Author Archives: Haig Hovaness

Military dominance is often treated as strategic insurance. Yet history suggests that battlefield superiority can generate domestic political instability when the moral and reputational costs of sustained force penetrate the patron state’s political system. Examining France in Algeria alongside the contemporary U.S.–Israel alliance, this article argues that the decisive variable is not military capacity but legitimation capacity — the ability of a democratic society to sustain political consent under the burdens of prolonged external conflict.

In 1956, Britain’s Suez campaign collapsed not because its forces were defeated, but because sterling could not withstand financial pressure. The episode revealed a structural truth: military capability is subordinate to monetary autonomy. Today the United States is not Britain under Bretton Woods, but it faces expanding global commitments alongside rising debt, elevated interest costs, and industrial constraints. This article examines how financial markets, rather than battlefields, may ultimately define the limits of American power. A single geopolitical shock is manageable. A sequence of them may not be. History may not repeat—but it can rhyme.

The collapse of nuclear arms control is not returning the world to Cold War stability, but pushing it into a more complex and less governable nuclear order. As treaties lapse, latent up-arming capacity, compressed decision times, and multi-actor deterrence dynamics combine to raise systemic risk. This article examines how the erosion of formal limits—rather than malign intent—has made nuclear escalation easier, more opaque, and more dangerous, and why the United States bears central responsibility for dismantling the institutional architecture that once constrained catastrophe.

The United States is not merely losing military capacity—it is losing the ability to recognize what it no longer has. As political posture outruns material readiness, allies and adversaries are conditioned to expect reserves of power that do not exist. The result is systematic risk mispricing, easier escalation, and a growing risk of military defeat.

Escalation advocates argue that bombing Iran could extract concessions, collapse the regime, or permanently secure Israel. History suggests otherwise. Strategic bombing has repeatedly failed to produce regime collapse, even under extreme destruction. More importantly, even the most maximal hypothetical “success” against Iran would not resolve Israel’s deeper strategic dilemma. The Middle East is not a two-player system, and force cannot substitute for a political end state. Without defined limits and durable arrangements, military action merely resets the cycle of conflict—accumulating risk over time rather than producing security.

Silicon Valley’s entry into defense contracting is often framed as a long-overdue modernization of a bureaucratic Pentagon. This article argues that the venture capital model is structurally misaligned with the requirements of strategic defense systems engineering. The rise of a Military–Industrial–Venture Complex risks collapsing governance into product design, accelerating technological deployment without corresponding institutional capacity, and increasing escalation and democratic accountability risks.