On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated air campaign against Iran — striking military installations, nuclear facilities, and industrial infrastructure across the country in what the Trump administration named Operation Epic Fury. The bewilderment and the naïve, almost liturgical search for truth that followed was nearly universal.
That the Western commentariat found itself genuinely confused speaks less to the opacity of the campaign than to the limits of the analytical framework through which it was observed. The confusion was not incidental; it was structural. Mainstream foreign policy discourse, anchored in the assumptions of liberal internationalism, has no ready category for a war whose purpose is destruction as an end in itself. And so the most credentialed voices defaulted to the only diagnosis their framework permitted: incompetence.
On the day of the strikes, the New York Times editorial board, in a piece originally titled “Why Have You Started This War, Mr. President?” and later amended to “Trump’s Attack on Iran Is Reckless,” declared that Trump had launched the campaign “without explaining his strategy for the future and without the support of almost any other ally,” concluding there were “reasons to worry about what comes next” (New York Times Editorial Board, February 28, 2026). Three weeks later, on March 21, the same board returned with “Trump Is Hiding the Truth About the War in Iran,” arguing that Trump had been lying “about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis” (New York Times Editorial Board, March 21, 2026). Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius was more direct: “there was no consultation, there is no strategy, there is no clear objective and the worst thing from my perspective is that there is no exit strategy” (NPR, March 26, 2026). Bloomberg‘s editorial board called for “a clearer plan” (Bloomberg Editorial Board, March 2, 2026). The Financial Times called it an “epic gamble” with “no good ending” (Financial Times Editorial Board, March 1, 2026). On CNN’s GPS, Fareed Zakaria — a lifelong popularizer of neoliberal foreign policy orthodoxy — borrowed Iran scholar Karim Sadjadpour’s phrase, “regime change by jazz improvisation,” calling Washington’s approach “scattered, shifting and uncertain” (Zakaria, Washington Post, March 6, 2026). That even Zakaria found the campaign illegible measures how thoroughly Operation Epic Fury exceeds the explanatory capacity of the doctrine he has spent decades amplifying. Even the reliably hawkish New York Post conceded that “regular Americans and experts have good reason to feel confused” (New York Post Editorial Board, March 11, 2026).
What unites these reactions is not critical acuity but a shared and unexamined premise: that a military campaign must culminate in a political outcome — regime change, negotiated settlement, territorial control, reconstructed institutions. The absence of any such endpoint reads, within this framework, as failure. It does not occur to its adherents that the absence might be the point.
The framework in question is liberal internationalism in its post-Cold War, neoliberal iteration — the intellectual architecture that emerged triumphant after 1991 and has governed Western foreign policy commentary ever since. It presupposes that the natural endpoint of any conflict is institutional stabilization — elections, constitutions, central banks, IMF programs, open markets. War is an expensive but occasionally necessary tool for expanding the perimeter of liberal governance: the defeated party is incorporated, restructured, and opened. This is not merely a theory of international relations. It is a theory of history — one in which every country is on a developmental escalator toward the Western model, and American power is the hand that keeps it running. Within this worldview, a war without a reconstruction plan is almost metaphysically illegible. And so, confronted with a campaign that destroys without building, that strikes without occupying, that has no IMF delegation waiting in the wings, the liberal internationalist mind does the only thing it can: it concludes that something has gone wrong. It never considers that something has gone exactly right.
Neoconservatism — ostensibly the ideological antithesis of liberal multilateralism — shares this blind spot entirely. The neoconservative project, as it crystallized from Leo Strauss through Irving Kristol to Paul Wolfowitz and the Project for the New American Century, was always a theory of transformation through power: American military supremacy deployed to remake adversarial regions, install friendly governments, and lock in American primacy for another century. Iraq was its laboratory. The assumption that destruction was prologue to reconstruction on American terms is precisely what made the absence of a postwar plan in Iraq legible as catastrophic failure rather than quiet success. Neoconservatives wanted to build a new Middle East. What they got, and what their ideological heirs have perfected in Iran, is something older and colder: not transformation, but elimination. Both ideologies, in the end, are theories of incorporation. Neither has a category for a war whose only ambition is to unmake (Norton, 2004; PNAC, 2000).
