{ "article": { "title" : "American Fault Lines: How America’s last frontier reflects the broader unraveling of the United States", "author" : "Jordan Gale, Economic Hardship Recording Project", "category" : "essay", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/american-fault-lines", "date" : "2026-03-23 14:37:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Jordan_Gale_16.JPG", "excerpt" : "

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LAPD officers, on horseback, rush through a line of protesters during a protest over Trump’s deportation efforts in Los Angeles, California on June 11, 2025.

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It has been seen as a proving ground for reinvention and a stage for the myths that shape American identity. The image of the rugged pioneer on horseback, long held up as a symbol of independence and westward expansion, still lingers today even as the country fractures and struggles with the realities of a dismantled democracy over a hollowed out landscape. These settlers steered the wagons that drove stakes into the ground, claiming land for themselves. These were the men that dug up thick black oil and gold from the earth, men and women who handed out blankets filled with disease. Their actions did more than lay the groundwork for future mythologies. They set in motion a trajectory that continues today, the formation of a nation facing drought, broken treaties, political division, Trump’s agenda.

\n", "content" : "LAPD officers, on horseback, rush through a line of protesters during a protest over Trump’s deportation efforts in Los Angeles, California on June 11, 2025. For generations, the American West has served as one of the nation’s most enduring metaphors, a frontier imagined as a place of possibility and abundance. It has been seen as a proving ground for reinvention and a stage for the myths that shape American identity. The image of the rugged pioneer on horseback, long held up as a symbol of independence and westward expansion, still lingers today even as the country fractures and struggles with the realities of a dismantled democracy over a hollowed out landscape. These settlers steered the wagons that drove stakes into the ground, claiming land for themselves. These were the men that dug up thick black oil and gold from the earth, men and women who handed out blankets filled with disease. Their actions did more than lay the groundwork for future mythologies. They set in motion a trajectory that continues today, the formation of a nation facing drought, broken treaties, political division, Trump’s agenda. Last June, under the blinding sun in downtown Los Angeles, I thought of these images of the westward pioneer. Those figures flashed through my mind as I watched, through my camera’s viewfinder, Los Angeles police officers on horseback charging through crowds of protesters, swinging wooden clubs through the air and into skulls. The moment felt both full circle and painfully linear. This is the America of today, shaped by overlapping crises and, in that particular moment, the early days of Trump’s mass‑deportation campaign. The scene also felt like a continuation of the country’s long history of conquest across the region, shaped by manifest destiny. Portrait of a young latino protester during national guard clashes over Trump’s deportation efforts in Los Angeles, California on June 9, 2025. (Right) Young Republicans stand for the national anthem at Turning Point’s AmericaFest convention in Phoenix, Arizona, on Dec. 20, 2025. Empty produce crates line a rural highway in Yakima, Washington, on October 2, 2025. (Right) A migrant farmworker sleeps with his belongings beside him in a cabin designated for seasonal laborers at a farm in Medford, Oregon, on August. 