Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and the Collapse of Western Restraint | Prof. Michael Brenner

## Introduction The conversation with Prof. Michael Brenner frames a stark thesis: Western restraint has collapsed, and the United States — long the engine of that system — now pursues hegemonic aims with renewed audacity. What the exchange captures is not merely a sequence of misguided policies but the unravelling of a consensus that once moderated American behavior abroad. The present moment, marked by military strikes, economic coercion, and a permissive political culture at home, reveals a broader imperial logic finally exposed in public. That logic, Brenner argues, is the accumulated product of elite consensus stretching back decades, a strategic habitus that normalized intervention and, now, leaves little margin for diplomatic restraint. ## American power and the road to Iran Brenner situates the assault on Iran within a long arc of U.S. policy that accelerated after the Cold War. He traces an intellectual lineage from the early 1990s security prescriptions—most famously the Wolfowitz memorandum—to a post-9/11 climate in which vulnerability and fear became justification for broad, preemptive use of force. Rather than viewing recent strikes as aberrations, the conversation insists they are logical extensions of a doctrine designed to deny rivals any chance of regional or global influence. The post-9/11 era transformed episodic counterterror operations into a rationale for wide-ranging intervention, turning policing problems into theaters for military projection. This doctrinal continuity helps explain why a presidency that rhetorically promised restraint could nonetheless act with such bellicosity: the deep institutional currents of American foreign policy were already flowing in one direction. Brenner also highlights the bipartisan nature of this evolution. Under successive administrations — Republican and Democratic — the United States normalized new instruments of coercion: drone campaigns, extensive economic sanctions, and logistical support for allied military operations. These tools did not merely respond to particular threats; they reshaped how power is conceived and exercised. The attack on Iran, therefore, is less a personal whim than the culmination of a policy ecology that prizes dominance and treats the use of force as an instrument of statecraft rather than a last resort. ## Channel note and Substack Midway through the discussion, a brief interjection about platform vulnerability illuminates a secondary yet revealing theme: the precariousness of public discourse. The interruption about a channel ban and an encouragement to follow a Substack underscores how debates over war and policy increasingly unfold in contested media spaces. That dynamic matters because narratives about legitimacy, legality, and necessity are fought online as much as in legislative halls. When mainstream outlets defer to executive framing, alternative venues become crucial sites for critical analysis and dissent. The conversation’s aside about shifting platforms reminds readers that democratic scrutiny depends not only on institutions but on resilient channels for independent analysis. In a moment when foreign-policy choices escalate quickly, the ability to sustain informed critique outside official media ecosystems is essential. ## Trump and the long elite consensus A central and uncomfortable claim in the exchange is that recent American actions are less the product of idiosyncratic presidential personality than the outcome of a long-standing elite consensus. Brenner contends that the fundamental architecture of U.S. strategic thinking — the impulse to maintain global escalation dominance — has been internalized across the policy class. Donald Trump, despite campaign promises of nonintervention, has operated within this hegemonic frame. What changed under his leadership was not the destination but the tone and tempo: greater audacity, less concern for normative constraints, and a willingness to weaponize economic and military tools with unprecedented bluntness. This framing challenges a common binary: that Trump either upended the foreign-policy establishment or merely tilted it. Brenner opts for a third reading: Trump accelerated trends that came from the heart of the establishment. The result is a dangerous synergy — institutional priorities that favor global control combined with a leader disposed to use coercion impulsively. The conversation suggests this fusion created the political space for decisions that would have been more contested in another era, and that the elite consensus has, in effect, collapsed the thermostat of moderation. ## Israel and US strategic overlap The discussion unpacks the entanglement of U.S. and Israeli strategic aims as a product of mutual reinforcement rather than unilateral manipulation. Brenner acknowledges the salience of personal ties between leaders and the power of lobby politics, but warns against simplifying the relationship into a one-way dependency. Both states have convergent interests in projecting power in the Middle East; Israel’s territorial and security ambitions dovetail with an American policy architecture that prizes regional dominance. That convergence, rather than mere instrumentalization, explains why U.S. policy often mirrors Israeli preferences even when those choices inflame regional tensions. Importantly, the conversation resists moralistic reductionism. It argues that while Israeli policy is driven by its own internal political and psychological dynamics, U.S. policy is not simply a puppet reaction. Instead, the United States and Israel operate within a symbiotic strategic ecosystem: shared goals, shared instruments, and a shared willingness to normalize extraordinary measures. That symbiosis makes de-escalation harder because it embeds aggressive options into the bilateral playbook, making restraint politically and institutionally costly. ## Western racism and imperial culture Beyond geopolitics, the exchange probes the cultural foundations that enable mass violence abroad. Brenner points to a persistent racialized logic and imperial culture within Western politics that renders the suffering of others more easily discounted. The historical memory of empire, combined with racial hierarchies that persist in policymaking circles, creates a moral geography in which distant lives count for less. This is not only a rhetorical observation: the mechanisms of sanctions, blockades, and covert operations disproportionately harm civilians and are justified by narratives that dehumanize or trivialize the targets. The conversation insists that any