The Last Army Standing: The US-Zionist Plan to Disarm the Middle East

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A Doctrine of Dominance

For decades, the strategic vision of the American-Israeli alliance has remained consistent and uncompromising: neutralise any military force in the region that could pose a threat to Israel’s dominance. Behind the rhetoric of ‘peace’ and ‘stability’, a much darker policy has played out that systematically dismantled nearly every national army in the Arab world.

The once-proud militaries of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon have been reduced to fragmented internal security forces. Today, only one major force remains largely intact. But for how long?

At the heart of this doctrine lies a concept that has come to define the post-9/11 West Asia (Middle East): Zero Threat Policy, which is the belief that no neighbouring country should be allowed to maintain a credible military capability that could challenge Israel, even in defence of its own sovereignty.

Zero Threat Policy: Redrawing the Military Map

This Zero Threat Policy has guided American and Israeli interventions for years. Whether through full-scale invasions, economic sanctions, covert operations, or diplomatic pressure, the objective is consistent: total regional military disarmament, while Israel is militarily empowered beyond any other regional ally. 

Israel’s doctrine of military supremacy is not defensive; it is proactive, preventative, and permanent, and it is preemptively offensive. The goal is not peaceful coexistence, but rather the complete elimination of any future military challenge, short-, mid-, and long-term. This has led to a carefully executed campaign that transcends governments and presidential terms. It is not a partisan American policy. It is a strategic consensus shared by every US administration since the Cold War, rooted in the belief that for Israel to survive, its neighbours must be perpetually weak.

Iraq: Dismantling a Powerhouse

Iraq once boasted the fourth-largest army in the world. It fought a brutal war with Iran in the 1980s that showcased its military capacity and regional influence, which was power-multiplied by the US. But by 2003, Iraq’s fate was sealed. The US invasion of Iraq wasn’t about the alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction; it was about destroying an Arab army that had the numbers, experience, and will to challenge Israel in the future. It was also the road to Damascus, and the fall of Syria, as described in the 1996 paper ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’. 

The first order of business after Saddam Hussein’s fall wasn’t reconstruction; it was the dissolution of the military. Under Paul Bremer’s authority, the entire Iraqi army was disbanded overnight. Hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers were thrown into the streets with no jobs, no pensions, and no future. Bremer served as the US Presidential Envoy to Iraq and Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority following the unlawful 2003 US invasion. He was appointed by President George W. Bush and arrived in Baghdad in May 2003. Many of them would later form the backbone of various insurgent groups, including those that resisted both US occupation and ISIS.

The post-war reconstruction deliberately avoided rebuilding a national army. Instead, Iraq was flooded with sectarian militias, foreign-backed paramilitary groups, and fragmented police units. What emerged was a state unable to project power; a broken nation too divided to stand. The concept of sectarianism in Iraqi society was externally fomented, rather than historically prevalent, according to Iraqi analyst Sami Ramidani.

Syria: Bombing the Future

Syria’s military once stood as a formidable force in the Levant. It fought multiple wars with Israel, and included Palestinian fighters that were incorporated into the Syrian military’s Liwa Al Quds brigade, which was instrumental in the 2016 liberation of Aleppo from Al Qaeda-led groups. But the regime change war that erupted in 2011, fuelled by Western intelligence operations, Gulf funding, and external political agendas presented a golden opportunity for the US and Israel.

While foreign-backed Takfiri factions celebrated the weakening of the former Syrian Government, Israel launched relentless airstrikes targeting arms depots, research centres, and missile production sites. Every sign of military revival was met with an Israeli missile. The final destruction of Syrian military capability by Israel was achieved after the fall of Damascus in December 2024. The war may have fragmented Syria internally, but Israel ensured it remained defenceless externally. Israeli officials were blunt: they would not allow the Syrian army to rebuild itself. And they meant it. 

