Gaza is not an aberration - Israel planned this genocide decades ago

Jonathan Cook

11 June 2026

In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-not-an-aberration-israels-genocide-gaza-was-planned-decades-ago

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza. 

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges... Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline "We were ordered to kill”. 

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war - often referred to as the Six-Day War - not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders. 

The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.

None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza - levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population - is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct. 

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” - the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4. 

Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration. 

Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.

Policy of starvation

The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” - or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war. 

Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.

This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state. 

Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza - the 22 per cent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt. 

The 1967 war was seen by the Israeli leadership as a second bite of the cherry: a chance both to seize and colonise all of historic Palestine through military occupation and the establishment of Jewish militia settlements, and to expand the ethnic cleansing operation to rid historic Palestine of its native inhabitants. 

Weeks after Israel seized the Palestinian territories, the prime minister of the time, Levi Eshkol, told his cabinet where the expulsions must begin. “We are interested in emptying out Gaza first,” he said.

Given international pressures, he was clear that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza would need to proceed by stealth, so as to attract less attention. Foreshadowing Israel’s 16-year siege of Gaza that started in 2007, he proposed that Palestinians could be forced out of Gaza “precisely because of the suffocation and imprisonment” Israel was imposing there.

The ethnic cleansing programme could be hastened, he suggested, by depriving the population of essentials like water. “Perhaps if we don’t give them enough water, they won’t have a choice, because the orchards will yellow and wither.” 

In this spirit, 40 years later, Israel would go on to calculate the minimum number of calories to allow into Gaza so that the people there would grow steadily more malnourished. Or as senior government adviser Dov Weisglass explained in 2006: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger." 

Seventeen years after Gaza was forced on to its “diet”, when Hamas briefly broke out of the enclave, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals seized their moment. 

They destroyed those “orchards” and transformed the “diet” into a full-blown starvation blockade - a crime against humanity for which Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, are wanted by the International Criminal Court. 

Targeting innocents

The crimes of 1967 were understood long ago by Palestinian historians, who were, of course, not listened to. Israeli historians took much longer to start piecing together the story as they gained access to parts of Israel’s military archives. 

Haaretz’s new investigation, based on research by the Akevot Institute, provides details of the ruthlessness of the mass expulsions of Palestinians beginning in 1967.

As the paper reports: “The historical inquiry shows that Israel expelled and drove out some 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and the [Syrian] Golan Heights. And as in 1948, the expulsion included killing civilians, sowing terror in Arab communities, looting and ultimately, destruction.”

Having managed in 1967 to again expel large numbers of Palestinians, the next task - as in 1948 - was to prevent their return. 

Uri Avnery, a journalist and member of the Israeli parliament, recorded testimonies from soldiers stationed at the borders with Jordan and Egypt, into which Palestinians had been expelled. The soldiers’ job was to murder any Palestinian families trying to get back to their homes.

Here is one soldier’s testimony, reported by Haaretz, that Avnery noted in his autobiography: “We blocked these crossings and received orders to shoot to kill, without prior warning. Indeed, such shots were fired every night at men, women and children, even on moonlit nights when it was possible to identify those crossing. That is, to distinguish between men and women and children. 

“In the morning, we would go out to scan the area, and we would kill, by explicit order of the officer present, those who were alive, including those hiding and the wounded. After the killing was over, we would cover the bodies with dirt until a tractor arrived.”

Today’s Israeli whistleblowers warn that this military doctrine is unchanged. Over the past three years, investigations have repeatedly shown Israel trying to conceal its crimes by secretly bulldozing its civilian victims into mass graves in violation of international law. 

It did so, for example, when troops massacred Palestinians seeking aid a year ago, and again when soldiers executed 15 Palestinian emergency workers in an ambush on ambulances in March 2025. 

Another soldier troubled by the 1967 shoot-to-kill policy recalled a conversation with his commander: “I asked the officer: And if I hear babies crying, should I shoot them too? The answer I received was: Don’t be a girl.”

