MADRID - There is a reading that circulates comfortably in certain political circles, reappearing punctually each time Washington changes occupant: the conviction that American hostility toward Iran is, at bottom, a matter of persons. That with the right interlocutor, the correct economic offer, the timely diplomatic gesture, the conflict could be resolved. 

This reading found its ideal candidate in Trump, the businessman who would close deals where politicians had failed, and has proved not merely incorrect but structurally incapable of grasping what is actually occurring. The problem does not reside in any president's psychology, nor in the negotiating skills of any delegation. It resides in the place Iran occupies within the logic of a contracting imperial power, and in the kind of order that power has spent decades attempting to impose: an order that does not simply regulate relations between states, but organizes the very conditions under which certain actors may or may not present themselves as legitimate political subjects. 

To understand why 47 years of negotiations have produced no durable agreement, and why the offensive of January 2026 is not an anomaly but a continuation, one must move from the register of conjuncture to that of historical structure. 

The hegemonic powers of history, at their moments of greatest solidity, have rarely needed to resort systematically to direct occupation. Their power operates through less visible and considerably more effective mechanisms: currency, credit, trade treaties, dependent local elites, and international institutions that process particular interests as if they were universal ones. Violence exists, but is preferably covert, delegated, plausibly deniable. What distinguishes this mode of domination is not the absence of coercion but its naturalization: hierarchy reproduces itself because it appears as spontaneous order rather than imposition. This order has, however, a precise architecture. It rests not only on economics or military force, but on the production of a knowledge that legitimizes it and a classification of the world that determines which actors are capable of governing themselves, which political forms merit recognition, and which populations belong by their very nature to the sphere of tutored subjects rather than sovereign interlocutors. This classificatory operation is the condition of possibility of imperial domination in its hegemonic phase: there is no need to occupy a territory if its elites have internalized the center s criteria of legitimacy and aspire to be recognized by it. 

Victorian Britain illustrates this logic with a clarity that has not been sufficiently acknowledged. Between 1815 and the 1870s, London did not need to plant its flag in every territory to control it. Control of ports, trade routes, debt and maritime security was sufficient. What made that informal empire possible was not only naval power or industrial superiority, but the efficacy with which British liberal thought had managed to present its particular interests, free trade, private property, sovereign debt, parliamentarism, as the general interests of humanity as a whole. Whoever resisted that order did not resist Britain; they resisted progress. The coloniality of knowledge, the determination of which knowledges, political forms and modes of being are legitimate and which are not, was the true engine of empire at its moment of fullness. 

What changed after 1870 was not the will to dominate but the capacity to do so from the shadows. When economic superiority ceased to be self-evident, the ideological scaffolding sustaining it began to crack. The occupation of Egypt in 1882, the partition of Africa, the Boer War: each episode marks the moment when an order that had previously reproduced itself silently demanded to be imposed by visible means. The transition from hegemony to coercive domination is not merely a change of instruments; it is a change in the nature of violence itself. In the hegemonic phase, imperial violence acts primarily on the being of dominated societies, reorganising their ways of knowing themselves, their criteria of value, and their political aspirations. It does not announce itself as violence because it presents itself as education, as opening, as incorporation into civilized order. When that diffuse violence ceases to produce the required effects, when dominated societies begin to articulate demands the existing order cannot process without questioning itself, the imperial power resorts to violence of another register: one that acts directly on bodies, territories and institutions. The occupation of Cairo in 1882 was not a demonstration of strength; it was the admission that the order Britain had presented as universal could only be maintained by military presence. 

The American trajectory reproduces this sequence. After 1945, Washington constructed its hegemony on instruments that avoided formal colonization while reproducing its internal logic precisely. The dollar as world reserve currency, Bretton Woods, the IMF, the World Bank, the network of military bases, and covert action when necessary: each mechanism operated simultaneously as an instrument of power and a device of classification, determining which economies were viable, which governments legitimate, which development models rational.

The coups of 1953 in Iran, 1954 in Guatemala, 1973 in Chile were not simply interventions in the internal politics of other states; they were the violent reaffirmation of the limits within which sovereignty could be exercised without consequences. The universality proclaimed always contained an undeclared exception, and that exception was precisely the order doing the proclaiming. When Bretton Woods collapsed, when the oil shocks and stagflation eroded American economic dominance, what was being consumed was not only a set of financial arrangements but the capacity of the American order to present itself as the natural horizon of modernity. When the knowledge legitimizing hegemony loses credibility, hegemony itself begins to depend on other resources. The Carter Doctrine of 1980, the televised war of 1991, the occupation of Iraq in 2003: the arc from the CIA operation that deposed Mosaddegh to the deployment of hundreds of thousands of soldiers on Baghdad is the arc of an order that has progressively lost its capacity to reproduce itself through knowledge, economic mechanisms and elite consent, and is compelled, consequently, to sustain itself through increasingly ostentatious direct violence. 

Iran is not a peripheral problem Washington has managed badly through tactical insufficiency. It is the point where several of the declining imperial power's central anxieties converge: the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf security architecture, the credibility of guarantees to Saudi Arabia and Israel, and the containment of China and Russia. But Iran's centrality is not exclusively geopolitical. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has represented something the imperial order finds genuinely disturbing: a political formation sustained by its own genealogy, which does not seek to legitimate itself in the terms of Western universalism, and which has survived nearly five decades outside the perimeter of conformity Washington considers the world's natural horizon. In the logic of imperial order, an actor that exists and persists in that position does not represent merely a strategic challenge; it represents an anomaly that questions the universality of the order itself, demonstrating that exit from that order is possible. That demonstration is what proves intolerable, beyond any specific dossier. 

This is the structural reason why the nuclear question, the missiles, regional policy, and Persian Gulf security have functioned for decades as successive pretexts without any of them exhausting the underlying problem. The agreement Washington can offer is precisely the one Iran cannot accept without renouncing its condition as a political subject with interests of its own. A declining power does not grow more moderate as it loses ground; it frequently grows more erratic and more exhibitionistic in the use of force, because force is what remains when the mechanisms of soft hegemony cease to produce their effects. The attack on Iran in January 2026 does not express the confidence of a power in control of its environment; it expresses the anxiety of one that has ceased to be able to govern invisibly. Ostentatious brutality is, in the history of empires, one of the most reliable symptoms of fragility. The promise and the result do not contradict each other: they are two moments of the same system, the first addressed to domestic politics, the second to the management of world order. That both can coexist without the contradiction proving insupportable is precisely a measure of how far the naturalization of war as an ordinary instrument of government has advanced.