The American Plan Against Russia
For three decades, Washington has been assembling the architecture to dismantle Russia. The war on Iran is the final piece it needed.
In January 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski sat down with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and confessed to something that most architects of American power take to their graves without saying aloud. He confirmed that the Carter administration had begun covertly arming Afghan resistance fighters in July 1979, a full five months before Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan. The operation was not, as the official record had long suggested, a response to Soviet aggression. It was designed to produce that aggression. “We didn’t push the Russians to intervene,” Brzezinski said, “but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” When the interviewer pressed him on whether he regretted creating the conditions for what became al-Qaeda, he was calm, almost professorial. “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe?”
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The stirred-up Muslims did not go home. They arrived in lower Manhattan on a Tuesday morning in September 2001, and in Madrid in 2004, and in London in 2005, and they kept arriving in various forms for the next two decades while the United States spent more than six trillion dollars fighting the populations Brzezinski’s strategy had organized, armed, and abandoned when the primary objective was achieved.
That outcome did not discredit the strategy in Washington. It complicated it. The method, using ideologically driven non-state fighters as instruments of sustained pressure against a nuclear adversary whose deterrent cannot reach them, was filed away rather than discarded. The lesson absorbed was not that the method was wrong but that the aftermath required better management. What is being assembled right now, across the Ukrainian front, across the financial architecture of Western sanctions, and in the skies over Iran, suggests the lesson has been processed and the method retrieved. The target is still Russia. The instruments are expected to be the same.
To read the strategy correctly requires looking at it as a sequence rather than a collection of separate crises. Most Western commentary treats the Ukraine war as one story, the campaign against Iran as another, the Trump administration’s hemispheric posturing as a third, and the broader fracturing of the post-Cold War order as background noise connecting all of them. They are phases of a strategic architecture under construction since the Soviet collapse, designed around a single organizing judgment: that Russia, despite its 1991 defeat, retained the capacity to function as a competing pole of global power, and that this capacity had to be eliminated before it could be consolidated.
The judgment was not wrong on its own terms. Russia under Putin demonstrated, with increasing clarity since the early 2000s, an intention to rebuild the influence it lost in the 1990s, to resist the further eastward expansion of American-led institutions, and to develop military and economic relationships providing alternatives to the Western-dominated order in the Global South. None of this required the territorial aggression that produced the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but the ambition preceded the aggression, and Washington read it correctly, if not always proportionately.
What the strategy requires, in sequence, is a secured home hemisphere from which American power can project without a contested rear; a managed conventional attrition of Russian military capacity through European proxy pressure; economic strangulation through sanctions architecture that accumulates faster than Russia’s capacity to adapt; and the one element that no conventional military campaign and no sanctions regime can provide: the ideological and insurgent force that can be applied to Russia’s most exposed geography without ever giving Moscow a state to target in response, a force that can only be released by destroying the one state that has organized and disciplined it for forty years.
The first piece is the least discussed. The Trump administration’s insistence on the Panama Canal, the annexationist language directed at Canada, the aggressive renegotiation of energy relationships across the Western Hemisphere: none of this is the erratic nationalism it appears to be when examined through standard frameworks of American media commentary. Rear-area consolidation is not a defensive posture; it is a preparation for forward deployment, and the forward deployment is Russia. The Monroe Doctrine, which American foreign policy has invoked selectively for two centuries, was always about securing the home hemisphere before projecting outward, and what is being planned in European and Central Asian theaters requires a home base that cannot be economically leveraged or politically contested by adversaries. American energy dominance, which has moved from a domestic political argument to an openly weaponized foreign policy instrument, reduces the leverage any adversary can apply to the economic foundations of American power while increasing Washington’s leverage over European allies whose energy dependence on Russian supply has been severed at considerable cost to them, a cost they are still absorbing.
