The US–Israeli war on Iran is the latest phase of the United States’ long-war in the Persian Gulf, a fifty-year project to secure imperial power in a region defined as a “vital interest” since the 1970s. Yet this latest phase lays bare the limits of that generational project. Devastating and predictably violent, Washington and Tel Aviv appear to be pursuing ruin in the absence of any clear political end. However the war ends, it will have consequences for Iran’s political order and American power, though unevenly. Two outcomes seem likely. First, key elements of Iran’s authoritarian state will not only endure but will almost certainly emerge strengthened, at immense cost to Iranian lives now and in the future. Second, the very logics that have long justified the US presence in the region—“stabilization” and the protection of oil flows—appear to have come undone.
Making sense of this fast-moving moment, not least given the unpredictability of the White House, is a difficult exercise. But it can be understood by situating it within the longer histories that created the conditions for it; that is, by tracing the political-economic and imperial formations from which this war has emerged. This account is necessarily partial and builds on a much broader body of work produced by scholars and writers across and beyond the region—many of whom continue to produce knowledge under conditions shaped by the very wars described here.[1]
What follows is therefore a deliberately partial view, shaped by my own position as a historian, of four moments in the long-war that are potentially productive to think with as a way to account for continuities rather than ruptures in US empire and its antagonism with Iran. Each marks a shift in the character and scale of violence while deepening the alignment between the US imperial project and the Israeli genocidal one. These include the making of a militarized political economy in the 1970s and 1980s, the sanctions regime of the 1990s in Iraq, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its regional consequences, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza after 2023.
At the center of this argument is a simple claim: the US construction of a permanent military presence in the Gulf through bases, naval deployments, and sustained warfare there since the late 1980s has not only structured US power in the region but has also been foundational to US capitalism at home, especially in shaping the geographies of the military-industrial sector. Drawing on Fred Cooper and Ann Stoler’s efforts to destabilize the binary between colony and metropole, I argue that the infrastructure of militarism extends across and binds both regions. In this sense, it is not only that the United States has remade the Gulf, but the Gulf, through oil, finance, and especially war, has remade the United States. War in the Middle East, as such, is not just generative of capital for US military industries; those industries, and the wars they sustain in the region, are themselves generative of new circuits of war-making and capital accumulation more broadly. As Adam Hanieh and Laleh Khalili have shown, this dynamic has increasingly anchored the Gulf as the center of twenty-first-century global capitalism.
How the Gulf Remade US Empire
The origins of this US-backed militarized order lie in the upheavals of the late 1970s and 1980s that shaped the phase of US empire in the Gulf that created the conditions for forever war. US corporate and state power—often against both nationalist and democratic possibility—forged the imperial and authoritarian context out of which war would later follow. But the 1970s marked a rapid transformation and escalation of American imperialism and its embrace of violence.
I want to dwell on this moment in particular because we still struggle to fully grasp its scale and complexities. The energy crisis of 1973–74, whether real or politically constructed, and Iran’s subsequent revolution in 1979 produced seismic shifts: the intensification of US militarism, the entrenchment of the petrodollar within finance capitalism, the consolidation of counterrevolutionary politics, and the escalation of anti-Arab and anti-Iranian racism alongside the sharp rise of both evangelical and liberal Zionism. Set against the late stages of the Vietnam War, the British withdrawal from the Gulf, Reagan-era conservatism, the fragmentation of the US left, a more confrontational era of the Cold War, and the emergence of the Washington Consensus and global austerity politics, this conjuncture laid the political-economic and cultural foundations that continue to shape the present. Taken together, these developments coalesced into a durable order that continues to define the terms of power, conflict, and capital across the region and beyond.
These shifts became explicit in the closing years of the Carter presidency. In the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the United States formally declared the Gulf a “vital interest” and committed itself to securing it by any means necessary. Under Reagan, and every administration since, that commitment steadily expanded. Washington moved quickly to institutionalize a strategic vision in which control over the region, its oil resources, and its political order—anchored in alliances with “friendly” non-democratic and counterrevolutionary regimes—became a long-term priority.
