From Bush's Crusade to Trump's Epic Fury: The Geopolitics of Messianic Wars

"We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

"Once weapons were manufactured to fight war. Now wars are manufactured to sell weapons."

I have been warning about this state of affairs for years. In "The Monstrosity of Our Century: The War on Palestine and the Last Western Man," I documented how Western governments-and in particular the United States-had allowed religious extremism to migrate from the margins of evangelical subculture into the architecture of foreign policy, sustaining and financing a conflict in Palestine that the International Court of Justice itself qualified as a "plausible genocide," while providing the ideological vocabulary to render atrocity acceptable, even necessary. What is happening today in Iran is not a departure from that logic. It is its consummation.

The war that began on February 28, 2026, is unlike anything the region has seen since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003-and it is unlike that invasion in one decisive respect: for the first time, the theological framework that drives it is not merely ambient but operational, not merely present in the rhetoric of political leaders but embedded in the command culture of the military itself. We are no longer dealing with a conflict in which religion provides convenient justification after the fact. We are dealing with a conflict that was, in significant measure, theologically desired, theologically prepared, and theologically conducted. To understand this war without confronting that fact is to understand nothing essential about it.

The Signal Fire Was Lit on Schedule

What followed was swift and devastating. The opening strikes of February 28 killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei-along with his daughter, son-in-law, grandchild, and daughter-in-law-in a strike on the Leadership House compound in Tehran. The Iranian defense minister and IRGC commander were killed in separate airstrikes the same day. Forty senior officials were reported dead in the first wave alone. By March 13, the Israeli military estimated the number of Iranian soldiers and commanders killed at between three and four thousand. The United States struck more than 7,000 targets across Iran in less than three weeks. In the southeastern city of Minab, a strike on an elementary girls' school killed more than 170 people-most of them children. The World Health Organization documented strikes on at least 18 hospitals and health facilities. Iran's parliament building was targeted. The state broadcaster's headquarters was destroyed. Wasn't it insane to believe, as I wrote years ago, that our civilized world was unable to find a path other than the one leading toward Mutually Agreed Destruction? It appears it was not insane. It was policy.

In retaliation, Iran launched wave upon wave of missiles and drones-against Israel, against US military bases in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Iraq, and against commercial shipping in the Arabian Sea. The strike on Iran's South Pars gas field by Israel-an act Trump himself later described as having been done "out of anger"-triggered Iranian attacks on energy infrastructure across the Gulf, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and an immediate surge in global oil and gas prices. The Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately twenty percent of the world's oil normally passes, became a weapon. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responded by temporarily lifting sanctions on Russian oil-a decision that, as Ukrainian President Zelenskyy estimated, would transfer ten billion dollars to Moscow's war economy. In the logic of the conflict's architects, this was not incoherence. It was the system working as designed.

Let us be precise about the human cost, because the prophetic framework that sustains this war is designed, above all else, to make human cost invisible. As of March 19, 2026: 1,444 Iranians confirmed dead, 18,551 injured, and nearly 2,000 distinct military events across 29 of Iran's 31 provinces, with Tehran enduring the heaviest bombardment. At least 61 Iraqis killed. At least 850 Lebanese have been killed since the war's expansion. Thirteen American soldiers dead. Workers, civilians, women, children-the arithmetic of what is being called, in Washington and Jerusalem, a divinely sanctioned operation. Isn't it the very definition of what I have called, in previous writings, the normalization of the monstrous?

A Theology Born in the Nineteenth Century, Killing People in the Twenty-First

The Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 embedded this theology in the footnotes of millions of American evangelical households. Hal Lindsey's 1970 bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, which sold twenty-eight million copies and was subsequently made into a documentary narrated by Orson Welles, popularized it for mass culture, identifying the Soviet Union as the northern coalition of Ezekiel 38 and forecasting Armageddon during the Reagan administration. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the prophetic timetable failed to deliver its promised catastrophe, the eschatological script required a new adversary. Iran-ancient Persia, explicitly named in Ezekiel's coalition of nations-was the obvious candidate. It has remained the preferred candidate ever since.

