the Americans didn’t bother sticking around to steer the direction of the state after the dust settled. Within three years, the country was engulfed in a civil war. That recipe — rain hell from the skies to annihilate the governing authority along with its national infrastructure, ensuring the state’s indefensibility and instability for the foreseeable future — is what Israel is openly calling for the U.S. to operationalize.

Before the Libya campaign, President Barack Obama gathered a multinational coalition and a Security Council resolution (one that the coalition completely outran). In a letter to Congress, he promised that the campaign would be limited, did not aim to conquer or occupy territory, and was intended to protect civilians and prevent humanitarian disaster. Trump, on the other hand, didn’t feel the need to bother offering any legal justification at all. Following the strikes, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte endorsed them, declaring them legal under international law without elaboration.

The Trump administration’s decision to unilaterally strike Iran’s nuclear program sends a clear signal to the rest of the world: multilateralism is dead, force rules above all, and any state without the martial capacity to inflict devastating pain must choose between utter subservience to the U.S. or risk annihilation. Of course, as consequential as they are for the broader fate of the LIO, Trump’s strikes were the end of a long sequence. War with Iran has long excited hawks in both parties, who, particularly in the period surrounding the execution of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nearly a decade ago, fantasized about its possibility. This fantasy never fully abated, and after Oct. 7 it gained new life. By all accounts, this weekend’s operation was planned and practiced during the Biden administration. During her campaign, Kamala Harris stated that all options against Iran would be on the table. And this year, leading Democrats such as Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries even tried to outflank Trump on Iran, accusing him of excessive dovishness. So far the primary criticism from the opposition party in the wake of the strikes seems to be that Trump didn’t get congressional approval ahead of time. Or, as the title of Iraq War salesman and (until now) Never Trumper David Frum’s Atlantic article put it, “Right Move, Wrong Team.”

American hegemony has suffered a series of devastating blows since Oct. 7, 2023, but it’s not clear if those in power have noticed. Shortly after his departure from the White House, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan — probably the Biden administration’s most important and determinative figure — told the Financial Times that “the core engines of American power are humming.” Perhaps, but the vehicle has driven clean off the road. For his part, Trump — despite a longstanding temperamental distaste for prolonged military engagements — has taken advantage of the freedom of movement with an array of wild gambits and provocations. He has threatened territorial expansion into Canada and Greenland and leveraged the specter of a migrant invasion to mobilize U.S. military forces along the southern border. An incursion into northern Mexico, a wild far-right fantasy only a few years ago, no longer seems like a remote possibility. An extended Iran campaign could delay that until the next Republican presidency, but it is a contingency that Mexico, and really any non-client state of the U.S., must now prepare for. Conquest is back on the menu.

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Domestically, U.S. support for Israel and the prospect of military adventurism in Iran and beyond have revealed fractures in the respective bases of each party. On the Republican side, Trump has managed to contain the contradiction between the party’s weak but increasingly vocal isolationist wing and its core neocon power structure. That most Republican voters aren’t necessarily interested in interventionism is unlikely to have an effect on Trump’s ability to wage as many wars as he likes, even if it informs his methods of waging them. But Trump, in both his volatility and his showmanship, is unique in his ability to mitigate these tensions — see JD Vance’s simpering performance on TV this weekend, an act of triangulation unconvincing even to himself — and in the near future, Republicans will inevitably enter a moment of more pitched struggle over the party’s orientation toward warmaking.

For the Democrats, however, the contradictions are unfolding entirely in the present tense. The Democratic Party has, for decades, been the site of liberal-progressive contestation. Alongside liberal institutions more broadly, the party has delimited the permissible boundaries of dissent on the one hand and, on the other, captured and diffused the calls of social movements to produce reforms. (Think of the radical demands of the Black Lives Matter movement and their coalescence in the form of body cameras.)

