A photograph of the Italian cultural heritage monument Palazzo
Doria-Tursi (wiki-ID: 0100252708), capturing a view under the Italian
title "visioni Palazzo Doria-Tursi."
Note to Readers:
You might normally see a piece like this floating in the Notes section,
but it quickly outgrew that format! I’m trying out something new:
publishing these "in-between" thoughts as shorter, distinct essays for
better readability. I use these pieces to organize my analytical
frameworks before building them out into my usual long-form essays. I'm
still working on the deep dives, and I'll keep using Notes for quick,
off-the-cuff observations.
The current US and Israel-induced war on Iran has brought an old debate back to the forefront: Mearsheimer’s “Israel Lobby” thesis versus the “US empire uses Israel as a proxy”
thesis championed by analysts like Berletic. Engaging with this is
neither an abstract nor a fruitless exercise; it is foundational for
understanding the structural forces driving an escalation that could
have global ramifications. Yet, from my perspective, pitting these two
theses against each other is less a binary contradiction than a false
dilemma.
I want to offer a third, synthesizing position: Israel is a functionally radicalized proxy that has also served as an ideological and military-operational laboratory
and role model for a specific faction of the US ruling strata
(neoconservatism and securitocrats), producing a feedback loop in which
US imperial strategy and Israeli state logic have become mutually
constitutive.
The
Mearsheimerites correctly identify a real, disproportionate lobbying
power, while Berletic correctly observes that this power operates within
a pre-existing, historically imperial US framework. The critical
missing layer is the ideological transfer mechanism,
where neoconservatism acts as the transmission belt between the two.
Furthermore, the distinct social-anthropological history of the Jewish
diaspora, specifically its historical capacity for dense, resilient
networking, provided structural tools that were instrumentalized by a
specific, right-wing radicalized Zionist faction. It is this political co-optation by a radicalized subset that amplifies that influence within the US political system.
Mearsheimer and Walt’s foundational argument is that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been significantly shaped by a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. policy in a pro-Israel direction”. Their central provocative claim:
“No
lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the
national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously
convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially
identical”.
The book, published
in 2007, documented AIPAC’s outsized influence in Congress and
executive branch hiring, as well as the effect on academic discourse.
The
empirical documentation of lobby mechanics is, of course, sound. The
limitation of this argument, nonetheless, is structural. It pesents US
foreign policy as having a pre-lobby, rationally-defined “national
interest” that is subsequently distorted. This is a realist assumption
that ignores how the interests of the US imperial system and more
specifically of its power elites are themselves ideologically constructed. More precisely, that which is ideologically constructed is not necessarily rational nor realist.
And this is precisely the point the “Israel as a proxy”
thesis exploits. The Lobby thesis also struggles to explain why the US
pursued Middle East destabilization long before AIPAC reached its
current power, and similarly why US grand strategy toward Iran is so
congruent with objectives that predate the lobby’s peak influence.
The counter-thesis (Israel is a proxy)
is rooted in a structural reading of US power: the US has been
exterminating indigenous populations, stealing land, and extracting
resources for nearly 200 years before Israel existed, and as Berletic states: “the
idea that ‘Israel’ somehow got the ruthless, racist thieves running the
US to bend a knee to ‘them’ is an absurdity at face value”. Indeed,
Wall Street (arms, oil, tech, pharma) spends vastly greater sums on
lobbying than AIPAC, and it remains dominated by nominally Christian
men. Israel, in his framing, is one of many proxies, analogous to
Ukraine, cultivated by the US power elites to project power with plausible deniability.
This
argument is strengthened by the historical record: the US backed Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq in its war against Iran in the 1980s, orchestrated the
1953 CIA coup against Mossadegh in Iran, and has pursued Iranian regime
change across every presidential administration of the 21st century.
The
limitation of this thesis is its tendency toward monocausality: by
reducing Israel purely to a US tool, it understates how the ideological internalization of Zionist Israeli methods by parts of the US ruling class created genuine institutional feedback loops
that are not merely instrumental. The proxy does not just execute
strategy but actively shapes the strategic imagination of the principal.
Stated differently: this is a dialectical process. One is shaped by the
other and vice versa.
Neoconservatism
emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s among former liberal hawks who
became disenchanted with the New Left and what they, additionally, saw
as dovish tendencies in the Democratic Party. As historian David Gibbs argues,
it was specifically an outgrowth of America’s failure in Vietnam and
thus, an effort to reinvigorate American militarism after its
catastrophic deflation. The movement migrated from the Democratic to the
Republican Party over the course of the 1970s-80s, eventually capturing the Bush administration.
