You can bomb a state. You cannot bomb memory.
America can defeat armies. It can destroy infrastructure, freeze assets, sink ships, sanction banks, cripple currencies, and remove governments.
What it cannot easily do is erase the memory systems of Iran or China. It cannot bomb a civilisation into forgetting itself. It cannot invade its way into legitimacy.
That is why the current American ambition to break Iran, and eventually contain or defeat China, is likely to fail.
The Empire That Rose When Older Worlds Were Wounded
In less than two and a half centuries, the United States has done what older empires took millennia to attempt. It crossed a continent, industrialised at speed, mastered finance, built the most formidable military machine in history, gave the world Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the dollar system, the Internet age, and the post-war institutions through which much of modern global life still moves.
The United States deserves more respect than its critics sometimes allow.
There. I said it. I am capable of impartiality. However…
America did not rise in an empty world. It rose at a moment when older civilisational centres were exhausted, conquered, divided, or humiliated.
Europe, the Roman civilisation’s arguable heir, had spent itself through imperial rivalry and industrial slaughter.
China was battered by internal collapse, foreign predation, and civil war. Others would call it a format, reboot, or systems upgrade that cost lives — otherwise known as the Cultural Revolution. But they turned out alright in the end.
India was locked inside the machinery of empire. But it now proudly wears the crown of having the largest population, albeit while still having issues with language. Hindi may have won by numbers, but colonial English is still used as an official language which is a problem to some scholars of civilisations. For a nation of 1.4 billion people with 5 millenia of history with an electoral democracy, that problem is no problem.
The Islamic world was fractured after the long retreat of Ottoman power. Persia had been squeezed between empires, sanctions, coups, and oil politics.
Into that vacuum came the United States: energetic, inventive, armed with capital, protected by oceans, and convinced that its success carried universal meaning.
For a time, that conviction looked almost reasonable. America did not merely dominate; it organised.
It rebuilt Europe. It occupied Japan and turned a defeated enemy into an ally. It secured sea lanes, denominated trade in its own currency, policed and bought control over energy flows, and converted military reach into an economic architecture it controlled.
The world did not only buy American products, weapons, technologies, and culture; it lived inside, and even embodied, American systems.
The technology it invented created connectivity that enabled the universalisation of American values.
That is the very definition of global power.
When Power Mistakes Systems For History
But power breeds a peculiar blindness.
The United States has increasingly mistaken control over systems for command of history. It has forgotten that there are political states like itself, and then there are civilisational states.
The former can be toppled. The latter absorb catastrophe differently.
There are fewer than a handful of civilisations that can credibly claim roots reaching back five millennia and still remain alive as recognisable centres of identity, memory, and geopolitical existence.
China is one. India is another. Iran, if understood not narrowly as modern Persia but as the Iranian plateau’s civilisational continuum, also belongs in that small company.
Egypt and the Andean world belong in the wider discussion.
These are not merely countries. They are archives and architectures of inter-millennial civilisational survival.
This does not mean such civilisations are as immortal as truth; common sense and history prove that age and longevity are no match for the sins and violence of humanity.
China has collapsed before under the weight of unchecked prosperity and arrogance. India was colonised in many senses of the word. Iran was conquered, thrived, fell, Islamised, was invaded, sanctioned, and remade many times. Egypt changed language, religion, and rulers.
Longevity is not a guarantee of victory by any stretch of the imagination, in any age.
It proves something narrower, but more important: these civilisations have survived existential shocks.
They have endured conquest without becoming merely the property of the conqueror.
They have changed skin without losing bone.
They do not understand time in electoral cycles, quarterly profits, decennial returns, let alone presidential terms.
They think in humiliation and restoration across generations, memory and revenge across centuries, decline and return across ages.
Iran: The Civilisation Washington Cannot Read
And here is where Washington misunderstands Iran most dangerously.
Iran’s resilience has another layer that Washington often misunderstands.
Iran is not only an old civilisation. It is also the principal Shia-majority power in a Muslim world overwhelmingly shaped by Sunni majorities.
For centuries, this gave Iran the psychology of the marked exception: Muslim, but not absorbed into the Sunni mainstream; Islamic, but not Arab; ancient, but still dynamic and far from fossilised; wounded, but not erased.
The Safavids made Twelver Shiism central to Iranian state identity, and the memory of Karbala gave Shia political culture an identity of suffering, sacrifice, and defiance.
Granted, this does not make Iran morally superior, nor does it make the Islamic Republic universally loved by its own people.
But it does mean that foreign pressure can easily harden into civilisational resistance.
Iran’s Shia identity has taught it how to survive as a minority.
Its Persian inheritance has taught it how to survive as an empire without an empire.
The Fatal Confusion Of American Power
This is the mistake at the heart of American power.
It is not that America is weak. It is not. America remains immensely powerful. But it has confused the ability to punish with the ability to prevail.
It has confused the ability to dominate systems with the ability to command civilisation.
That is why the current American ambition to break Iran, and eventually contain or defeat China, is likely to fail.
It is not because Iran is flawless or has some mystical defence system that can keep American missiles and madness at bay.
It is also not because China is benevolent in its efforts to preserve the current US-designed global order, or malevolent in challenging US unipolar hegemony.
It is not because ancient civilisations deserve automatic moral exemption, because they — like everyone else — certainly do not.
It is because military might does not, and should not, ever confer colonial rights.
And economic power, however enormous and coercive, is not and should never be used against any state or society, including those that have already outlived many empires.
How Empires Lose While Winning
The coming American failure will not necessarily look like defeat on a battlefield.
It may look like something more subtle: allies hedging, trade routes rerouting, currencies fragmenting, oil losing some of its political centrality, and civilisational states becoming more defiant after every attempt to discipline them.
That is how empires often lose.
Not all at once. Not always visibly.
They win engagements, issue statements, dominate headlines, and still find that the world beneath them has moved.
Iran and China are testing whether systems can conquer civilisations.
The US looks confident that it will emerge victorious against Iran and China because it controls systems.
But when up against those who have survived five millennia, I would wager that the one fighting from the corner born a quarter of a millennium ago – or, as King Charles put it, “just the other day” – does not hold the better odds.
The odds, methinks, are with Iran and China.
Howard Lee adalah Ahli Parlimen Ipoh Timor (PO64). Beliau juga ialah ahli Jawatankuasa Tertinggi Pusat (CEC) DAP selain menjadi ahli Jawatankuasa Pilihan Khas Perhubungan Antarabangsa dan Perdagangan Antarabangsa, Majlis Perundingan Luar Negeri dan ahli Lembaga Eksekutif Perak Investment Management Centre. Howard juga merupakan mantan Ketua Pemuda Sosialis DAP serta mantan Presiden Kesatuan Pemuda Sosialis Antarabangsa (IUSY).