28, 2021. With this experience fresh in my mind, I set out to create an extensive survey of the American West that aims to show not only the region in the midst of today’s many crises, but also how this moment in time has been shaped by decisions of the past and by the enduring influence of manifest destiny. I want to present the West within a broader American reckoning. This romanticized landscape, with its drought‑scarred riverbeds, contested borders, boom‑and‑bust economies, and the communities caught between resilience and despair, reveals the tension between myth and reality. Pulled together, this cumulative portrait of a coast on the brink offers a distilled view of the national mood and direction. Johnathan Kaltsukis sits in the driver’s seat of his car with his son Jermaine and friends while selling freshly caught salmon along Interstate 84 in Cascade Locks, Oregon, on July 25, 2024. A wildfire burns through a distant mountain ridge in Northern California on September 20, 2023. Portrait of Ronny and Levi, two of the last operators at The Hoopa Tribal Forest Industries Lumber Mill, in Hoopa, California on February 28, 2025. An American flag hangs in a closed down storefront window in Yreka, California on February 28, 2025. Ryan Frazier, a high school teacher, puts on a Trump mask at Desert Oasis High School in Othello, Washington, on April 2, 2025. Frazier uses the oversized mask to mock and discuss the president’s recent tweets and policies with his students. The idea that the West was a place to be claimed, conquered, and “made productive” still echoes throughout modern American rhetoric. You can draw a line between an ICE raid on an Oxnard farm and earlier campaigns of forced assimilation, boarding schools, internment camps, and the genocide carried out against Indigenous peoples. We continue to see federal administrations roll back environmental protections as well. Many politicians still view the finite resources beneath sacred land in the west as something granted by god, for those that would advance American interests and values. But the environmental consequences of westward expansion and the continued extraction of the region’s dwindling water, oil, and timber have accelerated severe drought, deadly wildfires, and ecological instability. The relationship between the many Indigenous nations of the West and the United States government has never healed from a history of displacement and attempted eradication. These practices and beliefs which echo and reverberate today have only deepened national wounds. A recent Afghan refugee and his son peer out the door of their motel room, their temporary home in Beaverton, Oregon, on March 11, 2025. A Private LGBTQ+ gun training class at a residence in Portland, Oregon on February 15, 2025. Portrait of Chris in Denver, Colorado, while hitchhiking to Wyoming to propose to his girlfriend on Nov. 10, 2025. A Christian evangelical sect performs a public baptism along the Deschutes River in Bend, Oregon on August 9, 2025. The frontier was never just a place on a map. It has always been a story we keep telling ourselves, even as the land beneath us buckles under the weight of that narrative’s consequences. The myths that once justified conquest now surface in new forms, shaping policy, identity, and the lives of people still searching for a foothold in a country that has never stopped remaking itself through exclusion and erosion. Yet in the faces of those I meet on the road, I see the possibility of a different inheritance, one built not on erasure but on reckoning. If America is still writing its next chapter, then perhaps the most urgent task is learning to listen to the echoes of the past without mistaking them for a guide. " } , "relatedposts": [ { "title" : "Collateral Language: I saw bombs raining over Beirut, CNN saw "crossfire"", "author" : "Denise Morillo", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/collateral-language", "date" : "2026-03-23 13:02:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Man%20in%20Beirut,%202006.jpg", "excerpt" : "

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The U.S.S. Iwo Jima (LHD-7): deployed to evacuate American citizens from Lebanon in 2006.

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In the summer of 2006, I found myself standing on the deck of the USS Iwo Jima, a U.S. Navy Wasp-class amphibious assault ship. There, I watched Beirut’s lights vanish into the dark – a city I was just beginning to get to know. Above us, bombs tore through the sky, while below, the hum of the massive ship filled the air. That night, sitting in the crowded cafeteria on board, I watched replay after replay of CNN’s coverage of this “conflict.” This version of the story felt very different from what I’d experienced. They used words like “escalation,” “crossfire,” “terrorist.”