Critically,
while neoconservatism was never exclusively Jewish, its intellectual
origins were deeply rooted in the largely Jewish milieu of 1930s and 40s
New York—specifically among Trotskyist academics who later migrated to
the political right. In the shadow of the Holocaust, this group came to
see Israel’s survival as a direct measure of the West's global
stability. Though not a religious movement, it was disproportionately
pro-Zionist from its inception because Israel embodied a very specific
strategic ideal: a state willing to deploy military force
unapologetically, offensively, and, at least in its own mythology,
successfully.
The
neoconservative project was never just about traditional lobbying; it
was about testing, observing and internalizing a specific operational
model through Israel. What I’m trying to convey is that Israel did not
invent the military logic its state carried out entirely on its own.
Rather, its strategic posture is historically founded in the broader
logic of Western settler-colonial states and their expansionist imperatives; a history it shares with the United States. Because of its geopolitical position,
however, Israel evolved into a highly active laboratory for military
strategy and technology, a status recognized even by institutions like
the CSIS.
For neoconservatives, this laboratory demonstrated the efficacy of
using maximal force offensively, disparaging diplomacy as weakness, and
treating hypothetical threats as grounds for preemptive war.
Therefore, when we see traces of the 1967 preemptive strike logic or a variation of the “never again” existential framing in US grand strategy, we are seeing a structural convergence.
Israel functions as a model US imperial project operating without
similar institutional constraints and stripped of domestic political
friction. The neoconservative vision was to take the lessons learned in
the Israeli laboratory and transfer that unhindered freedom of offensive
action back into the US system.
The structural convergence of US and Israeli strategic interests is best illustrated by the 1996 “Clean Break” paper
, authored by neoconservatives Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and David
Wurmser, which presented to incoming Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu a
strategy for Middle East destabilization that was effectively a US
neoconservative vision dressed in Israeli strategic language. The
earlier ideological precursor was the 1982 Oded Yinon plan, which argued
that Israel’s survival required becoming a regional imperial power by
fragmenting neighboring Arab states into smaller, ethnically and
sectarianly fragmented entities. The dissolution of Iraq, Syria, Jordan,
Saudi Arabia , the very states subsequently destabilized by US military
interventions, was the blueprint:
“Lebanon’s
total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precendent for the
entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula
and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq
later on into ethnically or religiously unqiue areas such as in Lebanon,
is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while
the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the
primary short term target."
So,
it is not that Israel told the US to do this, to think in terms of
trying to fragment and attack other countries. It is that the
neoconservative faction within the US ruling strata shared and share the
same fragmentationist logic as the
Israeli right, both for their own reasons. The US version is that states
that are too large and independent cannot be controlled (an essay about
this in the works), and must therefore be destroyed and fragmented. The
Israeli version, the Yinon logic, is that regional fragmentation into
weak, warring ethnic and sectarian mini-states neutralizes existential
threats to Israel but also serves to consolidate over resources in the
region. These two logics are structurally isomorphic; consequently,
neoconservatism and Likudnik Zionism continue to generate policy
outcomes that are effectively indistinguishable.
How does a state become an ideologically radicalized proxy in the first place?
The answer is through the injection of and support of a constructed,
radicalized ideology. Zionism was a product of late 19th century
European nationalism, and it received decisive imperial backing first
from imperial Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, which was explicitly a
colonial-strategic maneuver. Britain needed a loyal presence in
Palestine as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and as Britain’s military
governor of Jerusalem bluntly put it, Israel was to be “a loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism”.
The
US inherited and intensified this colonial logic after World War II,
funding, arming, and diplomatically shielding Israel while
systematically working to prevent pan-Arab nationalism from coalescing
into a regional power capable of controlling its own resources. Zionism
was thus doubly constructed: first as a response to real European
antisemitism (a genuine ideological force rooted in centuries of
persecution), and then as a useful instrument
selected and amplified by the Anglo-American imperial system precisely
because of its inherent settler-colonialist logic of exclusive
territorial possession.
An
important and frequently elided factor in these debates is the
social-anthropological architecture of the Jewish diaspora. Centuries of
systemic exclusion, persecution, and expulsion across Europe forced
Jewish communities to cultivate extraordinarily dense, transregional
networks of mutual aid. These were complex kinship systems spanning
continents, sustained through commercial partnerships, rabbinic
succession, and diplomatic brokerage. Crucially, these networks were not
the product of conspiratorial design, but rather social-historical
adaptations born of structural necessity: marginalized communities under
continuous threat inevitably develop resilience through high network
density.