The dispensationalist reading of Ezekiel 38-39-the so-called Gog and Magog war-identifies a coalition including Persia (Iran), Russia, Turkey, Libya, and Ethiopia descending upon Israel in the last days, only to be destroyed by direct divine intervention. For tens of millions of American evangelicals, the war that began on February 28, 2026, is not a geopolitical event to be assessed on its strategic merits. It is a prophetic milestone to be recognized, welcomed, and-in its most activist expressions-deliberately hastened. The Left Behind franchise, a sixteen-novel series based on dispensationalist theology that has sold more than sixty-five million copies and shaped the political imagination of a generation of American voters, normalized for three decades the idea that mass death in the Middle East is not a catastrophe to be prevented but a divinely necessary step whose arrival should be greeted with something approaching gratitude.

In The Monstrosity of Our Century, I cited the observation of Bill and Kathleen Christison-both former senior CIA officials-that the neoconservatives and Christian Zionists who had captured American foreign policy under Bush regarded Israel's domination over all of Palestine as "a necessary step toward fulfillment of the biblical Millennium" and viewed warfare between Jews and Arabs as a "divinely ordained prelude to Armageddon." What has changed since I wrote those pages is not the theology-it has remained perfectly stable-but its institutional depth. It has now moved from the corridors of influence into the command culture of the armed forces themselves. End-times theology, as the Military Religious Freedom Foundation's director Mikey Weinstein put it with unusual precision, "didn't infiltrate the military. It was invited in."

When Both Sides Believe God Has Already Won

On the American-Israeli side, the framework is dispensationalist premillennialism fused with Messianic Zionism. Iran must be militarily neutralized not only because it sponsors armed resistance to Israeli occupation-a political problem, in principle negotiable-but because its continued existence as a regional power constitutes a barrier to the conditions required for the Third Temple's construction and, in the most extreme formulations, for the eschatological scenario itself. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has presided over regular prayer gatherings at the Pentagon featuring Christian nationalist theocrats, characterizes Iranian leadership as driven by "prophetic Islamist delusions"-while simultaneously hosting evangelical pastors to lay hands on the Commander-in-Chief in the Oval Office and declaring, in the register of official Pentagon communications, that America is conducting a war for civilizational survival. Secretary of State Marco Rubio describes Iranian leaders as "radical Shiite clerics" who make decisions on the basis of "pure theology." The irony is not incidental. It is the system's operating logic.

On the Iranian side, the framework is velayat al-faqih-the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist-which holds that in the absence of the Twelfth Imam (the Mahdi, who is in occultation, or ghaybah), supreme authority rests with a qualified Islamic jurist governing on his behalf until the divine resolution of history. This is not merely a political theory of governance; it is a theology of historical suspension, in which the entire order of human affairs is provisional, awaiting a completion that transcends it. Within this framework, strategic retreat or diplomatic accommodation is not merely weakness-it is prophetic betrayal, a dereliction of the sacred obligation to maintain the conditions for the Imam's return. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi made this perfectly plain on March 15, when he dismissed Trump's claim that Tehran was seeking a ceasefire: "No, we never asked for a ceasefire, and we have never asked even for negotiation. We are ready to defend ourselves as long as it takes."

The result is precisely what Reza Aslan, whose analysis I have long cited and endorsed, identified as the defining characteristic of a cosmic war: it cannot be won, because its resolution has been deferred-by both parties-to a divine intervention that is not available to human political agency. As the Durham University professor Jolyon Mitchell observed in the conflict's opening days, "both sides believe that they have God on their side," and the consequence is the systematic dehumanization of the adversary that will make any post-conflict peace-building "even harder." This is a considerable understatement. When a war has been framed by both parties as the fulfillment of competing divine mandates, there is, strictly speaking, no post-conflict horizon. There is only escalation until one side is destroyed-or until those who bear no responsibility for the war's theological premises intervene to interrupt it.

Wars Are Manufactured to Sell Weapons-and to Fulfill Prophecy

The Israeli strike on Iran's South Pars gas field-described by Trump himself as an act of "anger" rather than strategy and immediately disavowed as unrepeatable-drove global energy prices to levels unseen since 2022. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz compounded the shock. Treasury Secretary Bessent's decision to temporarily lift sanctions on Russian oil already in transit-which Zelenskyy estimated would transfer ten billion dollars to Putin's war economy-illustrated with painful clarity that the prophetic and the economic circulate through the same infrastructure, each reinforcing the other's momentum. In the past, as I wrote, weapons were manufactured to wage wars. Today, as the evidence of the past three weeks demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt, both wars and prophecies are manufactured to serve a system of domination whose ultimate logic is not divine redemption but the perpetuation of profitable instability.

