These are the three social evils Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned would destroy America from within: Militarism, materialism, and racism. Decades later, they help explain the divisions in our country that led to the January 6 attack by protesters on the U.S. Capitol. Of the three, however, the role our recent wars have played in exacerbating these conditions is often the most overlooked.
Video produced by Khody Akhavi.
Gen. Dan Caine’s formulation of American war aims in Iran is remarkable not because it is bellicose, but because it is strategically incoherent.
In a press conference Tuesday morning, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not describe a limited campaign to suppress missile fire, blunt Iran’s naval threat, or even impose a severe but bounded setback on Tehran’s coercive instruments. He described a campaign against Iran’s “military and industrial base” designed to prevent the regime from attacking Americans, U.S. interests, and regional partners “for years to come.” In an earlier briefing he put the objective similarly: to prevent Iran from projecting power outside its borders. Rather than the language of a discrete coercive operation, this describes a war against a state’s capacity to regenerate power.
And once one says “industrial base,” the logic becomes much more radical than administration officials may realize. Destroying missile launchers is one thing. Destroying missile factories is harder but still intelligible. But preventing Iran from threatening anyone “for years to come” means something else again. It means attacking not merely weapons, but the system that produces and reproduces them: electric power, transport, fuels, machine tools, metallurgy, electronics, repair facilities, and perhaps the broader fiscal and industrial foundations of military recovery.
A country whose critical infrastructure remains intact can rebuild military industry. A country that cannot rebuild has, by definition, suffered something much closer to strategic deindustrialization.
That is why Caine’s wording evokes Henry Morgenthau’s wartime vision for Germany. Morgenthau argued that making Germany incapable of renewed aggression required more than smashing its armaments sector. He called for eliminating the metallurgical, electrical, and chemical industries and contemplated a Germany that would become “predominantly agrarian.” Another State Department summary described the plan as looking toward converting Germany into a country “primarily agricultural and pastoral in character.”
No, the administration has not formally announced a Morgenthau Plan for Iran. But that is not the point. The point is that Caine’s rhetoric tracks the same underlying logic: if your war aim is not merely to punish or deter, but to keep a state from threatening others for “years to come,” then you are no longer talking about operational suppression. You are talking about systematically crippling the economic foundations of war-making.
That is an extraordinary thing for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to say. Caine is supposed to be the sober professional in the room, the man who translates political impulse into disciplined military language. If he is now defining American aims in terms that imply the long-term disabling of an entire national military-industrial ecosystem, then one of two things is true.
Either the administration has genuinely lost its strategic bearings. It has wandered from limited war into maximalist fantasy without admitting the scale, duration, and destruction such an aim would require. Or it has sacrificed strategic communication to pure bloviation. It is using inflated language to sound tough while pursuing something much narrower in practice.
Neither possibility is reassuring. If the first is true, Washington is flirting rhetorically with an objective that airpower alone is unlikely to achieve absent a far wider campaign against Iranian infrastructure. If the second is true, American officials are carelessly overstating war aims in ways that make later restraint look like failure. In war, rhetoric matters. Maximalist definitions of success create their own escalatory trap.
That matters especially now, because this is exactly the kind of war Washington may soon want to curtail. If so, Caine’s phrasing was not merely loose. It was damaging. A chairman should clarify ends, align means, and preserve room for termination. He should not borrow, even inadvertently, the logic of Morgenthau while the White House still pretends it is fighting a limited war.
With Iran resisting the U.S./Israeli onslaught for the second week, what was supposed to be a quick transition to a pro-U.S. regime following the decapitation strike that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is fast turning into a quagmire. While the U.S. and Israel continue to sow mayhem on Tehran from the skies, the previously unthinkable option of sending ground troops to Iran is gaining ground.
