The Oligarchical Corridor

A Source of War

Is this an American war? It surely is, in the sense that Americans will bear some of its consequences. And it surely is, in that American voters are among its causes, having brought Donald Trump to power. But in its causes and in its purposes, one sees very little that connects directly with the people or the institutions of the United States of America.

If we examine the origins, or what we can discern of them, we get an inkling of something rather different: a closed domain of international oligarchs, exploiting the state’s power and patriotic sentiment, while creating a world order in which the American state is much weaker, or simply ceases to function. An oligarchical corridor.

Is the war American in its origins? Can we find the genesis of Trump’s war against Iran in the United States? There is of course a domestic politics to the war. Trump has already telegraphed that he wants to exploit this war to try to fix (”federalize”) the elections of November 2026, and preserve his power with artificial majorities of supine Republicans. But that would work with any war. And, for all we know, by the summer or autumn Trump may well have moved on to another war in Cuba, or yet another one after that.

The question is: why this particular war? Why Iran? There are certainly Americans who have wanted a war with Iran for a very long time. Years, decades, in 2003, longer. But that does not explain the timing. Why now? There does not seem to be an American answer to that.

No doubt the decision was Donald Trump’s, in the narrow sense that no one else enjoyed the practical authority to order the American armed forces into battle. But this begs the question rather than answer it -- and Trump himself lacks answers. Why did he make the decision that he did? He has been unable to explain why he started the war, to a degree that defies any explanation from deliberate ambiguity or even mental decline. He does not even seem very interested in the question, as though it had been answered by others for him. He clearly wanted a war, after the pleasure of Venezuela. But why this one?

One can recall various American origins for a war, more or less honorable, or more or less tawdry. We have fought wars that originated in legitimate threats from abroad, in attempts at secession within the country, in press campaigns, in governmental analyses of threats, in government propaganda campaigns. In all of these historical instances, however, there was some American component, some American process. That American input is missing here.

The subject is not the legitimacy of those past wars. The issue is a much simpler, analytical one: in all of these cases, there was some sort of American origin story to the armed conflict. In the case of the Third Gulf War, there is not. There was no threat, abroad or at home, nor any subjective public sense of such a threat. We see little evidence of any sustained discussion or debate within departments of the government (Vietnam) or even of a government press campaign designed to sway opinion (Second Gulf War).

Let us accept Trump’s own account that the only limitations to what he does are inside his “own mind.” That too just begs the question. What things are inside his head, and how do they get there? We see no sign that what is inside his mind right now has to do with his own expressed convictions (peace prize), public opinion (against the war), government consensus (absent) or propaganda campaign (likewise). What then are the channels into Trump’s head? The pathway to Trump’s mind seems to be an oligarchical corridor.

We don’t know nearly enough to be confident about what is in that corridor, as any historian will acknowledge. Decades from now historians will be debating why this war started, as we debate the origins of all great conflicts.

Those future scholars will have a difficult time, because there will be little written evidence. What passes for American foreign policy is largely carried out by private emissaries who are often unaccompanied by note-takers and who do not benefit from the institutional competence or area expertise of government departments.

One trace is left by the exhaust fumes of private jets which speed, tellingly, to some capitals but not to others. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have been involved in three sets of negotiations which touch the parties concerned by this war. They were Trump’s negotiators with Iran, where in their impatience (to put it mildly) they took a position that leaned towards that of Israel and Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf States. They were among Trump’s negotiators with Israel over Gaza, where I think it can be said without glaring injustice that their position tilted towards that of Tel Aviv. And they are Trump’s negotiators with Russia and Ukraine, where Witkoff’s stance is ostentatiously pro-Kremlin.

These men do have a place in Trump’s mind. His friend and his son-in-law are his chosen emissaries, and he talks to them. They connect him to countries concerned by this war: Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia (and other Gulf States), Russia, Ukraine. Witkoff and Kushner have favorites. Kushner has a plan to turn Gaza into a giant resort. In the case of the Gulf States, the two men benefit from (known and documented) financial transactions of unusual flexibility and generosity. There is no known financial connection between Kushner or Witkoff and the Kremlin, but it would be untrue to say that the possibility of such an arrangement does not intrude upon the imaginations of of regional experts.

America itself is outside the oligarchical corridor. We see three individual Americans -- Witkoff, Kushner, and Trump -- who share that cozy passage, an informational and emotional environment with interested and often extravagantly wealthy individuals from other countries. The conventional inputs from the American public and the American government being obviously irrelevant, and any threat to American safety or any account of American interests being just as conspicuously absent, we are justified to attend to the corridor.

In addition to asking about inputs -- what goes into the corridor--, we can consider outputs -- what comes out. Who benefits from this war? The United States certainly does not. No national interest is being served, and no real effort is even being expended to try to define one. We are shedding credibility, and we are shedding allies, we are exposing weaknesses in our practice of war, and we are burning munitions that might have been needed elsewhere.

And so who does benefit? Again, it has to be emphasized that we do not have the kind of sources that future historians would like. But there are nevertheless a few candidate who petition for our attention. Israel is the American co-combatant in this war, and its government has a clearly expressed interest in destroying Iranian power.

Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a regional struggle for power with Iran for 47 years. Interestingly, American war propaganda (picked up by regime-friendly commentators) now maintains that the United States has been at war with Iran for 47 years. (Orwell has gotten a lot of attention recently, but his “we have always been at war with Eurasia” in 1984 is very much a propos.) This obviously untrue claim implies that the United States has been a Saudi client state working against Iran for the better part of half a century.