serious critique of current Western conduct must grapple with this deeper ethical deficit. If policy is divorced from the full humanity of those it affects, then legal norms, diplomatic constraints, and humanitarian commitments become flimsy veneers. Recognizing this cultural dimension is essential because it frames why legal prohibitions and institutional checks have not been enough to restrain violence; the underlying worldview has too often been permissive of harm. ## Collapse of limits in Western politics Brenner describes a cumulative erosion of limits that once constrained state behavior. Institutional checks — congressional oversight, independent judiciary review, media skepticism — have weakened as political polarization and elite conformity expanded. The conversation underscores that this weakening is not merely procedural but normative: the threshold for invoking extraordinary measures has been lowered, and the public debate that might contest such steps is muted. Fear, partisan calculation, and media deference combine to produce an environment where military adventurism can proceed with limited scrutiny. This collapse of limits carries systemic risks. Once the presumption against broad coercion erodes, escalation becomes easier and reversal harder. Brenner warns that institutional atrophy leaves the polity vulnerable to runaway confrontat

No Escape For USA: The Iran Endgame | Prof. Michael Brenner The next US war of choice is laying bare the terminal stage of the kleptocratic system that has killed 38 million people since the early 1970s. Like a balloon that expands until a single needle pierces its mighty but soft skin, the future of the Western imperial system hinges on its ability to either deflate in grace or go down in a very big bang. Today, I'm talking again to Dr. Michael Brenner, emeritus professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Links: Neutrality Studies substack: https://pascallottaz.substack.com Opt in for Academic Section from your profile settings: https://pascallottaz.substack.com/s/academic Merch & Donations: https://neutralitystudies-shop. fourthwall.com Timestamps: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:38 American power and the road to Iran 00:08:53 Channel note and Substack 00:09:10 Trump and the long elite consensus 00:20:23 Israel and US strategic overlap 00:31:54 Western racism and imperial culture 00:48:06 Collapse of limits in Western politics 00:53:14 Trump and the Iran war endgame #Pascal Welcome back, everybody. I'm Pascal Lottaz, an associate professor at Kyoto University. Today I'm joined again by Dr. Michael Brenner, an emeritus professor of international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Michael, welcome back to the channel. #Michael Brenner Well, I'm very pleased to be back with you, Pascal. I'm somewhat envious of you—living in Japan and getting to enjoy the cherry blossoms soon. We don't have any of those here in Texas. #Pascal Well, the cherry blossoms will bloom soon. But before that, we’ve unfortunately had this tragedy with Iran. And by tragedy, I mean an open violation of international law and a war of aggression by the United States. You and I talked about this before—you gave me a wonderful rundown of the history of the neoconservative movement. It seems the neocons have once again won the day in the United States. Could you give me your analysis of where this war is coming from and what your view of the situation is? #Michael Brenner Look, there are some cardinal truths that unfortunately get obscured in this cacophony of voices— voices both spoken and written—which focus, for the most part, on immediate details or idle -- 1 of 15 -- speculation. I think the first thing to say is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has not really altered the fundamental direction of American foreign policy. What he’s done is change the mode, making it more audacious, more willing to take risks, more aggressive, and with an even greater emphasis on coercive means—whether those means are military, as is happening now in Iran, or commercial and financial. His great tariff war against all trading partners began within, what was it, forty-five days of his taking office. And that gave us a very clear indication of both the thinking of the president—such as it is—and his senior associates, as well as the extreme measures to which he was prepared to resort. That said, I think we should bear in mind that there is a remarkably comprehensive underlying consensus in the United States among, well, let’s say, members of the foreign policy community or the political elites and political class generally. It was first really articulated more than thirty years ago, right at the end of the Cold War, in that famous—or you might say infamous—memorandum that laid out in detail a strategy for the United States to establish its dominance, in fact its hegemony in a literal sense, at relatively little cost, and the means and methods to institutionalize it. And that included taking preemptive action against any other power, any other state, that one could even imagine acquiring the strength to challenge the United States. And this was global. That was expressed in a phrase used by the Pentagon in various strategic documents, talking about maintaining escalation dominance in every region of the world—by which they meant not just literal military dominance, but that American views and interests should hold sway wherever they were identified as such. Now, that 1992 document, in effect, expressed views that were held by relatively few people. It was repudiated, in fact, by President Bush the elder and by his administration. But it did represent the thinking of a willful core of individuals—officials, former officials, think tankers, academics. And what has happened over the ensuing—well, now thirty-five years—but I think the dialogue we had earlier explained exactly when and why in a moment, is that the essential precepts and assumptions of that Wolfowitz memo—it was Paul Wolfowitz who authored it—crystallized and became the foundational and consensual view of Americanism, or of the American political elite, because of 9/11. 