There is nothing exceptional about this. Israel is known to have killed more than 1,000 babies in Gaza under the age of one since 7 October 2023, not all of them anonymously in strikes from the air. 

The Israeli military allowed a group of five premature babies in al-Nasser hospital to die and decompose in their incubators after its soldiers took over the building in late 2023. 

Israeli commanders also knew that the first to die from a blockade of aid would be the most vulnerable. Babies froze or starved to death as the population was deprived of shelter, baby formula and food, with their mothers lacking sufficient nutrition to produce milk. 

As Soldier 2 noted, Israeli military doctrine encourages soldiers to stop seeing Palestinians, even Palestinian babies, as “human”. Their lives are considered worthless. 

Past familiar

Israeli soldiers murdered another Palestinian baby last week in the West Bank, after they ambushed a car driven by a lecturer from Bethlehem university, Fahd Abu Haikal, in the Palestinian city of Hebron, which is under particularly brutal occupation. 

One of the soldiers fired into the car, as it was slowing to a halt, from only a few metres away, from where he must have been able to see the passengers inside. The bullet killed Abu Haikal’s seventh-month-old baby, Sam, and wounded his wife, who was holding the infant. Abu Haikal’s 11-year-old son, also in the car, watched his baby brother bleed to death.

Israeli soldiers have been murdering Palestinian babies for decades. Yet none of it has roused an ounce of the outrage uniformly expressed by western media and politicians at Israel’s entirely fabricated claim that Hamas killed 40 babies on 7 October 2023. 

In fact, only one Israeli baby was killed that day: nine-month-old Mila Cohen, who, like Sam Abu Haikal, was shot in her mother’s arms. 

Israel’s 1967 campaign of expulsions in Gaza and the West Bank was not improvised, nor was it done on the spur of the moment. According to Haaretz, the policy had been carefully planned many years in advance. 

Since 1948, Israel had been waiting for a moment to carry out additional expulsions and seize the last parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories it had been denied for the completion of its violent settler colonial project. 

The 1967 war - against Egypt, Syria and Jordan - provided the pretext. 

Ishai Amrami, a senior battalion commander in that war, later admitted: “This thing, which I experienced first hand, was an attempt at massive population transfer.”

As Haaretz observes: “The Palestinians were mere bystanders in this story. Defence Minister Moshe Dayan wrote in his memoirs that the Palestinians residing in the West Bank did not take part in the war, and that it was not their war. Nevertheless, they were the ones who paid its price.”

Israel began the mass destruction of Palestinian communities, as it had done after 1948, so there would be no homes for Palestinians to return to. But as Haaretz notes, Israel became a victim of its own rapid military success. 

“This was one of the rare instances in the history of the conflict where Israel was forced to back down due to heavy international pressure.” 

It hardly needs pointing out that, unlike 1967, such international pressure has been sorely missing over the past three years. The new cast of western leaders, like Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer, once a noted human rights lawyer, have justified Israel’s explicitly exterminationist agenda against the Palestinians of Gaza, terming it “self-defence”. 

Unlike their predecessors in the 1960s, today’s western leaders and their media chose to buy Israel the diplomatic time and space it needed - as well as providing the weapons and intelligence - to destroy Gaza. The genocide would have been impossible without their assistance. 

Buoyed by this impunity, Israel has tried to spread the destruction further afield, with limited success in Iran and much greater success in south Lebanon. 

As western politicians and media happily forget Gaza, Israel keeps up the relentless pressure and misery there. A so-called “Yellow Line”, demarcating Israeli military control over the destroyed enclave, an area off-limits to Palestinians, has gradually expanded from half the land to 70 percent. 

The people of Gaza are quite literally being squeezed out of the ruins of their homeland, as Israel scrambles to find a third country - Egypt, or perhaps Somaliland - willing to take them in.

Excising context

As the US cosmologist Carl Sagan famously observed: "You have to know the past to understand the present." 

Which is precisely why western politicians and media have been so careful to strip out the past, excising the context and background, such as Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing campaigns of 1948 and 1967, that explain Israel’s behaviour in the present - in Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon. 

