Let me go ahead and make certain that everything is properly recording.

Yes, it appears to be working just fine.

So, today I want to bring up a question that I genuinely believe sits at the very center of global politics right now, more urgent and more misunderstood than almost any other.

That question is simply this.

Is Israel actually an ally of the United States? Now, on the surface, most people would say, “Of course, Israel is an ally.

” Look at the evidence.

America gives Israel billions of dollars in military aid every single year.

America vetos UN resolutions critical of Israel.

America sends aircraft carrier strike groups to the Eastern Mediterranean whenever Israel faces a threat.

These are not the actions of enemies, right? But I want to challenge that assumption directly and with full force because if you take the time to study history carefully, if you apply the logic of game theory without sentimentality, the truth turns out to be almost exactly the opposite of what we are told.

Israel is not America’s ally.

Israel is America’s replacement.

That sounds extreme, I know.

So, let me walk through the argument piece by piece.

This is a layered idea and it demands that we set aside what we think we know and instead look at how the world actually functions not how it is presented to us in newspapers and television debates.

First I want to return to a framework I have discussed before because without it nothing that follows will make complete sense.

At the deepest level of the global system you have what we call the empire.

The empire is the muscle.

It is the military power that enforces the rules, protects the flow of resources, and suppresses any challenge to the existing order.

For the last 80 years, that empire has been the United States of America.

Surrounding the empire, you have the world of finance, Wall Street, the city of London, the bank for international settlements.

These are the game masters.

They do not hold guns, but they write the rules of the economic game.

They decide who gets credit and who goes bankrupt.

Below them, the entire global economy runs on the US dollar, which gives America enormous structural power.

And then on top of everything, you have what Americans like to call the rules-based international order, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund.

These institutions exist to make the whole arrangement appear fair, legal, and legitimate.

But in reality, they are masks.

Their function is to hide the raw power of the empire and the quiet control of finance behind a screen of diplomatic language and procedural nicities.

Now, here is the crucial point.

Every major player inside this system, the big banks, the defense contractors, the intelligence agencies, the old family networks that span continents, their primary interest is not making the world better.

It is maintaining the system as it is.

They benefit from stability, from predictability, from the status quo.

They do not want fundamental change.

But there is a serious problem.

The muscle of the system, the American empire is visibly weakening.

And when the muscle weakens, the entire structure becomes vulnerable.

So the people who actually run things, the financial elites, the game masters, they now face one urgent, inescapable question.

Who will replace America? I realize this sounds like a grand conspiracy theory.

So, let me ground it in historical evidence because this is not a new pattern.

In fact, this is one of the most repeated patterns in all of human civilization.

I call it the mercenary pattern.

Here is how it works.

A great empire as it ages becomes reluctant to do its own dirty work.

It does not want to be seen as brutal.

It wants to project an image of civilization, democracy, lawfulness.

So, it outsources violence.

It hires mercenaries, local fighters, allied militias to do the killing, the destabilizing, the coercion.

And here is what is fascinating.

Over and over again, those mercenaries eventually turn on their masters.

Consider the Romans.

In their early days, the Romans fought as mercenaries for the Atruscans in northern Italy.

They did the Atruscans dirty work.

And then one day, the Romans looked at their employers and said, “We are the ones dying.

We are the ones fighting.

The Atruscans are weak and corrupt.

Why are we serving them? And so they replaced the Atruscans entirely.

Rome became the empire.

Consider the Mongols.

They began as mercenaries and border guards for the Chinese dynasties.

They protected the frontiers.

They fought the step tribes.

And then Genghaskhan looked at China and said, “We are stronger than these people.

Why should we obey them?” And the Mongols conquered China.

Consider the Aztecs.

They started as mercenaries for the Kalwa people in central Mexico.

Same story.

They eventually overthrew their employers and built their own empire.

Do you see the pattern in every single case? The mercenary becomes more hardened, more determined, more willing to sacrifice than the decaying empire they serve and eventually they replace it.

Now apply this to Israel.

Israel was created in 1948 primarily by British and American strategic planners.

Its original purpose was to serve as a reliable proxy in the Middle East.

A pitbull, a forward operating base, an aircraft carrier that could not be sunk.

Israel would fight wars, destabilize hostile governments, absorb international criticism, and do all the bloody work so that America could stand back and appear clean.

And for decades, that arrangement worked.

Israel fought in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, and repeatedly in Gaza.

