Trump’s war has destroyed the illusion of US military supremacy

Story by Trita Parsi

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/other/trump-s-war-has-destroyed-the-illusion-of-us-military-supremacy/ar-AA22eCTo

The war in Ukraine shattered a core assumption about great-power dominance: that size and military strength are enough to impose one’s will. Ukraine showed otherwise. With the right strategy, geography and resolve, a weaker state can survive and blunt – and in key respects even defeat – a much larger and stronger adversary.

The US now faces an uncomfortable parallel. The war with Iran is exposing similar limits to American power.

For decades, US grand strategy has rested on the belief that America’s unmatched military capabilities enabled it to uphold global stability and shape outcomes across entire regions.

After the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the mess in Iran, many Americans have reached a stark conclusion: the cost of that primacy is no longer sustainable, and no longer serves their interests.

A strategy that depends on military dominance everywhere, at all times, inevitably means being at war somewhere, all the time.

America’s endless wars are not an accident, they are the product of this approach. And if there is one rare point of agreement in an increasingly divided country, it is this: Americans are tired of war.

Yet, despite a war-weary public, mounting economic strain and politicians who promise to end endless wars, inertia – and powerful economic interests tied to war – have mostly kept this approach intact.

The question now being asked is whether Trump’s debacle in Iran will finally break this pattern. Early signs suggest its repercussions may exceed even those of George W Bush’s war of choice in Iraq.

The US actually won the Iraq war in under three weeks. Its military dominance was never in doubt. But it lost the peace, failing to stabilise the country once the insurgency took hold.

In Iran, however, the US hasn’t even won the military phase of the conflict, despite facing a far weaker conventional force.

Iran has leveraged geography and asymmetric tactics to blunt American power and inflict a strategic setback. Even more striking, early claims that US air strikes had significantly degraded Iran’s drone and missile capabilities now appear overstated.

The lesson is clear: control of the skies does not guarantee control of outcomes, and without the will to deploy ground forces – and without the ability to translate airpower into decisive results – US military hegemony begins to look increasingly hollow.

Meanwhile, as some experts have pointed out, even though the Iraq war ultimately failed, it did achieve its immediate goal: overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein. In Iran, the opposite appears to have happened. Rather than damaging the regime, the war has likely strengthened it and reinforced hard-line control, at a time when it was looking weakened by domestic protests.

Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor, notes that while the Iraq war destabilised the region, its global repercussions were relatively contained. It did not trigger an oil crisis, widespread food shortages or major supply chain disruptions. Iran, by contrast, has already sent energy markets into turmoil, driving oil and gas prices to record highs and triggering energy emergencies in multiple countries.

It may also have fundamentally reshaped the geopolitical landscape of the Persian Gulf for years to come.

Military primacy for the US was always a choice, not a necessity. The Iran war suggests it may no longer even be a viable one. A strategy built on escalation dominance falters when escalation itself becomes too risky to use. One that relies on decisive victories breaks down when enemies can consistently push for stalemates.

What emerges instead is arguably a different kind of global order: one not defined by dominance but by mutual denial. In this world, great powers cannot simply impose their will, and smaller states can resist them at tolerable costs. The result is not chaos, but constraint.

The most likely outcome of the current US-Iran stand-off is neither a deal nor a return to active war, but a prolonged, uneasy equilibrium. That, too, is a sign of the times.

The Trump White House may walk away from negotiations, but it is unlikely to re-enter a full-scale war. Not because the US lacks the capability, but because it lacks the strategic freedom to use it.

For countries that largely depend on US protection, this should be a wake-up call.

This does not mean alliances will collapse, but it does mean they will change. Countries will hedge more, diversify their security relationships and place greater emphasis on regional balances of power rather than reliance on a single guarantor.

In that sense, Iran is not a rupture so much as a speeding up of a trend already well underway.

Iraq and Afghanistan exposed the limits of Western occupation and regime change. Ukraine exposed the vulnerability of large conventional forces. Iran now exposes the limits of military coercion itself.

As my colleague Monica Toft argues, other smaller powers don’t need a vital waterway like the Strait of Hormuz to effectively constrain a superpower the way Iran has done. The shaping of terrain and geography – like in Ukraine – is sufficient. In short: Iran’s strategy is replicable elsewhere.

These conflicts, taken together, point to a more multipolar world – not because new great powers have risen but because existing ones can no longer dominate as they once did.