\n", "content" : "The U. S. S. Iwo Jima (LHD-7): deployed to evacuate American citizens from Lebanon in 2006. In the summer of 2006, I found myself standing on the deck of the USS Iwo Jima, a U. S. Navy Wasp-class amphibious assault ship. There, I watched Beirut’s lights vanish into the dark – a city I was just beginning to get to know. Above us, bombs tore through the sky, while below, the hum of the massive ship filled the air. That night, sitting in the crowded cafeteria on board, I watched replay after replay of CNN’s coverage of this “conflict. ” This version of the story felt very different from what I’d experienced. They used words like “escalation,” “crossfire,” “terrorist. ”The killing of civilians was reduced to collateral damage; the destruction of Beirut and all across Lebanon – homes, memories, sacred places – framed as geopolitics. The language suggested a symmetry that didn’t exist. My family’s trauma, and the suffering of thousands of others, was recast as a spectacle for Western audiences. Patterns of ErasureThis erasure didn’t begin in Lebanon, nor does it end there. After 9/11, the pattern became unmistakable. The media didn’t report the attacks so much as cast an entire people as suspects. Overnight, Arab and Muslim communities were boxed into a narrative of terrorism, suspicion, and foreignness. Headlines blurred distinctions between faith, nationality, and politics. Mainstream outlets framed surveillance and profiling as security measures rather than violations of rights. As a result, ICE was formed. Classrooms, airports, and workplaces became sites of suspicion. I even received my first death threat in the second grade – simply because I am Lebanese. For those of us in the diaspora, this means we exist in a double bind: our grief was never acknowledged, and our humanity is erased under the weight of collective blame. The “war on terror” became both a foreign policy project and a domestic erasure, and media narratives pave the way for both. Examples of CNN coverage of the 2006 Israeli attacks on Lebanon. This framing choice is not accidental. It shapes how conflict is understood, where sympathy lies, and which lives are deemed worthy of grief. Mainstream outlets framed the 2006 attacks on Lebanon in ways that minimized Lebanese lives while centering the Zionist narrative. A Brookings report at the time noted that civilian deaths in Qana were used for sensational copy, often without proportional context. A visual analysis found that stories of destroyed homes and grieving families rarely made the front page, and military imagery (propaganda) dominated instead. The effect was cumulative: reduce enough deaths to copy, and eventually they stop reading as deaths at all. That is how you determine whose grief registers as real. Lebanon becomes a stage rather than a people. If our death is only “collateral,” mourning us becomes optional. We see this at play today. Nearly two decades later, the architecture is the same – just applied to a larger scale catastrophe. During Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2023, a CfMM report found that major Western outlets frequently dismissed Gaza’s health ministry figures while refusing to contextualize decades of blockade and occupation. A letter signed by over 1,500 journalists said plainly: “Western newsrooms are accountable for dehumanizing rhetoric that has served to justify ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Double-standards, inaccuracies and fallacies abound in American publications. ”The disconnect I witnessed in 2006 between my lived experience and the reported narrative is not an isolated glitch. It is a systemic feature of how Arabs and Muslims are portrayed: through a critically censored lens. When Journalists Themselves Are TargetedPerhaps the starkest proof of media erasure is how little space is given to the deaths of journalists in Palestine, Lebanon, and across SWANA. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists,the hundreds of Palestinian journalists and media workers have been murdered since October 2023; making this the deadliest period for journalists since records began four decades ago. Al Jazeera reported in October 2024 that Israel killed at least 128 journalists and media workers in Palestine and Lebanon over the past year. By August of 2025 Israel had killed over 270 journalists. In October 2023, Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was killed in Lebanon by an Israeli tank shell. An independent investigation confirmed it was a targeted strike, even though Abdallah was clearly identifiable in a press vest and marked vehicle. The disregard is not subtle. It is blatant. And it reveals what corporate media cannot - and will not - say outright: some voices, even those tasked with telling the truth, are disposable if they don’t fall in line. When journalists are killed without accountability, when their deaths are buried in euphemism, it reinforces the idea that some lives just don’t matter. It gives political cover to crimes against humanity. In Gaza, Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif recorded a final message before he was killed alongside four of his colleagues: “If these words reach you, know that Israel has succeeded in killing me and silencing my voice. ”Pulitzer Prize-winning Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza, Mosab Abu Toha: on the killing of Maryam Abu Daqqa. The