The best question is not whether a faction in Washington or Jerusalem has formally written down a plan titled Burn the Middle East So We May Rule the Ashes. Criminal stupidity rarely files its minutes so conveniently.
The better question is colder:
Can Europe, in good faith, dismiss the possibility that powerful actors in the United States and Israel now see regional conflagration not as failure, but as instrument?
The answer is no.
Not “this is proven.” Not “the conspiracy is confirmed.” But no: Europe cannot dismiss it. Not anymore. The bodies are too numerous, the incentives too clean, the rhetoric too fevered, the strategic recklessness too repetitive, and the contempt for collateral civilization too obvious.
We are no longer discussing normal policy error. We are discussing a pattern of conduct that repeatedly treats instability as leverage, humanitarian disaster as background noise, law as furniture, and entire populations as consumable material in a larger civilizational drama. That does not prove a secret doctrine. It does, however, make the hypothesis anatomically plausible.
Who Would Be Behind Such a Thing?
Not “America.” Not “Israel.” States are not persons. They are aquariums full of knives.
If such a doctrine exists, it would not be held by a single table of theatrical villains. It would be distributed across factions whose interests overlap without needing to coordinate perfectly.
First: ‘the American imperial restoration faction’. These are not conservatives in the older Burkean sense. They are emergency men. They tend to be older man. They believe liberal institutions are decadent, multilateralism is a disease, international law is a trap set by weaklings, and American power should be used before it rots. Their dream is not stability. Their dream is command.
Second: the nationalist-theological faction. These actors do not merely support Israel as a state. They fold Israel into an eschatological, civilizational, or ethnonational story in which compromise is betrayal and escalation is purification. To them, peace is suspicious because peace requires coexistence with the unredeemed.
Third: the Israeli maximalist-security faction. Its logic is simple and terrible: every adversary must be permanently degraded, every buffer zone expanded, every hostile society kept fractured, every regional counterweight cut down before it matures. In such a worldview, the distinction between defense and domination becomes decorative.
Fourth: the catastrophe capitalists. War does not frighten them. War reprices assets. War redirects budgets. War justifies surveillance, extraction, emergency powers, energy shocks, arms contracts, reconstruction contracts, maritime security contracts, border fortification, and domestic political discipline. For them, chaos is not a tragedy. It is weather. Chaos is entertaining documentaries people 20 years watch dispassionately on discovery channel.
Fifth: the accelerationists, explicit or implicit. Some of these odd people may genuinely believe the United States is already sliding toward constitutional, fiscal, demographic, or imperial rupture. If collapse is inevitable, these strange human beings reason, then better to trigger it under conditions favorable to one’s own faction. Better to enter the furnace first, armed, prepared, and willing to kill. These are people that watched lots of postapocalyptic movies while much younger.
This is the moral atmosphere in which the hypothesis breathes.
What Morality Would Such Actors Have?
Their morality would be sacrificial, not humanitarian.
They would not experience themselves as evil. That is an acutely naive conception. They would experience themselves as acutely serious adults in a nursery full of sentimental fools. They would describe themselves as hard men, realists, guardians, civilizational surgeons. They would use words such as “resolve,” “deterrence,” “clarity,” “strength,” and “necessity.” They would speak of unfortunate costs. They can quote whole sections od Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Klausewitz verbatim. They would never say what they mean: that other people’s children are a currency they are willing to spend and they they wouldn’t feel much watching video of the aftermath.
Their ethics would be aristocratic in the ugliest sense. There are meaningful lives and managed lives. There are decision-makers and demographic mass. There are citizens, clients, enemies, human shields, refugees, collateral populations, and useful corpses. These are people that would make an effort to secure research data held by Shiro Ishii, and they would harmly negotiate to that end to offer comfortable retirement because ‘such valuable research data should not be lost’.
Such actors would not need to hate the people they destroy. Hatred is intimate. They could be polite to people they’d send into the field to die under truely horrific conditions.
Their central assumption would be that order is created by those with the courage to impose disorder on others. Burn a district to save a border. Break a state to save a doctrine. Collapse a region to preserve an empire. Starve the peripheral tissue to save the imperial brain.
This is not madness. Madness would be less organized.
It is predation with a national anthem.
How Does the Hypothesis Map onto Current US and Israeli Conduct?
Badly enough to disturb the sleep of any honest analyst.
Israel’s post-October 7 strategy has moved far beyond narrow retaliation. And some have argued some evidence put forward about the October 7 events … dubious at best. The attacks have normalized regionalized military action, repeated expansion of target sets, punitive destruction, permanent emergency, and the systematic shrinking of political alternatives. The Israeli security state increasingly behaves as though no surrounding polity has a legitimate sovereign interior if Israeli planners can define something inside it as a future threat.
Iran, for its part, is offensively inhumane as well. Iran’s proxy architecture, missile programme, repression, nuclear ambiguity, and regional coercion are ghastly. Tehran built a deterrence machine out of armed clients and ideological warfare, and then discovered that machines can summon the wars they were built to prevent. Iran is not the lamb in this theatre. It is another butcher with worse equipment and a larger appetite than competence. Iran is a country well founded on decades of torture.
But the United States is the decisive variable. When Washington provides near-automatic diplomatic cover, weapons flow, escalation tolerance, and rhetorical indulgence, it does not merely support Israel. It edits the strategic imagination of the Israeli state. It teaches Jerusalem what the ceiling is. Then it raises the ceiling into high geostationary orbit.