The danger for the US is not irrelevance. It’s that it continues to pursue a strategy designed for a world that no longer exists. The same is true for countries, like the UK, that have largely chosen to rely on American military dominance. American hegemony promised control, but the Iran war revealed the limitations of American power.

In the gap between promise and reality lies the likely end of an era. The winners will ultimately be those who adjust.

The West’s Bubble of Illusion About Israel – and About Itself – Is Finally Being Burst

The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy.

by Jonathan Cook | May 5, 202

https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2026/05/04/the-wests-bubble-of-illusion-about-israel-and-about-itself-is-finally-being-burst/

For decades, two irreconcilable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel.

On the one side, an official western narrative portrays a plucky, besieged “Jewish” state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbors. Even to this day, that story dominates the political, media and academic landscape.

Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to “the Arabs”, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed.

A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection of a vulnerable minority.

A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic “blood libel”.

It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state – armed by the United States and Europe – bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft.

On this view, the West implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost, there to subdue the native Palestinian population, and terrorize neighboring states into submission through relentless and overwhelming displays of force.

Palestinians cannot make peace, or reach any kind of accommodation, because Israel pursues only conquest, domination and erasure. No middle ground is possible.

The proof, note Palestinians, is Israel’s long-standing refusal to define its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, ever more extreme political agendas have surfaced, demanding not just Israel’s takeover of the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies but expansion into neighboring states like Lebanon and Syria.

Drunk on power

Here are two conflicting narratives in which each side presents itself as the victim of the other.

Two and a half years into a series of Israeli wars against the peoples of Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, how are these two perspectives holding up?

Does Israel look like the frustrated peacemaker facing off with barbaric opponents, or a rogue state whose decades-long aggression has provoked the very retaliatory violence exploited to excuse its constant war-making?

Is Israel a small, reluctant fortress state defending itself, or a western military client so drunk on its own power that it can no more limit its territorial ambitions than a great white shark can stop swimming?

The truth is that the past 30 months have graphically exposed not only what Israel always was but, by extension, what our own western states aspired to achieve through their most favoured Middle East client.

In a moment of imprudence last month, Christian Turner, Peter Mandelson’s replacement as British ambassador to the US, let slip the reality. Washington, the West’s imperial hub, he said, had no deep loyalty to its allies – apart from one.

Unaware his words were being recorded, he told a group of visiting students: “I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel.”

That special relationship requires that the political and media class in Washington’s other client states, such as Britain, shield the West’s Sparta in the Middle East from critical scrutiny.

So glaring have Israel’s atrocities become that the British government announced last month that it was shuttering its Foreign Office unit tracking war crimes – citing the need for cuts – rather than face further exposure of its collusion in those crimes.

If the British government refuses to monitor Israel’s war crimes, don’t expect more from the establishment media.

For months, Israel has been blowing up village after village in south Lebanon, driving millions of inhabitants from lands lived on for millennia by their ancestors, and it barely registers with our politicians and media.

Israel is destroying Gaza’s water supplies, as it earlier did the tiny enclave’s hospitals and health system, ensuring the further spread of disease, and our politicians and media have barely a word to say about it.

Israel kills journalists and emergency crews in Gaza and Lebanon week after week, month after month, and it raises barely an eyebrow from the political and media class.

Israel declares “yellow lines“ in Gaza and Lebanon, demarcating expanded borders that formalize its theft of other peoples’ lands, and this instantly becomes the new normal.

Israel continuously violates ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, spreading misery and inflaming yet more anger and bitterness, and once again, our politicians and media turn a blind eye.

Which western media outlets are pointing out a starkly revealing fact: that Israel now occupies more of Lebanon than Russia does of Ukraine?

Media bias

An analysis by the Newscord media monitoring group last month confirmed earlier research: that the British media studiously avoid naming ethnic cleansing and genocide when it is Israel – rather than Russia – carrying them out.

Comparing the coverage of the most “serious” establishment British news outlets – the BBC, the Guardian and Sky – with that of Al Jazeera, the study found that UK media consistently choose to obscure Israel’s responsibility for its crimes.

Israel was identified as conducting attacks in Gaza in only around half of British news reports, in contrast to nearly 90 per cent of Al Jazeera’s. As Newscord noted: “Half the time, BBC readers aren’t told who killed the person in the story.”

That was graphically illustrated in a notorious BBC headline: “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help”.

