Netanyahu's Defense Minister Israel Katz nervously warned last week:

If Hezbollah joins Iran in an attack on Israel, it will be dealt a heavy blow and lose additional territory in southern Lebanon, in the areas of Nabatieh and the Litani [River], which will become part of a permanent Israeli security zone – the IDF is prepared to launch a [new expanded] invasion….

Big talk from our best ally, but the bad news from Washington is this: we are broke, defenseless, politically divided with a growing sector of the angry population just about ready to Burn It Down. Israel's own situation, on a smaller scale, is similar.

Americans are legitimately confused about who runs our foreign policy, and which conniving pig in a capitol is playing Daddy this week.  Our no-longer-scary expeditionary military is the only military we have – there is no "homeland defense" unless you think a plumber with a Cherokee grandfather jerked out of the Senate to run DHS, lead ICE, and manage and maintain a domestic network of fusion centers that also host the rest of the national security state meets that criteria.  I don't.

Nobody wants US debt unless they get paid handsomely to hold it. Inflation plus unemployment means the printing will accelerate until the currency is destroyed. The US and NATO are ravenous for another war, or wars, that can last until the debt can be abandoned, and a new system of fiscal and population control implemented.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel for Washington, Israel and their EU lackeys. Oncoming train or a brave new world, both are acceptable to the leadership.   Most people around the world have noticed that the West, led by the US, won't quit a losing war until there is another one ready and waiting to feed the voracious maw of the MIC.  Nobody in Washington wanted to leave Afghanistan after 20 years of waste and blood; the poppies and the money laundering were both peachy.  Washington was only willing to shift the war machine away from Afghanistan because of a fresh promise of another profitable proxy war, this time in Ukraine.

The shoveling of American treasure into the dirty furnace of war must continue; location and purpose of these wars irrelevant.  Trump's meeting with Putin in Anchorage over a year ago threatened to slow the Ukraine war burn, but he had Venezuela in mind, with Cuba on the back burner.  Thanks to the CIA, Venezuela was a quick coup, and Little Marco is saving Cuba for himself.  The unprovoked attack on Iran on February 28th was an irresistible fine wine for Washington and Tel Aviv, a structured war, with a hint of destructive expansion and a subtle note of bloody murder.

The brutal and expanding war in West Asia is a Western colonial death spasm.  Yet this death spasm manifests itself as a kind of dramatic neo-colonialism, with small ongoing wars against Russia on several fronts, noisy threats to China and proud demands for complete South and Central American submission to Washington, under "Donroe." Imperial Israel's death spasm shows the same accelerated cycle of threat, tribute, subordination, colonization, and collapse.

It might appear that the bells are ringing in a glorious new century of colonial order around the planet, instead of what is really happening:  a screaming collapse of wasted empires consuming their final generations.

We often remind ourselves that the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.  But Thucydides' fundamental assessment of war was that all sides deceive themselves, misunderstanding and misapplying their strengths and doubling down on their unacknowledged weaknesses.  In our modernity, many assume that those connected to the great states of the world must be the strong, and the weak by default must be those who cannot leverage an equal quantity of "state" or "government."