Every time the Syrian Government tried to re-establish its military infrastructure, it was bombed, often with no international outcry. The West had already labelled Syria a ‘pariah state’, justifying any aggression as a ‘preventive measure’. What emerged from the ruins of the engineered coup was not a restructured national army, but a patchwork of foreign militias, local police, and ‘general security’ forces that remain affiliated to Al Qaeda. 

The very concept of a national military force was erased, replaced by security entities tasked with suppressing dissent and the brutal ethnic cleansing of minorities in Syria, not with defending borders.

Lebanon: An Army without Arms

Lebanon’s army has long been starved of support, caught between internal political divisions and international restrictions. While Hezbollah emerged as the country’s most capable military force in confronting Israeli aggression from 1982 onwards, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) were relegated to a secondary, often symbolic role, sponsored by the US.

Over the years, offers from Russia and Iran to provide Lebanon with advanced weaponry were blocked by the US. Washington, which exercises immense control over Lebanon’s political elite, made its conditions clear: it supports the Lebanese army only for internal stability, not to pose a threat to Israel. This position stripped the LAF of any meaningful deterrent capability. With outdated equipment, limited mobility, and minimal air power, the Lebanese army could not and will never be allowed to protect the country from Israeli incursions and occupation while Lebanon is controlled by the US and allies. It became an internal, domestic security force, not a national first line of defence against external threats.

In 2023 and 2024, the situation worsened. Lebanon’s economic collapse, a result of decades of mismanagement and Ponzi schemes, compounded by US-led sanctions and International Monetary Fund (IMF) pressures, left the military on the brink of collapse. Soldiers were earning $20 per month, leading to mass desertions and a dramatic drop in morale. In some cases, soldiers were seen driving taxis or working other jobs to survive; the same could be said for Syrian soldiers prior to the final collapse of the Syrian Government in December 2024. How can a country defend its sovereignty when its soldiers are hungry? That was precisely the goal.

Sanctions as Stealth Weapons

While bombs and invasions grab headlines, the unilateral coercive measures weapon has proven even more devastating because it is the silent destruction of a sovereign nation. Sanctions imposed on Syria and Lebanon have deliberately crippled their economies and, by extension, their military institutions.

In Syria, the Caesar Act, imposed by the US in 2020 under the first Trump Administration, were designed to prevent any reconstruction efforts by penalising countries for providing assistance to the besieged and battered country. Syrian soldiers went months without salaries. Military bases lacked fuel and supplies. Military factories and development centres were shuttered not just by war, but by financial strangulation.

In Lebanon, Western financial institutions froze assets, restricted aid, and pushed a corrupt banking system into collapse, all while Hezbollah was targeted with secondary sanctions that spilled over into the entire Shiite Muslim population. The independent banking systems linked to Hezbollah, like Jammal and Qard Al Hassan banks that worked on interest-free loans and rejected usury, were targeted for closure by successive US Administrations. 

The result was a military unable to recruit, pay, or equip its forces except through national service, and an army that lacked morale and a unifying nationalist ideology. Economic warfare ensured that military weakness became insidiously structural and permanent.

Internal Conflict: The Engineered Collapse

Beyond sanctions and bombs, the fostering of internal divisions has been a key tactic in weakening Arab armies. From Iraq to Syria, the rise of sectarianism wasn’t accidental; it was engineered.

In Iraq, the US promoted sectarian quotas in politics and the military, fuelling Sunni-Shia and other minority divisions. Again, this was a strategy introduced by Paul Bremer:

Ambassador Bremer’s infamous de-Ba‘thification order, justified as spearheading the construction of an entirely new social order, effectively disemployed the entire Iraqi management strata — over 120,000 people — from state service, while at the same time forcing underground the single most visible remaining group of nationalist actors within Iraqi society. Usually portrayed as anti-Sunni Arab in effect, in light of which groups the Ba‘thist government had favored, this order could equally be seen as damaging to secularists, Christians, smaller minorities, and feminists. However, by reductively tarring Sunni Arabs with the brush of Ba‘thism, American policymakers encouraged revenge actions expressed in a sectarian fashion. At the same time, in light of the high correlation between the former cadres of government technocrats and Ba‘thist membership, this order allowed exile groups — largely sectarian in nature — to fill nearly all governmental posts being opened up by occupation authorities at the time. This last outcome exacerbated tensions between exiles and locals who had never left the country.