This propaganda line is historically ridiculous -- remember when we trafficked missiles to Iran in 1981-1985? or when Saudis flew airplanes into the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001? But it is telling.

What about Russia? Here the case is certainly more complex. It is embarrassing for Putin that he has lost another political friend: after Maduro, now Khamenei. And Iran has been Russia’s backer during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, supplying the Shahed drones that have terrorized and traumatized the Ukrainian civilian population. Iran even sent its own personnel to Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory in autumn 2022 to teach Russians how to pilot drones; it would be very surprising if those trainers themselves did not direct some of the countless lethal attacks against Ukrainians. (The number of drone attacks on Ukraine is on the order of one hundred thousand, which is worth bearing in mind when a single drone attack on American forces is treated as something exceptional and dramatic). There is no doubt that the American attack on Iran will hinder any further supply of Iranian weapons to Russia.

Given their experience with those Iranian weapons, it is unsurprising that many Ukrainians greet the American attack on Iran as of benefit to them. I am afraid that this is not really the case.

The Ukrainians have one major vulnerability in the war right now, and that is air defense: in particular, the need for Patriot missiles that the Americans produce and which Europeans now buy and pass to Ukraine (there is no direct American weapon provision to Ukraine). The United States is now burning through those Patriot interceptors at a wild pace, to the delight of its possible adversaries.

The Patriot has exceeded all expectations in Ukraine these last two years. But if the United States wastes the stock of Patriots in its Iran adventure, then it will be hard to protect Ukrainian cities, or for that matter anything else. According to Kyiv, the Americans went through more Patriots in the first three days of the war with Iran than the Ukrainians have used in four years of defending themselves from a full-scale invasion by Russia.

This is, incidentally, a strong suggestion that the Americans are fighting in a way that is tactically as well as strategically unwise. It appears that the Americans are firing expensive Patriots at cheap drones, which is not how a modern war is fought. It wastes money, but it also wastes the potential that Patriots have to stop missiles. The Americans seem unprepared to deal with drone warfare. For this, they will need Ukrainian help. Whether the Americans acknowledge this in any way is another question.

The Russians have one major vulnerability in the war, and that is hydrocarbons. They depend upon selling oil and natural gas to buy weapons and pay soldiers. Thanks to the war on Iran, thanks to the oligarchical corridor, oil prices have now increased, to Russia’s great benefit, and Russia is filling the void left by Iran.

So on balance, the war exposes a Ukrainian vulnerability, and addresses a Russian one. The United States might have made preparations to prevent Russia from immediately profiting from its actions, but did not. This is consistent with an ongoing conversation inside an oligarchical corridor, in which American oligarchs would as a matter of course address Russian concerns.

Here too American propaganda might be revealing. Of the two propaganda messages that have survived for longer than a day, one is a Russian talking point: that Ukraine is to blame for everything, including American mistakes.

Trump and his spokesperson Karoline Leavitt have been claiming that the United States has the infinite weapons needed for a forever war --- but if that infinity is somehow violated, this is a result of the Biden policy of arming Ukraine.

This is absurd on a number of levels. Historically, the US sells the most arms to Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Israel, in that order. After the full-scale invasion, of 2022, Ukraine was generally given weapons that were about to be decommissioned. Ukraine used those weapons to hold off a full-scale invasion by Russia, which was backed by China, Iran, and North Korea. This is an incomparably more meaningful conflict than Trump’s war on Iran. Ukraine improved some of those weapons, deployed some of them in new ways, and then shared experience with the Americans, who were able to make improvements in both design and in practice.

The unfairness of this has to be registered; the point, though, is that Trump and Leavitt are repeating a Russian cliché. And, as with the idea of our always having been a Saudi client, the notion that Ukraine is to blame for everything is the only consistent American propaganda message. (The Americans don’t have to repeat Israeli propaganda: the Israeli prime minister went on Fox and supplied it himself, without the need for mediation.)

The war serves Israeli, Saudi, and (with qualifications) Russian interests; the war has led the White House to share Israeli, Saudi, and Russian messaging. These are the outputs thus far.

And so from the inputs and the outputs, we get a certain picture, one in which America is peripheral, and the oligarchical corridor is central. I don’t believe in the “smoking guns”: that one conversation with an Israeli or a Saudi or a Russian brought about this war. I think it is more fruitful to imagine the corridor in which an ongoing conversation takes place: one in which the American people are absent, American institutions are absent, and indeed everything American is absent. And through this absence we see the emerging reality: the American state is allowed to decay and falter, while oligarchs use the bits that remain to pursue private interests and private fortunes.

This is a world which better serves states such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, where the state and the oligarchy are already in alignment. It is not a world in which the United States has much of a place, or at least the United States considered as its people or its representative institutions. It is the world of Trump’s Board of Peace, in which peoples are understood as objects of deals, not as citizens of states.

The American armed forces will be sent hither and thither, as suits the chancy whimsy of the oligarchical huddle, but what they do will be untethered from anything that is substantively American. Their commendable loyalty to the state is abused by a president to whom such commitment is utterly alien. The violence that Americans wreak around the world will affect, among other people, Americans as well; the killing and dying is done in their name, though without their input or any thought to their well-being.

Is this an American war? It is a war of the irresponsibility of a few Americans inside the oligarchical corridor, one which pushes the country towards a future in which institutions fail and citizens do not matter. It could also be a war which allows other Americans to see this future, and to hinder it, and to imagine a better one. If we face squarely that this war is a step to our unmaking, then we have the beginnings of a plan for the remaking.