Command and Control: How Trump Uses War to Rule

How Trump uses military spectacle, foreign conflict, and domestic crisis to entrench executive power and erode democratic oversight.

Security—or the Appearance of It?

Has Trump’s strike on Iran made the world more secure—or has it served his own agenda?

That is the question this moment demands. While warplanes shattered bunkers beneath Iranian soil, the foundations of national security at home were already being quietly dismantled. Funding for the FBI and CIA has been slashed. Cybersecurity teams—critical to defending infrastructure, elections, and communications—have been disbanded, defunded, or sidelined. Intelligence briefings are politicized or ignored altogether. What the administration frames as strength abroad coincides with an erosion of institutional resilience at home.

At the same time, the strike deepens the isolation of the United States from its closest democratic allies. NATO partners were not consulted. European diplomats learned of the bombing from the newswire. Even governments that share U.S. concerns about Iran’s nuclear ambitions have condemned the action as reckless and destabilizing. In bypassing those alliances, Trump has traded cooperation for spectacle—undermining the multilateral frameworks that once managed conflict and constrained escalation.

This is not a paradox. It’s a pattern.

The Risk Map Has Shifted

For decades, diplomacy—even when weaponized or uneven—remained the framework of U.S. global engagement. Under Trump, that framework has collapsed. Provocation has replaced negotiation. Military action becomes not a last resort, but a means of asserting presence, staging control, and creating momentum.

By aligning with Israel’s assault on Iranian nuclear sites, Trump has transformed U.S. forces from strategic allies into primary actors. American bases across the Gulf and in Iraq and Syria are now seen as extensions of Israeli military power. The war is no longer distant. For Iran and its regional networks, the United States is no longer enabling—it is leading.

And that shift doesn’t end at the water’s edge.

When the Battlefield Comes Home

Following Israel’s 2023 assault on Gaza, antisemitic incidents across the United States surged. The Anti-Defamation League reported a 361% increase. Jewish students altered routines. Synagogues bolstered security. Threats that once simmered in digital spaces emerged in the physical world.

Alongside this, anti-Muslim hate crimes also rose sharply. These are not isolated reactions. They are expressions of a political climate in which global conflict becomes a domestic sorting mechanism—where identity is conflated with allegiance, and dissent with danger.

Diasporic communities—Jewish, Iranian-American, Arab-American—are caught in the undertow. Many are forced into symbolic roles that have little to do with their lives but everything to do with the political narratives into which they’ve been conscripted.

Far-right and accelerationist groups interpret Trump’s embrace of Israel not as contradiction, but as validation of a civilizational narrative they already believe. Antisemitism and Islamophobia rise not in opposition, but in tandem. The target isn’t coherence—it’s the manufacture of division.

The Political Economy of Perpetual Crisis

This is not simply a military escalation. It is part of a broader political economy—one that thrives on instability.

Trump’s wars are not waged solely through the state. They’re enabled by a constellation of private actors: defense contractors, energy speculators, surveillance firms, and logistics networks. These entities are not collateral beneficiaries. They are stakeholders. They profit when volatility becomes the norm.

Within hours of the Iran strike, defense stocks rose. Oil futures jumped. Markets responded not with fear, but with confidence that the machinery of war would deliver returns. This is not an unintended consequence. It is a structured outcome.

Trump doesn’t hide this convergence of power and capital. He institutionalizes it. The line between public action and private reward has not just blurred—it has become policy.

Rule by Exception

Trump does not merely react to crises. He governs through them.

The Iran strike lays the groundwork for a domestic political architecture rooted in emergency logic. Surveillance expands under the banner of national security. Protest is reframed as threat. Law is no longer stable; it is conditional, uneven, selectively invoked.

No authorization from Congress was sought. No public deliberation permitted. Even lawmakers who might have supported the strike were cut out—not because consensus was impossible, but because secrecy preserved the performance. Debate would have introduced friction. And friction would have disrupted the narrative. War, to serve its function here, required immediacy, not oversight.

This is governance by exception—rule not by consent, but by the constant invocation of danger. And it is not new. It is simply more visible now, as the mechanisms of oversight weaken and the language of wartime necessity replaces the language of civil authority.

What appears as chaos to some is, for Trump, a system of control.

The Timing Is the Tell

Why strike now—if not to defend the nation, then to discipline it?

Trump no longer needs a campaign strategy. He has a governing logic—one rooted in performance, distraction, and consolidation. The war floods the media with images of command, reframes legal scrutiny as sabotage, and silences dissent under the pretense of national unity.

And it is well-timed. While headlines focus on airstrikes and regional fallout, the administration advances its domestic agenda—most notably the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” a sweeping consolidation of executive power, deregulation, and institutional restructuring. Under ordinary circumstances, it would provoke widespread resistance. Under the shadow of war, it slips through with little scrutiny.

This is not crisis response. It is political choreography.

Power, Myth, and Empire

At the center of all this lies an older story. The Middle East as chaos. Iran as an archetype—irrational, dangerous, and uncontainable. American force as moral correction.

Trump doesn’t repackage this myth. He returns to its rawest form. The war is not framed as strategic. It is cast as redemptive—an act of purification, domination, and punishment. This is not about diplomacy or deterrence. It is about symbolic order.

And that narrative spills inward. Migrants, Muslims, protestors, journalists—all become interchangeable signifiers of disorder. The categories of foreign enemy and domestic threat collapse into each other.

But empires don’t merely impose order. They provoke resistance. The more this machinery advances, the more brittle its foundations become.

If we’re honest, this war is not about national defense. It is about domestic consolidation. It trades the infrastructure of real security—intelligence, diplomacy, cyber capability—for the appearance of strength. It makes the country more vulnerable while claiming to make it safe.

This is not peace through strength. It is power through spectacle.

And the cost will not be borne by the architects of the policy—but by those made most vulnerable by its logic. At home. And abroad.

We don’t need more symbolic victories. We need institutions that hold. We need civic infrastructure that doesn’t disappear under pressure. And we need the clarity to see performance for what it is—and call it what it does.

Suggested Readings

Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Bayart, Jean-François. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.

Bacevich, Andrew. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Narotzky, Susana. “Between Inequality and Injustice: Dignity as a Motive for Mobilization During the Crisis.” History and Anthropology 27, no. 1 (2016): 74–92.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.

Snow, Nancy. Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.