The same logic that I documented in The Monstrosity of Our Century-the logic that allowed Western governments to continue arms transfers to Israel while acknowledging "concerns" about civilian casualties in Gaza, that allowed the International Court of Justice's finding of "plausible genocide" to produce no meaningful political consequence-is now operating at the scale of an entire nation of ninety million people. Over 6,600 civilian sites were struck in Iran, according to the Iranian Red Crescent. A girls' school in Minab reduced to rubble. Eighteen hospitals hit. Energy infrastructure was deliberately targeted in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention's explicit prohibitions on attacks against objects indispensable to civilian survival. And across Western capitals, the same formulas: "concerns about civilian casualties," "calls for restraint," and continued military and diplomatic support for the operations producing those casualties. The hypocrisy is not new. Its scale is.

Nor is the regional spillover incidental. Iran's retaliatory strikes on Gulf states-on energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait; on the American 5th Fleet headquarters in Bahrain; on civilian areas in Manama; and on the vicinity of Dubai airport-have produced not a diplomatic intervention but a Trump demand that allies "secure the Strait of Hormuz" without specifying how. Lebanon, whose 850 dead since the war began represent the latest installment of a conflict that never truly paused after 2024, has prompted a papal intervention: Pope Leo XIV, on March 15, called for an immediate ceasefire "in the name of Christians of the Middle East and all women and men of goodwill." His words were noted and, in Washington and Jerusalem, disregarded. Isn't it the very measure of where we have arrived-that the voice of the Christian world's highest authority carries less weight in a war conducted in the name of Christian prophecy than the endorsement of evangelical pastors who pray over the president in the Oval Office?

Mass Hypnosis and the Machinery That Sustains It

Consider the architecture of the messaging. Hegseth denounces Iranian "prophetic delusions" while evangelical theocrats lead Pentagon prayer services. Rubio characterizes the Iranian government as uniquely driven by "pure theology," while Trump amplifies prophetic declarations about his own divine anointing. The administration that frames Tehran as irrational because of its religious convictions simultaneously deploys those convictions as the primary mobilizing instrument for its domestic political coalition-the tens of millions of American evangelical voters for whom this war is not a geopolitical risk to be assessed but a prophetic confirmation to be celebrated.

The media environment in which this double discourse operates has, predictably, amplified the hypnosis rather than interrupting it. Coverage of the strikes has focused overwhelmingly on military assets targeted, oil price movements, and alliance politics. The 170 schoolgirls killed in Minab received a fraction of the attention given to Trump's accusation-made without evidence-that Iran was using artificial intelligence to generate fake drone footage. The destruction of Iran's state broadcaster's headquarters was reported as a military milestone, not a press freedom crisis. The formal complaints of more than 200 American service members alleging that their commanders framed the war as the fulfillment of the Book of Revelation appeared in specialized military media and watchdog reports, not in the editorial positions of the governments whose armed forces were filing those complaints. The apocalyptic framework has been successfully embedded in the operational culture of a war while remaining publicly deniable as a factor in its conduct. This is mass hypnosis in its most accomplished form: the normalization of the extraordinary through sustained prophetic saturation, until the extraordinary disappears from view entirely.

The Pyramid of Domination, Perfectly Visible

The pyramid is visible in the current conflict's architecture with unusual clarity. The Messianic strand provides the theological justification: Iran must be neutered because its existence as a regional power frustrates the conditions for the Third Temple's construction and, in the most maximalist iteration, for the eschatological fulfillment itself. Netanyahu-who has reportedly said he has been waiting forty years for this confrontation-is not speaking strategically in that formulation. He is speaking theologically. The Messianic ministers in his cabinet who have cited Deuteronomy and the precedent of Amalek to justify collective punishment in Gaza apply the same scriptural logic, without significant modification, to Iran. The adversary changes; the theology is constant.

The political Zionist strand provides the state machinery: a government in which ministers who advocate population transfer and describe civilian casualties as acceptable sacrifice hold portfolios and command budgets; an intelligence apparatus with a forty-year record of targeted assassinations, now operating openly at the scale of decapitating the leadership of a sovereign state of ninety million people; and a military that has struck, in three weeks, more targets in Iran than it struck in Lebanon over two years. And the neoliberal strand provides the economic incentive structure: energy price spikes that benefit identifiable financial actors; arms sales to Gulf states seeking protection from Iranian retaliation; reconstruction contracts for an Iran that has now been bombed across twenty-nine of its thirty-one provinces; and the manipulation of Russian oil sanctions whose beneficiaries include both Trump's domestic political economy and Putin's military budget. The pyramid does not require coordination between its three pillars. It requires only that they each pursue their own logic and that their logics be mutually reinforcing-which, as the past three weeks have demonstrated, they reliably are.

