America's strategy of chaos
So long as chaos endures, the United States can justify its continued military presence in the Middle East — and keep its geopolitical enemies at bay
In my latest article for Compact, I look at the violence spreading like wildfire across the Middle East, which took a particularly worrying turn after Sunday’s deadly attack on an American base in Jordan, which claimed the lives of three US soldiers — and brought us one step closer to the terrifying scenario of an all-out war between the US and Iran.
Aside from going over the history of the longstanding confrontation between US-Israel and the Iran-backed “axis of resistance”, which has dramatically escalated since October 7, I consider the options available to the US. As I write:
The truth is that Washington is outmaneuvered vis-à-vis the axis’s ideologically determined and militarily impressive alliance: short of all-out war, there is simply no military solution available. But perhaps the mistake is thinking that American planners aim to “win” this war. An alternative explanation is that they are aiming for a regional war of attrition—not peace, but neither war.
This makes sense if we posit that Washington fears peace just as much as it fears war. Why should the United States promote regional stabilization at a time when the Middle East is increasingly rejecting Western dominance and strengthening its ties with the China-led BRICS bloc? So long as chaos endures, the United States can justify its continued military presence in the region—and keep its geopolitical enemies at bay.
In this sense, the US-axis confrontation and America’s role in Ukraine should be understood as fronts of the same global (proxy) war: a strategy of chaos aimed at slowing down the ongoing transition toward a multipolar system.
Read the article here.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
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The base is in Syria not Jordan. The US does not want to draw attention to its illegal presence in East Syria, so they pretend it’s in Jordan.
I am not particularly sure why Tiberio Graziani needs a ‘crisis arc model’ or “Theory of the Arc of Crisis” for analysing the present geopolitical disaster, but the article (you have provided a link to) is interesting. On the other hand, your article is (sadly) behind the pay wall.