US intervention in Iran is not solely for Israel’s sake (see America First is Not Israel First). Nor is it only about degrading Iran’s capacity to threaten its neighbors in the region and Europe. It’s about securing the Western realm, thwarting Communist China’s ambitions, and disrupting the transnational project to further undermine the Peace of Westphalia and establish a corporatist world order.
America can’t be first if it doesn’t lead the West, push Europe to reclaim the independent nation-state (Viktor Orbán’s loss in the Hungarian parliamentary elections is a setback), and extend the scope and depth of its security. “America Only,” the slogan of the blue-hat American First crowd, is America alone, and that means America last. Liberty and republicanism depend on US hegemony. (See Donald Trump’s Grand Vision: Make Western Civilization Great Again.)
For those unfamiliar with the Peace of Westphalia, it refers to a series of seventeenth-century treaties that marked a turning point in European history by establishing the principles of state sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs. The Peace of Westphalia is the foundation of the modern international system of independent nation-states. (I write about the Westphalia system in conjunction with the return of Lincolnesque Republicanism last year in my essay, Will They Break the Peace of Westphalia or Will We Save National Sovereignty for the Sake of the People?)
Regionalization is a direct assault on the Peace of Westphalia. To form the European Union (EU), member states “voluntarily” pool their sovereignty—in areas such as law, regulation, and trade—under common institutions. I say “voluntarily” because, whereas formally states join the European Union by choice and agree to its treaties, once inside, there are coercive or constraint-based elements that undermine their sovereignty. EU law enjoys supremacy in many areas, and its institutions enforce compliance through court rulings, financial penalties, or withholding funds. The European Commission can bring infringement proceedings against member states, and the European Court of Justice can issue binding decisions.
There are also more indirect pressures. Economically, abandoning or defying EU rules can be extremely costly, as seen in the disruption surrounding Brexit (the exception that proves the rule). Politically, smaller states have limited leverage compared to larger members like France or Germany, the latter the center of gravity for the pan-European superstate envisioned by National Socialism. Attendant to this is the advancement and entrenchment of progressive and social democratic forces in the various states, thereby cultivating popular loyalty to the superstate.
These forces are buttressed by the corporatist arrangements that mark the modern character of European states. Corporatism, often confused with socialism, is a government scheme in which the state organizes society into officially recognized groups—businesses, labor unions, professional associations—and coordinates them to manage economic and social policy. That corporatism is the essence of historical fascism is telling. At a minimum, corporatism is the instrument of corporatocratic governance.
Thus, the more accurate way to understand association with the EU is that entry is ostensibly voluntary, but membership creates binding obligations backed by enforcement and powerful incentives. Failure to comply can severely harm the populations of respective member states, principally through cultural disintegration.
It’s not only the smaller states that suffer national disorganization, but all the states, as seen in policies that open the French and German gates to non-Western populations with different cultural and religious systems who resist assimilation, forming ethnic enclaves that replicate those systems in the West. This phenomenon is the literal opposite of cultural integration.
Cultural disintegration is a feature of regionalization, and the loss of national integrity that results from it is an intentionally placed rot from within. The EU is thus antithetical to the Westphalian system on many fronts—it’s not cooperation between fully independent states, but a legal and political order that constrains and disrupts them from within by severely limiting national sovereignty and engineering cultural corruption.
The counterargument is that the EU doesn’t abolish sovereignty, but transforms it. But the counterargument actually bolsters my argument for this very reason; it admits what it is: transformation. Proponents of regionalization insist that member states choose to participate and can, at least in principle, leave, as Brexit demonstrated. But even if the sense of national sovereignty isn’t completely destroyed, populations are collectivized to achieve the goals of the transnational corporations and the world financial system. Proponents of regionalization argue that goals that individual states struggle to secure on their own are better achieved collectively. But this presumes that economic integration is a desirable goal. It’s rhetoric designed to justify the superstate by assuming the reasons for its existence are axiomatic and necessary.
The EU is described as a post-Westphalian system for a reason: it retains in rhetoric the ideals of the sovereign nation-state while adapting the various states under its control to a world where cooperation and interdependence are allegedly increasingly necessary, claims made by the very forces that seek to denationalize Europe.
The transnational world order is the same thing on a greater scale. Here, not only are the European states amalgamated into a regional corporatism that transcends national borders, but the nations of the world, including China, are integrated into the world capitalist system, not one based on sovereign nation-states but one shaped by transnational elites.