The articulation of the region as a vital interest was quickly translated into practice. By the mid–1980s, as part of efforts to defeat Iran during the Iran–Iraq war, the United States deployed its navy to the Gulf to protect Arab oil shipping, establishing what would become a permanent physical military presence. Both Iran and, later, Iraq were variously cast as threats to US hegemony and the regional order Washington sought to maintain. The interchangeability of these threats was itself a defining feature of the project, reifying claims that the region was inherently unstable and that US security assurances were necessary for safeguarding oil flows, countering “rogue” actors, and preserving order. The inflation of crisis, insecurity, and anxiety to justify an ever-deepening cycle of US intervention marked the genesis of the long-war and constituted a broader transformation of US empire in the Gulf.
This long-war has unfolded not only through direct military confrontation but through the construction of an integrated political economy of militarism that forms only one part of the imperial history of the 1970s and 1980s. It remade physical space in the Gulf, blurred the distinction between the materiality of oil and war, reconfigured sovereignty on the waters of the Gulf through the projection of US naval power, and created a mobile maritime system in which “security” and “flow” took on overlapping new meanings. At the same time, the shocks and the “energy crisis” of the 1970s generated unprecedented flows of capital. Oil revenues accumulated by Arab oil producing states—and Iran before the revolution—were then deposited, in US dollars, in US financial institutions, while massive arms sales to the Gulf states further deepened the relationship. These dynamics helped finance and sustain an expanding military-industrial base and financial order within the United States itself in the 1980s.
The convergence of oil, militarism, and Gulf capital also accelerated the making of a new geography of war-making inside the United States. Weapons circulated and created their own political-economies and networks of violence. They were built in and into the heart of empire in the United States and across its “Gunbelt,” a particular geography of weapons and war manufacturing that first spanned the Southern and Western United States and, increasingly, the Northeast. From Maine to Mississippi (home to the shipyards that built Reagan’s 600-ship navy of the 1980s) and Alabama and Arkansas (where missiles have long been manufactured) to communities across the United States that build small and large weapons systems, the business of war became central to the American way of life. Far from disrupting US-Gulf relations, the rise of Arab oil power consolidated them, financing US empire, its militarization of the region, and a shared consensus about the dangers of radical and “rogue” regimes.
The result was a system in which war and instability in the Middle East, while publicly framed as threats to be contained, became materially generative of US capital, labor, and value while simultaneously perpetuating a discourse of permanent crisis about the region. Reagan-era defense spending grew dramatically, partly justified in Cold War terms, but also tied to Reagan’s broader vision in which military expansion would drive post-1970s economic recovery and anchor a new social order, one in which the state subsidized both the production of weapons and the labor that sustained it.
Out of this convergence emerged a parallel cultural and political order structured by racialized discourses of threat; anti-Arab, anti-Iranian, and Islamophobic sentiment; and an increasingly entrenched alignment with Israeli power. This order was built into the American social fabric, its imperial political economy, and its domestic politics. Since the late 1970s, the Gulf and its environs have been cast as part of an “arc of crisis,” a framing that has not only shaped policy but has also been profitable and generative, sustaining both the material and ideological foundations of American power.
By the 1980s, then, the essential elements of the present-day US imperial militarism, which combined with a rapidly deepening embrace of Zionism and Israeli settler colonialism, were already in place. The Middle East, and the Gulf in particular, had become the central axis of anxiety at the heart of US imperial strategy. Critically, this increasingly militarized anxiety cut across political lines, uniting whatever passes as both the right and the left in the United States in a shared commitment to war in the region, and especially against Iran. Over time, shifting figures of threat—from Khomeini to Saddam Hussein to Khamenei—were folded into a stable narrative that required little precision and even less historical understanding.
The consequences have been lasting. This political economy of militarism has produced a durable consensus in Washington since the 1980s: one that centers the Gulf as both indispensable and perpetually dangerous, marginalizes Palestine, enables Israel as an engine of violence, embraces authoritarian allies, and elevates oil and security above all else. At the same time, it has narrowed the space for meaningful anti-war politics. Robust anti-imperialist critique has struggled to take root, and the US left, in particular, has rarely mobilized against war in the region. The 1980s, then, not only set the terms of this order, but they also entrenched a powerful inertia against which it has proven difficult to maneuver.