In fact, an Israeli tank had sprayed a stationary car with gunfire even though the Israeli military had known for hours that it contained a Palestinian girl – the sole survivor of an earlier attack – who emergency crews were desperately trying to reach. Israel killed the rescue team, too.

In another revealing finding, Newscord notes that four out of every five BBC reports on casualties caused by Israel’s attacks used the convoluted passive – rather than active – voice, clearly with the intent to downplay Israel’s culpability and savagery.

The British media also actively undermined the enormity of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza by regularly attributing the figures to a “Hamas-affiliated” health ministry – even though the numbers, currently at well over 70,000 Palestinians, are almost certainly a massive undercount, given Israel’s early destruction of the enclave’s government and its capacity to count the dead.

The fact that the United Nations has found the Gaza figures to be credible was mentioned in only 0.6 percent of reports.

Genocidal intent

Similarly, the BBC and the Guardian made the decision to humanize Israeli captives of Hamas twice as often as they did Palestinian captives of the Israeli state.

The inappropriateness of that double standard is underscored by continuing insinuations from politicians and the media that Hamas “beheaded babies” and carried out systematic rapes on 7 October 2023 – more than two years after those claims were utterly discredited.

Contrast that with the media’s effective burial of Euro Med Monitor’s report last month on the sickening practice by the Israeli military of raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs trained for that very purpose.

There has been a flood of accounts from Palestinians held captive by Israel of their systematic rape and sexual abuse, confirmed by human rights groups and by the testimonies of whistleblowing Israeli soldiers and medics. Little of this is making headway in the western media.

Newscord points to a further, veiled problem that skews western coverage: the omission of established but inconvenient facts that would present Israel in a depraved – that is, an accurate – light.

For example, observes Newscord, the BBC has entirely failed to report all but one of the hundreds of clearly genocidal statements made by Israeli officials, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down.

It is easy to understand why. Legal authorities usually struggle to make a conclusive determination of genocide because, crucially, it depends on divining intent, which is typically hidden by those committing atrocities.

Starkly, in Israel’s case, not only do its actions in Gaza look like genocide, but its leaders have been crystal clear that those actions are intended to be genocidal. That is behaviour only seen in those intoxicated by a sense of their own impunity.

Once again, the British media have obligingly taken it upon themselves to shield Israel from any legal jeopardy – all in the interests of objective reporting, you understand.

An old story

This is nothing new. It has been the same story since before Israel’s violent creation on the Palestinians’ homeland in 1948, when 80 percent of the native population were ethnically cleansed by Israel from the new, self-declared “Jewish” state. Or when, in the continuing language of deceit employed by western political, media and academic elites, some 750,000 Palestinians “fled”.

The aim has been to manufacture and maintain a bubble of illusion for western publics, one where our own crimes – and those of our allies – remain invisible to us.

Note in this regard the UK government’s determined exclusion of Israel from a recent “independent” inquiry, under former Whitehall bureaucrat Philip Rycroft, into malign foreign financial influence on British politics. It was, of course, Russia that was put chiefly under the spotlight.

Predictably, Keir Starmer’s government rejected in April a petition signed by more than 114,000 people calling for a similar public inquiry into the influence of the powerful Israel lobby.

That came as no surprise, given that any such investigation would have risked foregrounding the many hundreds of thousands of pounds known to have been received by Starmer and his ministers from pro-Israel lobbyists.

The same British political and media class so averse to investigating the malign influence of the pro-Israel lobby is also ignoring Israel’s current, systematic destruction of villages and infrastructure across south Lebanon – in flagrant violation of a supposed ceasefire.

Israeli soldiers have told local media that their job is to target all structures indiscriminately, whether civilian or “terrorist”, with the goal of preventing the Lebanese inhabitants from returning to their villages.

That fits with Israel’s announcement that it does not intend to withdraw after the fighting ends, and widespread plans to colonize the occupied lands in Lebanon with Jewish settlers.

Were it not for videos of Israel blowing up Lebanese communities breaking through on social media, despite algorithmic suppression, we might not know about Israel’s wholesale efforts to ethnically cleanse south Lebanon.

Responding to these videos with a rare “mainstream” report on the campaign of destruction, the Guardian sugar-coated the horror faced by Lebanese families discovering their homes gone, along with priceless memories and heirlooms. This experience was described – absurdly – by the paper as “bittersweet”.

Critics note a consistent pattern. Israel is not only leveling south Lebanon; over the past 30 months, it has leveled almost every building in Gaza, too.