This development inevitably weakens the West and relatively strengthens the East. Oriental culture is antithetical to the Enlightenment principles of liberty and republicanism that mark the Occidental world. In contrast to the Occidental world, the Oriental world is characteristically collectivist, hierarchical, and traditional.
These terms—Oriental and Occidental—may be obscure to many and feel outdated to those who study such matters, but they are useful here. Oriental refers broadly to societies in Asia and the Middle East. Occidental refers to Europe and, later, the Americas. These labels often carried more than just geographic meaning—they were tied to assumptions about culture, economic organization, and governance, with Occidental societies representing individualism, modernism, and rationalism.
The Orientalism of the East is how communism (really totalitarian state monopoly capitalism) and Islam took hold of Eastern populations. Corporatist arrangements and the collectivism inherent in them prepared Europe for integration in the new world order. Throwing open the doors to Oriental culture undermines Western moral and political sensibilities—individualism, liberalism, and republicanism.
Why these terms feel old or sound obscure is a consequence of postmodernist colonization of the sensemaking institutions of Western societies. Students in universities across the transatlantic space are conditioned to perceive the terms as hallmarks of Western imperialist and racist thinking. Their professors leverage postcolonial scholarship, principally Edward Said’s book Orientalism, in which it is argued that such categories were not neutral descriptions but part of a broader system of thought that distorts understanding of non-Western societies and justifies imperialism.
Today, these terms are perceived as outdated or problematic because they allegedly oversimplify complex cultures and can carry colonial-era biases. The elite abandonment of the terms is exemplary of how transnationalist power shapes language to cut off avenues of critical thought to those who might resist globalization. By manufacturing a consensus that these terms provide cover for imperialism and racism, elites condition populations to perceive opposition to globalization as reactionary.
This linguistic and conceptual disarmament serves a deeper purpose: it prevents Occidentals from clearly recognizing the civilizational stakes in the struggle against regionalization and the nascent greater corporatist world order. An Occidental order rooted in the Westphalian system of sovereign nation-states, individual liberty, and republican self-government is being deliberately eroded from within by the very collectivist mechanisms—corporatist coordination between state and private power, mass demographic transformation, and supranational institutions—that ease the integration of European societies into a transnational framework. That framework, in turn, renders the West more compatible with, and ultimately subordinate to, the collectivist and hierarchical realities of the Oriental world.
The intervention in Iran must therefore be understood not as a narrow security operation or an act of altruism toward Israel, but as a necessary assertion of Occidental leadership. By disrupting Iran’s role as a node in the axis connecting radical Islam, China’s Belt and Road ambitions, and the broader transnational project, the United States reasserts the conditions under which the Westphalian order can be defended and renewed.
A sovereign, culturally coherent Europe—reclaiming its Occidental character—cannot emerge while it remains entangled in regional corporatism and exposed to Oriental influences that thrive on weakened national boundaries. Only American hegemony, exercised in the service of Western civilization rather than abstract globalism, can create the breathing room for European nations to reassert sovereignty, resist cultural disintegration, and reject the collectivist drift that prepares them for absorption into a post-Westphalian order.
An “America First” that refuses to lead the Occidental world is self-defeating. It leaves the field to China’s model of state capitalism fused with transnational corporate power, and to the Islamic and progressive forces (the Red-Green Alliance) that accelerate Europe’s internal rot.
Liberty and republicanism are not universal abstractions that flourish in a borderless corporatist vacuum; they are achievements of the Occidental tradition, sustained by independent nation-states capable of self-defense and cultural self-preservation. Securing the Western realm against Iran is thus inseparable from thwarting the larger project that seeks to dissolve the very distinctions that allow us to understand what is being lost and what must be reclaimed.
In this light, US action in Iran is not imperialism in the pejorative sense condemned by postmodern critics. Nor is it an expression of the neoconservatism that warped Cold War liberalism. It is the responsible exercise of hegemonic power by the leading Occidental republic to preserve the international system that made liberty possible. Without it, the transnational regionalization of the West will continue apace, the relative strengthening of the East will accelerate, and the promise of “Make Western Civilization Great Again” will remain an empty slogan rather than a governing vision.
The blue-hat American Alone crowd swarming X to express its collective disappointment with Donald Trump appears incapable of understanding what’s at stake. The ancient hatred of Jews has robbed them of the capacity for reason. They have been transformed into useful idiots for the transnational corporate project. Standing on the ground of such idiocy, they are also robbed of their capacity to feel embarrassment.
freedom and reason 