What is breaking in America is not just the balance between republic and oligarchy. What is breaking is the unity of the state itself.

One body remains public, electoral, constitutional, moralizing, televisual. It asks for votes, performs accountability, speaks in the name of citizens, and distributes the sweet rituals of participation. The other body is real: capitalized, securitized, infrastructural, dynastic, and increasingly insulated from control. The first campaigns. The second decides. The first promises representation. The second manages continuity of rule.

That is why the standard language of “money in politics” is now far too weak. This is no longer just influence. It is capture at the depth of the state. Capital, security, technology, donor networks, media power, family access, and war-making capacity have fused so tightly that the public surface of the republic increasingly looks like a façade for the networks that actually steer it.

The citizen is therefore handed a consumer version of the republic. Elections, campaigns, patriotic emotion, therapeutic slogans, morality plays about saving civilization, war packaged as responsibility. A political ice-cream machine: it produces flavors of participation, the illusion of agency, and a sweet surface of legitimacy. The title is not only metaphorical. Recent reporting on a Pentagon end-of-year spending spree under Pete Hegseth included roughly $124,000 for ice-cream machines, alongside other extravagances funded by taxpayers. The republic dispenses treats on the surface while the war core consolidates beneath it. 

This is why the current march toward a wider conflict with Iran cannot be read as a simple return of old American imperial seriousness. It looks instead like a degraded form of power that has lost even the discipline of its own justifications. The old empire at least staged a language of responsibility. The new one increasingly performs only proximity to the leader, branding, and a crude readiness for force.

Reports about the role of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner matter for precisely that reason. Responsible Statecraft reported that they told the White House Iran was using talks to buy time, that Trump publicly said they helped persuade him to go to war, and that experts and foreign officials challenged both their grasp of technical issues and the accuracy of key claims they relayed.  This is not interesting because it reveals one more group of hawks. It is interesting because it suggests something worse: the road to war may have been shaped by people without the competence required to understand the negotiations they were helping conduct or interpret.

That kind of incompetence is still discussed far too rarely. When a doctor ignores clinical expertise, we call it dangerous. When an engineer ignores calculation, we call it a disaster in the making. But when rulers sideline military professionals, regional specialists, career diplomats, or logistics experts, it is too often rebranded as mere political decision-making. Yet here too professional knowledge matters. War is not a television segment or an extension of personal loyalty. If decisions of escalation are made in an atmosphere of impunity, with contempt for expertise and the assumption that closeness to the leader can replace competence, what we are witnessing is not state strength but palace degeneration.

But that is only one path of decay. The other runs through knowledge without measure. This is where the new techno-militarist class enters. Inkstick describes a worldview organized around permanent dominance, with firms such as Palantir and Anduril and the broader Silicon Valley militarist milieu gaining influence through lobbying, campaign money, and personnel pipelines into government.  Here coercion passes for innovation, technological supremacy for political wisdom, and fear for the only credible language of peace. This is not ignorance. It is expertise severed from restraint, proportion, and end. It is technocratic nihilism.

That is why the word nihilism is not rhetorical excess. It names a real transformation. The problem is not a lack of energy. There is too much of it. What is missing is an end that would be more than domination itself. Inkstick’s central point is sharp: the danger lies not only in excessive faith in technology, but in a distorted understanding of who should wield it, to what ends, and under what constraints.  Coercion is rewritten as innovation. Control becomes a substitute for judgment. Power no longer even bothers to explain itself in civilizational terms. It increasingly treats explanation as unnecessary.

At this point the American problem becomes legible in a broader frame. Russia and the United States are not the same regime. Their institutions, languages, and methods differ profoundly. But both reveal a similar fracture of the state. In Russia the oligarchic-security core is denser, harsher, and less disguised. In the United States it is more distributed, more legalized, and more elegantly wrapped in the language of the republic. In both cases, however, the lower orders may vote, mobilize, cheer, donate, and die, but they are not meant to seize the strategic core itself.

This is where a Byzantine temptation becomes useful as a figure. Not Byzantium as a precise historical analogy, but as the fantasy of power standing above law, above control, almost above justification itself. A visible constitutional body remains in place, but the real operative body drifts elsewhere: into capital, security, family networks, infrastructure, and insulated command. The old doctrine of the king’s two bodies has not disappeared. In the West it has been privatized, technologized, and embedded in oligarchic circuits that survive changes of party and rhetoric alike.