Language of EuphemismErasure doesn’t only happen through omission; it happens through the crafted language of euphemism. When Israel bombs Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Qatar, and civilians from all nations in international waters, headlines read as “defense” or “escalations. ” When Palestinians resist, words like “terrorism” and “provocation” dominate. When children die under rubble, they are “caught in the crossfire. ” When Israeli settler-combatants die in battle, they are “slaughtered. ”The asymmetry of words is part of the violence. It teaches audiences who deserves empathy and who doesn’t. It shapes foreign policy by making one side’s humanity visible and the other’s disposable. If Western audiences only ever see Israeli “responses,” then U. S. tax-funded aid packages and arms sales look like neutral diplomacy rather than complicity. If Arab civilians are never humanized, then our deaths are never treated as crises. If journalists are not recognized as targets, then information itself becomes collateral. Arabs are consistently depicted in mainstream media not as having complex societies with rich histories, accomplishments, and aspirations –  but rather as problems, threats, and abstractions. To this day, the pattern holds. A man walks through the destruction caused by Israel in Beirut, July 2006. Flattened Homes, Stories and VoicesThe erasure doesn’t only live in coverage. I’ve felt it within my own career in media – developing campaigns, pitching stories and ideas, shaping narratives across agencies, entertainment, and advocacy spaces. I often come across an unspoken understanding that my identity, and as a result, my voice, is not received on equal terms – that my ideas are filtered through suspicion, tokenization, and hesitation. Last year, I was helping a journalist friend source a subject for a Q&A. She was looking to interview an Arab woman working in PR and entertainment in the U. S. who could speak to her personal experiences. I couldn’t be the subject myself since I knew the journalist well. But one of the caveats to the story was that she could “not mention anything about what’s happening in the Middle East right now. ”Then how does an Arab woman candidly talk about her lived experience? While we watch from afar as our tax dollars kill children in our homelands, tear families apart, destroy our crops, our cultures, our histories– a platform with such conditions attached is not really a platform at all. The pattern repeats: Arab stories are too political, too “sensitive,” too… risky. Unless stripped of all “political” context. Unless made palatable. So when we actually do share our stories, we are not just amplifying culture or advocacy. We are pushing back against a system that conditioned us to believe our voices don’t belong. We refuse the default narrative. Twenty Years Later: to the DiasporaThis July will mark twenty years since I stood on the deck of that ship, watching Beirut’s lights disappear into the dark. Twenty years of the same euphemisms. The same asymmetry. The same decisions about whose deaths register as tragedy and whose dissolve into the footnotes. Last summer I went back to Beirut for the first time in seven years – not despite the destruction, but through it. And Lebanon was still breathing. Still refusing the story being written about her. We in the diaspora must do the same. Our voices are the counterweight, positioned uniquely in the in-between – close enough to carry memories of home, distant enough to see how the narrative gets repackaged for mass consumption. The responsibility falls to us to tell Lebanon’s story as it is. What’s at stake is not just accuracy. It’s survival. It always has been. " } , { "title" : "Argentina’s Migration “Security Turn”: How Javier Milei’s Migration Policies Are Reshaping Belonging in Argentina", "author" : "Marina Simonet Hernandez Jurado", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/argentinas-migration-security-turn", "date" : "2026-03-17 10:39:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Screenshot-2026-03-12-at-4.14.21PM.jpg", "excerpt" : "

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In late January, Argentina’s Ministry of Security published a video on Instagram showing federal forces conducting an operation in Villa Celina, a working-class neighborhood in La Matanza, reportedly searching for undocumented immigrants. Days earlier, a Colombian-born trans man who had requested asylum in Argentina, was detained at the airport for six days, unable to communicate with his family. According to La Izquierda Diario, his asylum claim was rejected, and he was placed on a flight to Porto Alegre, Brazil, under the classification of a “false tourist.” According to an X post by Alejandra Monteoliva, Argentina’s Minister of National Security, “in December and January, nearly 5,000 foreign nationals were either denied entry or expelled from the country”.

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These episodes unfolded amid significant changes to Argentina’s immigration governance. Before Javier Milei took office in December 2023, immigration policy fell under the Ministry of the Interior, but former Minister Patricia Bullrich transferred oversight of immigration to the Ministry of National Security in November 2025, effectively redefining migration not as a matter of civil administration, but as an issue of national security.

