Blaming Israel is easy. With its actions in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon, it is too easy. Taking responsibility is harder – and the deeper strategic malaise within the United States deserves far greater scrutiny than it receives.
This malaise is not merely political; it’s intellectual. It begins with inherited traditions, is captured in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theory of sea power, evolves through Henry Kissinger’s balance-of-power logic, finds its clearest geopolitical expression in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s vision of Eurasia as “the grand chessboard,” and echoes in any number of modern strategists spruiking of half-baked ideas about the “Indo-Pacific” and containing China.
Across these traditions runs a common assumption: that maritime powers – today, the United States – must prevent the consolidation of any dominant force across the Eurasian landmass.
It is a coherent framework. It is also, today, obsolete.
Historically, control of Eurasia was contested by continental empires – Greece, Rome, Persia, India, China, Mongolia, Russia, and Europe. Their influence expanded and contracted according to their economic strength, political cohesion, and military reach. Modern maritime strategy emerged as a response to this history: an external balancing logic designed to prevent any one of these continental systems from achieving lasting dominance. The result was a strategic imagination in which the periphery of Eurasia became the decisive arena.
From this perspective, the world resolves into a series of pressure points. The Korean Peninsula, Poland then Ukraine, the Middle East, and Central Asia. Iran is not an isolated crisis. It is one of the structural fault lines where maritime power presses against the continental interior.
Iran is a pivotal middle power. It occupies a critical intersection between the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Caucasus; it sits astride energy corridors, trade routes, and civilizational boundaries. It is neither fully embedded within a continental bloc nor aligned with maritime power. In classical geopolitical terms, it is not peripheral – it is decisive. And precisely for that reason, it is now being contested.
States in this position rarely experience stability during periods of systemic competition. They are not buffered; they are exposed. Their domestic politics are shaped by external pressure. Their sovereignty becomes conditional. Their crises become opportunities for others.
This pattern is not incidental. Ukraine sits between Russia and the Euro-Atlantic system. The Korean Peninsula sits as an anchor point in the Indo-Pacific. Iran and wider Middle East sit on the periphery of continental power. Elsewhere, Myanmar, Afghanistan, and Georgia exhibit similar instability – not as isolated failures, but as consequences of structural position. Even cases often treated as peripheral – Finland in the Arctic or Greenland in the North Atlantic – are increasingly drawn into similar strategic calculations.
These are not random events. They are the predictable outcomes of a geopolitical framework that reduces pivotal middle power states to instruments within the continental-maritime contest.
A surface level assessment focuses on the decision: the Mossad and the deep state run the Pentagon? The Israel Lobby controls politics and the media? Pedophilic escapades and Bibi’s threat of blackmail convinced Trump to go to war? It all may well be true. Who knows?
A deeper level assessment focuses on what made the decision even possible: the inherent belief that the prevention of continental consolidation remains both necessary and achievable.
Here lies the problem: Iran is not the source of instability – nor Ukraine, nor Korea. They are symptoms of a fading strategic paradigm, friction points where a rising continental hegemon meets a declining maritime balancer.
As the United States steadily discovers that its relative decline no longer supports its maritime balancing strategy, we should be asking what happens when the balance shifts.
When continental power increases in relative strength, the geometry of the system changes. The periphery – once a zone of intervention and fragmentation – begins to stabilize. This is not because conflict disappears, but because the incentive to fragment weakens. Continental powers seek coherence, connectivity, and strategic depth. Trade routes are consolidated, borders are normalized, and political arrangements – however imperfect – tend toward accommodation rather than permanent crisis.
The Korean Peninsula illustrates this dynamic with unusual clarity. Its condition has long been tied to China’s relative strength. When China is strong and internally coherent, the peninsula tends toward stability – whether through alignment, accommodation, or managed autonomy within a broader regional order. When China is weak, however, the peninsula becomes exposed to maritime encroachment, external intervention, and internal division. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are instructive: Qing decline opened the way for Japanese and later American influence, culminating in occupation, partition, and enduring insecurity. A strong continental center limits external penetration; a weak one invites it.
When maritime influence recedes and continental power – whether in the form of a dominant center or a looser continental alignment – increases, the likely outcome is not perpetual chaos but gradual stabilization. The structural incentive for fragmentation is removed. As in previous periods of continental consolidation, order emerges from concentration of power rather than its diffusion.
Are we then seeing a continental-maritime conflict? Are the plans of the United States to control resources and balance China on the continental periphery, as much to blame as the now popular notion of Israeli subterfuge?
This is where we are. Israel – a state that emerged in the retreat of Ottoman authority and at the height of British maritime power – now operates in concert with the United States in a last ditch attempt to retain maritime control over a critical strategic pivot on the Eurasian periphery.
But this is no longer a strategy in any meaningful sense. It is the continuation of a doctrine that has outlived the conditions that once sustained it. The United States’ maritime strategic culture is outdated. Its capacity to shape outcomes eroded. The pivotal middle powers used as instruments of encroachment are reverting back to continental influence. Blaming Israel is easy. Taking blame is harder.
Jeffrey Robertson previously worked for the Australian Government in the fields of foreign policy and diplomacy with a focus on East Asia. He now writes from the other side of the line – as an academic, consultant, and sometimes spy fiction ghostwriter. He writes and updates research at https://junotane.com.