This environment of division and instability paved the way for extremist groups like Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, and later ISIS, to rise and expand sponsored by the Zionist bloc; predominantly, the US, UK, Arab Gulf States, and Turkey.

Rather than strengthening national unity, the post-US invasion era fractured Iraq’s military landscape. The Iraqi army, once unified, became a battleground of warring allegiances, abandoned in key moments, infiltrated by sectarian agendas, and ultimately left vulnerable to collapse and infighting.

In Syria, the Zionist bloc-backed rise of Takfiri factions such as Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS devolved into fragmented and competing terrorist groups led by mafia warlords. Government forces (the Syrian Arab Army) that were nationally united and secular for the war years until 2020, collapsed into regional and decentralised brigades under increasingly divided leadership, afflicted by corruption that was driven by poverty and sanctions pressure. Israel, for its part, provided covert medical assistance, weapons, and intelligence support to Takfiri militia in southern Syria, thus sustaining the conflict and fostering national divides. By turning military institutions into hubs of civil strife, the very idea of a national army became untenable.

Yemen: An Anomaly

Yemen presents a unique case. While it has long been one of the region’s poorest countries, the rise of the Ansarullah movement (known as the Houthi in legacy media) brought about an unexpected development: the emergence of an independent, resilient, military-industrial capability. Despite a brutal Saudi-led war backed by the UK, US, UAE, and Israel, Yemeni forces developed long-range drones, ballistic missiles, and coastal defence systems. Their military achievements were not due to state wealth but to innovation, necessity, and the absence of foreign military ‘advisers’.

It is no coincidence that Yemen is now one of the most heavily sanctioned and bombarded countries in the world since 2015; one that has been historically steadfast in its solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. Its ability to develop a resistance-based national military force independent of Western control threatens the regional order. In addition, the US-led intelligence agencies in the West and Israel have admitted an espionage failure in Yemen.

Jordan: Silent, Stable for Now, and Subdued

Jordan rarely features in military analyses, and for good reason. Its military was never allowed to grow beyond internal policing capabilities. UK, US, and Israeli interests ensured that Jordan remained a buffer zone, a ‘safe frontier’ with a reliable, pro-Zionist monarchy, a security-focused state, and with no ambitions for regional power. Jordan receives hundreds of millions in military aid, but this is carefully calibrated. It is focused on counterterrorism and border control, not strategic development. Jordan’s army is professional but intentionally limited.

At the same time, Jordan was central to the regime change war against Syria. Under the notorious Obama-CIA Timber Sycamore operation, weapons were shipped from Jordan to the ‘moderate rebels’, aka armed Muslim Brotherhood factions, historically weaponised against Syrian governments. The so-called Free Syrian Army and the MI6-fostered White Helmets were trained by British and US special forces in Jordan before being unleashed on southern Syria. Israel used Jordanian airspace to conduct missile attacks on Syrian military and air defence installations during the 14-year war against the Syrian people. Jordan has provided air defence for Israel during missile attacks from Yemen and Iran. Jordan is, effectively, a vassal state of the UK, US, and Israel that is only allowed to operate within that construct. It is a textbook case of how military cooperation becomes a tool of control and coercion.

Normalisation and the Regional Disarmament Pact

The wave of normalisation agreements from the UAE and Bahrain to Morocco and Sudan has not brought peace, but rather military realignment and subservience. These states, many of which once embraced anti-Zionist rhetoric, are now replacing military resistance with trade and economic cooperation. Under the guise of ‘security partnerships’, the Abraham Accords essentially function as a regional disarmament pact. Israel is protected, and Arab armies are declawed and converted into an internalised security apparatus.