In
the modern US, this heritage translated into a profound, historically
grounded capacity for political and cultural organizing. We must,
however, draw a hard line between Jewish communal organizing, a diverse
civic spectrum that includes anti-Zionist factions, and Zionist
political lobbying, which is a specific, modern geopolitical project.
The persistent conflation of these two distinct categories is what makes
the current transatlantic speech-law dynamic so insidious. It
weaponizes the genuine issue of antisemitism to shield a state-driven
political project, functionally silencing both external critics of
Israel and internal Jewish dissent against Zionism.
I
will not delve into the origins and logics of Christian Zionism here
(that might be reserved for another article or essay), but I do want to
briefly note something that must be considered: while
Christian Zionism could, on the surface, be understood as mere
pro-Israel sentiment, there is a bit more to it. It intertwines
religious conviction with a military, strategic, and even economic
agenda, asserting that US support for Israel’s expansion is
simultaneously biblically mandated and materially in America’s strategic
interest. Its theology is eschatological. This belief that the ongoing
conflict in the Middle East is part of God’s divine plan for the End
Times makes Christian Zionists uniquely immune to cost-benefit reasoning
about military strategy, and consequently incredibly useful for
quasi-suicidal military doctrines and operations.
The
current Trump administration is saturated with Christian Zionists:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee,
and House Speaker Mike Johnson have all embraced this ideology (Johnson,
for example, has explicitly defended Israeli settlement expansion as biblically foretold). This creates a second layer of Zionist political pressure that is institutionally distinct
from AIPAC and Jewish-Zionist lobbying. From the perspective of US
imperial strategy, Christian Zionism provides a potential domestic
mass-mobilization capacity for a foreign policy that Wall Street and the
military-industrial complex require anyway, making it an
extraordinarily effective tool. In other words, Christian Zionists are
being mobilized toward ends that serve the military-industrial complex
and US hegemonic strategy, not the theological Rapture they believe they
are advancing. The open question is whether this dynamic has developed
its own self-reinforcing logic that could potentially escape rational
management.
The
neoconservative-Zionist-evangelical synthesis emerged structurally
enabled by the Powell Memorandum network. Lewis Powell’s 1971
confidential call
to arms for corporate America provided the blueprint for an aggressive
new think-tank infrastructure, most notably the Heritage Foundation, the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and the Cato Institute. Over the
following decades, these institutions systematically reshaped the US
academic, media, and political landscapes in favor of militarist,
anti-regulatory conservatism. By allying the Christian Right and
neoconservative intellectuals with the financial elite, this network
moved not only the Republican Party to the right, but successfully
captured large portions of Democratic foreign policy as well.
This
is the structural context that makes the proxy-thesis argument so
compelling: the material interests of Wall Street (arms, oil, tech) were
already pushing for an aggressive Middle Eastern strategy, regardless
of the Israel lobby. The Powell network simply fused these material
interests with an ideological superstructure (neoconservatism +
Christian Zionism) capable of manufacturing mass consent for what was
otherwise naked resource extraction and hegemonic strategy. We see the
zenith of this today: the Heritage Foundation, deeply embedded in the
current Trump administration through initiatives like Project 2025 and
the anti-Palestinian blueprint
“Project Esther,” now serves as the primary institutional transmission
belt turning Christian Zionist theology into hardline US imperial
policy.
Synthesizing
these historical and structural developments we have mapped out so far
provides us with a clear analytical lens: a framework comprising four
distinct but mutually interacting layers, outlined in the table below:
The Structural Convergence Model: Comparing the Proxy and Lobby theses across four distinct layers.
The key insight here is that these layers are mutually reinforcing
rather than strictly hierarchical. Analysts who emphasize Layer 1
correctly identify the structural foundation, while Mearsheimer rightly
points out that Layer 4 is operationally powerful. However, both camps
struggle to adequately theorize the feedback mechanism
at Layers 2 and 3. This is where the ideological model of Israeli
military practice, rooted in a shared settler-colonial logic, was
internalized by US ruling-class factions well before, and entirely
independently of, lobby pressure (which then led to the warfare
laboratory practice). That pre-existing ideological convergence is
precisely what made the later lobby work so extraordinarily effective.