Western audiences, deprived of the region’s history, have been more easily manipulated into believing that Israeli atrocities are a response - and a supposedly “proportionate” one, at that - to Hamas’ one-day attack on Israel in late 2023. 

An obvious truth has been obscured: that for at least eight decades, Israel has been exploiting any opportunity it could find to expel the Palestinians from their homeland. 

The October 2023 Hamas attack was not a turning-point or a rupture, as it is so often presented in the West. 

In 1967 - that is, 56 years before the Hamas attack - Eshkol advised that unforeseen events might accelerate Israel’s stealthy programme of ethnic cleansing. A moment might arrive in the future - what he called an “unexpected luxury solution” - when Israel could rapidly realise its dream of a Palestinian-free Palestine. 

“Perhaps we can expect another war, and then this problem will be solved. But that’s a type of ‘luxury,’ an unexpected solution,” he explained to the cabinet.

With the missing context added, as Israel’s Haaretz has done with its new article, the story is transformed. 

The events of 7 October 2023 look less like simple savagery and more like a desperate, last-roll-of-the-dice response to decades of Israeli atrocities designed to make conditions for Palestinians so miserable - through pauperisation, confinement, starvation, and murder - that they either flee their homeland or die in situ.

With the missing context added, Israel’s supposed “retaliation” in Gaza - its genocidal rampage - looks like what it actually is: a continuation of its eight-decade ethnic cleansing campaign. In fact, its final instalment. Its denouement. 

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, wrote to his son in 1937, 11 years before Israel’s creation: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places.” 

In a diary entry during the mass expulsions of 1948, Ben Gurion summarised the mood among his generals: “If we accuse a family - we need to harm them without mercy. Women and children without mercy. Otherwise this is not an effective reaction. During the operation, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.” 

The goal was the weaponisation of fear, making Palestinians too terrified to remain in their homeland. 

Mordechai Maklef, a senior commander in the fledgling Israeli army, noted two years later, in 1950, the logic behind Israel’s policy: “It is impossible to expel 114,000 people who lived in the Galilee without terror.” 

Even if we ignore Palestinian accounts from those times, the small sections of the Israeli archives that have so far been opened to Israeli historians document massacres and systematic rapes of Palestinians in 1948. 

In recent Israeli films such as Tantura - the village where a terrible massacre of Palestinians was carried out - old men who served as Israeli soldiers at the time confirm the archival documents, recounting how they personally witnessed Palestinian girls being raped. 

Let us note that weaponised rape continues to this day - in what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem calls Israel’s “network of torture camps”.

These rapes - now often using dogs specially trained for the purpose - are so widespread that they have become impossible to conceal. They have even come, very belatedly, to the attention of mainstream media like the New York Times, provoking a cacophony of protest and threats from Netanyahu to sue.

So routine is the sexual abuse of those Israel detains that international peace activists suffered systematic rapes when hundreds of them were seized last month in international waters off Cyprus, as they began their journey to Gaza to break Israel’s genocidal blockade. 

Israel wants the fear to spread, from Palestine itself to anyone who wishes to show solidarity with its people.

Western politicians and the media have barely referred to these horrific crimes against their own citizens. Why? Because to acknowledge those crimes would be to concede that even worse atrocities are being meted out to Palestinians under Israeli rule. 

Prisons of complicity

Gaza is not an aberration. It is fully in accord with an eight-decade-long Israeli military strategy. Westerners aren’t aware of that only because their political and media class have worked strenuously to stop them from learning about it. 

If western publics knew what has really been happening to Palestinians for 80-plus years - first, from the Zionist movement and then from the Israeli state - they might swell further the ranks of the protest marches, making these demonstrations politically impossible to ignore. 

If westerners knew what has really been happening to Palestinians, they might join activists who have been trying to incapacitate Israeli weapons factories, like Elbit Systems, operating quite openly in western countries such as Britain. They might, as a result, manage to smash the supply of drones and other weapons being used to massacre the people of Palestine and Lebanon.