Foreign Bases and the Displacement of Sovereignty

The US and its allies have replaced national armies with foreign military bases. Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, and the UAE all host major US facilities. These are not partnerships; they are protectorates, where sovereignty is exchanged for security guarantees. This presence ensures that military decisions are outsourced, and any challenge to Israel even rhetorical is crushed diplomatically or economically. The new map of the Arab world is not one of sovereign capitals, but of coordinated containment.

Egypt: The Last Army Standing

Among all of Israel’s neighbours, only Egypt retains a large, organised, and battle-hardened army. Despite the 1978 Camp David Accords, the Egyptian military remains a force to be reckoned with. It commands respect domestically, maintains a strong air force, and engages in major regional exercises. (Camp David can be seen as a precursor to the Trump-delivered Abraham Accords).

Egypt’s sellout to the Gulf Arab States and collaboration with the Zionists in the persecution of Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank is precisely why it is now a target. While Egypt officially upholds peace on paper with Israel, its population remains deeply opposed to normalisation and supportive of the Palestinian cause. The military, long seen as a pillar of Egyptian identity and independence, is perceived as a barrier to universal regional submission.

In recent years, US military aid to Egypt has been used as leverage, conditioned on political obedience and influenced by the US alliance’s weaponisation of human rights narratives. Simultaneously, Israeli influence in Washington has pushed for limits on Egypt’s military capabilities, especially in the Sinai.

Egypt today faces mounting economic challenges and debt enslavement across all sectors, and this is no coincidence. In the wake of the seismic shifts across the region since 7 October 2023, Egypt now stands as the only remaining Arab army with the size, structure, and experience to pose a real threat to Israel mid- and long-term.

For the vision of a Greater Israel to be realised, control over the Sinai becomes essential, and that cannot happen while a strong Egyptian military holds the line. It is therefore increasingly likely that Israel and the US will intensify efforts to weaken the Egyptian army, whether through direct confrontation, economic strangulation, or the use of proxy groups within Egypt itself, which is already a strategy adopted in the Sinai from 2013. The goal will be to destabilise the country, divert the military with an expanded internal conflict, and push it into a prolonged war against the same externally and internally-fostered Takfiri factions, replicating the same strategy that eventually disintegrated and eradicated the Syrian Arab Army.

Policing the ‘New Middle East’

From Iraq to Syria, from Lebanon to Yemen, the map has been redrawn not by borders, but by the disarmament of Arab power. The post-9/11 West Asia is no longer a region of national armies. It is a landscape of disparate militias, Western soft-power NGOs, foreign-military occupation bases, and so-called Israel/Western-aligned peacekeepers, all operating under the watchful eye of Israel and the protective shield of American force and collaboration. The Arab world has been transformed from a region of state-led national resistance to a collection of client states, each stripped of sovereignty and denied the right to defend itself. The Resistance has been forced into non-state actor roles, with the exception of Iran and Yemen.

From Sovereignty to Submission

The systematic dismantling of Arab military power was never about the post-9/11 counter-terrorism or intervention for peace. It was about ensuring that no state from the Euphrates to the Nile could ever stand in the way of Israel’s regional agenda. The tools of destabilisation have been varied: war, sanctions, political pressure, internal divisions, coercion, and incentivisation through normalisation with Israel. But the goal has remained constant: no army and no threat, with Israel’s security assured for decades to come.

Today, only Egypt’s military stands with its spine unbroken. But the pressure is mounting. And as regional alliances shift toward full normalisation, the last pillar of Arab military pride is being slowly undermined and forced into fighting a war imposed upon it by those seeking its destruction. Until the region reclaims its right to unite, to resist, to defend itself, and to build independent armies free from foreign diktats, the era of occupation, whether physical, economic, or political, will persist.

However, it must be reiterated that as Israel and its US-led alliance over-extends, the likelihood of a unified Resistance, even in the countries that have historically normalised relations with Israel and the West, grows ever more probable. When the region in its entirety faces an existential threat, the environment for the renaissance of a Pan-Arab resistance is created. This is the knife edge that Israel and the Zionist bloc are walking in the quest for full-spectrum dominance.

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