The current American right contains factions openly hostile to the administrative state, to multilateral constraint, to liberal legalism, and to any foreign policy that treats international institutions as more than obstacles. In that context, a Middle East crisis becomes useful if not “hilariously exciting”. Adventure in the middle east, whatever the nature disciplines Europe. It pressures energy markets. It justifies militarization. It creates useful enemies. It rewards loyalty. It punishes dissent. It drowns domestic decay beneath flags and explosions.
Would such actors literally seek American collapse?
Some may not. They may simply be stupid enough to court it.
Others may seek a controlled constitutional rupture: a new regime emerging from emergency. They may not call it collapse. They may call it restoration.
That distinction is of limited comfort to the dead.
What Evidence Would Matter?
Europe should not indulge fantasy. Such thesis demands evidence. But Europe should also stop demanding cartoon evidence with a pink ribbon. There will be no skull-shaped death star analogue conference room.
The meaningful evidence would be cumulative:
- A pattern of military choices that predictably widen the war while publicly claiming containment.
- Private or semi-public doctrine arguing that regional destabilization can restore American dominance.
- Administrative preparation for emergency rule at home paired with escalation abroad.
- Systematic sabotage of diplomatic off-ramps.
- Coordination between ideological think tanks, donor networks, military contractors, energy interests, and foreign policy officials around policies that make war more likely while making peace politically punishable.
- Repeated tolerance of Israeli actions that damage US and European interests unless the true objective is not stability but rupture.
- A rhetoric of civilizational war that migrates from fringe speeches into government language.
- An observable preference for irreversible facts over negotiated outcomes.
None of these alone proves the thesis. Together, they would form a smell. Politics, like meat, announces its corruption before it changes color.
What If the Thesis Is Only “Uncomfortably Plausible”?
Then Europe must act as a responsible adult in a house where someone may be drunk, armed, and playing with matches.
Not by declaring America an enemy and loudly screaming Jyhad. Not by pretending Israel has no legitimate security needs. Not by laundering Iran’s crimes through anti-imperial romance. Europe should do something more offensive to all fanatics: “behave rationally”.
Good Lord.
First, Europe must end automatic alignment. US requests for airspace, bases, intelligence support, sanctions escalation, naval participation, diplomatic cover, or legal shielding should be treated as requests, not commandments. Each should require independent European assessment: does this reduce war, or does it feed the furnace?
Second, Europe must place Israel under adult supervision. Association privileges, arms exports, dual-use transfers, intelligence cooperation, research access, and trade preferences should be contingent on compliance with international law and measurable de-escalatory conduct. Friendship is not a suicide pact. Nor is historical guilt a permanent license to subsidize future atrocities. Yes there will be loud whining.
Third, Europe must harden itself against Hormuz blackmail. Strategic reserves, alternative supply chains, accelerated energy independence, maritime coordination, and industrial demand planning are not green luxuries. They are civil defense. A Europe that can be held hostage by one strait is not a union. It is a customer.
Fourth, Europe must build a Gulf diplomatic architecture independent of Washington’s mood swings. Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan cannot be treated merely as supporting characters in an American-Israeli-Iranian psychodrama. They are the firebreaks. Use them.
Fifth, Europe must create an escalation audit mechanism. Every major Middle East policy should be tested against one question: does this make a wider war materially more likely? If yes, who benefits? Follow the benefit. Follow the donors. Follow the contractors. Follow the think tanks. Follow the little priests of catastrophe who always seem to have a white paper ready when the blood starts moving.
Sixth, Europe must prepare sanctions not only for enemies, but for allies. This is the sentence polite diplomats hate. Good. Let them hate it. If allied officials, ministers, commanders, settlers, lobby networks, or private contractors knowingly contribute to illegal escalation, ethnic cleansing, regional sabotage, or mass civilian harm, Europe should have visa bans, asset freezes, procurement exclusions, prosecution pathways, and institutional severance ready.
Seventh, Europe must stop confusing moral seriousness with emotional volume. Iran is dangerous. Israel is reckless. The United States is unstable. Palestinians are being crushed. Gulf states are terrified. Global shipping is vulnerable. European publics are manipulable. All of these can be true at once. Adults can count beyond two.
Eight, Don’t be weak and pathetic and start a dialogue with Russia. Just… don’t. Ugh.
The European Answer
The European answer should be this:
We do not accuse without evidence. We do not obey without judgment. We do not outsource our security to factions who may profit from disaster. We do not permit our continent to become the rear warehouse of someone else’s holy war, imperial tantrum, or controlled demolition fantasy.
If Washington wants European support, it must demonstrate that its policy reduces regional war rather than metabolizing it.
If Israel wants European partnership, it must demonstrate that its security doctrine has limits other than ammunition supply and American patience.
If Iran wants sanctions relief and reintegration, it must demonstrate that it can exist without proxy warfare, nuclear brinkmanship, and imperial vandalism in Arab capitals.
And if any actor — American, Israeli, Iranian, European, Russian, Gulf, private, clerical, ideological, or corporate — is found to be deliberately steering the region toward conflagration, then Europe should treat that actor not as a partner with a difficult viewpoint, but as an arsonist.
Civilization is not obliged to respect the matchbox.