But now Israel is looking at America and saying exactly what the Romans said about the Atruscans, exactly what the Mongols said about the Chinese.

We are the ones doing all the work.

We are the ones making the sacrifices.

America is weak, divided, corrupt, and confused.

So why should we remain the servant? Why should we not become the empire ourselves? This brings me to a second important concept.

How do global elites actually choose which country to back as the next empire? Think of it like venture capital.

Imagine you are an investor with trillions of dollars to deploy and two companies come to you asking for funding.

Company A says, “We have a hundred profitable subsidiaries.

We have decades of experience.

We have skilled managers.

We have enormous resources.

Trust us.

Company B says, “We have failed before, but we will work 16 hours a day.

We will never stop.

This is our last chance.

If we fail, we die.

We will do whatever it takes.

” Most people would choose company A as the safe bet.

But a truly smart investor chooses company B because Company A has a hundred other companies to fall back on.

They do not care if this particular venture fails.

Company B however has everything riding on success.

They will never steal from you.

They will never become lazy.

They cannot afford to fail.

This is exactly how the global elite chooses a new imperial muscle.

They look for three specific traits.

Number one, unity.

Does the population of this country fully support the mission? Are they willing to fight and die for it? Number two, capacity.

Does this country have the technology, the intelligence, the logistics, the resources to do what needs to be done? Number three, determination.

Is this country willing to accept terrible sacrifices? Are they willing to do what is necessary, no matter how brutal or how costly? Now, let us apply these three tests to the United States.

On unity, consider the current war with Iran.

Polling shows that only about 40% of Americans support military action against Iran.

That means 60% do not.

60% of the population either opposes the war or simply does not care enough to support it.

That is not unity.

That is deep division.

On capacity, the numbers are damning.

America spends 41% of all global military spending, more than the next 10 countries combined.

And yet, an Iranian drone that costs a few thousand can destroy an American helicopter worth millions.

a $13 billion aircraft carrier had to retreat from the theater of operations within 3 weeks because it was too vulnerable.

The F-35 fighter, which cost $100 million per unit and took 26 years to develop, has been repeatedly challenged by Iranian air defenses.

This is not capacity.

This is corruption, incompetence, and waste dressed up in expensive uniforms.

On determination, consider how America handles casualties.

The Pentagon is terrified of reporting soldier deaths to the American public.

During World War II, at the Battle of Ewima, America lost over 6,000 Marines taking one small island.

And the country was proud of that sacrifice because they understood that winning required blood.

Today, America sends 5,000 Marines into a potential conflict with a nation of 90 million people, mountainous terrain, and sophisticated military doctrine, hoping for a quick, clean victory.

That is not determination.

That is delusion.

So, America fails all three tests.

Now, apply the same tests to Israel.

On unity, 82% of Israeli citizens support the military operations in Gaza.

66% of Israelis believe they are fighting an existential war.

A war for the very survival of their country.

That is unity.

That is the kind of national will that builds empires.

On determination, Israel has shown in Gaza that it is willing to do absolutely whatever it takes.

The entire world watched in horror.

International courts accused Israel of war crimes.

The United Nations condemned Israeli actions repeatedly.

And yet, Israeli public opinion did not break.

Israeli political leadership did not collapse.

That is determination.

On capacity, consider the Lebanon pager attack of 2024.

Israel spent an estimated $275 million to implant explosives into pagers used by Hezbollah operatives.

They planned this operation for years, perhaps decades.

They penetrated supply chains.

They executed with precision.

And with one operation, they broke the psychological backbone of one of Iran’s most powerful proxies.

Compare that to America spending$1 13 billion dollars on a single carrier group that had to retreat.

So ask yourself again, if you were a global elite investor with trillions of dollars at stake, would you back company A, the United States, or company B, Israel? The answer, if you are rational, is obvious.

Now let us go deeper because this is where the argument becomes truly striking.

Inside certain powerful circles in Israel, there is a concept known as the greater Israel project.

Based on a particular interpretation of biblical scripture, this project claims that God promised the Jewish people all the land from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq.

That territory includes not only present-day Israel and Palestine, but also most of Jordan, all of Lebanon, all of Syria, large parts of Saudi Arabia, and even parts of southern Turkey.

Now, here is a fascinating detail.

Iran, ancient Persia, is not included in the Greater Israel map.

Iran lies outside this promised territory.

So, ask yourself a logical question.