\n", "content" : "In late January, Argentina’s Ministry of Security published a video on Instagram showing federal forces conducting an operation in Villa Celina, a working-class neighborhood in La Matanza, reportedly searching for undocumented immigrants. Days earlier, a Colombian-born trans man who had requested asylum in Argentina, was detained at the airport for six days, unable to communicate with his family. According to La Izquierda Diario, his asylum claim was rejected, and he was placed on a flight to Porto Alegre, Brazil, under the classification of a “false tourist. ” According to an X post by Alejandra Monteoliva, Argentina’s Minister of National Security, “in December and January, nearly 5,000 foreign nationals were either denied entry or expelled from the country”. These episodes unfolded amid significant changes to Argentina’s immigration governance. Before Javier Milei took office in December 2023, immigration policy fell under the Ministry of the Interior, but former Minister Patricia Bullrich transferred oversight of immigration to the Ministry of National Security in November 2025, effectively redefining migration not as a matter of civil administration, but as an issue of national security. There have been no large-scale arrests of undocumented migrants in Argentina. Yet the symbolic force of security operations in poor neighborhoods and the high-profile expulsion of an asylum seeker signals to a broader political narrative. Like Donald Trump’s “law and order” rhetoric in the United States, Milei’s discourse relies on nationalist appeals and moral distinctions between “decent Argentinians” and those portrayed as threats. Slogans such as “el que las hace las paga” (an idiom similar to “do the crime, do the time”) compress complex social realities into punitive certainties, repositioning immigrants, workers, and other vulnerable groups as subjects of suspicion rather than individuals with rights. The correlation between Milei’s and Trump’s anti-immigrant policies is clear from the dates of implementation: Javier Milei took office in December 2023 and made no major changes to immigration policies until May 2025 (only five months after Trump took office) with the publication of the decree 366/2025 that announced modifications to the Migration Law, especially in article 114 where the creation of the “Auxiliary Migration Police” was announced. Furthermore, the desire to emulate Trump’s ICE is explicit even from members of the Milei administration, as reflected in these statements published by La Nacion, by a source close to Patricia Bullrich’s office: “The ANM (National Migration Agency) will adopt a security-driven approach. It will be modeled on the United States Department of Homeland Security, including its Border Patrol and the TSA [Transportation Security Administration, which oversees airport screening]. We are working to establish a civilian-police force operating at all of Argentina’s border crossings — an agency that centralizes migration control and maintains comprehensive records of individuals with criminal backgrounds”. Argentina’s Ambivalent Immigration TraditionArgentina’s national mythology celebrates immigration more explicitly than that of most countries in the Americas—a tradition rooted not only in historical narrative but also in constitutional language, and linked to the country’s vast, sparsely populated territory. The 1853 Preamble famously commits the nation to “secure the blessings of liberty … for all men of the world who wish to dwell on Argentine soil,” embedding an explicit invitation to migrants within the country’s founding legal imagination and framing hospitality as a foundational principle rather than a contingent policy choice. Dominant narratives credit European migration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with shaping Argentina’s economic and cultural development, as well as its national identity—one that has often imagined Argentines as descendants of Europeans and, therefore, distinct from the rest of Latin America. However, enthusiasm for immigration was never universal. In 1899, physician and intellectual José María Ramos Mejía wrote in Las multitudes Argentinas that immigration had “made Buenos Aires ill,” contaminating the traditions of established families. This anxiety reflected elite fears of demographic change, urban disorder, and political radicalism. In the context of the country’s expanding capitalist economy, these fears translated into hostility toward labor organizing, often portrayed as a foreign and subversive activity, as unions began to develop under the influence of anarchist and socialist ideas, including organizations such as the FORA, the country’s first major anarchist labor federation, as documented by Working Class History. The state also responded with legislation facilitating deportations, most notably the 1902 Ley de Residencia (Law 4144), which allowed the executive to expel foreigners deemed a threat to public order. Today’s nostalgia for a “good immigration” rests on two fragile premises. First, European migration is interpreted through a contemporary lens that imagines Europe as inherently prosperous and orderly, projecting present-day “First World” status onto a past marked by poverty, instability, and social conflict. Second, that race did not matter. Yet Argentina’s self-image as a predominantly white nation emerged alongside the violent erasure of much of its Indigenous population, including state campaigns such as the Conquest of the Desert, and the marginalization of Afro-Argentine communities. The celebration of European immigration has always been intertwined with racial hierarchy, evident in the markedly different treatment given to European migrants compared to those from neighboring countries such as Paraguay and Bolivia, who were racialized in distinct ways. The distinction between “good” and “bad” immigrants persists, now recorded through the language of legality and security. The False Security ArgumentThe Milei administration justifies its migration policies in the name of public safety. However, official data complicates that claim. Administrative data from the National Registry of Persons (RENAPER) indicates that Argentina has roughly 2. 