One of the most enduring paradoxes in contemporary geopolitics is the persistent self-presentation of the most heavily armed states as existentially insecure. The United States, the world’s dominant military power, and Israel, the most militarized and technologically advanced state in the Middle East, repeatedly portray themselves as besieged, vulnerable, and under constant threat. This discourse endures despite overwhelming empirical evidence of military supremacy, strategic depth, and sustained offensive capacity. The contradiction between material power and narratives of victimhood is not rhetorical excess; it is a structural feature of how power is exercised, legitimized, and shielded from accountability.
The scale of U.S. military dominance is historically unprecedented. For more than two decades, U.S. military expenditure has exceeded that of the next several states combined. When formal Pentagon budgets are supplemented by overseas contingency operations, nuclear weapons modernization, intelligence expenditures, veterans’ obligations, and classified appropriations, total annual military-related spending approaches or surpasses one trillion dollars. The United States maintains hundreds of overseas military installations across more than eighty countries, commands naval fleets in every major ocean, and retains unmatched air, cyber, space, and precision-strike capabilities. Since 2001, it has conducted continuous military operations—through invasions, air campaigns, drone warfare, special forces deployments, and proxy engagements—across multiple regions simultaneously, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. No other state sustains such a permanent condition of global military engagement.
Israel occupies an analogous position at the regional level. Despite its small population and territory, it fields one of the world’s most technologically sophisticated armed forces, enjoys unconditional diplomatic and military backing from the United States, and is widely understood to maintain a significant though undeclared nuclear arsenal, making it the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East. Since 1967, Israel has militarily occupied the entirety of Palestinian territory beyond the Green Line, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. Although permanent ground forces were withdrawn from Gaza in 2005, Gaza remains occupied under international law due to Israel’s effective control over its airspace, territorial waters, borders, population registry, and economy. Across these territories, Palestinians have been subjected for decades to one of the most entrenched and brutal systems of military occupation in the modern era, marked by land expropriation, settlement expansion, movement restrictions, mass incarceration, collective punishment, and recurrent large-scale military assaults.
Israel’s occupation extends beyond Palestine. In 1967 it seized the Syrian Golan Heights, later annexing the territory in defiance of international law. Following the collapse of the Syrian state in December 2024, Israeli forces expanded their military presence beyond previously established disengagement lines, further entrenching their control over Syrian territory. Israel also repeatedly attacks Lebanon, routinely violates Lebanese sovereignty, and effectively controls Lebanese airspace. These practices have become normalized features of Israel’s regional military posture, carried out with near-total impunity.
Despite this overwhelming concentration of coercive power, both the United States and Israel consistently frame themselves as uniquely insecure, and/or obsessed with security. This framing functions not merely as political rhetoric, but as a governing doctrine. In the United States, “national security” operates as an elastic and expansive concept, capable of absorbing virtually any perceived challenge—from rival states and non-state actors to political movements and legal constraints. Threat inflation has become a defining feature of U.S. strategic culture, enabling the justification of preemptive wars, global surveillance architectures, sanctions regimes, and regime-change operations. Actors with limited or asymmetrical capabilities are routinely cast as existential dangers, sustaining the military-industrial complex and normalizing perpetual war.
In Israel, the security paradigm is even more deeply embedded in state identity. Security discourse serves as the primary lens through which all political questions are interpreted. Palestinian resistance—whether armed struggle, civil protest, or diplomatic and legal action—is systematically reframed not as opposition to occupation and dispossession, but as an existential threat to the state itself. This logic renders proportionality politically irrelevant and accountability structurally impossible. Israeli military violence is consistently justified as self-defense, while Palestinian resistance is categorically criminalized as terrorism, regardless of context or scale. Within this framework, the occupation itself disappears as a source of violence, replaced by an abstract and permanent threat narrative.
Crucially, insecurity in these cases does not reflect vulnerability but anxiety over control. For both states, security is defined less as freedom from attack than as freedom from constraint. International law, multilateral institutions, human rights mechanisms, and even allied criticism are frequently treated as strategic threats. When power approaches hegemony, any limitation on its exercise is experienced as danger. What emerges is a permanent siege mentality at the apex of military dominance.
This paradox is reinforced by deeper political and psychological dynamics. States whose legitimacy rests heavily on coercion—whether through global military primacy or prolonged occupation—rarely achieve genuine security. The U.S.-led international order relies on an extensive architecture of bases, sanctions, and enforced alignments rather than consent. Israel’s regional posture relies on military supremacy and the continued subjugation or fragmentation of the Palestinian people. In both cases, force manages conflict without resolving its underlying political causes. Power suppresses resistance but does not eliminate it, producing cycles in which dominance intensifies the insecurity it claims to prevent.
The war on Gaza has brought this contradiction into stark relief. International organizations, human rights groups, and legal experts have documented patterns of mass civilian killing, systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, forced displacement, and the deprivation of basic necessities. A growing body of legal and scholarly analysis has argued that these actions plausibly meet the threshold of genocide under international law, an assessment now the subject of ongoing judicial proceedings. Regardless of final legal determinations, the scale and character of the violence demonstrate how the language of security has been mobilized to justify catastrophic harm against a largely defenseless civilian population.
The invocation of insecurity also performs a disciplinary function within domestic politics. In the United States, questioning military spending or overseas intervention is often framed as naïve, irresponsible, or disloyal. In Israel, dissent from the security consensus frequently results in political marginalization or social exclusion. Fear narrows the range of permissible debate, delegitimizes diplomacy, and renders alternative conceptions of security—rooted in justice, equality, and political resolution—politically suspect.
Ironically, the relentless pursuit of security through militarization has repeatedly produced the opposite outcome. U.S. interventions have left regions fragmented, radicalized, and more unstable. Israel’s perpetual warfare and deepening occupation have entrenched cycles of violence, hardened resistance, and accelerated diplomatic isolation. Military supremacy, untempered by political solutions, produces neither peace nor safety.
The spectacle of the world’s most heavily armed states presenting themselves as perpetual victims therefore raises a fundamental analytical question: whose security is being defended, and at what cost? When security is elevated to an absolute—divorced from legality, accountability, and human consequence—it ceases to function as a protective principle and becomes an ideology of force. In that sense, the loudest declarations of insecurity are not signs of weakness, but symptoms of power unwilling to confront its own responsibility for the conflicts it sustains.
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The opinions and views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Kana’an’s Editorial Board.