If Iran is not part of greater Israel, why is Israel so desperate to go to war with Iran? Why is Israel constantly pushing the United States toward a direct military confrontation with Thran? The answer is not what you expect.

The answer is that Iran is not Israel’s biggest obstacle to achieving greater Israel.

America is.

Let me repeat that.

America is the primary obstacle to Israeli regional dominance.

Because right now, who actually controls the Middle East? Who has military bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Iraq? Who controls the oil shipping lanes? Who controls the major trade routes? The United States does.

American bases are sitting directly on the land that the Greater Israel movement claims as its own.

So, the strategy, whether openly stated or not, is brutally simple.

Use the war against Iran to destroy the American Empire.

How? Force America into a long, costly, unwinable conflict.

Force America to spend trillions of dollars on weapons that do not work.

Force America to overextend its military, its economy, its political capital.

Make America so exhausted that it has no choice but to withdraw from the Middle East entirely.

And when America leaves, who fills the vacuum? Israel.

This is not a conspiracy theory.

This is game theory.

This is how empires have always transitioned.

The old empire exhausts itself.

The new empire waits patiently and then the transition happens often so smoothly that most people do not even notice it until it is complete.

I can already hear the objections.

But Iran and Israel are enemies.

How can Israel replace America if Iran is still standing? This brings me to a third law of geopolitics which I call the law of mutual respect among the strong.

Strong powers rarely fight each other to the death.

Instead they recognize each other’s strength.

They find a modus vivventi and they pray on the weak together.

Think about this carefully.

Right now it looks like America, Israel and the Gulf monarchies are all aligned against Iran.

But as this war continues and as Iran proves itself to be strong and as America proves itself to be weak, the alliances will shift.

The strong look at each other and say, “Let us not waste our energy fighting each other.

Let us instead divide the weak between us.

I believe this is exactly what will happen between Iran and Israel.

Not today, not this year, but over the long term.

Once America retreats, once the dust settles, Iran and Israel will be the two remaining major military powers in the Middle East.

And they will have no choice but to come to some kind of arrangement because that is what strong powers always do.

There is another element here that almost no one in Western media discusses.

This war, which was supposedly designed to Iran, has actually made Iran dramatically wealthier.

How the Americans, fearing a spike in global oil prices, quietly allowed Iranian oil to flow back into international markets.

Overnight, Iran made an estimated $14 billion in additional revenue.

Remember that Iran’s entire annual military budget is only about $10 billion.

So in one move, America gave Iran more money than it spends on its entire military in a year.

Furthermore, Iran is now permanently embedded in two major global trade networks.

The first is the North South transport corridor which links Russia through Iran to India and the ports of the Arabian Sea.

This corridor allows Russia to bypass Western sanctions and gives Iran access to European markets through Russia.

The second is China’s belt and road initiative.

For China to reach European markets efficiently, trade routes must pass through or near Iran.

For Europe to access Asian markets, the same is true.

Iran sits at the absolute geographic and economic center of Eurasian trade.

What does this mean? It means that even if America wins the current war militarily, Iran wins economically.

Iran will come out of this conflict stronger, more connected, and more resilient than before.

And that means Iran has less reason to compromise, less reason to accept American demands.

The longer this war continues, the more Iran benefits.

So the United States is trapped in a strategic paradox.

The more it fights, the more it empowers its enemy.

And the more it empowers its enemy, the more it accelerates its own decline.

Let me now put all of this together and describe what the postamerican Middle East will look like.

I call this emerging order Pax Judea, the Israeli peace.

Just as history had Pax Romana, the Roman peace, Pax Britannica, the British peace, and Pax Americana, the American peace, we are now moving toward a new imperial order centered on Israel.

What are the pillars of Pax Judea? First, control of Middle Eastern resources.

The Middle East holds about 20% of the world’s proven oil reserves, massive natural gas fields, and the most important maritime choke points on the planet.

Israel, because of its geography, sits at the crossroads of three continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe.

It has coastlines on the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

No other country in the region has this strategic advantage.

Second, the India Middle East Europe corridor.

For India to trade efficiently with Europe, the shortest and most secure route goes through the Middle East directly across Israeli territory.

Once this corridor is fully established, it will become one of the most valuable trade arteries in the world and Israel will control its center.

Third, data and artificial intelligence.

Israel already has more data centers in the Middle East than any other country.

It has world-class universities, a thriving technology sector, and the most sophisticated intelligence infrastructure in the region.

