As if the genocide in Palestine were not enough, Israel simultaneously unleashed a war through a blatant and large-scale aggression. Does not Israel best fit the description of a “rogue state,” a term that the United States indiscriminately hurled at the countries it targeted?

Israeli motivations

For Netanyahu, it’s not just about staying in power and thus avoiding the legal prosecutions that would befall him once he returns to being a private citizen. Iran is the country in the region that stands in the way of the US-Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. Eliminating it is seen as necessary to achieve domination in the region by the United States and its Israeli extension. Iran is an obstacle to Israeli expansionism. It is the country that supports Hamas, Hezbollah, the Ansar Allah (Houthis), and the resistance movements in Iraq. And if all of them support the Palestinian cause, it is perhaps in part because Palestine is the most significant obstacle to the Greater Israel project, a project that Iran opposes.

In recent decades, Israel has made it appear that Iran was on the verge of building a nuclear bomb. In some very old clips from about 15 years ago, Netanyahu said it was a matter of weeks before Iran would achieve this. (A recent Glenn Greenwald show on System Update reviews all of Netanyahu’s false alarms.) So the Iranian nuclear bomb issue is just a pretext, just as the lie about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was 22 years ago. In any case, Iran’s nuclear equipment is buried underground and unreachable by conventional shells. The “preventive” war Israel has just launched cannot be explained by invoking this false danger. Rather, it is about eliminating the main political force hostile to US-Israeli hegemony and to the annexation of territories adjacent to present-day Israel. This is why the Western media immediately announced that Israel’s (and the West’s) real goal was regime change in Tehran. Israel is the only nuclear state in the Middle East, and it wants to maintain its monopoly at all costs. Finally, in addition to staying in office and saving his own skin, Netanyahu also hopes to go down in history as the man who furthered the Zionist project and the expansion of Israeli territory.

Since the 1940s, various Israeli leaders have engaged in murderous attacks against Palestinians, culminating in the current genocide, with the exploitation of Nazi crimes as justification for colonizing Palestine. They put these crimes to use for the purpose of carrying out occupation, ethnic cleansing and settler colonization. They deployed a similar strategy, but one which reversed the situation and placed them in the position of executioner. By posing as the eternal victim, Israel believes it can do anything, to the point of committing genocide in broad daylight, under the gaze of the entire world.

There is therefore a set of converging factors that explains Israel’s choice to attack Iran: saving Netanyahu from having to face justice, maintaining power thanks to a coalition bringing together the genocidal and warmongering religious far right, and expanding Israel’s territory. It acts with impunity with the support of Western countries that finance it, arm it, provide political cover, and repeat its propaganda. The Israelis would not attack Iran without the support of the United States. Therefore, to understand what is happening, we must also explain why the Americans also want to attack Iran.

The United States

For the United States, Iran was one of the ultimate targets in a series of seven countries in which it had to intervene in order to establish its control in the region. The clip of General Wesley Clark giving an interview to Amy Goodman, available on YouTube, is particularly revealing and eloquent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Knt3rKTqCk

Why do the Americans want to dominate the region? There was a time when they were concerned with ensuring their oil supply. Then, they sought to neutralize competition in oil production from various other countries, in support of the Gulf protectorates.

Thus, the United States invaded Afghanistan to provoke a regime change that would favor the establishment of American oil companies in the region, while also establishing a base in southern Russia. The United States is also present in Iraq to exploit the oil there. It then occupies a third of Syria where it can control oil production. In 2011, the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar launched a proxy war (using jihadists as surrogates) against Syria when the latter chose the Iranian pipeline over a Qatari pipeline that would have gone through Saudi Arabia. The United States forced Russia to intervene in Ukraine in order to justify economic sanctions against that country, including those aimed at cutting off Russia’s access to the European market for the sale of its gas and oil. It destroyed the Nordstream II pipeline, despite the fact that it was financed not only by Gazprom but also by Germany. The aggressiveness displayed by the Americans against Venezuela can be explained in the same way. This latter country is a very large oil producer.