There is, however, one ideological formation that requires no postwar plan — because it does not conceive of war as a means to a political end at all. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who presided over Operation Epic Fury, is tattooed with Deus Vult — “God wills it,” the battle cry of the First Crusade — and has spoken publicly of armed conflict as a Christian civilizational mission. This is not biographical color. It is the theological completion of that same structural logic. Where liberal internationalism imagines incorporation, and neoconservatism imagines transformation, Christian nationalist militarism imagines consecrated obliteration. The crusader does not reconstruct the city he razes. He does not draft a constitution for the civilization he dismantles. He fulfills a divine mandate and moves on. In this light, the absence of a postwar plan for Iran is not merely explicable as structural imperial logic — it is also, for at least one architect of the campaign, a matter of faith. Hegseth did not forget to plan for the morning after. In his framework, there is no morning after. There is only the will of God and the rubble it leaves behind.
But buried in an NPR dispatch, a single detail cuts through the noise. As ceasefire talks circulated, a source briefed on Israeli operations told NPR that the Israeli military was speeding up its targeting, “focusing on trying to hit Iran’s arms factories as much as possible — in case a ceasefire is declared” (NPR, March 26, 2026). Not missile sites. Not nuclear facilities. Arms factories. The term requires unpacking. An arms factory is not merely a place where weapons are assembled. It is the concentrated expression of a nation’s broadest industrial capabilities: precision metallurgy, advanced electronics, propulsion engineering, materials science, software integration. The same facilities that produce missiles produce the technical knowledge base from which civilian aerospace, automotive, energy, and telecommunications industries are built. To destroy Iran’s arms manufacturing infrastructure is to destroy the seedbed of its entire industrial future — the engineering universities that feed it, the supply chains that sustain it, the technical class that operates it. It is, in the most precise sense, a generational amputation. Israel was using the narrowing diplomatic window not to consolidate military gains but to sever that capacity permanently before a ceasefire could freeze the battlefield. This is not the behavior of a state pursuing security. It is the behavior of a state pursuing deindustrialization — one that understands that a rebuilt Iran is a recurring Iran, and that the only durable victory destroys not just the weapons but the civilization that produces them. The precedents are consistent: Israel’s decade-long strikes on Syria methodically eliminated whatever productive capacity the Syrian state retained; its intelligence cooperation with Washington before 2003 helped dismantle the institutional architecture of one of the Arab world’s most industrialized nations; and its strategic alignment with NATO’s Libya campaign removed a government that, according to declassified State Department correspondence, had been actively developing a gold-backed pan-African currency designed to free Francophone Africa from dollar and franc dependency (Blumenthal to Clinton, April 2, 2011). The stated rationales differed each time. The industrial outcome was identical. Netanyahu’s campaign against Iran was never primarily about the bomb. It was about the factory — and the elimination of the only regional power capable of building one. Israel’s strategic objective converges precisely with the imperial logic this paper has traced: not the defeat of an enemy, but the permanent destruction of a competitor’s productive capacity and with it, any sovereign alternative to Israeli and American dominance of the region.
That is not confusion. Nor is it without precedent. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq with no postwar administrative plan, systematically dismantled its state institutions and technical class through de-Baathification, and left one of the most industrialized nations in the Arab world in permanent dependency. In 2011, NATO’s air campaign in Libya — no occupation, no transition framework, no reconstruction — toppled a government actively pursuing economic sovereignty on a continental scale. In both cases, as in Iran today, the absence of a postwar plan was read as incompetence. A century of political economic thought points toward a more uncomfortable conclusion: it was the plan. To understand why, it is necessary to trace a line of argument that mainstream commentary has either never encountered or has chosen to ignore.
