A Nuclear Iran Would Be 'A Global Hegemon," Next CENTCOM Leader Claims

Edited by Sam Thielman

I HAVE SEEN SOME hyper-inflated threat assessments in my 20-plus years as a "national security" reporter. But in a whole different category is Admiral Brad Cooper's description of what will happen if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon. 

A nuclear Iran—which, before continuing, we must emphasize is hypothetical—would have "significant destabilizing military and diplomatic consequences," Cooper told the Senate Armed Services Committee two weeks ago in answers to written questions for his successful confirmation to lead U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), the U.S. military command that operates in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. And, sure. We can expect a nuclear arms race in the region, Cooper elaborates—a response that would of course be Saudi Arabia's choice, and perhaps its preference, but which Cooper attributes solely to Iran, while ignoring Israel's decades-long nuclear arsenal. 

"Iran would be able to further threaten U.S. Forces and U.S. interests" in the Middle East. Sure. A "strategically stronger Iran could also embolden its proxy/partner groups." Sure. "The risk of miscalculation and accidents would likely also rise." Sure, although I'd put it more like: The consequences of miscalculation and accidents would likely also rise. 

But Cooper was just warming up. "Additionally," he continues, 

the balance of power would shift, as Iran would become a global hegemon and maintain regional dominance for many years. Iran’s nuclear weapons capability would alter its position in strategic and economic negotiations very likely leading to increased geopolitical tensions and instability. Diplomatic efforts with Iran could become more challenging, reducing chances for peaceful resolution on contentious issues.

My emphasis. That's Cooper's answer to question 32, if you want to check that I'm not misquoting him.

I came to Cooper's written Q&A because I hadn't had time to watch his confirmation hearing, which occurred in the aftermath of the U.S. bombing Iran and Iran bombing al-Udeid. Recent reporting has held that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to launch Israel's June bombing campaign on Iran before the departure of U.S. Central Command's extremely hawkish leader, Army Gen. Erik Kurilla. Kurilla, whom Politico reported alpha-dogged Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, specifically recommended Cooper, his deputy and before that the commander of the Bahrain-based U.S. 5th Fleet. 

So I expected from Cooper a certain amount of continuity with Kurilla. That's generally what I found across several issues a CENTCOM commander will confront. Cooper wants to keep residual forces in Syria and Iraq. Cooper wants "an integrated Middle East"—that is, a walled garden of U.S. military and surveillance infrastructure sold/provided to Mideast proxies. Cooper accordingly wants "reform" of the foreign-military sales process, which is to say, he wants your tax dollars to go even more frictionlessly to defense contractors, and believes such a thing will stem Chinese and Russian power from advancing in the Middle East. Whatever the merits of all that, it's well within bipartisan and Security-State consensus.

Saying a nuclear Iran will become "a global hegemon" is not. That's as paranoid a fantasy as paranoid fantasies come. Were it even remotely plausible, it would be a world-historical development, not something to tuck away behind the word "additionally." But it's not remotely plausible. 

The United States has enjoyed global hegemony between 1991 and… arguably still today, given that no rival can project as much economic, military, cultural and diplomatic power across all continents, seas, skies, and even low-earth orbit. But multipolarity is indeed advancing, so let's for sake of this discussion cap the era of U.S. global hegemony arbitrarily at, say, 2022, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine put the U.S.-backed construct of European security under sustained challenge. Either way, that's the scale we're talking about when we talk about global hegemony. As U.S. global hegemony erodes, only China can credibly step into anything like a comparable hegemonic position, and China has substantial ways to go before it can sustain military power (as opposed to economic and diplomatic power) beyond Asia. China currently has one military base in Africa, in Djibouti, and may be looking at another in Gabon. Even after its recent forced retrenchment on the continent, the U.S. is ahead by a good two dozen.

Without disrespecting the numerous eras of Persian great-power status throughout history, the Islamic Republic of Iran is simply not that. Iran's economy has a gross domestic product of around $418 billion, which isn't within spitting distance of Brazil's $2 trillion, 10th-in-the-world economy. Ask global hegemon North Korea if sprinkling nuclear weapons atop a moribund economy, even in a highly militarized society, equals global hegemony. There is a plausible geopolitical story about the growth potential of Iranian power through leveraging its relationships with China, Russia and BRICS. But any such growth will occur in the aftermath of a serious blow to its regional security posture dealt by the U.S.-Israeli coalition, and may need to wait for the end of the U.S. ability to sanction its economy. There is no plausible geopolitical story, with or without nuclear weapons, where Iran achieves global hegemony. 

Lest I be accused of over-focusing on a weird word choice, Cooper also claimed that a nuclear Iran would "maintain its regional dominance for many years." Is Iran regionally dominant right now, though? I would contend that the last 21 months show that Israel, backed by the U.S., is regionally dominant, able to project unmatched and undeterred power into Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, all while conducting a genocide in Gaza. An Iranian nuclear weapon would increase Iran's deterrent capability against Israel and the U.S., unquestionably. But would this hypothetical nuclear deterrent succeed in rolling back U.S.-Israeli regional hegemony? Both the U.S. and Israel are of course nuclear powers. Cooper's absurd portrayal of what Iran might someday become obscures the actual hegemony in the Middle East, which since 2012 has been substantially predicated upon degrading what it is right now. 