But the template for both is of much earlier origin, as every Palestinian learns from a tender age.

Having expelled most Palestinians from their homes in 1948, Israel spent years blowing up some 500 villages one after another – even as Israeli leaders publicly claimed to be begging the refugees to return and western leaders were extolling Israel as the “only democracy” in the Middle East.

Expulsions that the West still pretends did not take place eight decades ago are now being live-streamed. This time, they are impossible to deny, as well as the colonial, supremacist agenda behind them.

Vilify the messenger

If the message inhering in Israel’s atrocities can no longer be disappeared, laundered or normalized – as it was in an age before 24-hour rolling news and social media – then a different strategy is required: vilify the messenger.

This is the political task of our times.

The anti-racist left are demonized as Jew-hating bigots for trying to burst the West’s long-established bubble of illusion by noisily flagging both the atrocities committed by Israel, supposedly in the name of Jews, and the complicity of their own governments in those atrocities.

Last month, Starmer’s government forced through the Commons a law allowing the police to outlaw protests causing “cumulative disruption” – that is, repeat protests like those against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The media barely blinked.

This week’s attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, allegedly by a mentally ill man with a long history of violence, is being quickly exploited by the main parties to prepare for even tighter restrictions on the right to protest.

Britons who try to stop Israeli war crimes, whether by targeting Israel’s factories of death located in the UK or by holding placards in support of this kind of direct action, continue to be treated as “terrorists”, even after a court ruling that the proscription of Palestine Action is unlawful.

With juries often proving reluctant to convict, the British state has set about openly rigging the trials. Juries are blocked from learning about the reasons for the targeting of Israeli weapons factories – the accused’s main defence. Judges instruct juries to convict.

Members of the public who silently hold signs outside court are arrested for reminding juries of a long-established right in law to defy such instructions, follow their consciences and acquit – a police abuse contravening hundreds of years of legal precedent, and one the courts appear increasingly ready to condone.

There are gags, being dutifully obeyed by the media, on other secret malpractices designed to help the British government secure the verdicts it needs to stop activism against the genocide. We only know because Your Party MP Zarah Sultana has used parliamentary privilege to draw attention to them.

It was telling this week that, in the current repeat trial of six Palestine Action defendants, five of them dispensed with their barristers for the closing speeches. They noted, darkly, that their legal representatives could not properly represent them due to “decisions made by the court”.

Meanwhile, the Starmer government is pressing ahead with plans to finally rid itself of troublesome juries and let more reliable judges decide these political show trials alone.

Welcome to the rapid unravelling of Britain’s most cherished constitutional rights – needed chiefly, it seems, to protect a far-off country that, according to the International Court of Justice, commits the crime of apartheid against Palestinians and may plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.

Painful lesson

But, of course, the British government – like the US, German and French governments – isn’t hollowing out its liberal democracy just to protect Israel. It is being forced to such extremes out of desperation.

The West can no longer sustain the bubble of illusion – about its moral or civilizational superiority – in a world of diminishing resources, a world where western elites are willing to cause planetary immolation to protect the fossil-fuel profits on which they have grown obese.

The agenda of the Epstein class is ever more transparent at home, and ever more under challenge abroad. The genocide in Gaza, and the ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, have exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy.

It is no surprise that a US empire on its last legs – an empire built on the control of fossil fuels – has chosen as the hill to die on the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s largest oil spigot.

Israel was, indeed, implanted in the region eight decades ago as a highly militarized client state whose primary job was to project western – that is, US – power into the oil-rich Middle East.

The US shielded Israel from scrutiny over its oppression of Palestinians and the theft of their homeland.

In return, “plucky” Israel helped the US construct a self-serving narrative that required the containment and overthrow of secular nationalist governments in the Middle East while protecting backward-looking monarchies that cosplayed opposition to Israel as they secretly colluded with it.

The region’s resulting states, embattled and divided, were ripe for control. They lacked the kind of accountable governments that would need to be responsive to their publics and might ally to protect the region’s interests from western colonial interference.

Now, Iran is stress-testing this decades-old system to destruction. It is forcing the Gulf states to choose: will they continue to serve the US, even though it has shown it cannot protect them, or ally with Iran as it emerges as a new great power, levying fees to pass through the strait?

The West is quickly learning that cheap drones can elude even its most sophisticated detection systems, and that a few mines and gunboats can choke off much of the fuel the global economy depends on.