The capture-and-diffuse sequence is frustrating for all involved, but over the past decades, it has sustained a loose sense of forward momentum — one that reached a high point after the 2020 Democratic primaries, when Bernie Sanders’s presence in the race added a great deal of popular pressure on the party. After some of that pressure, in addition to energy from the summer’s George Floyd uprisings, was captured and translated into a narrow Democratic electoral victory, there was a sense among progressives that they had secured a seat at the table. Perhaps a hapless president wasn’t the worst thing for a faction within the governing coalition looking to influence policy.¹

The onset of the genocide in late 2023 changed the calculus. From the start, it was clear that there was a colossal gap between the demands that rapidly emerged from campus and street movements — an immediate ceasefire and an end to Israeli occupation — and the course of U.S. foreign policy. This gap only widened as Israel’s genocidal aggression on Gaza transformed from a campaign of disproportionate retaliation to one of open-ended extermination, expulsion and annexation — and the flow of U.S. arms and diplomatic backing continued unimpeded. By the spring of 2024, with Biden’s reelection campaign well underway, the anti-genocide movement consolidated around a clear and specific demand — an arms embargo to compel Israeli withdrawal — that required only the implementation of existing U.S. law. For the Democrats, this was a frame-breaking scenario: the modesty of the demand made it impossible to discipline away, and its urgency made it impossible to placate with rhetorical concessions.

Beyond some feeble attempts at persuasion and vague assurances, the Democrats effectively ignored the anti-genocide movement and lost the election. Though most voters did not name foreign policy as decisive, the campaign’s unwillingness to break from Biden’s ironclad backing of Israel depressed enthusiasm among the base. Tellingly, in the wake of the loss, key voices within the party’s orbit blamed the loss not on the Palestine protests, but on the party’s relationship to social movements more broadly, euphemized as “the groups,” constructing a bizarre argument that voters rejected Harris for the stances she took in 2019 and 2020, rather than her 2024 platform or the radical unpopularity of her boss, from whom she made no serious effort to distance herself.

The attempt to foment a backlash against the groups should come as no surprise. Well ahead of the election, Democratic politicians were already signaling rightward shifts on key issues: In an extended backlash to the 2020 uprisings that had helped win them the White House in the first place, many Democrats sought to recoup a tougher image by attacking efforts to cut back police funding. In February 2024, Senate Democrats advanced a bill full of hardline immigration policies, many of which Trump himself had advocated for. The Laken Riley Act, which authorized the aggressive mandatory detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants, passed the Senate on the day of Trump’s inauguration with 12 Democrats voting in support.  Against this backdrop, the severe reaction to the Palestine movement can be read not so much an about face, but as a capstone to a wave of anti-progressive retrenchment. For some of the most vocal elements in the Democratic Party, the lesson is clear: the extortive power the party holds over social movements is more burdensome than it’s worth. The lesson for grassroots movements is probably the same.

With both sides of the left-liberal coalition poised to abandon the compact, political action from below is more likely to take the form of “cost-raising” maneuvers and agitations rather than persuasion, and discipline from above more likely to take the form of violent repression than co-option and assimilation.

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That is indeed what we’re seeing. So-called political violence — helpfully defined by the mainstream media in opposition to apolitical violence, such as school shootings, police brutality and warfare — is a clear feature of the moment. Political disaffection has inspired vigilante assassinations and attempted assassinations across the ideological spectrum that have reached politicians, a healthcare CEO and Israeli embassy staffers. In more collectivist forms of disaffection, rioters and other street militants have torched police cars and sabotaged commercial property. The ruling class hasn’t settled on a consistent response to these events — Trump’s attorney general is seeking the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, while Trump could barely manage to condemn the killing of a Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband — but in any case, none of these incidents has done much to shock the conscience of a nation now accustomed to both an incessant stream of snuff footage from conflicts abroad and the total inadequacy of conventional means of political expression at home.