The issue here isn't some sports-style power ranking or Iran's position on a leaderboard. It's about how someone who has just taken one of the most powerful, influential commands in the U.S. military portrays the stakes of an escalated conflict. After the U.S.-Israeli bombing, Iran has predictably suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and it's clear despite the Trump administration's manipulations that the nuclear program survives in diminished form. Cooper is now the most important U.S. military officer with regard to Iran. Presenting an apocalyptic portrayal of Iranian aspirations foreshadows a next round of bombs and missiles. 

One more thing about Cooper worth mentioning. When he was in charge of U.S. Fifth Fleet earlier in the decade, Cooper set up something called Task Force 59. Its purpose was to experiment with and integrate into the Fleet an array of drone ships and artificial-intelligence platforms. You can watch a short 2023 video interview with Cooper about Task Force 59 here. Accordingly, Cooper promised in his Senate Q&A to "launch new initiatives that advance our overmatch through the employment of cutting-edge technologies, including AI-enabled, unmanned platforms and digital integration." With the post-2021 networking of Israel and CENTCOM, how long until Cooper experiments with Lavender or Habsora?  

OK, ONE MORE LAST THING about Cooper. Cooper was an architect of both the Biden and Trump versions of the U.S. campaign against the Houthis, which he quite accurately told 60 Minutes was the most intense and sustained U.S. naval engagement since World War II. At Cooper's confirmation hearing, he predictably declared that the ceasefire indicated success. "The president gave the military a very precise mission, which was to restore the freedom of navigation, and that mission was successfully executed," he told Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Miss.). That was a constrained but consistent variant of his Biden-era 60 Minutes definition of victory: "the restoration of the free flow of commerce and safe navigation in the Southern Red Sea." 

But in the wake of the U.S.-Israel bombing of Iran and the intensification of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and in time Netanyahu's visit to the White House, the Houthis attacked non-U.S. shipping in the southern Red Sea yesterday. "We haven’t seen any real attacks on merchant shipping since December last year,” said Wolf-Christian Paes, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the AP. "And they’re back with a bang." If only someone could have predicted this! 

I don't consider Cooper responsible for two of his commander-in-chiefs giving him unreasonable objectives – "unreasonable" because those commanders-in-chief refused the only option that would have achieved them, which is to say forcing Israel to stop its Gaza genocide, the purpose of the Houthis' threats on shipping. But he's the latest CENTCOM leader to respond to an unreasonable objective by bullshitting Congress and the public about it, instead of explaining that the objective was beyond military means all along.    

FOLLOWING UP ON the initial whistleblower accounts of contractors with the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” deliberately firing on starving Palestinians, the BBC last week ran another such story, although anonymity makes it impossible for me to determine whether it's sourced to the same whistleblower. But not long afterward, two of the best investigative reporters covering "national security," Jonathan Landay and Aram Rostom, reported seeing GHF documents about creating "humanitarian transit zones" in Gaza that sound a whole lot like concentration camps. (Remember: a concentration camp and a death camp are not necessarily the same thing.) GHF and parent-like contractor Safe Reach Solutions (SRF) denied that the plan was or is operative, prompting Landay and Rostom to archly point out, "The document included the GHF name on the cover and SRS on several slides." 

On the heels of that quasi-denial came a Haaretz story on Monday reporting that Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered the IDF to plan for "establish[ing] a 'humanitarian city' on the ruins of Rafah, which would eventually house the entire population of the Gaza Strip." Katz reportedly briefed journalists that, in Haaretz's paraphrase, "Once inside, residents would not be allowed to leave." And "international partners," rather than Israel itself, would administer the "humanitarian city."

Construction might begin, the piece continued, during any 60-day ceasefire that Israel and Hamas are discussing via intermediaries this week. So not only is Hamas asked to accept a ceasefire with no provision for "phase two" talks on its permanence—don't miss Jeremy Scahill's reporting here—the IDF may use that pause in fighting to construct something that, at a minimum, is within field-goal range of being a concentration camp. 

ALSO, DON'T MISS Ken Klippenstein’s excellent reporting on the disgraceful ICE/CBP/federalized National Guard "show of force" through Los Angeles' MacArthur Park on Monday. Everything about this operation screams Imperial Boomerang. In miniature, it's reminiscent of the U.S. military in Iraq—though thankfully without firing on Angelenos thus far—down to servicemembers telling Ken that the whole thing is stupid and dishonorable. 

A document Ken published from the National Guard unit on site said the point of swarming in the park was "to demonstrate, through a show of presence, the capacity and freedom of maneuver of federal law enforcement within" what they are calling "the Los Angeles Joint Operations Area (JOA)." His sources also tell him that officers up the chain of command "have been talking about establishing some kind of command facility akin to a 'forward operating base' in the Park, an idea so provocative that the proposal keeps getting kicked far down the road." That's an idea taken from David Petraeus at the start of the 2007-8 Iraq Surge, when U.S. forces established "Joint Security Stations," rugged bases in the middle of hostile or unclaimed parts of Baghdad. And it's beyond provocative, as it tells Angelenos that their city is under occupation. 

Other documents Ken reproduces show absurd descriptions of the park posing a "HIGH" threat to "DoD personnel operating in the area." This is a place where kids play. Yet the Guard documents imply that MS-13 could lure the kidnappers of the undocumented into an L-shaped ambush and may even have taken up sniper positions: "In addition to alleys ringing the park, MS-13 likely maintains access to multiple 8-10 story residential apartment building[s] immediately adjacent to the park." I'm guessing this just means that Latinos live in those buildings. But like with Cooper and the coming "global hegemony" of Iran, the point of threat inflation is to justify any subsequent military operation. 

FINALLY, this Axios piece made me laugh.