“If we do not cease to be an empire, we will cease to be a republic.”

That line, written a quarter-century ago by Patrick J. Buchanan, remains one of the most prescient admonitions in modern American history.

It was not an appeal to pacifism or retreat, but a judgment rooted in historical experience: that no republic can bear the weight of empire without at last collapsing beneath it. Today, that warning echoes not from theory or abstraction, but from the hollowed earth of the Zagros mountains in Iran.

Interpretations of the Fordow strike are divided along partisan lines. The Left denounces it as reckless and needlessly provocative, while the Right fractures: some defend any action associated with President Trump, while others, rooted in the anti-war faction that helped bring him to power, warn that another entanglement in the Middle East would betray the very promises on which his support was built.

But even under modest scrutiny, the strike reveals itself as political theater.

Let us begin with the facts. Fordow is embedded deep within a limestone mountain near the city of Qom, buried approximately 260 feet beneath the surface. This is no ordinary geological cover. The mountain consists primarily of dense Cretaceous limestone and dolomite, with compressive strengths far exceeding those of conventional reinforced concrete. Limestone of this density is not only harder to fracture but also disperses energy more effectively, rendering even precision munitions ineffective beyond a certain depth. The site was chosen and built for a single purpose: to survive a high-intensity aerial bombardment by the most advanced bunker-penetrating weapons in the American arsenal.

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NASA FIRMS imagery 2025-06-19 of Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant. NB. The terrain imagery is older and undated (Public Domain)

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That arsenal includes the GBU‑57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, each bomb weighing roughly 30,000 pounds and designed to destroy deeply buried targets. Under ideal laboratory conditions, the MOP can penetrate up to 200 feet of 5,000 psi reinforced concrete. But Fordow is not buried in concrete; it lies beneath hundreds of feet of lithified carbonate rock, a medium both denser and more structurally cohesive. No weapon currently fielded by the United States is capable of reaching that depth through solid geological shielding.

Even if such penetration were theoretically possible, it would require multiple direct hits on the same precise location in rapid succession. Each B‑2 Spirit stealth bomber can carry no more than two of these enormous bombs. During Operation Midnight Hammer, seven B‑2s departed Whiteman Air Force Base under radio silence and traveled nearly 8,000 miles round-trip to their targets. Of these, six aircraft released two MOPs each on Fordow, amounting to twelve penetrators directed at the facility. A seventh bomber released two additional MOPs on the Natanz enrichment complex.

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NASA FIRMS imagery 2025-06-19 of the Natanz Nuclear Facility. NB. The terrain imagery is older and undated (Public Domain)

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In parallel, more than two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched against the Esfahan nuclear site, targeting power infrastructure and aboveground research installations. The simultaneous nature of the strikes created the appearance of overwhelming force, but in reality, each site received only a portion of the total firepower, diluting the effect and undermining the tactical logic.

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ASA FIRMS imagery 2025-06-19 of the Isfahan Nuclear Research Center. NB. The terrain imagery is older and undated (Public Domain)

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Against a site as hardened as Fordow, dispersing munitions across three locations renders the operation functionally meaningless. Iranian officials confirmed limited damage to surface-level access tunnels and ventilation shafts, but stated that no cascade halls, centrifuge chambers, or enriched uranium stores had been affected. Satellite imagery taken in the days following the strike showed no evidence of internal collapse or deep structural compromise. The mountain stood unbreached. The core remained untouched.

What, then, was the purpose? It was not military victory, nor was it the neutralization of a nuclear threat. It was a signal: directed inward to domestic audiences, outward to allied governments, and upward to the abstract logic of deterrence. But it was not a serious act of warfighting. It was the kind of gesture empires make when they feel compelled to move, yet lack the clarity to act decisively, and the courage to bear the consequences.

This is precisely the kind of foreign policy Buchanan warned against. In “A Republic, Not an Empire,” he argued that America’s destiny as a continental nation had already been fulfilled. There were no more frontiers to settle, no oceans left to cross, no existential threats pressing against its borders. The task before America was no longer expansion, but consolidation: to defend its territory, cultivate its people, and withdraw from the entanglements inherited from the collapse of the European empires.

Instead, the opposite occurred. In 1992, shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a classified memorandum began circulating within the Pentagon. Drafted under the direction of then Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, it asserted that the post–Cold War world must remain unipolar, and that the United States must prevent the emergence of any rival power, anywhere. The doctrine was sweeping in its ambition: it called not merely for defense, but for the active preservation of global military supremacy across all regions, at all times. When The New York Times published its contents, no effort was made to identify or punish the leaker. The message had already served its purpose. Washington wanted the world to know.

From that point forward, the logic of empire ceased to be theory and became policy. The United States expanded NATO eastward, intervened in the Balkans, deepened its security commitments in East Asia, and embraced a de facto doctrine of regime change in the Middle East. After September 11, these ambitions were placed on a permanent war footing. Iraq was invaded and dismantled. Afghanistan was occupied for twenty years. Libya was bombed into anarchy. Syria was inundated with arms and foreign fighters. In each case, the rationale shifted—first terrorism, then democracy, then humanitarianism—yet the outcome remained the same: disorder, death, and a widening gulf between American rhetoric and American capability.

Buchanan foresaw all of this. He warned that the United States could not act as the garrison of the Middle East, the hegemon of the Pacific, the guarantor of European security, and the global enforcer of liberal values, without sacrificing its republican character. Empire does not merely expand power; it transforms the regime itself. It demands permanent war powers, unbounded debt, a swollen bureaucracy, and a ruling class severed from the people it claims to represent. It replaces the citizen with the client, the legislator with the manager, and the nation with the world.

Iran is not an exception. It is the next stage in a pattern long established. The strike on Fordow was not launched to halt nuclear proliferation. It was undertaken without a coherent strategy, and followed by no diplomatic initiative. Its timing served a different purpose: to project strength after recent escalations, to reassure regional allies, and to deflect domestic accusations of weakness. Yet it brings the United States to the threshold of open conflict with a sovereign state whose terrain, alliances, and military capacity all but guarantee a war that would be protracted, costly, and regionally destabilizing. And it does so without the consent of the American people.

The republic is no longer sovereign over its own foreign policy.

The people are no longer consulted.

Congress does not declare war, and

presidents no longer seek its authority.

Decisions of war and peace now reside with unelected actors, within the bureaucracy, the defense industry, and the donor class, whose priorities no election can reverse and whose loyalties often align not with the American nation, but with foreign interest groups that exercise outsized influence over policy in Washington.

This is not sustainable. It is not moral. It is not even rational. It is the final phase of imperial drift.

As Buchanan warned, “The temptation of empire is to believe that we are called to remake the world in our image. But what we remake, more often than not, is ruin.”

The American people must now decide. Will they restore a republic defined by borders, interests, and identity? Or will they continue to underwrite an empire that squanders its blood in foreign deserts and calls it freedom?

The strike on Fordow changed nothing on the ground in Iran. But it revealed everything about what America has become.

And unless Buchanan’s warning is finally heeded, the curtain will rise not on another theater of illusions, but on war itself; and with each gesture cloaked in purpose, we drift nearer to the brink, where empires dissolve and republics do not return. America First means placing the interests of the American people above the ambitions of foreign lobbies, above the illusions of global hegemony, and above the restless compulsion to rule what we do not understand and cannot sustain.

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Chad Crowley is an illiberal riding the tiger. Writer & Translator. He blogs at chadcrowley.substack.com.

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