First, an apparent plan was being hatched to employ Kurdish fighters to take on Tehran. Then, when drones, allegedly flying from Iran although Tehran denied it, struck the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan — hitting an airport terminal and a village school, and wounding four civilians — the stage appeared set for the opening of a northern front against Iran. Here was an alleged act of aggression from Iranian territory against Israel's closest partner in the South Caucasus. It offered the pretext to goad Azerbaijan into joining the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev called the drone attack "an act of terror.” In a combative speech, he vowed retaliation and called Iran’s Azerbaijanis (who constitute an estimated 20 million Iranians, or twice the population of the Republic of Azerbaijan) his “compatriots” for whom Baku provided a “beacon of hope.” He also declared that Tehran had deliberately “smeared” Baku in the eyes of Iranian Azerbaijanis by accusing it of permitting Israeli warplanes access to its airspace during Israel’s 12-day air campaign against Iran in June.
All of that was music to the small but vocal group of neoconservative hawks perched at D.C. think-tanks, such as Hudson Institute’s Mike Doran, a former National Security Council official in the George W. Bush administration, and Brenda Shaffer who has performed undisclosed work for Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR. Shaffer has promoted Iran’s disintegration along ethnic lines in her work for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Doran and Shaffer appeared to be inciting Baku to join the fray against Tehran.
Despite Aliyev’s tough rhetoric, however, the hawks must be disappointed by his response, which so far has been mainly symbolic. The Iranian ambassador was summoned to the foreign ministry and handed a protest note. In practical terms, vehicle border crossings with Iran have been suspended, a measure that has mostly affected Russian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian truck drivers transporting goods to and from Iran.
Then on Sunday Aliyev spoke on the phone with his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian. According to the Azerbaijani read-out, Pezeshkian thanked Aliyev for personally visiting the Iranian embassy in Baku to express his condolences over Khamenei’s assassination and for pledging humanitarian support to Iran. He reiterated Iran’s official position that it was not involved in launching the drones towards Azerbaijan, echoing the official line of the Islamic Republic that blamed Israel for a “false flag” operation.
Aliyev also conveyed his condolences to the Iranian people for the death and destruction they have experienced.
Significantly, following the conversation, Aliyev ordered the reopening of the border; its closure lasted a total of only four days. The Nakhchevan airport resumed its operations.
This de-escalatory impulse was reinforced by Baku's closest allies. The Organization of Turkic States (OTS)—which includes Turkey, Azerbaijan, and the Central Asian republics—issued a joint statement in which they condemned the drone attacks "from the territory of Iran." Not "by Iran."
That careful diplomatic wording reveals where Baku and its Turkic partners stand. They are showing solidarity and support for Baku while avoiding casting blame on Tehran and thus providing cover for Aliyev to pull back from escalation.
This matters because the OTS countries are precisely the states that neoconservatives and Abraham Accords advocates have been busily courting. Their vision, promoted most actively by figures like Joseph Epstein from the Turan Research Center at the Washington-based Yorktown Institute, was always for an "alliance of moderate Muslim states” from the Gulf to the Caspian — a wall of secular Sunni-led countries allied with Israel against Iran.
On the face of it, the return on that investment is looking meager. When push came to shove, these states are choosing diplomatic ambiguity over confrontation with Iran and a pro-Israel alignment. The much-hyped expansion to Central Asia of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, with Kazakhstan formally joining last year, appears to be producing more symbolism than substance too. Kazakhstan, an OTC member, condemned the drone attack (without attribution) in a separate statement, and called for a joint investigation by Azerbaijan and Iran.
To understand Azerbaijan’s reluctance to join the war, one needs only look at the map — and Baku’s vulnerability becomes evident.
Azerbaijan's energy infrastructure—the oil and gas platforms and pipelines that underpin the entire economy — sits within easy reach of Iranian drones and missiles. In particular, the Baku-Tbilisi (Georgia)-Ceyhan (Turkey) pipeline, known as BTC, has become the economic lifeblood of the Azerbaijani state — and a key source of oil for Israel. In early 2026, the share of Israeli oil imports from BTC reached 46%.
According to Azerbaijan’s official media, up to 80% of the oil transported through this pipeline is of Azerbaijani origin. Disruption to its operation would severely damage the country’s economy. The Gulf states learned this lesson, which is why they have consistently chosen de-escalation with Tehran over confrontation. Azerbaijan is proving to be no different.