Instead of thousands, there might be tens or hundreds of thousands of people willing to hold up a placard in the UK opposing genocide, and be arrested as a “terrorism supporter”, overwhelming the prison system and making a mockery of Britain’s supposed “justice” system.

Armed with knowledge rather dulled by ignorance, more westerners might board boats, amassing an armada that it would be impossible for the western media to disregard. But most critically of all, were the real context understood - were Israel’s decades-long pattern of murdering, raping, and expelling Palestinians known - western publics might wake up to the fact that their political and media class are not moral actors. They are not upholding the values of a superior civilisation. They are not the guardians of international law and a democratic liberal order.

They are imposters. Or more accurately, they are working within political and financial structures that make it impossible to tell truths that would rock a system of power in the West that enriches a tiny elite through a lucrative war machine used to protect the gargantuan profits of the fossil fuel industries. 

That system of power drives some Palestinians into an early grave, and others into concentration camps, or exile, or penury. 

Meanwhile, it drives us in the West into prisons without physical walls - prisons either of ignorance and complicity, or of knowledge and impotence. 

Either way, like Soldier 1, we find our humanity deadened. Our hearts are hardened or broken. The challenge we face is the same as the Palestinians: to find a path out of our confinement. 

Tehran 'holds firm' to red lines as Trump backpedals from escalation threat

Trump pledged 'VERY HARD' strikes on Iran hours before claiming a deal with the Islamic Republic 'has been reached'

News Desk

JUN 11, 2026

https://thecradle.co/articles/tehran-holds-firm-to-red-lines-as-trump-backpedals-from-escalation-threat

An Iranian official told US media on 11 June that the “war will continue” until Washington “respects” Tehran’s interests, coinciding with reports that the Islamic Republic has withdrawn from negotiations.

Mohammad Mokhber, advisor to Iran’s Supreme Leader, told CNN that the situation is “in their hands.”

“If they respect Iran’s interests and act accordingly, the war will end; otherwise, it will continue,” he added, stressing that Tehran will “not back down” and “not step back.”

US President Donald Trump is “mistaken” if he believes he can continue to “test” Iran’s military capabilities, Mokhber said, adding that the “fate of the war depends on Washington’s actions.”

An Iranian source told Fars News Agency earlier on Thursday that there would be “no new talks” and that Tehran will “stand firm” on its terms.

The warnings from Tehran came a few hours before Trump backtracked on threats to launch major strikes on Iran and seize its strategic Kharg Island. 

“Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, canceled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening,” he said via social media.

He also claimed “final points” have been approved “in both concept and great detail” by all parties involved, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkiye, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others.

Trump stressed that the illegal naval blockade on Iranian ports will remain in place.  Just a few hours earlier, the president had said the US would be striking Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT.”

“At some point in the not-too-distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela.”

This followed overnight Iranian missile strikes on key US sites in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan – launched in response to new US airstrikes on Iran’s southern coast and Tehran province. 

Iran also announced the “complete closure” of the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping on 11 June.

Washington has repeatedly bombed Iran since the so-called ceasefire was announced in April. Tehran has retaliated each time.

 

Iranian missiles pierced US defense systems, hit 70% of targets: Fars

• By Al Mayadeen English
• Source: Al Mayadeen English
• 10 Jun 2026 

An Iranian military source says the large-scale operation struck 70% of designated targets, noting that ballistic missiles and drones hit US-linked bases in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/iranian-missiles-pierced-us-defense-systems--hit-70--of-targ

Preliminary data, satellite imagery assessments, and information from Iranian security services point to the success of Iran's large-scale military operation that was carried out at dawn Wednesday, Fars News Agency reported, citing an informed military source. 

According to the source, Iran's Air and Missile Forces successfully struck 70% of the designated military targets with high precision, adding that long-range ballistic missiles and drones operated by Iran’s armed forces were able to penetrate air defense systems deployed at US military bases in the region.

Iranian missiles and drones also accurately hit their designated targets at the al-Azraq base in Jordan, the Ali al-Salem base in Kuwait, as well as the headquarters of the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, the source stated.

