Washington called the bombs falling on Tehran "Operation Epic Fury." But in reality, it is the final unmasking.
For eight decades, the United States and its allies have parroted a sacred phrase: the rules-based international order. It has graced Davos panels, UN resolutions, and Nobel citations alike, holding out a solemn promise that the ghost of 1930s aggression had been permanently banished, that multilateral institutions now governed a civilised world.
But from the rubble of Gaza to the oil-soaked deserts of Libya, from the inflation-ravaged streets of Caracas to the now blazing skies of Tehran, that phrase has always sounded like a symphony conducted with a whip. The development of international law has been a euphemism for the development of imperial machinery.
Democracy is the cover, sectarian division the strategy, and resource extraction as the raison d'être.
The "rules-based order" was never a restraint on power. It was power's most sophisticated disguise, legitimising corporate capitalist dominance and subjugation of the ‘lesser mortals’ while dressing conquest in the language of liberation.
And today, by every measurable metric – Wall Street’s economic stagnation, rise of a multipolar world – the American firepower fails to deliver unilateral victory. The mask is slipping. The so-called mastery of America is over and out.
Doctrine of the Empire
The American empire was built by doctrine. From the Missouri's deck to the Sahel's drone bases, Presidents discovered the same enduring truth: the rhetoric of freedom is the most effective camouflage for the reality of control.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Monroe Doctrine, the original sin of hemispheric supremacy, was rebranded as Roosevelt's "Good Neighbour" policy, which sounded benign. Latin America was deemed a backyard rather than an equal community.
The transition from isolationism to global hegemony was formalised by Harry Truman when he took over as President. A farce pledge to support "free peoples" against "totalitarianism" that became a blank check for counter-resistance, coups, and the permanent militarization of foreign policy, the Truman Doctrine of 1947 was a masterpiece of rhetorical alchemy.
Dwight Eisenhower understood that the military-industrial complex required a permanent state of emergency controlled by big corporates. His doctrine - allowing the CIA to orchestrate the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 - established the template for modern American empire. It followed a simple rule: when sovereignty defies corporate interests, sovereignty must be erased.
By the 1970s, the machinery had become self-sustaining. Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation became ideological command centres. Institutions like the University of Nebraska, with its contentious counter-terrorism fellowship programs, became covert pipelines. Arming and financing extremist groups across South Asia had a singular goal: bleed the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Reagan perfected the architecture. The Reagan Doctrine was clear: regardless of the long-term consequences, support "freedom fighters" everywhere - the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua. When the International Court of Justice ruled the latter illegal, Washington ignored it. This would eventually become a routine.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, George H.W. Bush spoke of a "New World Order", which followed a unipolar moment in which the United States reserved the right to act unilaterally. The precedent of conditional sovereignty was established by the 1989 invasion of Panama and the 1991 Gulf War.
The Clinton Doctrine – an intervention to prevent "ethnic cleansing" - was applied selectively, despite Bill Clinton's brief burst of humanitarian rhetoric. It saved Bosnians but abandoned Rwandans. It expanded NATO eastward, planting the seeds for the confrontation with Russia that would bloom three decades later.
His successor, George W. Bush, stopped pretending. The Bush Doctrine of preemptive war was the naked face of empire. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was justified by lying about having weapons of mass destruction, was not an anomaly but rather the logical next step. When the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans cherry-picked intelligence to justify a war that would leave a million Iraqis dead, the “rules-based order” was revealed as a mechanism for resource extraction. Iraq’s oil was not a factor, Washington insisted, even as Western oil majors lined up for contracts.
Obama promised to heal the wounds. Instead, he refined the machinery. Drone strikes killed thousands across Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. In 2011, NATO bombed Libya into a failed state. Slave markets rose from its rubble. The justification was humanitarian, but the logic was imperial. Gaddafi had been planning a pan-African gold-backed currency to challenge dollar dominance. His removal was not merely a military victory. It was an economic execution.
Donald Trump (1.0) abandoned the language of liberal interventionism but doubled down on the substance. Sanctions were the weapon of choice under the Trump doctrine, which was transactional. He withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, imposing “maximum pressure” on Tehran, the economic strangulation designed to collapse the state. He moved the embassy, recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and mediated the Abraham Accords, which further isolated the Palestinians while normalising relations between Israel and Gulf states.
