Dr. Steve breaks down the biggest objections to the Iran war, including neoconservatism, the Israel lobby, and the need for ground troops, revealing why these arguments no longer fit today’s geopolitical reality.
With the rise of AI warfare, drones, satellites, and shifting Middle East alliances, this conflict signals a new multipolar world order that’s changing how wars are fought and won.
Transcript
Hey, gang, Dr. Steve here, your Patriot Professor. Today, I’m taking a holiday pause to step back, pray, and be with my family. But I never want you to feel alone in this fight. So we set aside this special conversation for a day like today, a quiet moment to step out of the noise and remember faith, family, and freedom.
As you watch this, treat it like a little respite, a little reset. Think, pray, and then share in the comments one way you’re living out your values today to encourage your fellow patriots.
Today I wanted to talk about some of the objections to the war, and I wanted to situate and answer those objections in light of this rising sort of civcosm framework that we’ve been talking a lot about, because I’ve been making the argument that this really is the first civcosm war, civilizational cosmocracy war, where
theopolitics
technopolitics, and
astropolitics
all come together, combine, and reveal themselves through the extraordinary dynamics of what’s happening in this war.
And, ironically, many of the objections to this war are perfectly valid.
They’re not being unreasonable, these objections, for sure.
Nobody likes war.
But I do think that they are being put forward within a frame of reference that the war has largely rendered obsolete.
A lot of the arguments against this war draw on a world that just doesn’t exist anymore.
And that’s really, in my opinion, key to understanding what’s going on.
So I just wanted to give you a few examples of that.
1st Objection: Trump Betrayed His Base, MAGA
So, for example, what I’m hearing a lot from the dissident right who are arguing that Trump has betrayed his base, and so forth.
I’m not going to get into the polls.
I’ve already talked about that.
I mean, you probably saw the CNN poll by Harry Enten.
Well, it was an NBC poll they used, where Trump literally had 100% approval.
I mean, this was like Kim Jong-un kind of stuff, 100% approval among his MAGA base.
I mean, so there’s what many in the dissident podcast world are saying.
It’s just simply not true there.
But some would argue that this is just neoconservatism with a MAGA face.
This is probably the most widespread critique that I’ve come across.
You’re seeing it on the left.
You’re seeing it more as the isolationist, right?
The libertarians are arguing that.
And it’s the accusation that Trump has surrounded himself with, you know, like Israeli-aligned hawkish neocons.
And he just got sucked into the neocon playbook.
So this is Iraq 2.0.
This is George Bush 2.0.
And the objection sounds compelling until you examine what neoconservatism actually was.
And I intentionally use the past tense there.
» The neoconservative project was at its core a universalist project. «
That’s very important to get.
It was the belief that American military power combined with liberal democracy could usher in what Frank Fukuyama called the end of history, where the whole of human history has finally found the one true political and economic system to unite the world in, and that’s liberal democracy and the advent of the liberal international order.
They appeal to institutions like the UN Security Council, the multilateral coalition, the post-war democratic reconstructions of things like the IMF, the WTO, and so forth.
Again, if you remember in the run-up to the Iraq war, Colin Powell had presented before the UN Security Council an entire justification for why our forces should invade Iraq.
It obviously turned out to be incredibly flawed, but they knew they couldn’t go into Iraq without UN approval.
They knew they couldn’t go into Iraq without EU approval.
Nation-building was the entire point.
Democracy was the export.
The liberal international order was the frame.
That world is dead.
That world doesn’t even exist.
Operation Epic Fury couldn't care less what the UN Security Council thought.
In fact, the UN Secretary General condemned the operation immediately.
We didn’t care.
The WTO wasn’t invoked, the IMF wasn’t invoked, the EU wasn’t invoked, and NATO wasn’t even invoked.
The Trump administration did not launch this war through the liberal international order.
He waged over the objections, over its objections, and over its ruins.
So the operative logic of operational epic fury is not universal democracy.
It’s civilizational security.
And that’s what you’ve got to get.
This is why this is just neocon.
No, it’s not even remotely neoconism.
It’s actually more Jacksonian foreign policy.
No greater friend and no worse enemy.
So we defend our allies by knocking out our enemies, and we don’t care what government those enemies set up.
They'd better not mess with us.
They better play by our defined rules, not some abstract, systematic liberal international order rule, rules-based order.
No, those days are over.
This is a civilizationalist world now.
It’s the defense of a specific arc of civilizational allies,
Israel, the Gulf states, India, Japan, and against China.
Remember, this is all about weakening China, particularly economically and militarily, in terms of their influence through their proxy of Iran, which they were financing in the Gulf.
It’s by weakening; it’s all meant to weaken China and strengthen Japan.
Guess who Trump’s meeting with today, right?
Takeichi, Prime Minister Takeichi of, Sanae Takeichi of Japan, and they’re strengthening out.
