Why has the US had to beg for peace with Iran?

The United States want to start peace negotiations with Iran because diplomacy prevailed. It did so because it had no choice. It is running out of weapons.

In the course of a few weeks, the US military has used somewhere between eight and ten years' worth of Tomahawk missile production. The United States can manufacture approximately one hundred Tomahawk missiles per year. It has fired many hundreds, and possibly a thousand, in this conflict alone. Those stocks cannot be replenished quickly. They cannot be replenished at all in the near term. And without them, and other critical weapon supplies, the USA has no credible capacity to restart a war with Iran.

This is not a temporary logistics problem. It is a structural failure, and neoliberalism created that. The US military, like the US economy, has been run on just-in-time principles:

• minimal stockholding,
• maximum efficiency,
• profits prioritised over resilience.

In addition, more than half of every US missile is manufactured outside the United States, across global supply chains that are now disrupted by the very conflict those missiles were used to fight. Aluminium, a critical component, is, for example, in short supply precisely because the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has constrained the materials needed to make the weapons that were supposed to open it.

The damage goes beyond missiles. Maybe three complex radar systems have been destroyed in the Middle East, each taking up to seven years to replace. The B-52 bombers flying missions from the UK are operating well beyond their operational lifespan. So are the refuelling tankers that support them.

As a result, the Financial Times is reporting that Trump himself appealed for peace via Pakistan, a reality that Pete Hegseth and the White House press operation will never publicly acknowledge.

Meanwhile, Iran's military model, based on low-cost, simple, rapidly replicable weapons, has proved devastatingly effective against the world's most expensive and over-engineered military power. Low-tech warfare has beaten the neoliberal military. Now, as a result, time favours Iran. It can replenish its arsenal quickly. The USA cannot.

The conclusion is stark: US military hegemony has been structurally weakened, and not just temporarily set back. It will take years, and possibly a decade, to rebuild. And in that window, the United States cannot threaten, coerce, or intervene with the credibility it once had. The world has changed. This video explains exactly how and why neoliberalism is the ideology that brought the world's biggest military power to its knees.