By James J. Devine
The spectacle unfolding once again from the White House is a familiar one: a grainy rerun of a film we have all seen before. It is the spectacle of the world’s most powerful nation, frightened by shadows and tilting at windmills, with the American president and his Israeli counterpart at the center of the frame, insisting that a mortal danger lurks just beyond the horizon.
The subject is Iran, and the charge, as it has been for decades, is that the Islamic Republic is a hair’s breadth from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
But the evidence, such as it is, does not support this existential alarm.
It is a master class in manufacturing consent for war, a performance that finds the United States once again beating the drums of conflict over a threat that, upon inspection, is largely of its own rhetorical making.
The pattern is a rerun of the greatest hit from the 2003 playbook. Then it was Iraq and the specter of weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence was a house of cards, constructed from the flimsiest of materials and collapsing under the barest scrutiny. Today, the script is the same; only the villain’s name has changed to Iran.
One searches the record in vain for firm evidence that Iran is actively racing to build a nuclear bomb. The intelligence community itself has repeatedly concluded that, while Iran can enrich uranium, there is no firm evidence that it is actively trying, or has recently tried, to weaponize it.
The country possesses no nuclear weapons. None. The immediacy of the threat exists only in the fevered declarations of politicians, a convenient fiction designed to justify escalation.
That this narrative is perpetuated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hardly surprising. For him, Iran is the existential threat that justifies his hard-line agenda and distracts from the deepening fissures within Israeli society.
For over three decades, Netanyahu has repeatedly warned that Iran is only weeks, months, or a few years away from developing a nuclear weapon, with his earliest predictions dating back to 1992.
These repeated warnings have remained a cornerstone of Netanyahu’s foreign policy and rhetoric for over 30 years.
He has been crying wolf for so long that the town is surprised when he does not. More instructive is President Trump’s willingness to play the dutiful partner, echoing and amplifying the alarm. This is not a policy; it is a pantomime.
The paradox is glaring. The United States, a nation of immense, almost unfathomable power, finds itself in a state of high anxiety over a country it has systematically strangled with sanctions and bombed with impunity. The asymmetry of the conflict is dizzying. It is the pugilist cowering at the shadow of a fly.
This hostility, however, is not a random aberration. It is rooted in a foundational myth. The Monroe Doctrine, a 200-year-old assertion of hemispheric hegemony, has been resurrected and weaponized.
That doctrine, which declared the Western Hemisphere a distinct U.S. sphere of influence, has, critics argue, been transformed by the current administration into a more aggressive “Donroe Doctrine,” a policy that prioritizes direct expansionist power projection over international law.
Under this conception, military force becomes a tool for reshaping the regional order and ensuring U.S. control over strategic and economic assets. It is a worldview that regards sovereign nations such as Venezuela, Cuba, and Colombia not as partners but as assets to be managed or, when uncooperative, as threats to be neutralized.
Even the pursuit of Greenland, a territory belonging to a NATO ally, is viewed through this mercantilist lens of imperial ambition—a blunt assertion of ownership over anything considered vital to American interests.
Critics argue that this perspective has since expanded beyond the Western Hemisphere into a broader belief that the United States has a unique mission to oversee the world.
This is the imperial project laid bare: a nation so secure in its exceptionalism that it believes itself entitled to kidnap a foreign president, bomb sovereign territory and blockade its adversaries.
They contend that the 2025 National Security Strategy reflects this approach by declaring that the United States will restore “American preeminence” and prevent “foreign hostile forces” from gaining a foothold in the region.
The warning from many international observers is stark. They argue that such a policy is “set to severely erode the current global order and stability” and amounts to a “blatant trampling of the post-World War II international order.”
Yet, critics say, those cautions have found little purchase within the White House.
As the president has said, his “own morality” is the only constraint on his power, suggesting to his detractors that international law is whatever he decides it is.
Morality is not Donald Trump’s strong suit. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, put it this way: “We live in a world—the real world—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. … We’re a superpower, and we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
The superpower is now fighting to survive as the president undermines the value of the dollar, depletes our military munitions, wrecks decades-long alliances, and incites bitter divisions among our own people while making civil society itself terribly discourteous, ill-mannered, and disrespectful.
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