By Sheerpost-Michael Brenner - June 22, 2025

Friends & Colleagues. As of this writing, the Trump White House has launched an attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran – a country that already is the victim of an unprovoked aggression by Israel. B-52 bombers have hit three major nuclear facilities; batteries of Tomahawk missiles also have been fired.

The potential consequences are catastrophic. This action is in violation of the explicit Constitutional provision that Congress alone has the power to declare war. That fundamental fact gets barely mentioned in whatever public discourse has taken place.

The termination point of this reckless path to war will find us despised in the world – whatever the immediate military outcome. At home, the nation will demonstrate once again that it has become incapable of shame, and that whatever self-respect survives will be in the form of that confected adulation that egoists apply to themselves. A pariah despised abroad and a sullen, autocratic nation look to be our ignominious destiny.

By what route did we get here?

Background

Americans harbor an intense hostility toward the Islamic Republic of Iran that is an emotional response to the humiliation they felt from the occupation of the United States embassy in Tehran in November 1979. That searing experience left a scar on the American psyche. It has irritated us constantly ever since. So, the long smoldering impulse to destroy the mullahs’ regime is driven by an animus that goes beyond realpolitik calculations or the relentless pressures from Israel and its American lobby. That emotion added to and was itself intensified by the 9/11 trauma.

 I offer the proposition that the 9/11 phenomenon qualitatively changed American attitudes toward the world and themselves. It generated powerful emotions – of vulnerability, of free-floating anxiety, of vengeance – that have swirled just beneath the surface of our thinking about the United States place in the world, our objectives, and – not least – the means that we are prepared to use to reach them. That is the theme of the appended essay (below) titled AMERICAN’S MOBY DICK which was written some years ago. Here are its concluding points:

“Since there is no actual Moby Dick out there to pursue, we have fashioned a virtual game of acting out the hunt, the encounter, the retribution. We thereby have embraced the post-9/11 trauma rather than exorcised it. That is the “war-on-terror.” That war is about us – it no longer is about them. It is our Passion Play. The psychodrama unspools in our own minds and imagination.

Ahab destroyed himself, destroyed his crew, destroyed his ship. He sacrificed all in the quest – a quest for the unattainable. The United States is sacrificing its principles of liberty, its political integrity, the trust that is the bedrock of its democracy, its standing in the world as the “best hope of mankind,” and its capacity to feel for others – including its fellow citizens. America’s Moby Dick has migrated and transmuted itself. It now is lodged in our innermost being.

There, it spawns fictive offspring – foremost, the Iranian mullahs and Vladimir Putin. Now, China too. But the phantasmagoric ‘Putin’ is but the projection of our own existential dread. The spectral persona who haunts our minds, “Putin” has no objective existence.  “Putin” – and the diabolical mullahs – are the creation of our troubled national psyche. We have transposed onto them the whole maelstrom of turbid emotions we had imparted to Osama bin-Laden, and then the Islamic State.  ‘Putin’, like depictions of Satan, is the dark star amidst a host of demonic furies: Iran, Assad, the Taliban, Hezbullah, Houthis, Hamas, M-13.

To be rid of America’s transmuted Moby Dick we must kill part of our tainted being – a form of psycho-political chemotherapy. Otherwise, our national soul will wither away just as Ahab was sucked into the ocean depths entangled in the very ropes he had fashioned to ensnare Moby Dick. “ 

BACKGROUND

Thirty-five years again when the Cold War’s negotiated end, followed by disintegration of the Soviet Union, ushered in the “unipolar moment,” we seemingly saw confirmation of the belief that there was a teleology of history at work that moves in parallel with the American project.  That article of faith encouraged the United States in the audacious project to globalize an American directed Western hegemony.

The record indicates that for a decade the execution of that project entailed relatively little direct conflict or coercion – the big exception being the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. A smaller exception being the Kosovo intervention. The American political class, and the populous at large, favored the country’s ambitious activities abroad in a mood of quiet self-satisfaction.

Today, while the global project remains intact for elites and the vast majority of the public, we do witness dramatic changes in methods and national mood that emerged post 9/11. Emotions play a more prominent role in what we aim for, what we do and how we do it – be they aggressiveness, righteousness, or the impulse to denounce, scapegoat and punish others who obstruct us. We pick fights with whomever we perceive as hostile. We resort to violent force as the first resort rather than the last. We engage in acts of gross inhumanity – directly or as accomplices.

The stress on the 9/11 does not preclude the facilitating influences of other societal trends. Over the past few decades, it is evident that the country’s social fabric has loosened, that spreading nihilism has opened a playground for narcissists and self-seekers of all stripes, that the software of our liberal democracy is corrupted, that moral sensibilities are weakening – all expressions of a coarsened society and a calloused conscience. In short, the ethic of involvement in and responsibility for public affairs – at home and abroad – has thinned dramatically.