The bubble of illusion has finally burst. The West is getting a rude and long-overdue awakening. The lesson will be painful indeed.

Greater Israel and Israeli Hegemony in the Middle East

These two are the true objectives of the wars in the Middle East since 1967.

For international Zionism and for the various Israeli governments, the ultimate goal is for Israel to become the hegemonic power in the Middle East, with its adversaries mired in chaos and Balkanization (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, and soon Turkey and Saudi Arabia), leaving the State of Israel as the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the region, with the most powerful conventional army; as a communications and trade hub between Asia and Europe; as the leading technological and scientific power; and all of this guaranteed by the military-economic might and the political and diplomatic support of the United States.

In the second half of the 20th century, the Israeli political-military leadership disguised these objectives by claiming that what it wanted was to avoid its “destruction” at the hands of its enemies in the region and therefore required the military support of the United States and Western Europe; as well as armed forces vastly superior to those of its opponents.

But once, throughout the 21st century, successive US administrations have fulfilled Israel's wishes to eliminate its adversaries in the region (from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to the war against Iran in 2026), the Israeli political-military-religious leadership has abandoned the "defensive" explanation of its Middle East policies and now states, without euphemism, that its objective is not only to expand Israeli territory (annexing the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and southern Lebanon and Syria), but also to establish political and military hegemony over the countries of the region through constant military intimidation (always supported by the United States) that will force them to follow Israeli political and economic directives.

Thus, Israel will apply the same strategy it has used against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon: “mown the lawn.” That is, to prevent peace and development among its adversaries in the region through wars and military interventions that hinder their ability to recover economically and militarily, thereby keeping them permanently in a state of underdevelopment and constant threat.

This implies a kind of Spartan state, as Netanyahu himself indicated in September 2025, when he spoke of turning Israel into a “super Sparta.”

While Netanyahu made this statement in light of Israel’s growing isolation in the international community due to its constant violations of international law, with the aim of preparing Israeli society to live in a constant state of war, the reality is that the prime minister was aware that this strategy is only possible if the United States continues to fund and provide military aid to Israel.

Therefore, the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is key to Israel’s continued territorial expansion. It can continue to maintain a significant advantage in conventional weapons and be the only country with nuclear weapons in the region; and it can become (as is its objective) the main economic, commercial, communications, and transportation hub between Europe and Asia.

If the Zionist magnates in the United States can maintain control of the government of the world's leading power (as they have managed for over 60 years), so that it serves Israel's grand objectives, it is very likely that we will see even more wars and instability in the Middle East in the coming years, since Netanyahu and the Israeli political-military establishment in general agree that not only must Iran fall into chaos and destabilization, but Turkey and Saudi Arabia must follow.

They care little that all of this generates a constant economic crisis worldwide, and even less that chaos persists in the Middle East, since for them the most important thing is to eliminate and/or weaken the countries that, from their perspective, could undermine their hegemony and halt their expansionist plans.

So, as long as the United States remains a subordinate piece of Israel's expansionist and hegemonic strategy; as long as Europe is unwilling or lacks the means to intervene and prevent this strategy; and as long as China and Russia have other priorities in their respective spheres of influence and prefer not to confront the United States and Israel in the Middle East, the region will most likely remain in a permanent state of conflict, with pauses and "truces" that will not last long, because Israel is determined to achieve the grand objectives that Zionism set for itself in the 19th century, and which it now sees as feasible to achieve with the acquiescence and help of the world's leading power, the United States.

US-Germany spat over Iran intensifies as Hegseth orders troop removal

German defence minister says Europe must look after itself, as 5,000 American troops set to leave Germany

By MEE staff

Published date: 2 May 2026

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/us-germany-spat-over-iran-intensifies-hegseth-orders-troop-removal

The spat between the US and Germany over the war on Iran is intensifying after Washington announced the withdrawal of 5,000 American troops from German soil. 

Responding to US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth's order on Friday, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Saturday that "Europeans must take responsibility for our own security".

Pistorius said the US move to withdraw troops from Germany, its largest European base, had been expected.

US President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have been sparring all week over the war on Iran. 

Merz has said that the US is being "humiliated" by Iran's leadership and has suggested that Tehran is outwitting the White House at the negotiating table. 

The German leader has criticised the US for entering the war without a clear plan, saying that this complicates efforts to bring the conflict to an end.

“The problem with conflicts like these is always the same: it’s not just about getting in; you also have to get out. We saw that all too painfully in Afghanistan, for 20 years. We saw it in Iraq,” he said last week.

