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America’ s Internal Fractures
Flashmag! Issue 171 April 2026
No analysis of this crisis would be complete without examining how American foreign policy has become the product of an internal cold civil war. Since at least 2016, the United States has been governed by two incompatible narratives of its own national identity. One— carried by the MAGA movement and its evangelical allies— champions a sovereigntist, nationalist vision, suspicious of multilateral institutions, whose support for Israel is not strategic but theological: grounded in a literalist reading of biblical prophecy that makes the State of Israel an actor in Christian eschatology, in the battle of Gog and Magog, in the imminent return of Christ. For these millions of Americans, war in the Middle East is not a foreign policy problem. It is an event foretold in Scripture. The other narrative— more institutionalist, more internationalist— is conscious of the strategic and moral cost of unconditional support, and finds itself increasingly torn between its proclaimed values and its concrete alliances. The student movement that shook American campuses in the spring of 2024, the largest pro-Palestinian demonstrations since the Vietnam War, reveals a deep generational fracture within the Democratic coalition. This internal American incoherence is read, in the capitals of the Global South, not as the sign of a healthy democracy— as Washington likes to frame it— but as the signal of an empire that contradicts itself. And a self-contradicting empire, in the geopolitical calculus of rising powers, is an empire that can be circumvented.
The Eschatological Vertigo: When Wars Become Sacred Narratives
One of the most destabilizing dimensions of this conflict is its saturation by religious imaginaries that strip it of any possibility of rational resolution. On the Iranian side, the Islamic Republic legitimizes itself within a Shia eschatological register. The expectation of the Hidden Mahdi— the occulted imam whose return will inaugurate the reign of justice— confers upon resistance against the world’ s“ arrogants,” to use the Quranic term designating imperial powers, a sacred dimension that forbids compromise perceived as capitulation. Iranian foreign policy is not entirely religious. But it is partly shaped by officials who sincerely believe they are working to prepare the ground for the Mahdi’ s return. On the American side, a significant portion of the most unconditional political supporters of Israel are animated by an evangelical theology— dispensationalism—
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