When Gaza’s resistance forces broke through the colonial barrier that was supposed to be inescapable, this showed that the game had changed. That no matter how thorough and advanced the imperial system’s surveillance systems are, resistance fighters can overcome these systems, and put their captors at risk of defeat. This action by the Palestinian liberation forces, called Operation Al Aqsa Flood, had been inspired by other successes of anti-imperialist forces; Russia’s fight against NATO in Ukraine was something that Palestinian officials had been paying particular attention to while assessing the vulnerabilities of their enemies. And now that we’ve seen a new great act of resistance in Iran’s strikes against the Zionist occupier, more Al Aqsa Floods are even likelier to come into being.
It’s this realm of resistance, where subjugated people defy their circumstances to strike a dire blow against the system, that our imperial ruling class fears the most. It’s what Pentagon officials have been talking about when they’ve made statements like: “I think we are in this plastic period. We are in an acute threat environment. And ideally, sooner rather than later, the various parties will step down an escalatory ladder.” Mara Karlin, the former Pentagon policy official who said this, was reacting to how many resources Al Aqsa Flood has forced Washington to divert towards West Asia. Because the resistance disrupted the “peaceful” era of oppression that had existed in Palestine before October 7, the U.S. has had to forgo its plans for war with China to protect its Zionist strategic asset. And the best the foreign policy elites can do is hope that during this desperate imperial war, the world will view Washington as much stronger than it actually is.
Trump’s provocation against Iran last month was a psyop, a trick where the U.S. exaggerated how much damage it did with the hope that this would make its challengers respect it. The White House hoped either that Iran would take the bait, and enter into a war with the U.S. that it couldn’t handle; or be intimidated into complying with whatever demands the U.S. gives it. Instead, Iran has chosen the path that will advance the progress of the resistance, and responded by further bombing the Zionist entity. This means the hegemon’s latest aggressions have backfired on it, confirming the latent anxieties of imperial strategists.
Pentagon officials know that Washington’s resources are not inexhaustible, and that the post-October 7 crisis will turn into a much bigger problem if the empire doesn’t navigate things carefully. Former top Pentagon civilian official Dana Stroul has affirmed a basic sense of confidence in the military’s capabilities, yet admitted that these capabilities have limits which are worth concern. Said Stroul last year about the U.S. response to Al Aqsa Flood: “What the U.S. military demonstrated is that it is flexible and nimble enough to respond to a crisis and that the U.S. has the political will to sustain the increase in posture in support of a strategic partner. The challenge is always going to be that the U.S. can’t sustain that posture in perpetuity.” Because the hegemon can’t truly sustain that expansion in its efforts, it’s needed to de-prioritize its project at arming Taiwan. And this has made our ruling class shift its next war plans to new areas, ones that are much closer to the United States itself.
I’m not just talking about the plans for a war against Mexico, which have come to gain renewed traction after they got derailed a couple years ago. I’m also talking about the plans to turn the imperial war machine against the USA’s own people.
This is the logical conclusion of every effort that our government has been making to clamp down. U.S. military training resources and speculative literature have long been exploring the idea that one day, a war will need to be fought against Americans themselves. And with the campaign to combat “antisemitism,” the national security state has found a crucial pretext for this war. This is one of the reasons why promoters of the “Jewish question” have been getting heavily boosted by big tech algorithms: when pro-Hitler sentiment is so widespread, Zionism’s proponents can find endless justifications for their position, and the state has an excuse to criminalize dissent. The War on Terror, Russiagate, the attacks against the Mexican nation, and anti-Chinese paranoia have all been leading up to this grotesque project, where anyone who fights against the genocide will be treated as an enemy combatant.
These threats towards our liberty are very real, as real as the extermination campaign that our government continues to wage against the Palestinian people. There is another aspect to these realities, though, that gives proper context to the menace we are facing: everything that Washington is doing has the purpose of making the hegemon appear invincible, when it’s actually in peril. Which means that if we don’t accept the myth about the United States being strong, we’ll be in place to outmaneuver our imperial ruling class.
Sun Tsu wrote that “should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.” These are the things the U.S. empire has been doing since October 7: concentrating its forces in the places where they’re needed most, at the expense of the war efforts that it will need to carry out in order to reverse its long-term decline. It’s prioritized the tactical front in West Asia, while focusing less on the strategic front in East Asia; which has put the PRC in a better position to take Taiwan. And the U.S. foreign policy elites aren’t sure to what extent they should put attention onto China, because they can’t lose the Zionist entity.
In their efforts to bring a war to save the Zionist entity, the imperialists have adopted a strategy of inflating their willingness to do damage, then hoping this will bait Iran into a war with the U.S. Trump’s Iran strike showed that the Trump White House is open to war with Iran, but only if this war starts on the USA’s own terms. Washington will not try to launch a full-scale invasion of Iran, like it did against Iraq; it will keep trying to provoke Iran through attacks that are made out to be much bigger than they actually are. The places where the U.S. empire will still attack without reservation are in the countries which it views as sufficiently weak: Yemen, Palestine, Syria, and so on.
The hope is that the world will see these genocidal assaults, and be intimidated into giving up on fighting the hegemon. Yet even in the places that have been most thoroughly devastated by imperial schemes, resistance does exist; we cannot forget about the military members fighting Syria’s Salafist regime, who absolutely do have the potential to get as far as the Palestinian or Yemeni revolutionary movements have. Things are not always as they seem, and there are many points of vulnerability in the imperial control structure that may not be visible at first. It’s when we learn to see beyond the anti-resistance narratives about Palestine, and understand the nature and strategy of this liberation struggle, that the path towards revolutionary victory becomes much clearer.
This has been my experience since October 7: realizing that Hamas is not a controlled opposition org, as many alternative media sources have suggested, but is a real threat towards imperial power. It becomes apparent as soon as you notice how big of a material impact Al Aqsa Flood has had, and how unstable the occupier’s grip has truly become. The Palestinian resistance has revealed how even a formerly quite stable ruling order can be existentially endangered, and what’s happened in occupied Palestine may soon play out on a much larger scale.
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