Another reason for Aliyev’s caution is Turkey’s restraining role. While also targeted by Iranian missiles apparently designed to hit the giant Incirlik Air Base used by the U.S. military, Ankara’s worst nightmare is the emergence of an independent Kurdish entity in western Iran which it would regard as a direct threat to its territorial integrity and security.
Most critically, Iranian Azerbaijanis, much more numerous than those in the Republic of Azerbaijan, have shown no interest in seceding from Iran, much less in joining Baku in a “Greater Azerbaijan.” The majority appear to identify with Iran, with many playing key roles in Iranian governance: the slain Ayatollah Khamenei was ethnically Azeri, as is President Pezeshkian and countless other members of Tehran’s elites.
Despite the efforts of exiled “South Azerbaijani” activists, pan-Turkist propaganda appears to have made only limited inroads among Iranian Azerbaijanis.
None of this is to suggest that the hawks’ project to lure Azerbaijan into the war has run out of steam. If the war continues for weeks or months, as now seems likely, the “humanitarian aid” that Aliyev has professed to be willing to offer Iran could plausibly turn into “humanitarian intervention” to protect his ethnic kin, a possibility that Baku’s pro-regime commentators openly entertain. That could include encroaching deep into Iranian territory to create what the latter call a “buffer zone.”
Pressure will also grow on Aliyev to reciprocate for Israel’s help in his war with Armenia in 2020. Turkey, which also supplied weaponry to Azerbaijan in that conflict, would likely be opposed, however.
In any case, the best way to prevent the northward spread of a conflict that already involves in one way or another well over a dozen countries is to end the war as soon as possible and to stop listening to neoconservative hawks in Washington.
Trump’s “all over the place” press conference at his Miami resort on Monday appears to have had two key objectives: a) Calm the markets by signalling the conflict may soon be over because it has been so "successful,” and b) Prepare the ground for Trump ending the war through a unilateral declaration of victory.
Though ending a war that never should have been started in the first place — rather than fighting it endlessly in the pursuit of an illusory victory as the U.S. did in Afghanistan — is the right move, it won’t be as easy as Trump appears to think.
Tehran also has a vote — and there is little to suggest that it will agree that the war is over.
Tehran objects to what it would consider a premature ceasefire out of fear that it would only give the U.S. and Israel time to regroup, rearm, and then re-attack Iran. For the conflict to be ripe for a ceasefire, Tehran believes that enough cost must have been inflicted on the U.S., regional states, Israel, and on the global economy that all states conclude that starting the war was a mistake — and as a result, no state will seek to restart it.
Moreover, if the war ends now, Iran will be in a worse situation than it was before the start of the war. Much of its infrastructure has been destroyed, its missile capabilities have taken hits, its ability to export oil has been damaged, and most crucially, its prospects for sanctions relief have been obliterated. Indeed, who will and can help rebuild Iran under these circumstances?
This would leave Iran not only in a weakened position but also in a continuously weakening state. Which, in turn, would make another war of aggression by the U.S. and Israel more, not less, likely, since it is Iran’s perceived weakness that prompted Trump and Israel to see an opportunity for war.
As such, it appears likely that Iran will continue to target Israel, even if the U.S. declares victory and withdraws its military. Even GCC states may continue to be targeted. And Tehran will very likely try to keep the Straits of Hormuz shut. (At least for now, there are no signs that Tehran has lost its ability to do these things).
This will create a dilemma for Trump. It will be difficult for him to stay out while Iran and Israel continue to go at each other. But if he reenters the war, the hollowness of his declared victory will have been revealed. Markets will react negatively, and all the costs Trump is currently trying to avoid will likely intensify dramatically.
Iran, of course, does not want, nor can it afford, an endless war. But it will likely demand some significant steps in order to accept a ceasefire. This may include a commitment from Trump not to restart the war (though I don’t understand the value of such a commitment). But more importantly, it will likely require sanctions relief and release of its frozen funds abroad.
Trump will, of course, bark, but if the outcome is continued war, that will put a lot of pressure on him. Here, the role of some GCC states may prove crucial due to their willingness and ability to find an arrangement that could leave both Trump and Iran feeling that they “won.”
Whether Israel will allow that to happen, of course, is a different matter.
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