Merz's interventions have infuriated Trump. “The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Trump posted earlier this week.

The US president also threatened to withdraw forces from Germany in response to Merz's remarks.

German military infrastructure

The New York Times, citing defence officials, reported that the US relies heavily on its bases in Germany to conduct operations across the Middle East, Europe and Africa, underscoring the strategic importance of the deployment. 

The US presence includes the vast Ramstein Air Base and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, both of which have supported operations related to the war on Iran, as well as previous conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pistorius said the partial withdrawal would affect a current US presence of almost 40,000 soldiers stationed in Germany, Reuters reported. Other estimates put the active-duty troop presence at around 35,000.

“Germany is on the right track,” Pistorius said, referring to his country's plans to expand its armed forces, speed up military procurement and build military infrastructure.

Trump has consistently - even before entering politics - complained about what he sees as excessive US support for its allies.

In 1987, the then-real estate developer spent nearly $100,000 on an advert criticising US foreign policy in major American newspapers.

“For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” the letter stated. “The saga continues unabated as we defend the Persian Gulf, an area of only marginal significance to the United States for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent.

“Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests?”

Germany wants to boost the number of its active-duty army soldiers from a current 185,000 to 260,000, Reuters reported, though critics of Pistorius have called for further expansion in response to what is widely seen as a growing threat from Russia.

Nato members have pledged to take on more responsibility for their own defence. However, tight budgets and significant gaps in military capability mean it will take years for the region to meet its security needs.

Israel pours $730m into global propaganda machine as reputation collapses

Experts agree that the mass spending on 'Hasbara' will do little to reverse Israel's reputational freefall

News Desk

MAY 1, 2026

https://thecradle.co/articles/israel-pours-730m-into-global-propaganda-machine-as-reputation-collapses

Israeli lawmakers last month approved a sharp increase in the 2026 public diplomacy budget, allocating roughly $730 million to the global messaging apparatus, also known as “Hasbara,” according to a report by the Jerusalem Post on 29 April.

Surveys point to a deepening collapse in international support, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and continued aggression toward its neighboring countries have sent the Tel Aviv's reputation into freefall on the global stage.

The funding accounts for more than four times the previous year’s allocation, and forms part of a broader push led by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, who characterized the effort as a strategic imperative, saying it should be treated “like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors” and calling it “an existential issue.” 

The campaign spans large-scale digital outreach and political engagement aimed at bending perceptions and influencing narratives around Israel.

Around $50 million is being funneled into social media advertising, and roughly $40 million is going toward flying in foreign delegations such as politicians, clergy, and influencers as part of the outreach effort.

Officials insist the strategy improves perceptions abroad, with Israel’s consul general in Los Angeles, Israel Bachar, claiming that “Everyone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you must fly out a lot of people.”

However, polling data cited in the reports shows a sharp collapse in public opinion towards Israel, particularly in the US.

A Pew Research Center survey found that 60 percent of US respondents now view Israel unfavorably, with declines cutting across political, religious, and demographic groups.

Analysts and researchers dismiss the spending outright, arguing it cannot offset the impact of Israel’s actions on the ground. 

Communication scholar Nicholas Cull said, “Our conclusion was, it’s the policy, stupid,” referring to Israel’s policy of genocide and apartheid, and its broader military conduct as a central pillar of its expansionist agenda.

“Yes, you can do a lot with public diplomacy, and there are strategies that could help on the margins. But they’re only going to affect a small percentage, because the bulk of the impressions on issues that people care about are shaped by the actual policies, not how well you sell those policies.” 

“The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore,” said Ilan Manor, another expert cited in the report, warning that increased funding may expand reach but will not restore trust.

That push is reinforced by what Israeli officials describe as a parallel “Eighth Front” – a so-called “Digital Iron Dome” that combines mass reporting campaigns, AI-driven targeting, and coordinated influencer networks to suppress dissenting content and flood platforms with state-approved narratives in real time. 

Israel had invested millions in coordinated digital influence campaigns, including a $6-million contract to shape AI outputs, targeted Gen Z messaging, and large-scale ad buys, in an effort to control online narratives and counter declining public support in the US.

The country’s propaganda arm had previously deployed a large network of at least hundreds of fake social media accounts and fabricated news sites to spread unverified claims linking UNRWA to Hamas's 7 October Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in order to undermine its humanitarian mission in Palestine.