And by the way, who’s just, what did they, was a third, just signed a, a whole new treaty, an agreement where they’re buying up $30 billion of our oil straight from Alaska rather than from the Middle East.
It’s absolutely astonishing stuff.
It’s about defending our specific arc of civilization, our networked multipolarity, against a theocratic revolutionary regime that was effectively serving as China’s proxy in the region.
So it’s got nothing to do with neocons.
If anything, Trump has converted the neocons into becoming Jacksonians.
And that’s the most logical position to have in an increasingly civilizational multipolar world.
2nd Objection: Trump Was Duped by Israel
This is the Tucker Carlson objection.
This is where Joe Kent just went.
And that is exploiting a very real Jewish lobby, a very well-funded Jewish lobby, that has in the past, certainly I’ve talked about it often following John Mearsheimer’s work, successfully swayed U.S. strategic decision-making and steered it towards policies that favored Israel’s interests.
And this is key...
This is absolutely key as over and against Arab interests.
Got to get that.
That’s the critique.
It was a certain specific historical period where the United States was navigating a Middle East in which Israel was diplomatically isolated and where embracing their interests meant that we were structurally at odds with those of the Sunni Arab world.
So doing the bidding of Israel meant that we were acting against the preferences of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states as a whole.
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That world doesn’t exist.
That structural reality simply no longer exists.
This is my biggest problem with the dissident podcast world right now.
They’re not keeping up with the world.
And they’re just living in a different world.
And hence why they sound like broken records.
And they just sound so complainy and whiny.
Because they just can’t make sense of what’s happening.
The Abraham Accords fundamentally changed that world.
So right now, as we speak, the Sunni Arab world has joined forces, at least rhetorically, with Israel.
It’s a world we could never even have imagined.
So the GCC, the Gulf Country Cooperation Association, issued a unanimous statement condemning Iran, and they are 100% behind Israel’s mission to completely defang Iran.
They’re 100% behind.
Again, this world just didn’t exist back in 2003.
Certainly didn’t exist in 1991 in the first Gulf War, where Israel had to sit out, even though they were getting attacked by Saddam Hussein’s Scuds.
They had to sit out because the moment they started flying sorties into Iraq, all of a sudden, the Gulf state coalition that Bush senior had built would fracture because they couldn’t, by definition, couldn’t fight with Israel.
The Abraham Accords forever erased that world.
Well, at least hopefully forever erased that world.
So to say that Trump is doing Israel’s bidding in this war is to simultaneously say that he’s also doing Mohammed bin Salman’s bidding and Qatar’s bidding and the UAE’s bidding and Bahrain’s bidding.
It’s an argument that collapses under the weight of the new civilizational architecture that it unfortunately refuses to see.
3rd Objection: Can’t Topple the Regime Without Ground Troops
And this is simply the ghost of 2003 continuing to haunt us, and in many ways, rightly so.
And the bottom line is they’re just saying you can’t affect regime change without actually physically taking down their flag.
You’re going to need troops to do that.
And of course, that’s when we deployed 300,000 troops to invade Iraq.
Now, you have to understand, from a practical perspective, that it is numerically impossible for us as a nation.
Iran is three times the size of Iraq.
Four times the population.
So we would need probably around 1.2 million troops to invade.
We do not have a force to die.
I mean, we could, if we wanted to, amass that force, but that’s not what’s in the Gulf right now, and there are no plans to do that.
What has changed the entire equation is that, 23 years after Operation Iraqi Freedom, we now live in a technopolar moment, where those who control the technological stratum are increasingly controlling the world.
I mean, it’s astonishing.
In the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury, the United States struck double the number of targets that opened the entire Iraq War.
And not with mass armored columns, but with B-2 stealth bombers guided by AI targeting systems processing satellite feeds in real time.
You remember the kill chain back in 2003 could take months, from the processing of the satellite feeds to all the intelligence analysis it had to go through.
That month-long kill chain is done literally in a split second today with AI.
The Pentagon’s explicit design for this war is one fought without American boots on Iranian soil, a decapitate and delegate architecture, not even an invasion architecture.
And it’s working precisely because technology has made physical occupation of territory strategically unnecessary.
So take, for example, the Lucas drone…
Drone warfare is just changing everything, and Iran knows that.
As a matter of fact, it’s ironic that a lot of the, again, sort of dissident social media world is saying, oh, Iran’s winning because they’ve got these drones, right?
Yeah, well, the Lucas drone that we have is a reverse-engineered Iranian Shahed drone built by an American startup for $35,000 per unit.
It’s AI guided autonomous drone under Starlink navigation.
And it’s achieving its targeting effects that would have required special operations forces to be actually in the territory back in 2003.
We don’t need that anymore.
It’s literally flown by people from operators literally miles upon miles away from the Iranian border, as well as by AI.