The European dimension is the most visible and therefore the most misread. The weapons flows into Ukraine, the NATO expansion, the German Zeitenwende and its defense spending revolution, the accession of Sweden and Finland to the Atlantic alliance: all of this has been analyzed exhaustively as a defensive response to Russian aggression. It is that, and it is also something more specific and more cold-blooded. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have been conducting an attrition campaign against one of the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals since February 2022, at a cost in American lives of zero. Russian armored divisions, artillery stockpiles, precision munitions, and military-age men have been drawn down at rates the spring 2022 planning documents did not anticipate. Russia has replaced those losses, expensively and with declining quality of materiel, and has demonstrated a strategic patience that Western analysts consistently underestimated. But patience is not infinite when the economic base is under accumulating pressure and the demographic losses of military-age men are real and compounding.
Europe is being rearranged into a structural confrontation with Russia in which the strategic benefit flows primarily to Washington. The emerging European military-industrial base, the political realignment of states that spent the Cold War in studied neutrality, the transformation of the EU from an economic project into something approaching a security actor: all of this places European populations in a confrontation where any escalation to direct kinetic conflict between NATO and Russian forces occurs first in the Baltic states or Poland, not in Colorado. The United States built NATO partly as a structured mechanism for European participation in American strategic priorities, and what has changed is the scale of what is being asked, which means a greater share of the risk, which means the conventional pressure arm of this strategy against Russia is being paid for substantially in European rather than American blood and treasure.
The sanctions architecture is the third arm, less dramatic than the military campaign but more durable in its effects. The expulsion of Russia from SWIFT, the asset freezes, the technology export controls, the energy embargo: these are not punishments imposed in reaction to the Ukraine invasion but the tightening of a structure under construction from the moment Russia began demonstrating, in the mid-2000s, that it intended to use its energy leverage as a political instrument. The 2022 invasion provided the political conditions for implementing at full scale what had previously been applied in partial measures. Russia has adapted, redirecting energy exports to China and India, building parallel financial infrastructure, sustaining its fiscal position through oil revenues that the price cap mechanism has not reduced as effectively as its designers intended. But adaptation under sanctions runs on treadmills; every workaround has costs, and the cumulative drag on an economy that cannot access Western technology, Western capital markets, or Western supply chains for sophisticated manufacturing is a structural problem that no amount of strategic patience resolves over time.
Three pressure arms, none of them individually decisive, all of them sustainable from the American side at costs Washington has decided are acceptable, and none of them capable on its own of producing the one outcome the strategy requires: the exposure of Russia’s southern and internal geography to a form of pressure that a nuclear deterrent cannot address.
Iran’s destruction is the mechanism for releasing that pressure, and understanding why requires setting aside the narrow frame of nuclear negotiations and Israeli security requirements in which Western commentary consistently embeds the conflict. Iran is the only state in the Middle East that has successfully defied American primacy for four decades, absorbing sanctions, sustaining military capacity, projecting influence through organized proxy networks, and doing all of this without collapsing and without capitulating. It supplied Russia with Shahed-136 drones that rewrote the economics of the Ukrainian air war, filling a precision-strike gap that Western sanctions had opened in Moscow’s arsenal. It holds the southern flank of any serious regional alignment against American power. Most consequentially, it has provided a living demonstration, visible to every government in the Global South watching to see whether resistance to Washington is survivable, that it can be survived, and that demonstration has been operating as a proof of concept that American primacy cannot afford to leave standing regardless of what Iran does or does not do with uranium enrichment.
For Russia specifically, a degraded Iran produces losses of a kind no single military defeat could deliver simultaneously. The drone supply disappears. The political cover Tehran provides in multilateral forums, where Moscow needs Muslim-majority states to abstain rather than condemn, evaporates. The model of sanctions endurance that other targeted states are studying gets destroyed mid-course. The IRGC’s organized networks in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, which have been operating as a coherent anti-Western coalition with Iranian logistics and Iranian strategic discipline, lose their management layer and scatter into something less useful to Moscow and far less predictable to everyone. And Russia’s southern exposure, which Moscow has feared and managed at considerable cost throughout its modern history, opens in a way it has not had to confront since the Soviet collapse.