As U.S. cities become battlefields in miniature, what exactly are those means? Spectacular and audacious snatch-and-grab operations from masked federal agents, alongside the administration’s promise of mass deportations, have renewed popular attention to the horror of U.S. immigration “enforcement,” with protesters combating police, Department of Homeland Security and military personnel in pitched street battles. While Los Angeles and the border regions of the Southwest have been the epicenter of these confrontations, there have been uprisings in cities across the country. Protesters’ primary target has been ICE and their primary tactic is physical disruption. At the very moment Israel initiated its aggression on Iran with a spate of targeted assassinations, a riot rocked the infamous Delaney ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, during which four detainees escaped. Protesters outside the facility barricaded the gates, delaying the agents tasked with pursuing the detainees.

Trump’s reliance on ICE underscores a transformation toward a domestic politics of domination that mirrors his administration’s lawlessness abroad. Just as Trump felt no obligation toward any kind of established diplomatic processes before bombing Iran, he has positioned himself entirely against the courts, attacking the bedrock concepts of judicial review and due process as interfering with the project of mass deportation. Judges and city officials have been arrested for allegedly interfering with immigration enforcement. Immigration policy has long been inseparable from the project of domination and extreme coercion — but the aggressive attack on a federal judiciary heavily organized by decades of Republican politicking represents a marked shift.

Only time will tell if the reversion to a politics of domination on both the international and domestic fronts represents the turbulence of a phase change between equilibria, or a lasting order in and of itself. But in an age of ecological collapse and its knock-on effects — resource competition and mass migration — the global prospects are gloomy.

In the short term, the violence will continue to escalate. Despite the stated intentions of the Trump administration, there are effectively no prospects for diplomacy with Iran after the strike on nuclear sites. And with Israel’s insistence on permanent escalation and Iran’s need to restore its deterrence, the bilateral strikes between the two nations are likely to continue. Even if the U.S. goes all-in militarily in defense of Israel, Iran has the capacity to drag out the conflict, increasing the risk of new escalatory thresholds, new combatants and new theaters.

Moreover, a new imperial adventure in the Middle East would keep U.S. streets — already replete with a combination of Mexican and Palestinian flags — filled with protestors looking to agitate. As long as the major parties fail to oppose the war — or, in the Democrats’ case, offer only a more technocratic imperialism as an alternative — political dissent will continue to manifest as riots and vigilante violence. Trump’s deployment of military personnel to the streets of Los Angeles points to both the scale of the repressive force an escalated street movement will face, and to the common cause of pro-migrant and anti-imperial resistance.

Our increasingly repressive state apparatus is constrained by the fact that its agents believe the lies they tell about us. From Trump all the way down to the masked ICE thugs wending their way across farmlands, repair shops and Home Depot parking lots, our enemies are convinced that basic humanist demands represent a national security threat. Overreaction from the state engenders oppositional consciousness among the masses. A similar process is already underway internationally, as states, particularly those in the Middle East, may start to wonder who is next on the chopping block should Iran fall, and whether they ought to take a more defensive posture.

It’s one thing to declare that the U.S. government is run by fascists and quite another to mobilize a response adequate to fascism. Perhaps a fractured left-liberal coalition can open space for popular, non-electorally orientated modes of resistance aimed at sabotage and disruption. But old habits die hard, and we may instead see grassroots movements try once more to curry favor from institutional actors intent on boxing them out.

The post–Oct. 7 period has been defined by a turbulence that is showing no signs of abatement. Many structures have fallen, and many more are likely to follow. In our state of open contingency, one thing feels certain: the temperature is rising. Let’s hope we can stand the heat.

1. Palestine, however, was always the exception. See Matt Duss’s article in Jewish Currents about the Biden administration’s out-of-touch attitudes toward Israel and Palestine even before Oct. 7. Writing about the 2020 Democratic platform, Duss notes that “Biden’s emissaries never really argued against calling the occupation an occupation, nor would they engage on the substance of the occupation’s horrors. They just sang the hits. The commitment to Israel’s security is ironclad. Israel faces critical threats from every direction. Israel has no better friend than Joe Biden. The final platform language — which could’ve been written 20 years earlier — reflected the sensibility of both Biden and, in [former Ambassador Wendy] Sherman’s words, ‘the view of the vast majority of Democrats in Congress.’” ↩︎