Iran retaliates against 21 US-linked targets

Iran's Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) announced early Wednesday that it launched an attack targeting 21 US-linked sites across the region, including the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, stressing that the operation was in response to recent American aggression on Iran.  

The targets also included a US F-35 fighter jet base in al-Azraq in Jordan, as well as a command-and-control center at the same facility. Iranian Fars news agency reported that the IRGC used Kheibar Shekan missiles in strikes targeting F-35 hangars in Jordan. 

The IRGC added that it had destroyed four high-value targets using long-range solid-fuel missiles and said a US MQ-9 drone was shot down during aerial engagements over Jam in Iran’s southern Bushehr province.

The IRGC warned that continued hostile actions would be met with “more severe and harsher responses,” signaling readiness to expand its military operations if attacks persist.

At the same time, Iran's Tasnim News Agency reported that Iranian air defenses shot down an American MQ-9 drone over the city of Jam in Bushehr province in southern Iran.

 

The Iran War and the Future of American Empire

The choice is between controlled retrenchment now and forced retrenchment later.

Jennifer Kavanagh

Jun 8, 2026

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-iran-war-and-the-future-of-american-empire/

Wars often go wrong in unexpected ways. Even well-planned operations can be derailed by surprise events, equipment failures, bad weather, or bad luck. But the disaster that followed President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran on February 28 was not a surprise. War-gamed and red-teamed dozens of times over decades, the risks of the campaign were well-known and obvious. 

Still, the war’s outcome has been worse than the most pessimistic predictions. Three months into what the Trump administration has called an “excursion,” the initial assessment that Operation Epic Fury was a “tactical success but strategic failure” appears too generous. After all, neither strategic nor tactical goals were achieved. The United States did not replace the Iranian regime with new, moderate leaders. It failed to seize Iran’s highly enriched uranium or eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. Worse, most reports suggest Iran has retained much of its military capacity, including access to large portions of its missile and drone stockpiles. Finally, the war has created a new, bedeviling problem. The Strait of Hormuz, once the passageway for 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas, remains effectively closed.

No matter how the war ends, the costs of the latest U.S. military adventure in the Middle East will be steep and the geopolitical consequences irreversible. The next generation of U.S. leaders will face a stark reality. The United States, which for decades has made decisions based on what policymakers thought America should do, will be forced to consider what the United States can do. The change will have major implications for the United States, but also for U.S. allies who have come to depend on American security guarantees and for the international community that relies on the United States for provision of global security goods, like freedom of navigation. 

It will take time for the American imperial project to disappear for good, but from this point, U.S. retrenchment is inevitable. In 20 years, the world will look back on this moment as a turning point: the beginning of the end of American empire.

President Trump has declared victory in the Middle East. But to anyone with eyes, his rosy prognosis does not match the reality. The most obvious evidence of the American failure is the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz (which was open before the war), despite several attempts by the U.S. Navy to get traffic moving again through the narrow chokepoint. Although a small number of tanker and cargo ships have successfully transited the strait in recent weeks, most of the traffic remains stalled due to the security concerns of ship owners, captains, and their crews.

Away from Hormuz, the inability of the United States and Israel to suppress Iranian missile and drone attacks is perhaps the war’s biggest disappointment. Ambitious U.S. goals like regime change and eliminating Iran’s nuclear program were never achievable using military force alone, but destroying Iran’s ability to produce and launch missiles and drones that could be fired at regional neighbors seemed attainable. Recent reporting, however, suggests that even this objective has slipped through the U.S. military’s fingers; Iran appears to retain as much as 70 percent of its pre-war missiles and launchers and access to 30 of its 33 missile sites. Iran’s ability to manufacture drones also seems robust. That Iran was able to sustain a consistent rate of fire after the war’s opening days is further evidence that the damage inflicted by the U.S. military was somewhat less devastating than suggested by the Pentagon and the White House.

The results of the war, then, are dismal. The costs of the military failure, on the other hand, are significant—and not only in monetary terms. 