The starting point is Thorstein Veblen, who in 1915 identified something counterintuitive: that established industrial powers are structurally threatened not by weaker nations, but by developing ones. A late industrializer — building its factories from scratch — has the advantage of starting fresh. It can adopt modern technologies without the drag of outdated systems or sunk costs, and can out-compete the hegemon on the hegemon’s own terms. Iran, over decades of sanctions-enforced self-reliance, did exactly this — building a domestic missile industry, a drone manufacturing base, and a refining capacity that owed nothing to Washington or its allies. In Veblen’s terms, it had become a late industrializer approaching the threshold of genuine competitive threat, not militarily in any global sense, but in the specific sense that mattered: independence (Veblen, 1915).
Paul Baran, writing in 1957, took the next step. Baran argued that the relationship between wealthy and poor nations was not one of neglect but of active suppression. Dominant economies depend on keeping subordinate ones from reinvesting their surplus — the wealth generated beyond basic survival — into factories, universities, and weapons, because that reinvestment is what produces independence. Imperialism, at its core, is the systematic prevention of that reinvestment. Sanctions and financial exclusion are the preferred tools. But when those tools reach their limit, as they did with Iran, obliteration — to borrow the word Trump himself has reached for repeatedly — substitutes directly. The ordnance raining down on Iranian industrial facilities since February 28, 2026 — and with horrifying persistence, still falling as these words are written — is, in Baran’s framework, simply sanctions delivered at altitude (Baran, 1957).
André Gunder Frank gave the argument its sharpest formulation. Frank rejected the notion that poor countries were simply behind and would eventually catch up. Instead, he argued that underdevelopment is not a starting condition but a produced one — that the wealth of the core is not merely correlated with the poverty of the periphery but generated by it. Applied to Iran, his logic is merciless: a self-sufficient Iran is not just inconvenient for Washington — it is structurally incompatible with the system Washington manages. The destruction of its entire industrial base — down to its technical colleges and engineering universities, the very institutions that would rebuild what the bombs unmake — is not a side effect of the campaign but a mandate: the center’s supremacy cannot be maintained so long as the periphery retains the human and material capacity to challenge it (Frank, 1967).
Giovanni Arrighi added the dimension of time. Studying the long cycles of global power, he identified a recurring pattern: when a challenger approaches the capability threshold that would make suppression impossible, the dominant power acts. The window is narrow — strike too early and the justification is thin; too late and the challenger can absorb the blow. Applying Arrighi’s framework of systemic cycles of accumulation, Operation Epic Fury fits the pattern of a hegemonic power under terminal pressure resorting to military force to forestall the productive rise of a potential challenger. The timing — launched as Iran’s missile-industrial complex reached operational depth — is difficult to dismiss as coincidence (Arrighi, 1994).
Michael Hudson brings the argument into the present tense. Since the collapse of Bretton Woods in the 1970s, Hudson argues, the United States has organized the global economy around dollar dominance and the recycling of petrodollar revenues through American financial markets. Nations that develop independent industrial capacity, trade in other currencies, and refuse to financialize their surplus become threats not to American security but to American economic primacy. Iran had been doing all of these things. Its sin was not its nuclear program or its regional proxies. Its sin was economic self-sufficiency. The war was the invoice (Hudson, 1972; 2022).
Taken together, these five thinkers — writing across a century, from different national traditions — converge on a single argument: dominant powers do not merely compete with rising ones. They periodically destroy them. The destruction is not irrational, not the result of miscalculation or ideological excess. It is the plan — executed with varying degrees of violence depending on how far the challenger has advanced and how much time remains.
The dominant narrative — carried by the Times, echoed on CNN, amplified across every major Western outlet — is not merely wrong. It is a form of ideological protection. By insisting on incompetence, it forecloses the only question that matters: not why there was no plan, but why none was needed. A commentariat that cannot think outside the grammar of liberal internationalism will never arrive at that question. It will keep searching, liturgically, for the strategy that was never missing — because naming what was actually happening would require dismantling the assumptions on which its entire analytical world is built. The bewilderment, in the end, is not incidental to the project. It is part of it.
Behrooz Ghorbanian
References
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Frank, A. G. (1967). Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. Monthly Review Press.
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