3 million foreign-born residents, representing about 5 percent of the total population. Compared to countries where immigration dominates electoral politics, Argentina’s foreign-born population remains relatively small. According to 2023 national penitentiary statistics, foreigners account for roughly 6 percent of Argentina’s incarcerated population, approximately in line with their share of the country’s population. These figures suggest that migrants are not overrepresented within Argentina’s criminal justice system. Essentially, migration has not been a central axis of political instability or social crisis in recent years. Framing migration as a primary security concern appears disproportionate to the available evidence and contrasts with claims by President Javier Milei that migrants disproportionately benefit from public services such as health care and education or contribute significantly to Argentina’s economic crisis. Emulation and Political StrategyThe parallels with Trump-era discourse are not accidental. Javier Milei has openly aligned himself rhetorically with global right-wing leaders who frame migration as both a cultural and criminal threat. The emphasis on border control, internal enforcement, and moral categorization mirrors strategies used by U. S. and European conservatives to consolidate political identity around fear and grievance, while also resonating with broader regional trends. Argentina is not an isolated case in the adoption of restrictive migration policies; rather, it reflects a broader regional trend. In Chile, President-elect José Antonio Kast campaigned on proposals that included large-scale deportations of undocumented migrants. Similarly, in Costa Rica, President Rodrigo Chaves Robles declared a state of emergency in 2023 in response to migrants transiting the country en route to the United States, as reported by Reuters. In a recent interview with Louis Sarkozy, son of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Milei argued that when a migrant “does not adapt to your culture,” it constitutes an “invasion” capable of “altering the cultural foundations” of a country. Yet beneath this security narrative lies a broader political project. The administration’s economic agenda (including labor reforms framed as “modernization”) favors deregulation and business interests. In this context, anti-immigrant rhetoric functions less as a response to empirical conditions than as a symbolic instrument: it constructs an internal adversary while redirecting attention away from structural economic transformation. The coherence of this narrative is further complicated by reports, including those published by The New York Times, suggesting an alleged agreement between Trump and Milei for Argentina to receive deported migrants from the United States. In this sense, security has become the language through which a deeper class realignment is articulated. Argentina’s history shows that debates over immigration have often reflected anxieties about identity, race, and labor control rather than measurable threats. The current turn toward securitization thus represents not merely a policy shift, but a transformation in democratic language itself. The question, then, is not whether Argentina faces a migration crisis, the available data suggests it does not, but what political purpose is served by insisting that it does, and what this insistence reveals about the broader direction of governance under Milei. By constructing an internal enemy embodied by vulnerable populations, the government seeks to redirect attention to politically expedient scapegoats. This logic is reflected not only in the immigration policies described here, but also in labor reforms that frame workers’ rights as a burden on public spending, the repression of retirees demanding improved pensions, and new restrictions on protest and the right to strike that limit collective organization. Taken together, these measures suggest that immigration restrictions form part of a broader institutional reconfiguration, one that prioritizes the projection of authority over the resolution of concrete social and economic challenges. In doing so, the government reframes manageable social dynamics as existential threats, a shift that risks undermining the very constitutional principles it claims to defend, both domestically and in its international positioning. " } , { "title" : "Borrowed Geography: How US Bases Serve the Empire", "author" : "Jwan Zreiq", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/borrowed-geography", "date" : "2026-03-17 10:03:00 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/us-syria.jpg", "excerpt" : "

Who are the bases for? For decades, the United States and Arab regimes have rehearsed the same script: the lie that American military presence in the region protects the Arab world, to preserve stability, and to defend against external threats. Hundreds of bases, tens of thousands of troops, naval fleets parked in the Gulf, all of it, supposedly, for Arab safety. But if protection is the purpose, then the question answers itself: protected from what, exactly? The Arab region has endured more wars, more destruction, and more instability since the establishment of these bases than in any comparable period before them. Iraq was invaded. Syria was shattered. Yemen was starved. Libya was bombed into state collapse. Palestine remains under occupation and siege. If this is what protection looks like, then the word has lost all meaning.