We
can see the clearest real-world application of this model in the
current US-Iran confrontation. The unbroken continuity of US policy
toward Iran across all 21st-century administrations strongly suggests
this posture is not dictated by the shifting domestic lobbying of any
single presidency, but by an overarching structural imperative. As the largest independent state actor in the Middle East defying external control, Iran, according to the fragmentationist grand strategy thesis (I am currently working on), must be either structurally destabilized or entirely destroyed.
The
roles here are clearly distributed across four layers. The Israeli
dimension is operational: it acts as the forward pressure-application
mechanism, supplying localized strike capabilities and intelligence
infrastructure while catalyzing Iranian responses used to justify US
escalation. The Christian Zionist dimension acts as the engine for
ideological mass mobilization. The neoconservative dimension supplies
the doctrinal legitimation through its hypothetical threat logic. Yet,
beneath it all lies the material logic: securing Iranian resources,
denying that vital energy flow to China, and geopolitically isolating
Russia. That material imperative is the structural bedrock upon which
every other layer rests.
The
US-Israel nexus, analyzed through this lens, offers several
implications that help us understand the current geopolitical situation.
First, the radicalization of proxies (but
also of “specialists of violence” and the masses themselves) could
partly be a deliberate strategy whose outcome is difficult to envision
(and perhaps difficult to control). The Anglo-American imperial system
actively selected and amplified the most maximalist, exclusionary
variant of Zionism (the Likudnik-settler strand) as the operationally
useful one, while tolerating but not empowering more moderate or
non-Zionist Jewish political expression. This pattern is generalizable:
imperial systems tend to radicalize proxies in ways that make them functionally dependent and ideologically committed. This is even more true the closer an empire senses its own decline.
There is also the ideology-institution feedback problem.
Once an ideology is institutionally embedded (in think tanks, military
academies, political parties, and congressional staffs), it develops its
own reproduction logic that can partially escape the control of the
material interests that originally sponsored it. Thus, the question of
whether Christian Zionism has developed its own autonomous dynamic is
theoretically important, because institutions can become path-dependent
in ways that constrain even their original sponsors.
Furthermore, the enforced silence on Israel-Palestine in US academia can be understood as the product of a convergence of interests:
neoconservative ideologues who need the Israeli model protected from
critique, military-industrial complex actors who need the political
consensus for Middle East strategy maintained, and Zionist organizations
leveraging the legitimate moral weight of antisemitism to foreclose
critique of a political project. The speech law is the point at which
all four layers interact most visibly.
The US and Israel have a historically constructed and politically maintained relationship. It is better understood as a co-constitutive strategic symbiosis
in which each partner has some agency (though the US has significantly
more, just by the sheer nature of its material and territorial scale),
genuine interests, and a genuine capacity to shape the other—but within a
power asymmetry that is not in question.
Israel without US backing cannot survive; the US can exist without
Israel but has structurally chosen not to, because Israel performs
functions in the Middle East that would be far more costly to replicate
through direct US military presence alone.
Ultimately,
the more productive framing is that both schools (the proxy and lobby
theses) are measuring different layers of the same system. What is
missing from both is the ideological transfer mechanism, where
neoconservatism serves as the conduit.
These are the Notes that partly touch upon the topics discussed here:
The current unprovoked and so-called “preventive” attacks by the US and Israel on Iran
A Question of Time: Why the U.S. Strategy in Iran is Deliberate (and Dangerous)
The Crime of Geography
The Chicken and the Egg of Current Geopolitics: Ideological Imperial Needs from Nationalism to Holy War
If
this framework holds, if the meta-structure of US-Israel relations is
actually a co-constitutive feedback loop that binds the empire to a
radicalized logic, then we have to look at how this impacts our own
societies.
Do
you see this institutional path-dependency happening around you? Have
you noticed the “laboratory” effect, where the militarized,
unconstrained tactics of the proxy are slowly imported back into
domestic policing, politics, and foreign policy? Have you encountered
the specific speech-law dynamics we discussed—the point where the
military-industrial complex, neoconservative ideology, and the
weaponization of antisemitism converge to silence dissent? The Bunker
State is built locally in every decision to prioritize hypothetical
military threats over domestic stability, and in every attempt to crush
the political imagination. Where do you see this ideological
transmission belt breaking down? Where do you see resistance? Let’s
discuss in the comments below.
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To
map the architecture of the Bunker State, one must be able to operate
outside of its institutional path-dependencies. As we discussed
regarding the enforced silence in academia and media, this kind of
analysis relies entirely on the freedom to research without the filters
of the military-industrial complex or the speech laws that protect
geopolitical projects from critique.
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Stay curious,
Nel