Joe Biden arrived promising a return to normalcy, but the Biden Doctrine was continuity dressed in diplomatic language. Israel is a strategic asset, and the "rules" apply to everyone except America's allies, so his administration's response to the Gaza war - rushing aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean, vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the Security Council, and dropping 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps by air - is the logical extension of 75 years of policy.
Economics of Decline
The foundation of American imperial power was always economic supremacy. That foundation is cracking.
The dollar remains the world's reserve currency but faces its most serious challenge since Bretton Woods. The BRICS bloc has accelerated de-dollarisation. Bilateral agreements increasingly bypass SWIFT. China and Saudi Arabia negotiate oil in yuan; India and the UAE settle trade in rupees. The weaponised dollar, Washington's favourite tool of economic coercion, has driven its targets to build the very architecture that circumvents it.
Meanwhile, China's economy, measured by purchasing power parity, is now the largest on earth. Its Belt and Road Initiative has financed infrastructure across 140 countries - roads, ports, power plants - in regions where Western institutions offered only austerity and political conditions. At home, American infrastructure decays while the Pentagon budget approaches a trillion dollars annually.
The 2026 Global Firepower Index tells a story unimaginable two decades ago. The gap is closing.
Stealth aviation and carrier strike groups are two examples of advanced technologies where the United States has a qualitative advantage, but the gap is closing. China now possesses the world’s largest navy by hull count. Despite sanctions, Russia has rebuilt its industrial base. India and Pakistan 'hypenated" after May 2025; stand at 4 and 14 in the global power index. North Korea has also gone up in ranking. All have advanced ballistic missile programmes that render the concept of American continental immunity obsolete.
The United States is stretched: supporting Ukraine against Russia, arming Israel against Iran and its proxies, maintaining a posture against China in the South China Sea, and conducting counter-terrorism operations across Africa. The Pentagon’s own war games have repeatedly shown that a conflict with a near-peer adversary would produce unacceptable losses. The centre cannot hold because the empire is too big.
Architecture of Unrest
When Washington funnelled billions through institutions like the University of Nebraska at Omaha to arm and legitimise Afghan mujahideen commanders, it was not building capacity. It was manufacturing chaos with plausible deniability. The sectarian fault lines it deliberately widened - Sunni against Shia, Deobandi against Barelvi - did not disappear when the Cold War ended. They were inherited by local actors, amplified and diversified across the region, and are now beyond anyone's control.
Nowhere is this inheritance more bitter than Kashmir. Divided by a Line of Control, administered by two nuclear-armed states, and instrumentalised for eight decades by Washington as leverage over both New Delhi and Islamabad, Jammu and Kashmir region remains the unresolved wound at the heart of South Asian geopolitics.
The US Senate's own 2026 Annual Threat Assessment identifies Kashmir as a live risk for nuclear escalation. The "rules-based order" that claims to govern such disputes has never once applied its rules here. It never intended to.
Sahel and the Resource War
Systematically ignored by Western media, Africa is the continent where the machinery of the "rules-based order" is most deeply embedded, just as South Asia is the Cold War's chronic wound.
The United States Africa Command, AFRICOM, was established in 2007 with a mandate to “promote stability and prosperity.” It currently operates from more than thirty bases across the continent, including Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and the drone bases in Niger, which launched strikes into Libya, Mali, and Burkina Faso prior to the coup of 2023.
Gold, oil, gas, and uranium - the fuel for France's nuclear power industry - are all found in abundance in the Sahel. Libya, whose 2011 destruction by NATO has been described by critics as the single most destabilising event in modern African history, remains a failed state a decade and a half later. The intervention that toppled Muammar Gaddafi was in reality a resource war dressed in the language of liberal interventionism.
The response from governments in Africa has been instructive. Over the past three years, military juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have expelled French and American forces, turning instead to Russia’s Wagner Group for security assistance.
This has been portrayed as a Russian takeover by Western commentary. But on the ground, the logic is simpler: after decades of Western military intervention that brought neither peace nor development, African governments are shopping for alternatives. It turns out that sovereignty is the only thing that matters when you are being bombed.
