On August 30, six months and two days after the United States and Israel began bombing Iran with the promise that overwhelming force would quickly rearrange the country to their liking, American drones struck launchers on Larak Island near the Strait of Hormuz, Iran answered by firing missiles toward American forces in Jordan, and the oil market rose once more to salute a war whose only reliable accomplishment has been giving every side another funeral to avenge. The attack was the first acknowledged American strike in a month, which is how peace now appears in official language, a pause long enough for the people doing the bombing to describe the next bomb as defensive, while those beneath it are expected to forget who arrived in whose country with aircraft carriers and a plan for its future.

Donald Trump said the war would take four or five weeks, and the White House announced that American power would obliterate Iran’s missiles, annihilate its navy, sever its regional alliances, and prevent it from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon, verbs selected by men who believe the violence of a sentence can substitute for the absence of a political idea. Six months later, the Iranian government remains in power, enriched uranium remains in Iran, American weapons stocks have been badly depleted, and the Strait through which a fifth of the world’s traded oil once passed is still so constricted that twenty four ships in a week are presented as progress where roughly one hundred and thirty crossed every day before the war. Washington has therefore returned to economic warfare, because sanctions were said to have failed badly enough to require bombs and the bombs have now succeeded badly enough to require sanctions.

Thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced across the region, yet the measurements favored in Washington remain tonnage, shipping lanes, barrels, and whether the government marked for destruction has finally learned to obey, as though the Middle East were a piece of strategic geography occasionally inconvenienced by the people born there, whose homes become target coordinates and whose grief is treated as evidence that the bombing has begun to work. An empire can destroy a ministry, poison a water system, empty a neighborhood, and kill the official whose name appeared in the briefing packet, but it cannot manufacture consent from the crater, because terror may compel silence for a time while planting beneath that silence a memory no aircraft can reach.

Iran has already lived through an earlier version of this promise, because when Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry that Britain had treated as its private inheritance in 1953, British officials proposed a coup to replace him with a government they called more reliable, and American records acknowledged that the new government would need immediate political and financial support followed by an oil agreement. The coup removed an elected leader, restored the Shah, and taught Iranians what the West meant when it spoke of stability, which was that Iranian oil could travel freely so long as Iranian sovereignty did not. Seventy three years later, the vocabulary has acquired missiles and nuclear facilities, while the demand beneath it has barely aged at all, because Iran is again permitted a future only if Washington and Israel are allowed to write it.

The same fantasy carried the United States into Iraq in 2003, when George W. Bush promised that a new government in Baghdad would become a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom across the region, as though democracy were hidden inside an American bomb and Iraqis had simply failed to excavate it. The weapons used to justify the invasion were never found, while the public record now contains the names of roughly two hundred thousand civilians killed by violence and Brown University found that more than a million Iraqis remained displaced twenty years after the invasion. Iraq did become an example, although not the one advertised beneath the applause, because it showed how quickly liberation becomes occupation when the liberated insist that their country still belongs to them, and how easily the men who destroy a state call its ruins proof that its people were incapable of governing themselves.

Cuba has endured the slower weapon for more than sixty years, beginning with a State Department memorandum written in 1960 that recommended denying the island money and supplies in order to lower wages and produce hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of its government, language unusually honest about the civilian body being made to carry Washington’s political demand. The government survived, ordinary Cubans absorbed the deprivation, and every American president inherited an embargo whose failure became the reason to continue it, since imperial policy is one of the few places where repetition is mistaken for resolve even when the result has contradicted the purpose for generations.

Venezuela was given the same education through sanctions that the United States government’s own auditors found had contributed to the country’s steeper economic collapse, followed in January by an American military operation that seized Nicolás Maduro and carried him to a jail in New York. By August, Trump announced that the United States had secured majority control over more than sixty five billion barrels of Venezuelan oil, a declaration made with such casual ownership that the old accusations of imperial plunder began to sound less like accusations than minutes from the meeting. Washington had spent years insisting that its concern was democracy, only to discover after removing the president that democracy apparently comes measured in barrels and can be transferred to American companies before Venezuelans are asked what they want.

Trump inherited this method, and his peculiar contribution has been to remove the tablecloth from an appetite his predecessors preferred to dress for dinner. American officials planned the overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz after Guatemala took unused land from the United Fruit Company, and Richard Nixon instructed his government to make Chile’s economy scream after Salvador Allende won an election and threatened foreign control over copper. Whenever a people claim the wealth beneath their own feet, the empire suddenly discovers an emergency, because property is sacred only while it belongs to those who arrived from elsewhere, and self determination becomes extremism at the exact moment it interferes with extraction.

The present war extends that logic across the Middle East, where Israel has attempted to build security by making Palestinian life impossible, has exported the method into Lebanon, and joined Washington in imagining that Iran can be bombed into a regional order designed without Iranians. Trump has even said he likes the idea of declaring the Strait of Hormuz American territory, a sentence that would be treated as lunacy if it came from a government without enough weapons to make lunacy sound like policy. The Strait lies between Iran and Oman, yet the president of a country thousands of miles away looks at it and sees an American possession temporarily occupied by its geography, which may be the clearest summary of the war anyone in his administration has offered.

These wars keep producing resistance long after the planners announce that resistance has been destroyed because people do not experience their country as a collection of assets waiting for a more powerful nation to administer them, and they do not forget the parent killed beside them because a foreign spokesperson used the word precision before the photograph arrived. The right to decide who governs, who owns the oil, and which alliances a country chooses cannot be delivered by the state demanding control over all three, because freedom offered at gunpoint contains only the freedom of the gunman.

For centuries the Western order has depended on a useful emptiness, land described as vacant when indigenous people stood upon it, resources described as global when they belonged to someone else, and entire populations reduced to tribes, militants, proxies, or demographic problems whenever their existence obstructed another country’s design. Palestine was never a land without a people, Iraq was never clay for American democracy, Venezuela was never an oil reserve with a flag attached, and Iran is not a troublesome shoreline around a Strait that Washington covets. These places are homes, which is precisely why the people who live there continue to resist being converted into scenery inside somebody else’s empire.

Six months of war have demonstrated that an iron fist can close around a country without ever possessing it, crushing lives while the future it meant to capture keeps slipping through its fingers. When the carriers finally leave the Gulf, as every foreign army eventually leaves the country it has failed to understand, Iranians will still be living beside the Strait Trump imagined he could declare American, burying the people his war killed and deciding what comes next without him. Washington will call its diminishing authority disorder because power has always mistaken its own absence for chaos, while everyone else may recognize the ordinary beginning of a world in which a people can look beneath their feet and know that what is there belongs to them.

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