The Pentagon has told Congress that the first 40 days of war, up until the April ceasefire, cost $29 billion, but this is almost certainly a vast underestimate. The Department of Defense (DoD) has been ambiguous about what is included in this estimate, but at the very least it does not account for the massive damage to U.S. military infrastructure or the full costs of replacing U.S. military aircraft and other equipment lost in the conflict. The full price tag is likely to be twice as high as DoD’s early tally. 

Most up-to-date assessments suggest that at least 16 U.S. military installations across eight countries—most of the U.S. military positions in the region—suffered severe damage. For many of these sites, the damage incurred was so extensive as to render the facility effectively unusable for military operations. The cost of reconstituting these bases and hardening infrastructure across the region against renewed conflict will be high, but the total is difficult to estimate since the U.S. government is still limiting access to open-source satellite data in the region. Iranian missile and drone strikes also successfully targeted dozens of U.S. sensors and radars across the Middle East, including those underlying U.S. regional air defense and early warning networks. Forty-two military aircraft, including an E-3 AWACS, four F-15s, and seven air tankers, were also damaged or destroyed. Replacing these assets will require tens of billions in additional spending.

Costs to long-term military readiness are hard to measure and surely not counted in the Pentagon’s estimate, but they are worth considering anyway. In addition to wear and tear to equipment and personnel caused by the war, the loss of aircraft and air defense platforms and the depletion of U.S. missiles and air defense interceptor stockpiles will affect U.S. preparedness for future military operations. Some estimates suggest the United States has burned through 1,000 Tomahawk missiles, nearly 50 percent of its Patriot and THAAD stockpiles, and significant portions of advanced stand-off weapons like PRSM and JASSM missiles. 

The constraints on U.S. military power created by these shortages will be consequential and enduring. In congressional testimony, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth admitted that it would take years to replenish the missiles expended in Iran. During this time, American strategic flexibility will be limited. For example, leading experts now assess that the U.S. military arsenal is not sufficient to support a defense of Taiwan, long considered the highest priority contingency for American military planners. To put this more bluntly, if China were to attack Taiwan tomorrow, the United States might be forced to watch on the sidelines. The same is probably true of a major conflict in Europe.

As seriously, the problems facing a diminished U.S. military will be contagious, affecting the rearmament efforts of U.S. allies across regions. As our stockpiles are rebuilt, the United States will have to divert most defense production to its own military, reducing what is available for sales to U.S. allies and partners who have based their rearmament plans on such weapons purchases. Already, European NATO members are hearing that shipments of much-needed missiles and other weapons are being delayed indefinitely. Allies in Asia have been similarly warned. Japan’s shipments of Tomahawk missiles, for instance, are likely to arrive late, as are most weapons in recent Taiwan arms packages. 

For many of these allies, such delays are unsustainable. In Europe, for instance, there is talk of focusing more heavily on indigenous production or shifting orders to other suppliers such as Israel, Turkey, or South Korea. In some ways, allied assessments that the United States is an unreliable partner are a good thing, pushing countries that have long been dependent on the United States firmly and finally in the direction of independence and self-sufficiency. But, for the United States, it will be a dramatic change that contributes to a gradual erosion of its position of global military dominance.

Beyond military costs, there is the economic damage caused by the conflict, which is outside the Pentagon’s purview but real and serious nonetheless. The economic losses caused by disrupted trade are likely to be massive, measured in slowed economic growth and lost corporate profits and national income. For the United States, the effects of higher oil prices and inflation for American consumers are the biggest concerns. And of course there are also the opportunity costs, that is, the U.S. government investment in domestic programs that will now be delayed and foregone to support higher military budgets. 

The bottom line is this: The war has not made Americans safer, but they will be paying for it for decades anyway.

