What was mapped out in Washington’s military planning rooms as a lightning campaign to force a swift regime change in Iran has degenerated into a deep quagmire for Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. While the White House clings to the delusion that it can shape the world to its liking, the reality on the ground proves that the era of unipolar power has definitively come to an end.

Peter Mertens

Economic warfare is never abstract. It always cuts deep into the daily lives of ordinary people. For decades, the United States has deployed devastating sanctions and strangling tariffs as weapons against Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and a host of other countries. But in March 2026, Washington gets a taste of its own medicine when Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. The imperial boomerang returns at breakneck speed and sends shockwaves through global supply chains.

Today, the pulse of our global economy is determined by a bottleneck barely thirty-three kilometres wide. There, in the Strait of Hormuz, a fifth of the world’s daily oil production glides past. Before the illegal American–Israeli attack, that vital waterway functioned almost without a ripple. Today, the situation has escalated entirely.

The consequences for the world market are nothing short of catastrophic. Across large parts of Asia, the impact is devastating. Sri Lanka was forced to introduce a four-day working week and ration fuel. In Vietnam, the government is asking citizens to work from home to conserve energy. Millions of families in India and Pakistan are confronted with unaffordable basic necessities such as cooking oil. They are paying the price for Trump and Netanyahu flouting international law.

But as always, not everyone takes the same hit. While the working class is left to pay the bill, the oil giants are cashing in. In the early days of the war, the hundred largest oil and gas companies were estimated to be earning an extra 30 million dollars per hour (!) from war-inflated prices.

The vampire that lives on debt

In her documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy, American film-maker Abby Martin exposes the inconceivable scale of the American war machine. It is a monster that devours 270,000 barrels of oil per day, sucks up billions in capital that could be spent productively elsewhere, and must constantly fan the flames of conflict in order to sustain itself. The American military is an insatiable glutton: the more oil, capital, and war it consumes, the greater its hunger becomes.

No state on earth can plunge itself into debt as deeply as the United States. Washington can do so by virtue of the dollar hegemony. In the spring of 2026, the American national debt reached the astronomical threshold of 39 trillion dollars. That invisible mountain of debt is the only means of keeping the visible war machine turning. The German poet Peter Hacks once wrote with great precision that imperialism is a vampire. “The beast is dead,” he observed, “and it stays out of death only for as long as it can keep sucking fresh blood.”

The myth of invincibility

American hubris has been shattered against a hard strategic reality. The assumption that a nation of 92 million people could be destabilised through bombardment has proved a fatal miscalculation. Rather than bending, Iran has responded with a lethally efficient asymmetric maritime strategy. The large, conventional vessels of the Iranian navy absorbed heavy blows, but Iran continues to dominate the Strait of Hormuz with an agile mosquito fleet. Fast patrol boats, mobile coastal missiles, and small submarines are proving virtually elusive.

For American naval planners, this is a sobering moment. Their enormously expensive aircraft carriers and destroyers have suddenly been exposed as unwieldy, outdated instruments. They have been reduced to strategic ballast that must remain far beyond the range of enemy fire simply to survive. In the Red Sea, we already witnessed a comparable scenario, when the Americans were forced to back down against the Houthis, simply because the expensive Western munitions stockpiles were running dry.

European complicity

Donald Trump may loudly complain that the Europeans are doing too little to support him, but the reality behind the scenes paints a very different picture. European leaders condemn the violence in West Asia at best with lip service, while their NATO bases operate like a well-oiled logistical machine for the American war effort. American bombers, drones, and warships are continuously resupplied, rearmed, and directed from military staging posts in the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, Italy, France, and Greece. Ramstein Air Base in Germany functions as the beating heart of the operation. Europeans are thus fully complicit in the escalation in West Asia. Without European facilities, the entire American air bridge to the Gulf region would grind irreversibly to a halt.

The shadow of Gaza over Lebanon

The quagmire into which Washington is sinking is deepened further by the actions of its genocidal ally Israel. Under the dark banner of ‘Operation Eternal Darkness’, the Israeli army is waging a war of annihilation in Lebanon that seamlessly replicates the gruesome tactics of Gaza. The result is devastating. More than a million Lebanese have been driven to flee. Thousands of civilians have lost their lives in bombardments that no longer distinguish between military targets, civilian neighbourhoods, and refugee camps.

What we see here is a deliberate strategy to pulverise entire societies. Military analysts point to the genocidal aspects of this doctrine: the Gaza model is becoming the blueprint for the entire region. It is precisely this merciless approach in Lebanon that caused earlier ceasefire attempts to founder. For the Zionist hawks who dream of a ‘Greater Israel’, diplomacy is not an option; the goal is the absolute annihilation of every Iranian counterforce in the region.

A dress rehearsal for the abyss

Arms giant Lockheed Martin is working at full stretch, yet is managing to scale up production only in dribs and drabs. This bottleneck in supply is forcing the Washington government into drastic choices: military deliveries to West Asia are now inevitably coming at the expense of supplying Ukraine, while simultaneously draining strategic reserves in the Far East at a rapid pace. And that is precisely the crux of the problem. For in the eyes of the American hardliners, this entire war against Iran is merely a preparation – a dress rehearsal – for the real, great confrontation: the one with China. And that rehearsal is shaping up to be an exhausting one. The giant from Washington is unsteady on its feet.

Washington was rock-solid in its conviction that the Russian economy would implode under the weight of Western sanctions within a week. Reality proved more stubborn. They thought they could strangle China’s technological advance by banning microchip exports. The opposite happened: Beijing accelerated the development of its own independent industry. And Washington deluded itself into believing that the Iranian regime would collapse after a few air strikes. Today, all Western intelligence agencies must concede that they have grossly underestimated the balance of power.

The war against Iran reveals not the omnipotence of the American empire, but its ultimate inability to adapt to a multipolar world. Imperialism is choking on its own debt, stumbling over its own technological arrogance, and failing morally on every front. The Strait of Hormuz is far more than a choke point for oil tankers; it is the rocky seabed on which the old, unipolar world order has definitively run aground.

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Peter Mertens is General Secretary of the PVDA-PTB (Belgium). He is a Member of the federal parliament and author of ‘Mutiny’ (New York, 1804 Books, 2024) and ‘The Last Days of the Old Normal’ (forthcoming, 2026), among others.