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The American military footprint in the Arab region is staggering. The United States maintains forces in more than a dozen countries, with at least nineteen military sites, eight considered permanent. Qatar hosts Al Udeid Air Base, the largest US installation in the Middle East, serving as the forward headquarters for US Central Command with around 10,000 troops. As of mid-2025, roughly 40,000 American service members were deployed across the region. The narrative behind the purpose of these bases were sold to Arab governments, and by extension, to Arab publics, as shields against regional threats, primarily framed as Iran. But the record tells a very different story. They have served as launch pads for the destruction of Arab states, not their protection.

\n", "content" : "Who are the bases for? For decades, the United States and Arab regimes have rehearsed the same script: the lie that American military presence in the region protects the Arab world, to preserve stability, and to defend against external threats. Hundreds of bases, tens of thousands of troops, naval fleets parked in the Gulf, all of it, supposedly, for Arab safety. But if protection is the purpose, then the question answers itself: protected from what, exactly? The Arab region has endured more wars, more destruction, and more instability since the establishment of these bases than in any comparable period before them. Iraq was invaded. Syria was shattered. Yemen was starved. Libya was bombed into state collapse. Palestine remains under occupation and siege. If this is what protection looks like, then the word has lost all meaning. The Scale of PresenceThe American military footprint in the Arab region is staggering. The United States maintains forces in more than a dozen countries, with at least nineteen military sites, eight considered permanent. Qatar hosts Al Udeid Air Base, the largest US installation in the Middle East, serving as the forward headquarters for US Central Command with around 10,000 troops. As of mid-2025, roughly 40,000 American service members were deployed across the region. The narrative behind the purpose of these bases were sold to Arab governments, and by extension, to Arab publics, as shields against regional threats, primarily framed as Iran. But the record tells a very different story. They have served as launch pads for the destruction of Arab states, not their protection. What the Bases Did to IraqThe invasion of Iraq in 2003 remains the most damning evidence, and a vital one to read alongside what is happening today with Iran. Here is an Arab country, a founding member of the Arab League, destroyed using bases hosted by neighbouring Arab states. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and others became staging grounds for an invasion whose human cost is staggering. Population-based studies estimate over one million Iraqi deaths resulting from the war, while the Iraq Body Count project has documented between 186,901 and 210,296 violent civilian deaths. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence across Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan, with more than 432,000 of those being civilians. The bases did not protect Iraq. The bases destroyed Iraq. And the Arab states that hosted those bases were complicit, whether they admitted it or not, in the annihilation of an Arab neighbour. If the bases exist to protect Arab nations from external aggression, then what do you call an invasion launched from those very bases against an Arab capital?At the time of writing this, the pattern is repeating, and it is vital to read what is happening today alongside the record of Iraq. The US-Israeli alliance has launched strikes on a sovereign nation, Iran, calling it preemptive. Unnecessary, unprovoked, and deeply violent. What much Western media has failed to acknowledge is that the strike is unlawful. Not a grey area. A criminal act under international law. The current escalation is driven not by any genuine Iranian or Arab interest but by Israeli strategic calculations that position American bases as staging grounds for strikes against a neighbouring, non-Arab, Muslim-majority country with which Arab states share geography, trade, and centuries of cultural exchange. The shield became the target. Exactly as predicted. Netanyahu’s Guarantee; Peace Is Always One War AwayThere is no better illustration of Israel’s role as the architect of this configuration than the words of Benjamin Netanyahu himself, whose career has been