The Interest in the Fire

Conflicts do not persist because they are insoluble. Most of the great protracted conflicts of modern history could have been resolved at certain moments — technically, diplomatically, territorially. They were not resolved. The question that is rarely asked is not: why not? But: for whom not?

Resolved conflicts no longer produce anything. A pacified war needs no weapons, no intelligence operations, no emergency laws, no war premier. For certain actors that is no relief. It is an existential threat.

I. Management Without Collusion

It would be a simplification to paint the picture that conspiracy theories always paint: back rooms, phone calls, a coordinated plan. That is not the thesis of this paper — nor is it necessary.

Management needs no collusion. It describes the coming together of converging interests that stabilise one another without ever being openly coordinated. An estate agent, a divorce lawyer and a removals firm all profit from the same broken marriage — without ever having spoken to one another. Their shared interest in the dissolution of the marriage does not make any of them a perpetrator. It makes them structural partners.

This is the Megamachine in its geopolitical dimension: not a conspiracy, but converging systemic logics that produce the same result as a conspiracy — without the coordination costs.

II. The Four Structural Partners

In the case of the conflicts in the Middle East, at least four such interests converge without collusion.

First: the interest of certain political leaderships in the permanence of the state of emergency as an instrument for staying in power. A peace process deprives this instrument of its raw material. At the time of 7 October 2023, Israeli domestic politics was in the gravest constitutional crisis since the founding of the state. Within hours of the attack the protests were over, the constitutional debate suspended, the indicted head of government a war premier. This is not a claim about cause and effect. It is an observation about benefit and beneficiaries.

Second: the interest of the arms industry in real theatres of war as test tracks, sales markets and budget justifications. The Iran war is the first large-scale deployment of AI-supported kill chains — for certain companies a proof of production with a global audience.

Third: the interest of theological movements in escalation as fulfilment. For them every de-escalation is a postponement, every escalation a step closer to the promise. They have no interest in a solution. The solution would devalue their narrative. Cornell University found in an analysis that tens of millions of American evangelicals believe in dispensationalism — the theological conviction that conflicts in the Middle East will trigger the return of Christ. That is not a sect. It is a mass conviction — and it now sits in the command structure of the greatest military power on earth.

Fourth: the institutional interest of an 800-billion-dollar military machine in the permanence of threat narratives. An army of this size without a serious enemy loses its legitimacy. That is not malicious intent — it is institutional logic. It is the bureaucracy principle from this paper: the apparatus cannot bring forth anything that contradicts its own nature.

III. Strategic Ignorance

In intelligence analysis there is a distinction that rarely makes it into public debate: between the failure to find something out — and the failure to want to know something. In hindsight both can look like an information deficit. Both produce the same gap in the record. But the causes are different.

Political leaderships sometimes ignore warnings not because they do not believe them — but because believing them would force them into action they do not want. Between 1940 and 1941 Stalin received dozens of precise warnings of the German invasion. He had an agent arrested who warned particularly persistently. That was not a failure of information. It was a refusal of information out of strategic convenience. This strategic ignorance protects against the duty to act. It creates plausible ignorance. It can hardly be distinguished from actual ignorance — unless the documents surface later.

IV. The Missing Brake

In 1983 one man saved the world because he hesitated. Stanislav Petrov had twenty minutes. He used them not to act but to doubt. The hesitation was the moral act — and it was possible because Petrov knew what was at stake, for him, for his country, for his family. He was not outside the harm. He was right in the middle of it.

A theology that promises its faithful that they will be taken out before the worst destruction — through the so-called Rapture — eliminates this brake in a more fundamental way. Whoever believes he will watch the apocalypse from above calculates the risk differently. Not out of malice. Out of theology.

This describes a combination that has never existed in this form before: a great power with an arms industry that profits from war, with political leaderships that need the state of emergency, and with a significant part of its military command structure that interprets war as a God-willed end time — and sees itself as beyond the consequences.