War-making: Destruction, Sectarianism, Genocide
The 1990s marked a second phase, not so much a break from what came before but a transformation in how war was practiced.Under Bill Clinton, the US-led war against Iraq normalized and routinized forms of violence that expanded US war-making while rendering much of it invisible to the American public, even as they proved devastating in the region. This was a war waged not only through bombs but through sanctions regimes that systematically degraded the conditions of life, even as they were justified in the language of containment and humanitarianism. War-making increasingly targeted infrastructure, public health systems, and the basic conditions necessary for social reproduction to maximize collective pain for limited political objectives, producing long-term environmental damage, generational trauma, and widespread displacement. These modes of violence have since become routine,central features of both US and Israeli military practice, visible in Gaza, Lebanon, and now in the escalating confrontation with Iran.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq marked a third turning point. While it extended earlier patterns of US intervention, it also reshaped the region’s political landscape in ways that continue to reverberate. Most consequential was the intensification of sectarian politics and the important role that sectarianism played in consolidating a regional consensus against Iran. Rising anti-Shiism and the perception that Iran both meddled in and benefited from the US invasion fueled intensive new rounds of sectarian politics and regional realignment. Among the most significant outcomes was the deepening alignment between Israel and Gulf Arab states, one that is foundational to the current state of affairs. This alignment has been grounded in shared security concerns over Iran’s post-2003 influence, its ability to build the Axis of Resistance, and the demonstrated capacity of its allies—from Hezbollah to the Houthis—to disrupt US and Israeli dominance.
The shared anti-Iranian sentiment is not new to any of these actors, but the 2003 Iraq war linked them more closely and in new ways, particularly in the realm of security cooperation. In doing so, it facilitated the gradual sidelining of whatever commitments Arab states had once made, however flimsy, in support of Palestine and against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.
The uprisings and revolutionary movements that began in 2011 briefly rattled the durability of the regional order. In Bahrain, home to the command center for the US Fifth Fleet and US Naval operations in the Gulf, anti-regime protests called for the overthrow of an autocratic monarchy and the creation of a long-sought-after democratic order. Yet these demands were swiftly recast by counterrevolutionary forces. Led by Saudi intervention, the violent suppression of the uprising reframed Bahraini aspirations not as democratic but as sectarian, attributed to alleged Iranian interference. The Saudi-led counterrevolution proceeded with the backing of the Obama administration, which proved unwilling to support democratic movements across the region and remained committed, in the Gulf in particular, to preserving the pre-2011 status quo. The United States continued to prioritize regional and Israeli security, the uninterrupted flow of oil, and the management—rather than resolution—of tensions with Iran, while continuing its long-standing pattern of sidelining democratic possibility.
The last phase of the war emerged with the Israeli genocide in Gaza after October 2023, which made clear the extent of US commitment to its regional order and the unprecedented degree of impunity afforded to Israeli violence. Supported by the Biden administration and its critics alike, the genocide on Gaza has helped consolidate a trilateral alignment between the United States, Israel, and key Gulf Arab states, bound together by shared interests and shared antipathy toward Iran.
The 2026 phase of the long-war is the first overt collaboration between Israel, the United States, and some Arab states in a war against Iran. This should be understood as the product of a longer convergence that has increasingly aligned US imperial strategy with Israeli regional ambitions, now with overt consent from the Gulf oil states. More specifically, it aligns longer-term calibrations of US empire with ongoing Israeli settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide as both an anti-Palestinian project aimed at securing Israeli regional dominance. What is at stake, then, is not only the preservation of the US-led order, built since the 1970s, but the enabling of Israel’s territorially maximalist project of regional dominance that extends across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, oriented toward the weakening, if not destruction, of Iran as the only regional power that might challenge this agenda.
While Israel appears to have steered the tactical decisions of the current war, particularly the expansion of war into Iran and Lebanon, it has done so by operating within the framework of a longstanding US project. In other words, this is less a case of the United States being drawn into Israel’s war than one in which Israel has cynically exploited the conditions produced by decades of US imperial policy. Those conditions were not inevitable, but they have proven durable, part of the American imperial DNA.
