The Funeral of Hegemony

How America’s Decision to Attack Iran Would Be Strategic Suicide

Ibrahim Majed, Jan 25, 2026, https://ddgeopolitics.substack.com/p/the-funeral-of-hegemony?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1769298&post_id=185644623&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

n American attack on Iran would not be a limited military operation, a punitive strike, or a calibrated act of deterrence.

It would represent a strategic rupture, a point at which accumulated American power begins converting itself into cascading liabilities. This is not a moral argument, nor is it a humanitarian one, it is more like a balance-sheet assessment of empire.

The question is not whether the United States can strike Iran. It can, and we’ve seen it. In June 2025, American warplanes joined Israel’s twelve-day campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities. Tehran struck back at a U.S. base in Qatar. The damage was extensive on both sides.

The question is what the United States loses the moment it does so again, and this time, without a ceasefire to stop the bleeding.

What follows is not ideology, but an autopsy written before the patient is declared dead.

The Liquidation of ‘FOB Israel’

For decades, Washington has not treated Israel merely as an ally, but as a Forward Operating Base, an unsinkable aircraft carrier, an intelligence nerve center, and the technological anchor of U.S. power projection in the Middle East.

A war with Iran inverts this logic.

Iran’s response would not be symbolic or theatrical. It would be functional. Through what Tehran describes as the Unity of Arenas, a coordinated strategy of simultaneous pressure across multiple fronts, retaliation would be applied with a singular objective: rendering Israel operationally unreliable as a base.

This doctrine is not a myth. It was first operationalized in 2021 during the Saif al-Quds war, when a joint command structure coordinated operations between Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian-aligned groups. The concept matured through 2023 and 2024, expanding the geography of confrontation to encircle Israel from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

If airports are disrupted, ports degraded, and civilian life in Israel’s economic and technological core placed under persistent stress, the asset ceases to function as an anchor. The United States would no longer project power from Israel, it would divert power into Israel merely to keep it viable.

At the moment of maximum strategic need, Washington loses its most valuable regional platform.

And then the anchor chain is cut.

The Trap of Strategic Overstretch

The U.S. military is built for dominance through speed, precision, and overwhelming force. Iran is built for endurance.

It will not fight where the United States is strongest. It will fight in time, depth, and dispersion, and force escalation without resolution.

The June 2025 strikes exposed this dynamic. Iran acknowledged extensive damage to its nuclear infrastructure. But within months, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was claiming that Iran had “reconstructed everything that was damaged.” Whether true or not, the statement illustrated Iran’s strategy: absorb the blow, reconstitute, and wait.

Once engaged, Washington faces a structural dilemma: it cannot disengage without reputational collapse, yet it cannot remain without accelerating exhaustion. Every escalation deepens commitment. Every deployment degrades readiness. Every month consumes forces needed elsewhere.

The U.S. military currently maintains approximately 50,000 troops across bases in the Middle East. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group has just been diverted from the South China Sea, the very theater where America’s strategic future will be decided, and is now steaming toward the Gulf.

Iran seeks defeat by entropy—the slow erosion of capacity through overuse.

This is how empires bleed.

Economic Hemorrhage

A war with Iran would not be financed through shared sacrifice. It would be financed through monetary expansion and debt.

The consequences are predictable: inflationary pressure, rising energy costs, and the diversion of capital away from domestic resilience. Infrastructure, innovation, and social cohesion would erode as resources are consumed by a conflict offering no strategic return.

The Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s most critical energy chokepoint. Roughly one-fifth of global oil consumption passes through its narrow waters. Iran has long threatened to mine or close the strait in the event of war, and this threat grows more credible as conflict intensifies.

Tehran could also target energy infrastructure across Gulf states: pipelines, terminals, refineries. The resulting supply disruptions would send shockwaves through global markets, punishing American allies in Europe and Asia far more than the United States itself.

The empire would stabilize its periphery by hollowing out its core. History is unforgiving to systems that consume their own interior to preserve external dominance.

The China Dividend

The greatest beneficiary of a U.S.–Iran war would not be Iran. It would be China.

While Washington’s strategic nervous system is absorbed by escalation management in the Middle East, Beijing gains freedom of maneuver. The Indo-Pacific becomes secondary. Influence expands. Partnerships deepen. American deterrence thins.

This calculus is openly acknowledged in Beijing. As one prominent Chinese scholar at Renmin University recently observed: “Washington’s deeper involvement in the Middle East is favorable to Beijing, reducing Washington’s ability to place focused attention and pressure on China.”

The arithmetic is brutal. If the United States deploys two carrier strike groups off the coast of Iran, and it can only maintain three on station globally at any given time, that leaves one for the entire Pacific theater. Taiwan. The Philippines. Japan. All left with diminished coverage.

Every missile expended in the Gulf is one unavailable in East Asia. Every carrier tied down is one removed from Pacific balance.

In a zero-sum system, China collects the dividend without firing a shot.

Unconventional Retaliation

Perhaps the most underestimated consequence of attacking Iran is retaliation by actors who are not Iranian at all.

A U.S. strike would not be perceived globally as a bilateral conflict. It would be read as a hegemonic act and a signal that force remains Washington’s primary language. This perception would activate a diffuse ecosystem of anti-hegemony actors: ideological extremists, decentralized cells, and radicalized individuals scattered across continents.

They require no coordination, no command structure, and no attribution. The danger is not scale, but diffusion. American embassies, corporations, logistics nodes, and symbolic targets would face persistent, low-intensity pressure worldwide. Deterrence fails when the enemy is not a state but an environment.

This is the empire’s nightmare: a world where American presence itself becomes the trigger.

The Collapse of Credibility

Power ultimately rests on belief.

If the United States initiates a war it cannot conclude, fails to secure trade routes, exports inflation to allies, and generates instability rather than order, confidence erodes. Allies will hedge, partners will diversify, and rivals will start to probe.

The June 2025 campaign was supposed to demonstrate resolve. Instead, it demonstrated limitations. Six months later, western-backed protests have erupted across all 31 Iranian provinces, and the regime still stands. The strikes did not produce regime change. They did not eliminate the nuclear program. They did not deter reconstruction.

If the most powerful navy in history cannot impose decisive control over critical chokepoints, if it cannot translate kinetic superiority into political outcomes, the myth dissolves.

The emperor is revealed, not as weak, but overextended.

The Self-Inflicted Defeat

The final assessment is brutally simple. The greatest threat to American power is not Iran’s missile program. It is the American decision to attack it.

By doing so, the United States would neutralize its forward base, exhaust its military, hollow out its economy, accelerate China’s rise, and globalize resistance to its presence.

Empires do not collapse only when defeated. They collapse when they choose wars that consume them faster than their rivals.

In the case of Iran, this would not be miscalculation, it would be strategic suicide.