How long will the United States remain at war? We are now nearly two months into the Iran war, and very little progress has been made. In spite of the President’s threats to “destroy an entire civilization”, the Iranian government remains in power, and the original goals of the war, vague and ambiguous as they were to begin with, seem to have been totally and completely abandoned. Now, the primary goal seems to be to achieve a situation in which the United States can withdraw from Iran while keeping the vital chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz open. This is, of course, nonsensical and leaves open the question of why we invaded in the first place. Two months ago, the strait was open. A war that, in the best-case scenario, ends status quo ante bellum is a meaningless war, an exercise in superfluous death.

Even this perfunctory goal, however, seems unachievable. Talks with Iran in Pakistan a few weeks ago collapsed, in spite of the U.S. sending its most charismatic and level-headed representative, JD Vance. (To be fair to Mr. Vance, perhaps he was distracted– he had spent the rest of that week in Budapest campaigning for Hungary’s far-right, comically corrupt Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s reëlection. Orbàn ended up losing in the biggest landslide in Hungarian history.) The United States is now engaging in a costly, redundant blockade of the Strait, publicly admonishing any reporters that question the direction of the war, and gas(ha!)lighting the public about rising prices at the pump.

And so the question remains, why are we at war to begin with? Well, for one, because the current Israeli government wants us to be. Benjamin Netanyahu personally, and the state of Israel more broadly, has been determined to go to war with Iran for decades- there’s footage of Netanyahu in the 90s arguing in front of the UN that Iran is mere months from a nuclear weapon. (The irony of Israel, a country that almost certainly actually possesses secret nuclear weapons, accusing Iran, a country that almost certainly doesn’t, of this, is lost on them.) They have pushed the past several administrations to go to war with Iran and have so far never found a willing partner. The current administration, however, seems significantly more willing to play along with Israel’s ambitions.

Anti-semitic conspiracies about Jewish or Zionist control over the government are, of course, bigoted and deplorable, and unrelated to the point I am making. However, the administration’s (and the previous administration’s) unwavering support of Israel through an ongoing genocide and several meaningless wars with Iran and Lebanon has made clear that there are parties within the United States, particularly within the right-wing neo-conservative foreign policy establishment, for whom the Israeli government’s desires are the primary motivating factor in Middle East policy decisions. The logic behind this is obvious and internally consistent, if morally dubious. Israel is our only ally in the Middle East, the most geopolitically essential region in the world, so we’d better not upset them. It’s less that Israel “controls” the United States (as some far-right conspiracists would argue), or that Israel is an extension of the United States’ imperialism (as some far-left proponents would argue), and more that it’s a symbiotic relationship, with both parties feeling that they need each other’s unwavering support in order to survive and enact their (unpopular and frequently immoral) actions. This is, however, difficult to sell to the public, and some former members of the right-wing ecosphere have taken a curiously anti-Zionist tilt in recent months: Theo Von, for example, questioned whether the President was “compromised by Israel”, and Tucker Carlson released a public apology for having ever supported Trump.

The other reason we’re at war is almost astonishingly cynical. War is, simply, good business. Not for the regular person, obviously, who is now paying far more for gas than before, and not for most of the general economy, which has been in a nervous state since the start of the war, but for defense contractors. A huge section of the American economy is devoted to the business of war and death abroad, and this sector is more involved with the United States government than maybe any other. The Department of Defense relies on contracts from these companies, and due to the infamously poor and opaque record-keeping of the Pentagon, has had some questionable interactions and dealings with these companies. Dick Cheney, famously, was on the board of directors for Halliburton, a defense contractor, during the war in Iraq. For a company like Palantir, which the administration is involved with, war is good business. And the administration, like any politician in a capitalist democracy, has debts to pay to its donors.

In conclusion, people will continue dying, and profits will continue rising. We should be angry.