Operation Epic Fury, launched on February 28, 2026, is the attempt to complete this piece, and Iran has not fallen. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is fighting as if its institutional existence depends on the outcome, because it does. The Iranian state is fighting as if survival is the question on the table, because it is. Washington does not want Iran simply defeated; it wants Iran’s capacity to function as an organized state-level actor eliminated: its command structures dismantled, its proxy networks severed from their logistics, its nuclear infrastructure destroyed, and its IRGC dispersed into something that can no longer be centrally directed. That is a different objective from winning a war, and it explains both the particular intensity of the campaign and Iran’s particular intensity of resistance. There is no negotiated outcome available that preserves what Tehran is fighting to preserve.
The ferocity of Iranian resistance is not, in the cold logic of the strategy, a complication. An Iran that negotiates is an Iran that might reconstitute. An Iran that fights to organizational destruction is an Iran whose networks, dispersed from state patronage and state discipline, become something different: stateless, ideologically driven, deprived of the management layer that made them strategically coherent, and available to be directed by the geography of their interests and their grievances toward the adversary Washington most needs pressured, which has fourteen to fifteen million Muslim citizens concentrated in territories that have twice in living memory demonstrated a capacity for sustained insurgent resistance against which Russian military force has proven catastrophically ineffective.
Fourteen to fifteen million Muslim citizens, concentrated in Chechnya, Dagestan, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Ingushetia, and these are not administrative regions in the sense that, say, Yorkshire is an administrative region. Dagestan alone borders the Caspian Sea, shares proximity with Azerbaijan, and sits at the junction of the Caucasus and Central Asia in ways that make it a strategic corridor as much as a governed territory. The ethnic and linguistic diversity within these communities, Chechen, Avar, Lak, Dargin, Kumyk, Lezgin across Dagestan alone, means no single political arrangement or patronage network can hold all of them simultaneously. Ramzan Kadyrov has governed Chechnya through a personal arrangement with Vladimir Putin that has no institutional foundation and no clear succession. He has deployed Chechen fighters into Ukraine under arrangements that amount to an assertion of political debt, and political debts of that kind accumulate interest at a rate that can shift very quickly when the creditor loses confidence in the borrower’s future.
Beyond Russia’s borders, the Central Asian republics have been drifting out of Moscow’s orbit in ways the Ukraine campaign has accelerated rather than reversed. Kazakhstan refused to send troops to Ukraine and has consistently hedged in every multilateral forum where a clear alignment might have been expected; its President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev made that refusal explicit and public at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in 2022, with Putin sitting beside him on the stage. Uzbekistan, home to the Fergana Valley and its long history of Islamic political organization, has cultivated economic relationships with China, Turkey, and Gulf states that reduce its dependence on Russian preference. Tajikistan hosts Russian military bases while pursuing a political identity organized increasingly around Tajik nationalism rather than Soviet continuity. None of this amounts to a formal break; it is the slow erosion of relationships built on power asymmetry, and power asymmetries shift when the asymmetric power is simultaneously fighting a major land war, absorbing economic attrition, and losing the one regional partner that made its relationships with the Muslim world manageable.
Russia has understood this exposure for years. Following its 2015 Syria intervention, Moscow constructed an elaborate media infrastructure targeting Muslim-majority audiences. RT Arabic was substantially expanded. Sputnik Arabic developed significant reach in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and across the Levant. Russian state media invested in a consistent argument: Moscow is the sovereign defender of Muslim governments against Western imperialism, the one great power that did not participate in the post-2001 wars on Muslim populations. The argument had genuine traction. It was also entirely defensive, not an expansion of Russian influence but a recognition of how exposed Russia’s domestic Muslim populations and its Central Asian periphery would be if Islamic resistance movements concluded that Russia, like the United States, was their adversary rather than their protector. The distinction Moscow was drawing, between supporting Muslim states and opposing Muslim insurgencies, is coherent as policy and fragile as ideology, and it becomes impossible to sustain once Iran, the living argument that resistance to American power can be Muslim, state-backed, and effective, is destroyed from the air.