Is the inference that 30 or 40 years ago, we as a people and our leaders could not have countenanced or participated in an open genocide (precedented by our participation in the long homicidal assaults on the Yemenis); that we would  not invade other, non-threatening countries cavalierly without even a ritual bow to principle or international law? that we would not have snatched migrant children from their parents and stuffed them into holding-pens owned by privateers? That the step toward ultimate disaster taken today would have been ruled out of order?

 Or, domestically, that the Supreme Court majority would not treat the Constitution as a speed bump on the way to reaching whatever predetermined conclusion they had set themselves? that successive Presidential admissions would not have ignored or perverted stipulations of the 1st and 4th Amendments?

We can only speculate. My personal assessment is that we could not have done so.

AMERICANS’ MOBY DICK

Captain Ahab’s obsessive hunt for Moby Dick was driven by the thirst for revenge. The great white whale had maimed Ahab – in soul as well as body. Ahab was consumed by the passion to restore his sense of self, to regain his prowess and make himself whole again, by killing his nemesis – a compulsion that his wooden leg never lets weaken.

America’s “war-on-terror” became our national mission for restoration. The psychic wound of 9/11 is what grieves us; it inflames our collective passion for vengeance. The physical wound is already healed. By now, it must be memorialized in order for the scar to be seen – and we want it to be seen, to feel it.  It never did impair our functioning. In that sense, little more than a broken toe. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was genuine fear of a repeat attack – something that we now know never was in the cards. Our enemy has been emasculated; the great Satan was shot dead in Abbottabad. Only pinpricks at long intervals from within our midst draw blood. 

Catharsis has eluded us, though.  We still seethe with emotions – most below the surface, most of the time. We suffer from the embedded anxiety that is dread, from uneasy feelings of vulnerability, from a seeming lost prowess and control. A society that talks casually about ‘closure’ on almost all occasions cannot find closure on 9/11. Instead, it has a powerful need to ritualize the fear, to pursue the implacable quest for ultimate security, to perform violent acts of vengeance that neither cure nor satiate.

So, we search the seven seas hunting for monsters to slay; not Moby Dick himself, but his accessories, accomplices, enablers, facilitators, emulators, sympathizers. Whales of every species, great and small, fall to our harpoons. The dead and innocent dolphins far outnumber them. Fortunes of war.

Since there is no actual Moby Dick out there to pursue, we have fashioned a virtual game of acting out the hunt, the encounter, the retribution. We thereby have embraced the post-9/11 trauma rather than exorcised it. That is the “war-on-terror.” That war is about us – it no longer is about them. It is our Passion Play. The psycho-drama unspools in our own minds and imagination.

Ahab destroyed himself, destroyed his crew, destroyed his ship. He sacrificed all in the quest – a quest for the unattainable. The United States is sacrificing its principles of liberty, its political integrity, the trust that is the bedrock of its democracy, its standing in the world as the “best hope of mankind,” and its capacity to feel for others – including its fellow citizens. America’s Moby Dick has migrated and transmuted itself. It now is lodged in our innermost being. 

There, it spawns fictive offspring – foremost, Vladimir Putin. Now, China too. But the phantasmagoric ‘Putin’ is but the projection of our own existential dread. The spectral persona who haunts our minds, “Putin” has no objective existence. “Putin” is the creation of our troubled national psyche. We have transposed onto him the whole maelstrom of turbid emotions we had imparted to Osama bin-Laden, and then the Islamic State.  ‘Putin’, like depictions of Satan, is the dark star amidst a host of demonic furies: Iran, Assad, the Taliban, Hezbullah, Houthis, Hamas, M-13.

To be rid of America’s transmuted Moby Dick we must kill part of our tainted being – a form of psycho-political chemotherapy. Otherwise, our national soul will wither away just as Ahab was sucked into the ocean depths entangled in the very ropes he had fashioned to ensnare Moby Dick.  

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Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is Professor Emeritus of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins. He was the Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at the University of Texas. Brenner is the author of numerous books, and over 80 articles and published papers.

His most recent works are: Democracy Promotion and Islam; Fear and Dread In The Middle East; Toward A More Independent Europe ; Narcissistic Public Personalities & Our Times. His writings include books with Cambridge University Press (Nuclear Power and Non-Proliferation), the Center For International Affairs at Harvard University (The Politics of International Monetary Reform), and the Brookings Institution (Reconcilable Differences, US-French Relations In The New Era). Author