Donald Trump’s presidency, with its combination of impulsiveness and arrogance, has accelerated this trajectory and, in many ways, created the conditions for Israel to shape the next phase of the war. Yet the present moment cannot be understood as his creation alone. Trump inherited its conditions of possibility, shaped in significant part by the Biden administration, above all its support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its failure to revive nuclear diplomacy with Iran. These were not departures from the long-war, but continuations of it.
"Stability" and Disruption
What distinguishes the current phase of the war is not only its escalation but the emergence of new kinds of warfare for which the United States appears unprepared, and which may ultimately undo its imperial foothold. Iran’s asymmetric tactics, especially its use of low-cost weapons, drones, and the resilience of its missile capacity despite overwhelming US and Israeli firepower, have proven especially effective in the maritime spaces of the Gulf. These developments have made clear the limits of what might be called the American “empire of flow”: the fluid geographies and the deep histories of the Gulf, which have shaped the physical contours and features of the Strait of Hormuz, are uniquely well adapted to low-tech disruption of conventional naval power.
In some ways Iran has long had the potential for this. It was precisely this concern that drove US naval escalation in the late 1980s, when US forces moved to counter Iranian mining operations and the unfettered movement of small Iranian craft targeting shipping lanes. At the time, the United States effectively contained that threat, but largely because Iran was already exhausted by its war with Iraq and because Washington signaled its willingness to escalate without restraint, most starkly in the 1988 downing of an Iranian passenger jet, which killed 290 civilians.
Still, it is clear that the “stability” that endured from the late 1980s to 2026 was always contingent and partly fictional, less a reflection of US control than an indication of Iran’s calibrated restraint. Once the United States and Israel changed the terms of engagement, that restraint gave way to effective forms of disruption that Iran had long been capable of deploying. Neither Washington nor Tel Aviv were prepared for the consequences.
The United States remains the most powerful military actor in the region, but it is also an empire in decline. It is fascinating to think that for decades US strategy has been organized around the imperative of protecting the flow of oil, a framework that Robert Vitalis has aptly described as “oilcraft.” Yet in a matter of weeks US policy has created the conditions for this strategy’s undoing. In some ways, Trump’s decision to enter the United States into the long-war is his Afghanistan. While the United States fought a war for 20 years in central Asia to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, Trump appears engaged in a war that has generated the very anxieties that have, for nearly 50 years, been used to justify the US presence in the region.
Much remains uncertain. It is unlikely that the United States, Israel, or their oil-producing Gulf allies will pursue fundamentally new security arrangements to stabilize the region.
The material incentives that sustain the current order—profit, militarization, and the deep entanglement of state power with the American “Gunbelt”—remain too strong. Trump made this staggeringly clear in early April when he proposed a $1.5 trillion budget for the nation’s 2027 defense budget. More fundamentally, any meaningful reconfiguration of US empire and its alignment with Israel and the Gulf states would require a reckoning with Palestine and with the role of genocide in sustaining the regional order—questions that have long been integral to, yet systematically obscured within, the logic of America’s long-war.
Israel may hope to emerge from the war as the region’s uncontested hegemon, particularly in light of a perceived weakening of US power. But just like all regional powers, such dominance is likely to prove fleeting.
Nor is it likely that the domestic foundations of US militarism will shift in the near future. Militarized capital, now fully captured by AI firms, the missile manufacturers, and those able to successfully speculate and gamble on war for financial gain, remains deeply embedded in the structures of the state. Yet this does not mean that US empire will emerge from the current phase of the war unscathed. The long-war is not yet over, but it has entered its least coherent and most unstable phase. What follows is unlikely to resemble what came before and will bear the marks of an imperial project that, for all of its endurance, is now confronting the limits of its own making.
[1] Asma Abdi, Sinan Antoon, Elham Fakhro, Behrooz Ghamari, Arang Keshavarzian, Laleh Khalili, Maya Mikdashi, Kali Rubaii, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Zainab Saleh, Ala’a Shehabi, and Naghmeh Sohrabi, among others.