The Iranian conflict represents a dual eschatology, religious and material. In its religious guise it shows itself via the preservation of distinct sects – Shi’ism, the Third Temple of Jerusalem and Christian Zionism. All are wrapped in eschatological narratives that intermix with geopolitical goals.

“A postmodern statecraft of increasing chaos and narrative dispersion is evolving in the context of an evolving and decaying American empire”[1]. From it, new monsters are emerging. A postmodern statecraft is one beyond the confines of national sovereignty. The borders of a Hobbesian realm represent a bygone era of definable limits. In an interconnected, globalised world the parameters of sovereignty are captured by elite networks, ultra-mobile forms of capital and multi-scale surveillance that flits between private and public ownership.

The great othering of the multicultural project, to instantiate an abstract post-national identity upon primarily White Anglo-Saxon and European populations, alongside the growth of security-technological complexes through public intelligence agencies and private tech fiefdoms, are two of the main threads of the postmodern political condition. The end of spatial limits and the rewriting of national geographies and demographics, a globalised end to the partitioning of identities through borders or ethnicity.

The publicity of violence and the terror it spreads are one of the most potent means of establishing control of the public sphere, shaping its discourses and undermining dissent. “Deterrence is longer aimed only at the military sector, but essentially at the civilian population”[1] for the purpose of resisting the disequilibrium between decentralised action and centralised vulnerability. Everything and anyone becomes an enemy. Information is always weaponised. The official narrative provides the epistemic authority[2] through which clarity is sought.

With Trump’s negotiation strategies around Israel-Palestine and the Ukraine conflict, so-called transactional means, we see the return of politics to the international stage. The assertion of a national interest in distinction to international moral obligations shows that politics, as strategic negotiation defined by favourable terms to the hegemonic power (e.g. the largest funder of Ukraine), has become central to the distributional dividend of military spending and a NATO umbrella.

Time-space compression is the apex of globalisation. Yet it sits over a paradox – the vast resources required to maintain and expand this compression require a greater expanse of space to conquer. The aim of a boundless globe requires the existence of a vast frontier from which water to cool server farms and nuclear reactors and rare earth minerals to feed electronic arrays is extracted. This paradox is tearing globalisation apart. The post-globalised world slowly growing through Chinese and Russian revanchism and US consolidation is becoming acutely aware of the need for space and the resources it provides.

The neutral veil of governance is the prevailing myth of modern politics. An array of agencies, organisations and bodies are legitimated as governing entities because of their neutrality on a number of subjects. Post-politics is the centring of expertise that goes beyond dichotomy. By having entities that govern in an abstract interest (for the public but not for a people), an area of governance is foreclosed from scrutiny. Whether it is called the blob or the deep state, it “comprises ‘a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process’”[1].

“Liberalism disembodies the friend-enemy distinction”[1]. The expansionary nature of liberal ideology and its infrastructural power is sublimating. Space is to be extended through, with obstacles removed or absorbed. “Despite its relative physical durability—infrastructure space is often only regarded as a byproduct of more volatile markets and political games”[2]. Space is a liminal element that is mouldable to market dynamics. It is to be homogeneous and parameterised so as to extend ideological contiguity.

In conceiving a liberal empire we are dealing with inherent contradictions. The premise of liberalism is that of spontaneous emergence through the mechanism of an invisible hand (or series of invisible hands) that concatenate various social actors into an array of competitive and cooperative games. “Invisible hand mechanisms of balance, competition, and emergent system-level goods were at the heart of the liberal project”[1]. Through these mechanisms should emerge a social order that both expresses individual autonomy and induces obedience to higher goals related to the general welfare, and thus emerges the contradiction.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has precipitated the re-emergence of Western warmongering after the lull of covid and the American disengagement from Afghanistan. A foreign policy establishment has regrouped out of the chaos of the Trump presidency and into the settled situation of the Biden administration, where an entrenchment of liberal imperialism pushed by figures like Victoria Nuland and Anthony Blinken is on the cards. And Ukraine is the perfect theatre through which to push such imperial ambitions, becoming centre-stage for expanding American energy interests and maintaining the encirclement of Russia (and by extension maintaining a foothold in the Eurasian rimlands).