The U.S. failure in Iran is unprecedented in its effect on American geopolitical standing, but the military mistakes made in Iran are themselves not unique for the United States. Like previous ill-fated U.S. military campaigns, the Iran War began with unclear, broad goals that could never have been achieved using military force alone. Also as in previous wars, the stakes for the United States were considerably lower than they were for the adversary, a fact that set the United States up for failure from the start. For Iran, the stakes of the current conflict are existential and willingness to endure pain seemingly infinite, while for the United States, the interests at stake are limited at best. Iran was never close to having a nuclear weapon, and, despite its aggressive rhetoric, Tehran posed no real threat to U.S. national security. Finally, American political and military leaders once again made the error of believing their goals in Iran could be accomplished quickly, and then failed to develop a strategy or theory of victory for an extended campaign.

In the past, America’s overwhelming military and economic advantages have offered Washington a generous margin of error to absorb these repeated military disappointments. Today, this cushion has evaporated. Combined with the cumulative effect of decades of U.S. overextension, China’s rapid military development, and the democratization of military power to weak states and non-state groups, the war in Iran has erased much of the remaining U.S. military edge. Forty days of fighting plus six weeks of blockade have not only drained stockpiles but revealed systemic weaknesses in the American way of war and clear limits on American military power. For the first time in decades, the U.S. military looks beatable—and is.

First, the vulnerability of U.S. bases, ground-based air defense, and military aircraft during the war has significant implications for the sustainability of U.S. military commitments. U.S. operations in any sort of Indo-Pacific contingency would depend heavily on forward bases to project airpower, to support intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and to manage logistics and combat support. Pentagon plans also place faith in the ability of ground-based air defense to protect U.S. military infrastructure, personnel, and aircraft. If U.S. bases in the Middle East cannot withstand attacks from Iran, could those in Asia survive in a conflict with the much more militarily capable Chinese military? Would U.S. air defense networks, which were degraded so quickly by Iranian drones, remain viable in a contingency in Asia? The answer to both questions is probably no. 

At the same time, the war has underscored the limits of what can be accomplished with “stand-off” attacks (those executed from a distance). American air and naval strikes achieved only narrow success against Iranian military targets, despite Iran’s limited defenses. Iran was able to protect much of its military infrastructure and capabilities and to innovate in areas like air defense throughout the conflict. Similar attacks on Chinese infrastructure are likely to be even less effective, especially if U.S. air and naval forces must operate from beyond the second island chain to avoid Chinese missiles. 

U.S. failures in other areas are also revealing. The United States has been unable to reopen the Strait of Hormuz using military force, though some might contend that it could if it were willing to accept the high escalation risks and costs of such a maneuver. And the sieve-like nature of the U.S. counter-blockade should raise a red flag for those who argue that the United States could cut off access to the Strait of Malacca or impose embargos on Chinese ports in case of a war in Asia. Finally, U.S. ground forces have largely failed to counter Iran’s drone threat and are unable to match it with capabilities of their own. Together with observations from the war in Ukraine, U.S. Army leaders have already acknowledged that they will have to radically change how they think about maneuver warfare as they plan for future contingencies, including those to support NATO allies in a ground war in Europe.

The key takeaway is that U.S. military power simply doesn’t reach as far or have the staying power that it used to. Just as seriously, the war in Iran suggests that the insolvency of the current U.S. military position is systemic and strategic, not simply a question of lack of funds or insufficient magazine depth. A $1.5 trillion defense budget or investment in the defense industrial base cannot solve these problems. Instead, the United States will be forced to reevaluate and reduce its global commitments in a way that it has not in the past.

Writing in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, A. Wess Mitchell, an alumnus of the first Trump administration, acknowledged that the United States is overextended. He calls for a strategy of consolidation, in which the United States would shed burdens in peripheral theaters—namely the Middle East and Europe—and revitalize the engines of American military and economic power by investing in its defense industrial base and rebalancing trade relationships with major partners like China. He suggests that consolidation is an alternative to retrenchment, on the assumed premise that the foundations of American military power remain solid, needing only a reset.

