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I sat down with my friend Séamus Malekafzali—co-host of the Turbulence podcast and one of the sharpest analysts I know on the Middle East—to make sense of the war on Iran and what it reveals about the U.S.-Israel relationship.
We recorded this on April 9th, at the start of a “ceasefire” that didn’t seem to exist on paper and a bombardment of Beirut that was still ongoing. In addition to providing a sweeping overview of the state of things, Séamus offers a crucial intervention in the debate over whether the “tail is wagging the dog” or the “dog is wagging the tail,” laying out, instead, a feedback loop between the U.S. and Israel that generates a “collaborative impunity,” decades in the making.
We also get into the psychoanalytic dimension of Zionist expansionism and what it means that America seems to be importing the same ideological structure without any of the scaffolding holding it up.
Finally, Séamus reveals what comes after American hegemony…