And so, again, you’re dealing with a technology, a robotic technology that’s increasingly rendering physical boots on the ground as obsolescent.
So the era in which we need boots on the ground to achieve these goals is an objection that is nothing more than a fossil.
Or the era is over, and it’s rendering that objection a fossil.
And then my fourth and final one here is, you know, well, we’re only...
In the end, we’re only delaying things because Russia and China are going to rebuild Iran.
And this is what’s known as the
4th Objection: Non-proliferation Establishment
The arms control scholars, the IAEA veterans, the foreign affairs essayists, who are just all good for nothing, to be quite honest with you.
But they know in the end, we saw it with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after 1991.
We’ve seen it with Syria.
We saw it again and again.
No matter what we do to Iran, they’ve got the engineers, the supply chains, the institutional knowledge, the hardened underground structure, to rebuild.
They’re going to sustain this.
It’s going to be rough, but they will eventually rebuild.
And of course, China and Russia will help them to rebuild.
Now, in any previous era of warfare, that objection would have been very decisive.
And it still would be if it weren’t for the orbital layer.
If it weren’t for the satellites, we would have the high ground.
You see,
What’s permanently changed is that we now have continuous space-based surveillance with a resolution and persistence that no previous generation of military planners has ever possessed.
So the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates in concert with US Space Command, now provides real-time intelligence coverage of Iranian territory around the clock, 24/7.
Every truck convoy, every cement pour, every new excavation, every centrifuge shipment moving across open ground is visible from orbit within literally minutes of its occurrence.
Iran can’t reconstitute a dispersed nuclear program under tarps and in tunnels without generating a detectable signature that American orbital assets find.
And again, this is the key immediately.
So the age in which a regime could rebuild a covert weapons program in the gaps between satellite passes, calculating the orbital windows, moving assets in the dark, those days are just over.
Again, it’s not 2003 anymore.
The constellation now, again, we have over 10,000 satellites up there.
The constellation is now just too dense.
It’s too persistent and too integrated with AI-driven pattern recognition for those gaps to exist at a meaningful scale.
And that AI-driven pattern recognition doubles in its capacity literally every month.
And of course, then there’s Starlink, 6,000 of those satellites are Starlink satellites.
And what happened is, you know, we’ve been able to more or less penetrate Iran’s attempts at trying to keep its people from the outside world, from outside information.
What we’ve been able to do is smuggle in all kinds of routers and so forth, so that people can avail themselves of Starlink and get information out to the outside world and also draw in information from the outside world.
So there’s really nothing comparable today to the old 1991 world where you kind of bomb Baghdad to smithereens, and then Saddam just spends the next 10 years rebuilding with the help of Russians and Chinese and so forth.
I mean, they can do that, but they will be immediately called out for it, just like what we saw over the last year after we bombed them back in June of 2025.
And Trump’s immediately, so they’re back at it again, trying to rebuild their nuclear capabilities.
And he’s like, guys, If you didn’t get the message that time, you will get the message this time.
You can’t do anything in secret anymore.
We see everything.
So this is why I say in many ways, this is a war like no other.
What the critics miss in every case, across every objection, is not a fact; it is a frame.
They were measuring this war against the templates of the world that actually preceded it.
The neocon world, the Israel lobby world, the industrial warfare world, the preorbital world,
And in every case, this war refused to fit those worlds.
It kept exceeding the template.
It keeps operating in registers that the old vocabulary has no words for.
And so that’s why I think it’s so important for us to understand that what’s happening here is a war like no other, because it’s revealing a very new world.
And ironically, a very ancient world, because at the heart of that world is theopolitics, right?
You’ll hear me say this a lot in my videos: this is a religious war, not like the old medieval conquering one religion over another kind of thing.
But in terms of civilizational alliances, this is an Abrahamic alliance versus a Shiite alliance.
When you bring in the Hezbollah and the Houthis, and well, Hamas is Sunni, but they’re part of that alliance, and the Iraqi Shiites.
This is a religious war between two very different civilizational alliances.
And make no mistake, it’s being fought in the technopolar stratum and at the astropolar stratum.
And so it’s astonishing.
It’s a very Star Wars-y, like... world that’s rising, a highly religious, technological, and astrological world.
Incredible stuff.
That’s why I don’t call it so much a world order as much as an orbital order, and it’s only going to continue to escalate, not the war itself, but that orbital order with lunar bases, space stations, and what, they’re already talking about terraforming Mars within five years.
Not us, not humans, but robots and AI.
It’s crazy, but it’s happening.
We’re at the cutting edge of it, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, the cutting edge of societal evolution.
There you go.
There are four objections, again meant in good faith, but I think they are rendered obsolete by the new orbital order rising within the civilizational cosmocracy.
Love you guys.
God bless.
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