The nuclear deterrent, which organizes all serious analysis of great power conflict, is structurally irrelevant to the fourth pressure arm. Russia’s deterrent holds against states, against armies, against defined adversaries with capitals and populations and command structures that can be threatened with proportional response. It does not hold against what is being positioned toward Russia’s southern geography. Insurgent movements do not have capitals. They do not have fixed populations against which a nuclear threat is meaningful. They regenerate through ideology and grievance faster than any military operation can suppress them, and the suppression, with its civilian casualties and institutional brutality, functions as the most reliable recruitment instrument available to any ideologically organized resistance. The Soviet Union sent the Red Army into Afghanistan in 1979 with mechanized armor, strategic airpower, and the full weight of superpower commitment, and withdrew ten years later, defeated, having lost to fighters who were out-equipped by every measurable metric except the one that decided the outcome: they were willing to die for a cause the Soviet conscript in Kabul was not willing to die for, and they would be there long after he went home.
Russia fought two Chechen wars and the lesson of both was the same. It lost the first outright, forced into a 1996 ceasefire after two years of fighting that destroyed Grozny and consumed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers. It won the second through the Kadyrovite settlement, an arrangement so personal and so institutionally unfounded that describing it as a resolution rather than a deferral has always required more optimism than the evidence justifies. Throughout both wars and the decade of attacks that followed, including Dubrovka in 2002 and Beslan in 2004, Russia possessed the largest nuclear arsenal on earth, and the arsenal was operationally irrelevant. You cannot detonate a thermonuclear weapon in Dagestan to suppress a guerrilla movement, and you cannot threaten a stateless network with strategic annihilation when it has no state to annihilate.
The IRGC’s Quds Force was, among other things, the mechanism that made dispersed Islamic resistance strategically useful rather than strategically random. It organized, funded, and imposed coherence on armed movements that would otherwise have operated in pure ideological register: unlimited, undirected, and impossible for any external actor to instrument or contain. Hezbollah was not a militia in this framework; it was a military organization with budgets, payrolls, training academies, and strategic assignments that Tehran decided and could, within limits, modulate and restrain. When Hezbollah calculated whether to escalate against Israel at any given moment, that calculation included Tehran’s strategic preferences and political requirements. The Houthis in Yemen received support that came with conditions. The Iraqi Shia militias coordinated through IRGC networks had organizational capacity they could not have generated independently, and Tehran maintained leverage over their operations. The Quds Force was the management layer that converted ideological energy into a directed instrument, and, more critically, that maintained an off-switch. When that layer is destroyed or dispersed, the movements it organized do not close down; they retain the organizational capacity, the combat experience, the weapons knowledge, and the ideological conviction the patronage was built around, but reconstitute without state-imposed constraints and without any calculus that factors in Tehran’s diplomatic position when deciding whether to escalate. The geography of Islamic resistance movements’ interests and Russia’s exposed southern flank will produce pressure on Moscow not because Washington will direct it but because the absence of Iranian state management releases organizational energy into a landscape where Russia’s vulnerabilities are the most proximate and the most historically resonant.
The Arab states have watched this architecture assemble with a particular kind of relief, and it is the mechanism of that relief that illuminates the trap most clearly. The Gulf Cooperation Council states, predominantly Sunni Arab monarchies, organized significant portions of their domestic politics, their security expenditure, and their relationships with Washington around the Iranian threat for forty years. Iran was Shia and Persian, and the Shia-Persian alignment had been coded in Arab nationalist political culture as an existential challenge to Sunni Arab dominance since the 1979 revolution. Saudi Arabia’s clerical establishment framed the regional contest with Iran in theological terms that served the House of Saud’s domestic consolidation and justified arms purchases that have made the kingdom one of the largest military spenders on earth relative to its population. Bahrain, with its Shia majority and Sunni ruling family, interpreted every regional upheaval through the lens of Iranian interference. The UAE carried territorial disputes over Gulf islands. For these states, the degradation of Tehran’s military and institutional capacity is not a geopolitical abstraction but the removal of the external threat that has organized their politics for a generation.