In the 21st century, data is power.

Surveillance is control.

Whoever controls the AI backbone of the Middle East controls its populations.

Israel is positioned to dominate this field completely.

Fourth, intelligence superiority.

Consider the history of ISIS.

ISIS carried out devastating attacks across the Middle East in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and beyond.

But there is one Muslim majority country where ISIS never succeeded in mounting a major attack.

Israel.

Many intelligence analysts believe this is not an accident.

They believe whether correctly or not that ISIS was at least partly shaped or manipulated by intelligence services to serve strategic ends.

I am not endorsing any specific theory but the empirical fact is clear.

Israel has demonstrated a level of strategic intelligence capability that no other power in the region can match.

So this is Pax Judea control of trade routes, control of energy, control of data, control of intelligence.

This is what the Middle East looks like after the American Empire withdraws.

Now, let me turn to what this means for the United States itself.

Because this is the most painful part of the analysis.

America is spending trillions of dollars.

It is sending its young men and women to die or to return home with lifelong physical and psychological wounds.

It is neglecting its own infrastructure, its own schools, its own hospitals, its own struggling cities.

And the primary beneficiary of all of this sacrifice is not America.

It is Israel.

The journalist Julian Assange once made a profound observation about American military policy.

He said that the point of American wars is not to win.

The point is to have endless wars so that the military-industrial complex can transfer taxpayer wealth to a transnational elite.

I think there is truth in that.

But I want to add a crucial layer.

The military-industrial complex is not merely stealing from the American people.

Whether they understand it or not, they are also accelerating the decline of the American Empire and accelerating the rise of the Israeli Empire.

Every dollar America spends on bombing targets in Yemen or Iraq or Syria is a dollar that cannot be spent rebuilding a collapsing bridge in Pittsburgh or hiring a teacher in Detroit.

Every soldier who dies in the Middle East is a soldier who cannot come home to start a business or raise a family or contribute to the American economy.

Every bomb dropped on Tyrron is a bomb that could have been used to address the crumbling water systems of Baltimore or the opioid crisis in West Virginia.

America is consuming its own future to build someone else’s empire.

And the most tragic part is that the American people do not see it happening.

They are told that these wars are for American security.

They are told that the goal is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

They are told that American soldiers are fighting for democracy and freedom.

But the reality is far simpler and far darker.

These wars are not the beginning of something.

They are the end.

They are the final chapter of the American Empire and the first chapter of Pax Judea.

Let me summarize the core argument.

Number one, the global elite that manages the world system requires a powerful military empire to enforce order.

The United States can no longer perform that role effectively.

So, the elite is actively searching for a replacement.

Number two, Israel has been auditioning for this role for decades.

It now demonstrates the three essential qualities of an imperial power, unity, determination, and capacity.

It is proving to the global elite that it can provide the muscle for the next phase of the world system.

Number three, the mercenary pattern from history tells us that this kind of transition is not only possible but historically common.

The mercenary always replaces the empire eventually.

Israel has been America’s mercenary in the Middle East for over 70 years.

Number four, the current war against Iran is not simply a bilateral conflict.

It is a mechanism designed whether consciously or not to exhaust the American empire and to create the conditions for Israeli regional hegemony.

Number five, after this war concludes, two major powers will remain standing in the Middle East, Israel and Iran.

And according to the logic of geopolitics, strong powers eventually learn to respect each other and to pray on the weak together.

the Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and others will become increasingly irrelevant and dependent.

I want to be absolutely clear about something.

I am not saying that this is what should happen.

I am not endorsing this outcome as good or just or desirable.

What I am doing is using the tools of history, game theory, and strategic analysis to describe what is likely to happen based on the evidence we have.

This is predictive history.

The goal is not prophecy.

The goal is to sharpen our thinking, to make us more curious, to make us better at understanding the real forces that shape our world.

If this analysis is correct, then we now have a useful framework for interpreting events as they unfold.

And if it turns out to be wrong, that is also valuable because we can go back, identify our mistakes, and build a better model.

That is how you learn to think like a strategist.

Next week, I want to go even further.

We will discuss specific strategies for how the American empire could be dismantled from within.

We will talk about economic weapons, the stock market, oil prices, the dollar, and how these tools might be used to force an American withdrawal from the Middle East.

That will be a fascinating and challenging discussion.

For now, thank you for listening carefully to a difficult and uncomfortable argument.

I will see you next