Hey, POTUS, America First Ain’t Got No Beef With Iran And Don’t Need No Bunker Busters, Neither
As the clock ticked away on the Donald’s two weeks ultimatum to Iran—-surrender or I will bomb you to smithereens—the bright line between legitimate homeland security, on the one hand, and the pursuit of Empire, on the other, has never been more illuminated. The fact, is there is no basis in homeland security for POTUS’ ultimatum because Iran has no military capacity whatsoever to harm any American from Bangor Maine to San Diego California.
After all, it has no blue water navy or air or sealift capacity to put a single Iranian soldier on the shores of New Jersey. It also has not a single long-range bomber that can reach New York City or any other US city, with or without a nuclear payload.
Likewise, its longest range missile has an arc of just 2,000 kilometers, which is only half-way to the Strait of Gibraltar, which is 5,000 kilometers away from Tehran; and, even more to the point, only one-fifth of the way to Washington DC, which is 10,000 kilometers away.
At the same time, Iran’s $12 billion defense budget is a pittance which amounts to just 1.2% of the Pentagon’s $1 trillion annual budget. That is, the entirety of Iran’s military might is equal to about 100 hours per year of US defense spending.
And when it comes to the economic and industrial base necessary to pose a realistic enduring military threat, fuhgeddaboudit: No nation with just $400 billion of GDP—and which GDP is heavily dependent upon oil and natural gas exports that can be bottled up in the Persian Gulf with ease—is not a threat to America’s 75 times larger $30 trillion of technologically-advanced and industrially diversified GDP.
So, Iran is just plain no military threat. Full Stop. End of story.
Moreover, if America were still a constitutional Republic adhering to the founders’ wise admonition to pursue friendly commerce with all nations but entangling alliances with none, the Donald’s two week ultimatum would not have been on the table at all, nor even under discussion anywhere on the banks of the Potomac. No peaceful republic minding its own business would dream of bombing a nation 10,000 kilometers away–no matter how disagreeable and noxious were its rulers or how hostile its relations with one or more nearby neighbors in the region.
Indeed, war is so inimical to the very health and well being of liberty that the founders counseled against it in no uncertain terms. James Madison himself would have excoriated Donald Trump’s current threat to trample upon yet again the War Powers reserved exclusively for an act of Congress, reflecting the voice of all the people, in order to engage in an utterly discretionary act of war unrelated in any way to defense of the American homeland:
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” —James Madison
To to contrary, the very idea of dropping 30,000 pound bunker buster bombs on Iran’s Fordow nuclear enrichment site was purely a stratagem of Empire. And in this case, another foray into the middle east in behalf of an “ally” that his done precious little to enhance America’s Homeland Security over the decades since 1948, but is the overwhelming reason why the map below appears as it it does.
Even today, there are upwards of 51,000 US troops in the region surrounding Iran but all of them are attributable to the contingencies of Empire, not the necessities of Homeland Security. These former factors which unnecessarily position US forces and military assets in harms’ way include defense of Israel, protection of the Persian Gulf oil supplies and functioning as the regional and global gendarme for the alleged good of mankind.
But all of these reasons are illicit, as we amplify below.
For example, why in the hell would a peaceful republic even think about stationing 900 US servicemen in the failed state of Syria (before and after the fall of Assad)?
Unfortunately for its polyglot of 17 million Alawites, Druse, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, Turkmens, Armenians, Yezidis and countless more ethno-fragments it has been reduced to a hell-hole of misery by Washington’s 15-year multi-billion interventions in behalf of “regime change”. Yet how in the bloody hell did this tiny $25 billion fragment of a country have any bearing whatsoever on the Homeland Security of America?
Surely, by now the same can be said of the 2,000 US military personnel stationed in Iraq, where its own government—one that Washington allegedly liberated from Saddam’s evil clutches—has now pronounced Washington persona non grata.
Likewise, the 10,000 troops stationed in Kuwait is beyond hideous. After all, this “country” actually amounts to little more than a large oilfield surrounded by a few camels, royals and foreign workers. Ditto when it comes to the nearly 15,000 in Qatar and Bahrain, which are hothouse petro-economies generally for sale to the highest bidder.
And most preposterous of all is the 6,500 US sailors aboard ships in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Neither of these inland seas have any bearing at all on the defense of the American shorelines or airspace—-to say nothing of nuclear deterrence.
The fact is, a fulsome defense of the American homeland requires none of the bases shown above, nor does it need any allies in the entire region (or elsewhere). That’s because the two requisites of a homeland security are an invincible nuclear deterrent and an ironclad Fortress America defense of the US shorelines and air space.
Neither of these requisites require entangling alliances abroad, foreign military bases or intervention against states like Iran. And it makes no matter whether or not they espouse a noxious theocratic ideology or hold hostile views of their neighbor—not when they pose no threat whatsoever to the US nuclear deterrent or Fortress America conventional defense.
As it happens, the US nuclear deterrent sports 1,750 active warheads buried deep in 400 Minutemen missile silos, 13 Ohio Class submarines cruising the deep ocean bottoms and 66 strategic bombers. This entire invincible triad deterrent, however, costs just $75 billion per year and requires no foreign bases or operations.
Likewise, several hundred billion additional would provide more than an adequate continental air force and attack submarine defense of Fortress America. So in the order of $500 billion plus of the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget is actually for the pursuit of Empire, not direct homeland security.
One excuse for Empire, of course, has long been Persian Gulf oil security, but five decades after the early 1970s oil shocks one thing is damn obvious: Any regime that gains control of substantial petroleum reserves, whether friendly or hostile to Washington, produces them to the maximum extent because all regimes in the modern world need all the oil export revenues they can muster. As we saw recently, even the head-choppers of ISIS pushed the rickety old oil wells of northeastern Syria to their maximum capacity.
There is no petroleum security need at all, therefore, for the 5th fleet in the Persian Gulf or any of the dozens of land bases in the middle east. At length, any temporary production cutbacks or outages cause the global oil price to rise and worldwide markets to adjust production and conservation levels in the global economy with alacrity.
Thus, in the mid-1970s the real post-embargo oil price in 2025 dollars was about $75 per barrel, which is the same as it is today. Trillions of US military spending and middle east interventions in the interim have had no effect at all, as the global price of oil has oscillated $25 up and $25 down from its current $75 per barrel market-driven equilibrium for the past 50 years.
Index of Constant Dollar Oil Price, 1974 to 2025
Needless to say, the argument that massive Washington military intervention is needed in the middle east to combat terrorism is actually upside down. The limited number of terrorist attacks on the US homeland—including the freakish tragedy of 9/11—were all done by Sunni militants, not Iranian Shiites.
And it is also now pretty clear that the Sunni-based terrorist episodes have been blow-back for massive and multiple US incursions in the middle east that have resulted in a staggering level of death and destruction. According to GROK 3, the estimated number of Middle Easterners killed due to U.S. military interventions there since the First Gulf War ( i.e. over 1990 to 2023) is approximately 1.8–2
Article from LewRockwell
LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
