Who Is the Aggressor? Turning Obstacles into Threats

MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA, 15 Jun 2026

Joe Lauria | Consortium News – TRANSCEND Media Service

U.S.-Israel biennial command post simulation and training exercise, October 2010. Then IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz and Deputy EUCOM Commander U.S. Lt. Gen. John D. Gardner  (IDF/Flickr)

Obstacles to the aggressors’ expansion and occupation in the Middle East are Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shia militia in Iraq. They are presented as “threats” rather than defenders of their dignity, sovereignty and land.

10 Jun 2026 – If you understand who the aggressor is, you are on your way to understanding the mad and perilous times we live in.

Once you get that, what you’ve been taught all your life starts to lose its hold on you.

Establishment education and media try to confuse you. Independent media try to clarify.

Establishment education and media portray the aggressor as the defender, and the victim as the threat. Consortium News endeavors to show you the “threat” is really an obstacle. An obstacle to aggression and occupation. An obstacle to expansion. Locally and globally.

Few would agree with aggression, paid for with your taxes in a so-called democracy. So obstacles to aggression become threats you’re supposed to be afraid of. Offensive action is made to appear as “defense” to protect you from the “threat.”

There’s nothing new in this.  The Romans dressed up their imperial aggression as self-defense against fake threats. Rome provoked tribes, first in Italy and then Gaul and Germania, into forming alliances to protect the tribes’ sovereignty, and then Rome presented these alliances as “threats” that had to be destroyed, justifying war against them.

Rome would also provoke an adversary into invading or launching an attack to obtain the casus belli needed to start a pre-planned war. For instance, Roman ally Masinissa of Numidia repeatedly raided Carthage to provoke it into finally responding militarily in violation of a treaty it had with Rome. The empire used this as a pretext for total destruction and annexation — even though Carthage, an obstacle to Roman expansion, posed no realistic, existential threat.

In the earlier U.S. imperium, Mark Twain explained it this way:

“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”

Today the obstacles to the aggressors’ expansion and occupation in the Middle East are Iran plus the legal, armed resistance to Greater Israel and Greater America: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shia militia in Iraq. They are presented as “threats”rather than defenders of their dignity, sovereignty and land.

In Asia the “threat” is China. Beijing protecting its sovereignty in its own region is somehow a threat to U.S. warships near China’s waters and to Taiwan, which the U.S. agrees is part of China.

In Europe years of NATO expansion, refusal to negotiate a mutual security treaty, rehabilitation of fascism, a coup, and civil war in Ukraine against ethnic Russian coup-resistors provoked Russia to intervene, much as the Romans provoked Carthage.

Getting Russia to invade Ukraine allows the portrayal of Moscow as the aggressor and a “threat” to all of Europe and not as an obstacle to the U.S. and Wall Street return to their 1990s dominance of Russia. (Now there is constant talk of direct NATO war with Russia. The fear is another provocation to get Russia to start it.)

All of these obstacles to U.S. global hegemony are presented to you as existential threats that only the mighty United States, NATO and Israel can protect you from. There’s nothing in it for them, of course, except saving your life, we’re expected to believe.  Except you don’t have to believe it.

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Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. Email: joelauria@consortiumnews.com

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