But since the Americans are now almost self-sufficient in gas and oil, why are these resources so important to the United States? The answer is that the most important resource for the Americans is not gas or oil, but the US dollar as the de facto world reserve currency. Defending the Gulf countries, where immense hydrocarbon reserves are located, is the United States’ way of ensuring that oil and gas will continue to be sold in dollars. It is a crucial relationship for securing the primacy of its currency in the world. Supported by the oil and gas trade, the dollar is the main pillar on which United States imperialism rests.

In this regard, it is worth recalling that Saudi Arabia has been torn between the West, its traditional ally, and China, an economic superpower eager to buy Saudi oil, but paying for it in yuan. The Saudis also considered joining the BRICS countries and made peace with Iran. But the Americans want to keep Riyadh in their fold and associate it with Israel (the ” Abraham” Accords). Hence the Saudis’ reluctance to join the BRICS.

Potentially fruitful negotiations?

Is it correct to make the United States play a belligerent role in the conflict between Israel and Iran? Were not the Americans on the verge of reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran? Some may have believed this when Trump seemed to accept the existence of a nuclear industry in Iran. But, very quickly, he raised his voice. The demands became more stringent, and Iran was ordered to completely abandon its nuclear industry development program. It had to end all research in this field, even if it is the right of every sovereign country. Trump was repeating Netanyahu’s rhetoric. Skeptics then argued that the “negotiations” initiated with Iran only served to falsely reassure Iran so that military intervention could take Iran by surprise. This would be overestimating the skill of the Trump administration. Rather it believed that it could intimidate Iran into submission during the talks. In the end, negotiations became a way for the United States to distance itself from the Israeli attack and make the international community believe that the United States has nothing to do with it.

The United States pretended to distance itself when Israel began using famine as a final solution against the Palestinians. It built a bridge to bring food to the Gazans, a project that quickly failed and turned out to be nothing more than a marketing operation to preserve its public image. Now it pretended to negotiate and pose as an intermediary, when in fact it is a stakeholder in the conflict between Israel and Iran.

This policy was inspired by the Brookings Institution: Which Path to Persia (2009), Brookings Institution: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06_iran_strategy.pdf Commentator Brian explained the ins and outs of it on The New Atlas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPAFvlPf-UE

The deeper motivations

The United States has attacked Russia and Iran, respectively using Ukraine as a proxy and cannon fodder, and Israel as a protectorate and beachhead. If it wants to attack China, using Taiwan as a pretext and justification, it is because it wants to perpetuate its global hegemony. Otherwise, the expansion of the BRICS with China as a leading member would risk providing the international community with a globalization unfolding outside the Western system, and therefore outside the complex involving the US dollar, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Swift system. The US dollar could lose its de facto status as the world’s reserve currency. Trump wants the US dollar to lose its value in order to increase United States exports and reduce the trade deficit, but he also wants the dollar to preserve its status as the world’s reserve currency. Hence the announced threat of imposing 100% tariffs on countries that want to operate within the BRICS.

Why does the United States want to preserve the dollar’s privilege? Without this privilege, buying U.S. Treasury bonds would no longer be a safe investment. To attract investors, interest rates would then have to be raised, which would make inflation soar, slow the economy, and increase the debt burden as well as debt service. Americans could quickly find themselves not only forced to borrow in order to pay interest on the debt, but also enmeshed in hyperinflation and then in default, which would encourage investors to sell away their now worthless dollars. In its fall, the dollar would drag American imperialism down with it.

Conclusion

It is sometimes said that to understand geopolitics, one must follow the pipeline. It can now be added that one must also keep an eye on the dollar. He who conquers by the buck will perish by the buck. So, Israel’s genocidal and warlike actions are part of an overall strategy and the United States is at the heart of it.