The Trump administration has portrayed the war on Iran as a video game, a spectator sport, and a social media festival, according to a new analysis. The White House uploaded clips featuring montages of Top Gun, Braveheart, and Breaking Bad with the caption “Justice the American way”. Another clip, entitled Touchdown, shows NFL players tackling each other, followed by footage of a strike explosion. SpongeBob SquarePants also appears, asking “Wanna see me do it again?” before an explosion.
“We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude,” a senior White House official told Politico. “There’s an entertainment factor to what we do.” The analysis argues that this approach reduces the conflict to a competition about scoring, winning, and humiliating the other side, removing the need for complex narratives or justifications.
The war has become a quagmire, with Iran pummelling Gulf countries and Israel with drones and missiles, and shutting the Strait of Hormuz, blocking the passage of oil, gas, and commodities. What was supposed to be a quick win has turned into a quagmire, so it must be simplified for viral dopamine into something triumphant.
AI has been deployed on an unprecedented scale in the conflict. In a video posted by the Centcom commander for Operation Epic Fury, Adm Brad Cooper summarised that in more than 5,500 strikes on Iran, AI had played a crucial role. “Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot,” he said, “but advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.” This process is known as “streamlining the kill chain”, reducing the effort to surveil, collect intelligence, and then select a target.
The remote nature of the conflict deepens the state of unreality. There are no boots on the ground, no one seeing the whites of the eyes of those who are killed, and few casualties on the American and Israeli side relative to the scale of the assault. The analysis concludes that all there is, is a faceless enemy, and a measure of success or defeat only measurable in terms of boosts or injuries to the US’s ego.
