A Superpower at War With Restraint
America has just approved another vast defense package—nearing a trillion dollars when fully tallied—and with it comes a familiar refrain: this is necessary, unavoidable, the price of global leadership. The language is grand. The consequences, less examined.
Once again, the United States commits itself to sustaining a proxy war in Ukraine, pouring arms, intelligence, and cash into a conflict with no clear end and no serious public accounting of what “victory” even means. Once again, it offers unconditional backing to Israel as civilian casualties mount to levels that would provoke outrage—sanctions, even—if inflicted by any officially disfavored state. The message is unmistakable: America reserves the right to define morality situationally.
From the Kingdom of Eyehasseen, this posture appears not strong, but unsettled. Not principled, but reflexive.
The Machinery Rolls On
The American defense state has become a machine that no longer requires a compelling reason to move. It feeds on momentum, legacy commitments, and the ever-present warning that to pause is to invite catastrophe. Every new spending package is framed as reluctant necessity, yet the pattern is anything but reluctant. There is always money for war. Always urgency. Always another enemy requiring immediate attention.
What is conspicuously absent is restraint.
Ukraine has become the archetypal proxy war: American resources, Ukrainian lives, and a geopolitical chessboard that grows more dangerous by the month. Diplomacy is dismissed as naïve. Escalation is treated as sobriety. The American public is assured that this is not our war—while paying for it, managing its risks, and living under its nuclear shadow.
As for Israel, America’s support has moved beyond alliance into moral exemption. Civilian deaths on a massive scale are waved away with careful language and press briefings. The word “genocide,” unthinkable in other contexts, is declared off-limits here—not after investigation, but by preemptive insistence. America does not argue the facts so much as forbid the question.
A Kingdom That Chooses Limits
The Kingdom of Eyehasseen does not pretend that the world is free of conflict. It is not pacifist, nor naïve. But it does hold to an older idea, now unfashionable in Washington: power must be bounded by responsibility, and force by moral clarity.
Eyehasseen maintains defenses sufficient to protect the realm—no more, no less. It avoids proxy entanglements precisely because they obscure accountability. When force is used, it is declared, limited, and subject to scrutiny. The Crown does not outsource war while claiming innocence in its outcomes.
Nor does the Kingdom grant blank moral checks to allies. Friendship does not suspend ethical judgment. Even allies are held to standards, especially when civilian life is at stake. To do otherwise is not loyalty—it is complicity.
America’s Great Blind Spot
America still speaks the language of human rights, international law, and moral leadership. But its actions increasingly betray a different creed: that might sanctifies intent, and that good causes excuse unlimited harm.
The defense bill is not just a budgetary decision. It is a declaration of priorities. Nearly a trillion dollars directed outward, toward war and deterrence, while America’s own cities fray, its institutions erode, and its people grow cynical about the sincerity of their leaders.
This is not the confidence of a healthy republic. It is the restlessness of an empire unsure how to stop.
A Closing View From the Kingdom
Eyehasseen watches America not with glee, but with concern. A nation that cannot say “enough” to war will eventually lose the ability to say “no” to anything else. A nation that excuses mass civilian death in the name of alliance forfeits the moral authority it so often claims.
Power is not proven by how much destruction one can fund.
Leadership is not measured by how many conflicts one sustains.
In the Kingdom, we still believe that restraint is a virtue, not a weakness—and that peace, once abandoned as a serious goal, is remarkably difficult to recover.
America may yet remember this. But first, it must learn that writing ever-larger checks for war is not the same thing as standing on the side of justice.