The Only Available Interruption

What does that recovery require? First and most immediately, it requires the recognition-by governments not party to the conflict, by international institutions, and by the independent press-that they are confronting a theological problem as much as a strategic one, and that the diplomatic instruments currently deployed are calibrated for adversaries who respond to rational cost-benefit calculations. They are not calibrated for adversaries who believe that God's timetable supersedes human cost. This does not mean that diplomacy is impossible. It means that diplomacy must engage the theological dimension directly-must name the institutionalization of end-times theology in military command structures as the constitutional violation it is, must refuse the prophetic vocabulary in its own official communications, and must resist the temptation to treat the eschatological framing as rhetorical excess rather than operational doctrine.

Second, it requires the systematic elevation of the counter-voices that exist within the religious traditions being weaponized-because those voices exist, they are not marginal, and they are being deliberately suppressed. The historian Daniel Hummel has documented that the "ancient prophecy" behind the Iran war is a modern invention, barely two centuries old, with no serious claim to represent the mainstream of either Jewish or Christian tradition. Significant currents within American evangelicalism have opposed the conflation of dispensationalism with foreign policy for decades. Within Israel, Orthodox rabbinical authorities who reject Messianic political theology represent a substantial tradition with deep historical roots. Within Iran, scholars of Islamic jurisprudence who distinguish between the theological expectation of the Mahdi's return and its political instrumentalization by the Revolutionary Guards are engaged in an internal critique that external actors cannot substitute for but can support. The amplification of these voices is not a soft measure or a cultural courtesy. It is a structural intervention in the ideological infrastructure of the war.

And third-because I have learned, across the years of writing that preceded this essay, that structural analysis without structural remedy is merely sophisticated despair-it requires the dismantling of the economic incentive system that makes perpetual conflict profitable. When energy price spikes that result from strikes on civilian infrastructure benefit identifiable financial actors; when arms transfers that fuel the conflict are approved by officials whose financial interests include the defense sector; when reconstruction contracts are awarded before the bombing has stopped-these are not coincidences to be noted and forgotten in the next news cycle. They are the neoliberal pillar of the pyramid, and their exposure and political contestation is a precondition for the accountability that the eschatological framing is specifically designed to prevent.

As I wrote in The Monstrosity of Our Century-and as the events of February and March 2026 have confirmed with a force I wish they had not-the course of events in Palestine, and now in Iran, has discredited the moral authority of the West and devalued international law to the point where those instruments can no longer be taken for granted as the default language of international relations. The question is no longer whether that devaluation has occurred. It has. The question is what, if anything, is built in its place. The 170 schoolgirls of Minab, the 850 dead in Lebanon, and the Palestinian population whose dispossession initiated the cascading logic that produced the current war-they are not abstractions in a geopolitical argument. They are the measure of what the pyramid of domination costs, in flesh and blood and futures foreclosed.

Reza Aslan was right that cosmic wars are unwinnable. The conclusion that follows is not resignation but obligation: the obligation to insist, against every incentive the current system provides, that the conflict is political, its causes are traceable, its costs are measurable, and its resolution is a human responsibility that cannot be outsourced to the divine.

Also, in his brilliant 2004 book, two-time Pulitzer-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., explored the topics of the 2003 Iraq War, the American presidency, and the future of democracy. He explained why it's imperative to go to war only as a last resort and how the "Bush Doctrine" (preventive war) has led the US so badly off-course. Schlesinger acknowledged a long line of presidents-from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton-who advanced the principle of collective action and rejected the preventive war argument, noting that "it requires an accurate crystal ball," in other words, the ability to forecast the future. Citing the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who warned against "the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play the role of God to history," Schlesinger pointed out that "the statesman who is surest that he can divine the will of the Almighty most urgently invites his own retribution. As for the future of democracy in the US, he noted chillingly that "there is little evidence that constitutional democracy will triumph in the century ahead." Donald Trump's ongoing war proved the historian right on all accounts.

Isn't it insane to believe that our civilized world is unable to find a path other than the one leading toward Mutually Agreed Destruction? I asked that question years ago. I ask it again today-not rhetorically, but with the urgency of a moment in which the answer, if it comes at all, must come now.