The Perimeter Problem: How America’s Shows of Force Are Expanding Risk Instead of Control
by Jaffa Levy
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This article is not about imminent world war or the collapse of American power. It examines something quieter and more structural. Across Iran, Venezuela, Greenland, and the Red Sea, the United States is using visible coercion to signal strength, but those signals are generating new obligations faster than they produce compliance. The result is not defeat, but a widening perimeter of responsibility that strains endurance, attention, and control.
In the first weeks of 2026, the United States appeared to be everywhere at once. Iran. Venezuela. Greenland. The Red Sea. Ukraine. China. Each week brought a new flashpoint, a new threat, a new show of force. To supporters, it looked like decisiveness. To critics, chaos. To most readers, it was simply hard to follow.
What matters is not any single crisis. What matters is the pattern that connects them. When you step back, a clearer picture emerges. Washington is not struggling because it lacks power. It is struggling because it is using power in a way that creates more problems than it resolves.
The point is not that the United States is weak. The point is that it is using strength in ways that create follow on obligations faster than they create compliance. Every apparent quick win widens the perimeter of responsibility, and every widened perimeter increases the likelihood that smaller or weaker actors will test the seams through asymmetric probes or opportunistic alliances. That is how overstretch begins, quietly and incrementally.
Read these events one by one and they look manageable. Read them together and their structure becomes visible. Iran. Venezuela. Greenland. Maritime enforcement. Ukraine. China. These are not isolated files. They are expressions of a single operating style: coercion by spectacle, applied across domains, backed by finite logistics, finite industrial depth, finite political attention, and a global audience that now learns quickly.
Case File: What We Can Actually Establish
Venezuela: The UK House of Commons Library reports that US forces captured President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores in Caracas on 3 January 2026, while noting uncertainty about political stabilization and US end state planning.
Iran: Reporting documents widespread unrest, a lethal crackdown, and near total internet disruption beginning 8 January 2026, with human rights organisations arguing the blackout concealed mass violations.
Connectivity as terrain: Monitoring groups describe the shutdown as a decisive short term tool to disrupt mobilisation and external narrative amplification.
Red Sea: Parliamentary and institutional assessments conclude that Western air strikes have not restored normal shipping or durable deterrence against the Houthis.
Industrial constraint: CSIS and Congressional Budget Office analyses show China’s dominance in commercial shipbuilding and identify US shipyard bottlenecks that limit sustained fleet repair.
Fiscal constraint: Government Accountability Office reporting highlights munitions and sustainment limits imposed by fiscal caps.
1. Iran: Where Threats Become Commitments
Iran is often described as the spark that could ignite a wider war. That framing is dramatic but misleading. The more useful way to understand Iran is as the place where threats begin to turn into commitments.
Recent reporting describes intense unrest followed by a violent crackdown and a nationwide communications blackout. The shutdown was not only about repression. It was also about control. By disrupting connectivity, Iranian authorities collapsed the rapid feedback loop between protest, imagery, and external pressure. Whether this secures long term stability is unclear. In the short term, it blunts coercion.
When President Trump speaks publicly about the need for new leadership in Iran, he is sending a signal. It reassures domestic audiences. It tells Tehran that the conflict is existential. It alerts allies that retaliation, price shocks, or regional escalation may follow. But once such language is used, the space for de escalation narrows. Signalling without a defined end state becomes a wager that fear alone will do the work.
History suggests it rarely does. Air power can degrade targets quickly but it seldom produces political closure. RAND analyses of Iraq show that early air dominance in 2003 did not prevent escalation into a decade long stabilisation effort, with post strike costs exceeding two trillion dollars. In Iran’s case, any strike campaign would predictably widen into a regional problem involving retaliation, base vulnerability, shipping disruption, and oil price shock. This is the theatre where improvisation carries the highest penalty.
2. Venezuela: The Illusion of the Clean Operation
Venezuela appears, at first glance, to offer something Iran does not: proximity, familiarity, and speed. It sits inside a long standing American mental map of hemispheric enforcement. It is the kind of place where decisive action looks possible.
The problem is that removing a leader does not remove the political problem. Capture operations often unify actors who otherwise disagree, as occurred after the removal of Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989. What looks like resolution can quickly become responsibility.
The House of Commons Library summary is careful. It records the event and flags uncertainty about what comes next. That uncertainty is the risk. Once Washington owns the outcome, it inherits the obligation to stabilise whatever follows. That obligation persists long after the cameras move on.
Beyond Venezuela, the signal travels. Other states reassess custody risk, alliance guarantees, and exposure to US power. Precedents matter most to those who believe they may be next.
3. Greenland: When Allies Become Audiences
Greenland is often justified in strategic language: Arctic access, resources, surveillance. Those arguments are not frivolous. But the immediate dynamic is political.
Public pressure and tariff threats directed at allied governments transform a strategic discussion into a test of hierarchy. Coercing allies in public carries costs. It erodes confidence in collective defence and accelerates hedging behaviour. Hedging rarely means open defection. It means delay, diversification, and quiet preparation for autonomy.
The paradox is that visible dominance can expose dependency rather than strength. When compliance requires threat and punishment, alliances begin to look less like partnerships and more like protection arrangements. That perception spreads.
4. Why the Sea Matters More Than It Seems
The ocean runs through every one of these disputes. Maritime mobility underpins American power, and maritime enforcement tests its limits. The Red Sea crisis made this visible. Air strikes imposed costs, but they did not restore normal shipping or durable deterrence.
Endurance is measured in repair slots, dry docks, skilled labour, and munitions throughput. Congressional Budget Office projections indicate US shipyards can sustain only seventy to eighty major repairs each year, even as demands multiply. In long contests, time itself becomes a weapon.
This is why sanctioned shipping and contested interdictions matter. Every enforcement action teaches counterparties how to adapt. Each attempt at control becomes rehearsal. The sea is not a sideshow. It is where limits reveal themselves.
5. What This Pattern Tells Us
Put together, the picture is clear. Washington is applying pressure across multiple theatres at once while constraints tighten: allied cohesion is brittle, maritime deterrence is contested, industrial replacement capacity is uneven, fiscal limits restrict sustainment, executive attention is divided, and global audiences increasingly interpret coercion as predation.
The risk is not imminent world war. That is prophecy. The risk is escalation without closure. Each unresolved campaign generates the need for the next. Each new theatre dilutes attention. Each dilution invites opportunism. Power is rarely lost in a single defeat. It erodes through cumulative misalignment between performance and capacity.
This is not an argument about inevitable decline. It is an argument about method. Empire by optics can dominate headlines. It cannot reliably consolidate outcomes. When it fails, it escalates to recover the illusion it just lost.