Pulling the Single Rope
The February 28, 2026, bombing of Tehran was intended to serve as a warning. Instead, it may prove the final unmasking. The coordinated American-Israeli the air assault that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, former speaker Ali Larijani, and roughly 4000 Iranian civilians was an act of such brazen illegality that it has fundamentally altered the strategic calculus of the region.
The United States vetoed a Russian-drafted UN Security Council resolution condemning the strikes, and the Kremlin is already in military confrontation with Kyiv, since February 2022.
Once more, the "rules-based order" was used to defend an act of war against a sovereign state that had not fired a single shot. The operation was described as "a defensive action to prevent an imminent nuclear threat" by the White House. No evidence was provided. None was expected.
The realignment has accelerated in the weeks since. Iran has quietly heard from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that they won't let their territory be used for more strikes. Turkey has established a channel for direct military communication with Tehran. Along its western border, Pakistan has added air defense assets and is reportedly in the process of making a formal agreement with Iran for mutual defense.
The Abraham Accords, once celebrated as a triumph of American diplomacy, now look increasingly fragile, as Arab publics demand their governments distance themselves from an alliance that has brought war to the doorstep of the Muslim world.
Western commentators frequently dismiss this new alliance, referring to it as an Islamic NATO, a Muslim-led security compact, an authoritarian alliance, or a Chinese proxy. But such dismissals miss the point. A multipolar alternative is not a threat but rather a liberation for nations that have experienced the "rules-based order" as a system of selective sovereignty and resource extraction.
China is the natural external partner. Beijing does not demand political submission in exchange for economic cooperation, unlike the United States. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is more than just an infrastructure project for Pakistan. It is also a way out of the IMF's never-ending cycles of austerity and debt.
An alternative to the American security umbrella, which has made the Gulf states perpetually susceptible to Washington's whims, is provided by such a group. It provides a platform for Turkey's renewed regional ambition. And for the smaller states of the Muslim world and the African continent, it offers the possibility of economic cooperation and diplomatic protection outside the Western framework.
The Reckoning
An argument for anarchy is not made in support of the criticism of the rules-based order. It is an argument for genuine multilateralism - a system where the sovereignty of all nations is respected, not conditional on allegiance. The current order has failed that test. Instead of bringing about stability, it has brought selective chaos, imperial hypocrisy, and the prolongation rather than the resolution of the conflict.
It will be difficult for the United States to change its position. Rhetoric does not dismantle the empire's machinery: the 800 military bases, the aircraft carriers that patrol the world's sea lanes, the intelligence agencies that destabilize unfriendly governments, and the financial system that can isolate any nation from global commerce. But the foundations are cracking.
A whole generation of Muslims from the West have become disenchanted with the conflict in Gaza. The war in Ukraine has exposed European dependence on American security guarantees as a form of vassalage. An alternative economic axis has emerged as a result of China's rise. And the growing coherence of the Global South - from Brasilia to Beijing, from Jakarta to Johannesburg, from Abuja to Algiers - is creating political space for defiance.
The West will call this new alignment a threat. It will use the language of order and rules from the international system it claims to have created. However, that language has run its course. The system has been rigged from the start, the rules have been applied selectively, and the order has been brutally enforced.
The empire is not eternal. The question will no longer be how the stability, progress and prosperity was lost, but rather whether the world that emerges from the wreckage will be one in which sovereignty is truly universal or simply the privilege of a set of masters.
Lal Ded’s Timeless Wisdom
For the nations that have spent seventy-five years under the rules-based order, the moment of reckoning is at hand. The old order is dying. Whether a genuine multipolarity follows or there is a return to the law of the jungle, the warning in the verses of Lal Ded (Lalleshwari), 14th century mystic poet of Kashmir:
“Kyāh karāe pachun dahān teh khāhan
Yus yēti lāji vakhun karith gōv
Sari yī samyun aksi rāzi lamhan
Adē kyāzi rāyihā kāhan gōv”
(What should I do with numbers 5, 10, and 11?
Those who went to stir the cauldron—
A single rope should have been pulled by everyone,
Then how would the eleven have lost the cow?”)
Lal Ded’s question echoes across the centuries: kyāh karāe pachun dahān teh khāhan
Yus yēti lāji Waksun Kareth Gowyi.
(What shall I do with five, ten, and eleven? The answer is in her verse: gather, unite, pull the single rope.)
Have you liked the news article?