That is also why part of the Western elite is fascinated by Putin in a way that goes beyond mere admiration for brutality. What they envy is visible unaccountability. The palace, the distance, the security cocoon, the ceremonial separation from the governed, the spectacle of power that no longer has to pretend equality with those over whom it rules. This is not simply admiration for force. It is longing for a form of rule no longer constrained by the humiliations of republican procedure.

Once that structure is named, the methods of suppression become easier to read. In Russia exposure of the real core is met more openly by the security apparatus, criminalization, and fear. In America the methods are softer until they are not: delegitimation, donor pressure, media campaigns, procedural exclusion, and the rapid branding of structural critique as extremism, disloyalty, or simply “the left.” Different costumes, same reflex. The point is to prevent the oligarchic core from becoming the object of durable public visibility and real interruption.

There is another element that should not be politely ignored. The problem is not only oligarchy in the abstract, but a governing culture openly vulnerable to money, gifts, private ventures, and foreign-financed access. Recent reporting has documented major Trump-family business entanglements tied to Gulf capital, including stablecoin-linked arrangements involving an Abu Dhabi-backed fund and controversy around lavish benefits and gifts from regional actors. There is no honest basis yet to say that the attack on Iran was simply bought. But there is a serious basis for saying that decisions of war and peace were being made inside an administration unusually exposed to financial entanglements and favors from regional powers hostile to Iran. In such a setting, corruption does not need to arrive as a suitcase of cash. It works more elegantly: through access, gratitude, family business, donor networks, and the slow erosion of any boundary between state interest and private reward. Pressure from Israel and Saudi Arabia was also reported as part of the environment shaping Trump’s turn toward confrontation with Iran.  n with Russia should be made carefully but firmly. In Russia, the invasion of Ukraine did not look like oligarchs buying a war from outside. It looked more like the product of a fused oligarchic-security core around the Kremlin, where business elites are dependent on the center and the war serves the regime’s architecture of domination. In the United States the corresponding corruption is more porous, more marketized, more exposed to gifts, deals, and private channels of influence. Different mechanism, same rupture: the public body of the state speaks the language of the nation while its real body decides inside circuits of loyalty, access, interest, and immunized power.

That is why the debate over Iran is badly misread when reduced to Lindsey Graham or another cycle of America First hypocrisy. The deeper problem is that much of the American right no longer oscillates coherently between isolationism and interventionism. It oscillates between spectacle and consequence. It likes war as image, threat, mood, and televised virility. It panics when war returns as logistics, casualties, oil pressure, disrupted shipping, and regional uncertainty.

There is also a further humiliation for contemporary great powers: they increasingly cannot conclude what they begin. Russia has not subordinated Ukraine despite its larger size, firepower, and willingness to wage a long war of destruction. Reuters reported on March 14 that Russia launched roughly 430 drones and 68 missiles across multiple Ukrainian regions in a broad assault that killed civilians and damaged infrastructure, yet the war remained prolonged, costly, and unresolved. A similar paradox has emerged in the confrontation with Iran. Reuters reported that U.S. strikes hit military sites on Kharg Island, the hub for roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, while maritime disruption in the Strait of Hormuz deepened amid mine threats and pressure on regional infrastructure. The lesson is stark: late power still retains the capacity to punish, but increasingly loses the capacity to conclude. It can destroy, but it cannot easily produce a stable political end from destruction.

This is where the whole anatomy comes together. What used to be sold as imperial responsibility has split into two parallel paths of degeneration: one runs through loyalty without knowledge into the palace improvisation of war, the other through knowledge without measure into technocratic nihilism. Both converge at Kharg Island: a shelled symbol that has not yet burned, but has already been entered into a ledger of costs that no one wants, and perhaps no one is any longer able, to close.

For Israel this should be read without illusion. The temptation is to imagine that such an America is automatically more loyal because it is louder, more emotional, and more eager to speak in civilizational slogans. But a war machine built on an oligarchic core has no true partners. It has temporary alignments, usable symbols, and theaters onto which costs can be loaded. Today it wraps itself in solidarity. Tomorrow it may treat the same region as one more laboratory of deterrence through chaos.

What we are watching, then, is not merely a strategic crisis. It is a constitutional crisis in the oldest sense. It concerns the question of what the state really is and where its real body now resides.

The new American war machine is not merely aggressive. It is post-explanatory. It no longer seriously asks what a war is for. It asks only whether the system can absorb it, package it, automate it, and market the result as strength.

It is oligarchic nihilism armed with impunity.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)