defined by a single recurring promise: destroy the current enemy, and peace will come. The enemy changes. The promise never does and it never will. In the 1980s, Netanyahu told Pat Robertson that the Soviet Union was “a major force” behind international terrorism and that “if you take away the Soviet Union, its chief proxy, the PLO, international terrorism would collapse. ” In 2002, Netanyahu appeared before the US Congress to lobby for the invasion of Iraq. He told lawmakers: “If you take out Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations in the region. ” Predicting that regime change in Baghdad would trigger the implosion of Iran. In 2015, he returned to Congress to sabotage the Iran nuclear deal, claiming it would guarantee an Iranian bomb. The same language of certainty he had used about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which never existed. In 2024, he stood before Congress again: “Israel will fight until we destroy Hamas’s military capabilities and its rule in Gaza. That’s what total victory means. ” He framed every front as one war: “When we fight Hamas, we’re fighting Iran. When we fight Hezbollah, we’re fighting Iran. When we fight the Houthis, we’re fighting Iran”. The normalisation agreements of the Abraham Accords were about integrating Israel into a security architecture in which American bases, Arab territory, and Israeli strategic interests become indistinguishable. Even the $142 billion Saudi arms deal is constrained by America’s guarantee that Israel receives more advanced weaponry than any Arab state, a policy known as the “qualitative military edge. ” A deal that, as Foreign Affairs documented, was designed to normalise relations with Israel without demanding, in exchange, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. The bases that were once justified as protecting Arab sovereignty now serve a framework that prioritises Israeli security at Arab expense. At no point in this trajectory have the bases served the interests of ordinary Arab citizens. They have served American power projection, Israeli regional ambitions, and the narrow survival calculations of ruling elites who exchange sovereignty for patronage. The geography has been borrowed for decades. The return on that investment has been the destruction of Iraq, missiles falling on Doha, and trillions flowing in the wrong direction. The Geography Reclaims ItselfBut the myth is fracturing. In January 2026, the Iraqi army assumed full control of Ain al-Asad Airbase after a complete US withdrawal, ending more than two decades of American military presence in western Iraq. In Jordan, daily protests after October 7 forced the government to recall its ambassador from Israel; Israel evacuated its own and has not replaced its diplomatic mission since. In Morocco, which normalised relations with Israel in 2020, public support for normalisation collapsed from 31 percent to 13 percent after October 7, and in 2025, the country’s largest labour union called for banning Israeli-bound ships from Moroccan waters and organised protests in support of Gaza. The 2025 Arab Opinion Index, the largest public opinion survey in the Arab world, covering 40,000 respondents across fifteen countries, found that 87 percent of Arabs oppose recognition of Israel, citing its status as a “settler-colonial state occupying Palestine”. Despite the Abraham Accords, support for normalisation dropped even further, including in signatory states. This is not passive discontent. It is a political force constraining governments that would otherwise deepen their alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv. Within the Arab world, a generation of writers, organisers, and researchers from Azmi Bishara’s work on sovereignty and the failure of normalisation, to Abdel Razzaq Takriti’s recovery of Gulf revolutionary traditions, to the policy analysts at Al-Shabaka dismantling the security-sector myth, is building the analytical tools to name what previous generations could not say aloud: that the security architecture sold to them was never designed for their protection, and that genuine regional security begins with sovereignty–not the kind performed at summits and investment forums, but the kind that decides who can and cannot wage war from your soil. The Yemeni blockade of Red Sea shipping, whatever one’s position on the Houthis may be,, demonstrated something that decades of Arab League communiqués never did: that collective action rooted in solidarity with Palestine can materially disrupt the logistics of empire. " } ] }