The trap is in what that removal actually accomplishes. The Arab states that have facilitated Iran’s destruction, through intelligence sharing, through basing rights, through the studied silences of governments that might have applied meaningful diplomatic pressure for a ceasefire but chose not to, have not eliminated a threat; they have eliminated the only organized state-level force in the region structurally opposed to American and Israeli primacy. The Iran they feared was real: its proxy networks pressured Arab governments, its sectarian politics inflamed communities across the region, its support for the Houthis devastated Yemen and produced a missile threat that reached deep into Saudi territory. The Iran they helped destroy was also the state that prevented the region’s strategic map from being arranged entirely by Washington and Tel Aviv, and the failure to hold both of those truths simultaneously is what made the quiet facilitation in certain Gulf ministries a generational strategic error whose consequences are still being designed in other people’s planning documents.
Mohammed bin Salman demonstrated, through the China-brokered Saudi-Iran normalization of 2023, that he understood some of this: that an Iran existing as a diplomatic counterweight is more useful than an Iran bombed into organizational incoherence. He signed the normalization because it served Saudi commercial interests and because a functioning relationship with Tehran reduced the proxy pressures on Saudi territory. He subsequently watched Washington make clear that the normalization was not the outcome American strategy required, and the campaign that followed has produced the outcome Washington required instead. The Abraham Accords architecture, built on the premise that Arab governments will accept Israeli regional primacy in exchange for security guarantees and economic relationships, can now proceed in a landscape where the one state capable of offering Arab populations an alternative pole of political identification is gone, and the Arab leaders who believed they were removing a threat to themselves were removing a barrier to someone else’s order.
Pakistan sits at the confluence of every strategic line being drawn in this architecture. It shares a long, porous border with Afghanistan, which was the laboratory of the 1979 strategy and remains the graveyard of every imperial project that has attempted to manage Central Asia from outside. It shares a border with Iran, whose potential collapse will generate refugee flows, armed network dispersal, and sectarian pressures that will cross that border regardless of what Islamabad decides. Pakistan possesses the world’s sixth-largest military and a nuclear arsenal that makes it the only Muslim-majority state with a second-strike capability. It sits astride the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the most strategically significant infrastructure project in South Asia, built because Pakistan’s geography connects Chinese economic expansion to the Arabian Sea in ways that bypass American naval chokepoints.
Pakistan has already been used in this arrangement, in extraordinary depth. The ISI and the CIA ran the Afghan jihad together from 1979 to 1989 through a partnership so intimate that it remains difficult, even now, to map where one organization’s decisions ended and the other’s began. Pakistan believed it was pursuing its interests: containing Soviet expansion on its western border, building strategic depth against India through Afghan client relationships, demonstrating its indispensability to Washington in terms that would translate into military and economic support. Those calculations were not without validity at the time, and Pakistan paid for them with thirty years of internal terrorism that killed tens of thousands of its own citizens, with a sectarian violence infrastructure that the jihad’s organizational networks constructed and no subsequent government has dismantled, with a narco-economy the opium trade of the war years embedded into its border regions, and with American drone strikes on its sovereign territory conducted for over a decade while Pakistan was nominally an ally receiving American military assistance. The relationship has oscillated between dependence and mutual contempt with a regularity that reflects a structural condition: Pakistan is too large and too strategically positioned to be ignored, and too financially dependent on American-aligned institutions to refuse, and those two facts together have produced a foreign policy that is neither alignment nor resistance but a permanent negotiation from structural disadvantage.
