The term “gangster empire” seems pretty apt. The orange baby has, throughout its adult life, functioned like a crime boss (or at least like what normal people understand a “crime boss” to be. Source material: Lucky Loser.
“We have now entered a new phase of Western-led global savagery — prefigured by the genocide in Gaza — in which all pretences have been dropped and only the logic of raw, unrestrained violence remains.”
There is another perspective, of course: that the US is actually still being led by at least some people who are at least rational, and using the orange baby is a sort of marionnette (it is demonstrably easy to manipulate). What these people (if they exist) have as a world-domination goal, as opposed to simply the crap that’s going on in the US, probably has to do with the increasingly shaky status of the US dollar as the world’s “reserve currency.” From this perspective, the most significant opponent of our gangster empire is China. Iran is aligned with China, at least to an extent. So from this angle, changing the regime in Iran is absolutely the goal, and it’s also a means to the end of reducing China’s influence in the Middle East.
If these folks exist, semi-directing US international affairs, there’s a big question mark about the “rationality,” because US soft power around the world has just been dismantled. It’s always been the soft power, it seems to me, that has been the most significant. After all, the US just hasn’t been successful at getting its way by using bullets, missiles, and bombs; the ensuing chaos and unintended consequences have almost always been beyond the ken of US minds for the past 7 decades.