9/11 had some very basic, serious, and enduring effects. One, it exposed for the first time—maybe since Pearl Harbor, if you like—American vulnerability, at a time when it was almost universally believed that the United States had acquired a sort of invulnerability with the collapse of the Soviet Union. And don't forget, back in the ’90s—let’s say 2001—China did not yet loom as a kind of systemic challenger to the United States, as it became 10, 15, 20 years later. So it was a real shock to the American people, to the American system. And one of the effects it had was that it refocused and re- energized interest and concern about how the United States could use its overwhelming vectors of force to, in effect, achieve the world‑forward subjective goals of institutionalizing American dominance and control over the most essential aspects of international affairs. It also justified a very high level of intervention that was explained and presented in terms of the war on terror. -- 2 of 15 -- Of course, there was a war on terror, but what should have been, in effect, a series of police and intelligence missions and operations became instead an endorsement for the United States to flex its muscle in regions of interest to it. And that’s how we got the Iraq War, as we all know. I mean, that was based on a crude set of lies. Saddam had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. In fact, the jihadi groups were his bitter enemies. He was an enemy of them, and he and Osama bin Laden had a personal, deeply hostile relationship. #Pascal Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. #Michael Brenner Yeah, and so I think we have to understand this background and the context it created. It gave the impetus—you might think of it as the theistic impetus—to a policy of increasingly expansive, extended, and intense applications of American power around the world. #Pascal Hey, very brief intermission because I was recently banned from YouTube. And although I'm back, this could happen again at any time. So please consider subscribing not only here but also to my mailing list on Substack. That's pascallottaz.substack.com. The link’s in the description below. And now, back to the video. #Michael Brenner Don't forget who came after Barack Obama, to whom the torch of American leadership was passed by George W. Bush, the younger—the one who sent American troops into Syria. It was Obama who introduced the idea of drone strikes against individuals identified as enemies of the United States, supposedly terrorist leaders, the definition of which was greatly expanded. It was Barack Obama who involved the United States in the Saudi Arabian assault on Yemen. Without direct American involvement—not just in terms of intelligence, but also in providing aircraft to refuel Saudi attack planes—the assault, which went on for, what, four or five years against the Houthis in Yemen, would have been technically and physically impossible. And the casualties from that campaign, which never got much attention, were in the hundreds of thousands. And that's been attested to by various independent agencies, organizations, the United Nations, and so on. That includes a couple hundred thousand children who died from disease and starvation because of the blockade in which we participated. I mention that less because of its inherent strategic importance, but because it demonstrated the extent to which American leaders of all stripes were prepared to act aggressively on the international scene. So that’s the context. That helps to— well, let me make an important point here. If one were to extract from the original Wolfowitz -- 3 of 15 -- memorandum a set of propositions—I’ve done that in a paper I wrote some time ago—and then set them alongside what appear to be manifestly... The proposition is accepted—manifestly but implicitly—by Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is incapable of fashioning a doctrine or organizing his thoughts coherently. But if you were to place one set of basic propositions against the others, they’re identical. That’s why all the optimistic views expressed when he burst onto the scene in 2017, and then again when he returned to office a year ago—about Trump being opposed to deep-state interventionism, that there was a streak in the man that was considerate and wanted to present himself as a peacemaker, and so on—were never based on any firm foundation or evidence, except for a few rhetorical remarks he made during the campaign, which people took at face value, even though they were contrary to everything the man had done, said, and shown in his personality over the course of a lifetime. And that's the background. It's also the context, which explains the passivity with which the American political class and the media have reacted—or not reacted—to the increasingly, sort of, you know, aggressive moves by Trump, or which have occurred as we aligned ourselves within a short period of 13 months. And let's underscore and highlight the extremity of those actions, right? Some began under Biden, some were initiated by Trump himself. There was participation in the Gaza genocide—no small thing. #Pascal Yes. #Michael Brenner There was a trade war against everyone—a tariff war against everyone from Lesotho to China— which was not only ill‑considered, it wasn’t even thought through. It was impulsive. #Pascal Right. #Michael Brenner It came out of Trump’s gut and the warped minds of some of his advisers, like Mr. Besson, Navarro, and a few others. And then we’ve gone on at an accelerated pace—the Anschluss in Venezuela, the all‑out economic war against Cuba, the aborted Greenland land grab, and on Ukraine, despite all the ballyhooed talk and broadcasting of Trump’s supposed inclination to mediate a peace. How can you mediate a peace, by the way, in which you are, in effect, one of the protagonists, right? #Pascal -- 4 of 15 -- Yeah. #Michael Brenner But as has been shown, Trump was unwilling and unable to do the most elementary things necessary to come up with terms of a settlement that would even minimally satisfy the concerns and interests laid out by the Russians and stated repeatedly. For example, in its most coherent and succinct form, by Vladimir Putin in his June 14th, 2024 speech. Now, none of these bellicose actions or declarations elicited any serious opposition in the United States at any level. And this is a reflection of two things. One, as we said a moment ago, is the fact that the fundamental premises underlying it—although not visible through the fog of Trump’s rhetoric—were held by nearly the whole of the American political class. So the fundamentals were in place and agreed upon. And that, of course, held for the media as well. And the second factor, which explains how all of these things could be done without really stirring much debate or even serious discussion, was Trump’s ability to intimidate compliant parties— whether it be allies in Europe, the feeble political opposition, the Democratic Party, which shared, again, as I said, most of the aims and purposes that Trump was pursuing—and certainly the media, which has gone along with almost everything he’s done. That brings us to the present m