Pakistan’s significance to the architecture being assembled extends well beyond its military capacity. Its youth population, among the largest in the world, is mobile, connected, and in substantial numbers economically desperate. Its diaspora runs through the Gulf, through the United Kingdom, through North America, and through networks of religious education that Pakistani institutions have built across Central Asia and Africa over decades, a human network of complexity and geographical reach that no other Muslim-majority state possesses at the same scale, and one that great power competition has learned, from the Afghan experience, to read as a potential instrument.
The Muslim world has a documented history with the offer now being prepared, and the record of what accepting it has produced is available to anyone willing to read it without the self-deception that great power sponsorship tends to cultivate in its recipients. The fighters who drove the Soviet Union from Afghanistan did not find, when the Soviets left, a grateful American foreign policy waiting to honor the implicit contract. They found a country Washington had decided was no longer strategically relevant, stripped of support and left to consume itself. The Taliban that governed from 1996 to 2001 was the direct institutional product of that abandonment, and the al-Qaeda that planned the September 2001 attacks was its ideological product: the conviction that the superpower that had used Muslim fighters and discarded them was not a liberator but an enemy whose true nature had only become visible after the work was done, a conviction that the subsequent six trillion dollars and twenty years of war did not extinguish so much as distribute across a wider geography.
No great power has used a Muslim population as a strategic instrument and honored the implicit contract afterward. The British Empire armed Arab nationalists against the Ottomans and drew the Sykes-Picot lines across their promised land. The American empire armed the Afghan mujahideen and spent the subsequent twenty years hunting their organizational descendants through the hills of the same country, a record that establishes the arrangement as structural rather than contingent: instruments are discarded when the work is done, and the people who were instruments are left to manage the consequences of having been used.
Russia’s Muslim populations, if mobilized in the manner this strategic logic anticipates, will not be fighting for their own political futures. They will be fighting for a Western strategic objective they had no voice in formulating, that offers them nothing once the objective is achieved, and that places them in conflict with a Russian state that, whatever its considerable failures, has governed their territories within a continuous political order. What follows a successful destabilization of Russia’s southern flank is not Muslim political autonomy in Dagestan or Tatarstan; it is post-imperial collapse in a territory containing the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and the organizational remnants of a state security apparatus that will not dissolve quietly or cheaply or in ways that remain contained within the geography where they are currently deployed.
The sectarian fault lines that make this strategy possible were not invented in Washington. The Sunni-Shia divide, the Arab-Persian competition, the fractures between Muslim-majority states that prevent any collective response to the position they are being placed in: these are real, deep, and available for external exploitation precisely because Muslim political culture has repeatedly failed to build frameworks capable of managing them without external mediation. The Arab states that quietly facilitated the Iran campaign were not simply deceived; they were pursuing what they understood as their interests, and the problem is not bad faith but a strategic horizon that extends to the dynastic interest and stops before the structural consequence.
Iqbal, writing a century ago about a Muslim civilization being pulled apart by competing European empires, placed the problem precisely: the greatest danger was not external conquest but internal submission, the willingness to accept the categories and priorities of the dominant power as if they were universal truths rather than imperial instruments, a submission cognitive rather than military in character, the inability to read one’s own position in someone else’s design before the design is complete.
The strategy may work. It may exhaust Russia before the dispersed Islamic resistance movements exhaust their usefulness to it, and before the blowback from their dispersal reaches the states and the interests that enabled the sequence. Washington’s architects have the historical record, the institutional capacity, and the consolidated hemisphere from which to believe it will, and they have something else as well: the 1998 interview, the September morning that followed the strategy it described, the six trillion dollars and the years of war that followed that morning, and the Taliban government running Afghanistan today, which is to say the full evidence of how consistently the long-term consequences of stirring up Muslims have been managed by the people who do the stirring. The question is not whether they know this history. They do. The question is whether the prize of a dismantled Russia, measured against everything that history records, has led them to conclude that blowback is a manageable risk they are prepared to impose on populations who were never consulted, and the answer, written across the skies of Iran since February 28, is unambiguous.
Brzezinski called it liberation.