Unfortunately, after the war with Iran, this option no longer appears realistic. The gap between U.S. means and its currently articulated ends is simply too vast and structural to be addressed with industrial investments or new trade deals. The fundamental assumption of consolidation, that the engines of American military power are still viable, is now in doubt. U.S. manufacturing capacity has failed to rebound despite significant investment, and with a national debt that exceeds 100 percent of GDP and rising energy prices, American economic endurance is sputtering. There is little chance the United States can produce enough missiles fast enough or reboot its shipbuilding capacity sufficiently to sustain even a fraction of its current portfolio of global commitments. Moreover, after expending so much military power on the war in the Middle East, it is not clear that there is much left for the United States to consolidate and redirect to the theaters that Mitchell defines as higher priorities, including Asia and the Western Hemisphere. 

Now retrenchment is the only choice for the United States. But the news is not all bad. America’s military dominance is waning, but the country continues to have notable advantages in most theaters over any possible rival. Even in Asia, where Washington faces a peer challenger, China’s military is not capable of driving the United States out of the region entirely. Decisionmakers, therefore, have a degree of flexibility in terms of what commitments to keep and which to surrender. Retrenchment, in other words, can be managed.

In making tough choices, U.S. policymakers should adopt a narrow definition of national interests—just two, in fact: defending the homeland and ensuring access to key economic markets. Such a definition would allow for a substantial reduction of U.S. military forces based abroad. The United States does not need military bases and deployments in Europe or the Middle East to protect these interests. There is no true hegemonic challenger in either theater, and the threats that exist to the United States can be addressed with periodic deployments of air and naval power, better missile defense of the homeland, and a more robust global economic strategy. Managed retrenchment would also demand a narrowing of U.S. security guarantees. Even if the United States remains in NATO, it should return to a literal interpretation of Article 5 that reduces U.S. obligations and should give up all security commitments in the Middle East—a region that has brought only headaches. 

In Asia, a managed retrenchment strategy would similarly reduce American posture and security guarantees, though perhaps initially to a lesser extent. Unsustainable positions, like the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity on Taiwan, should be dropped. Washington should state clearly that it will not defend Taiwan, a move that would reduce the risk of a war with China that at this point the United States is unprepared to fight. The United States should drop other necessary alliance commitments, including those to Thailand, the Philippines, and South Korea, while narrowing its commitment to Japan. This would allow for a repositioning of U.S. military forces in Asia away from China’s coast toward northern Japan and the second island chain—sufficient to defend U.S. access to markets and trade routes. 

These changes in posture and alliance commitments would amount to a massive transformation of American foreign policy, but the result would be a sustainable military position, consistent with U.S. capabilities and resources and tailored to protecting U.S. interests. 

Those hoping to cling to U.S. dominance—many of the same people who see the Iran War as a success that requires just a few more weeks of bombing—will abhor these recommendations, pushing efforts to sustain the status quo. But such a delay will close the opportunity for managed retrenchment and thrust the United States into a reality in which retrenchment will be mandatory and required, forced on the United States.

Forced retrenchment could occur in many ways, but they will all feel like a retreat. Resource constraints could require the United States to reduce commitments, close bases, and shrink force structure. Defeat in a military conflict, provoked by unsustainable deployments, vulnerable bases, and chronic overextension, could also force U.S. pullback. In any of these scenarios, involuntary reductions in U.S. military posture could compromise U.S. interests. Under duress, policymakers will lose the ability to control the pace or location of changes in U.S. military footprint. Instead, these decisions might be made by U.S. adversaries, fiscal pressures, or external constraints that leave Americans less safe and less well-off over the long run.

Today, the U.S. foreign policy debate is driven by the aftermath of the war with Iran. An agreement to end the root causes of the conflict has yet to be signed, but policymakers now need to start talking about what comes next. The war has revealed the fragility of U.S. military power and the clear limits on what it can accomplish in the modern era. Instead of maintaining the fiction that after the war U.S. foreign policy can return to normal, policymakers should face reality: The period of U.S. military dominance—and of American empire—is over. The resulting future will be less comfortable for the United States, but its changes are overdue and its challenges manageable. With the right moves today, American retrenchment can leave the United States, and the world, better off.