In 1934, a best-selling book called Merchants of Death made a simple and outrageous argument: that arms manufacturers had conspired to drag the United States into World War I because war was good for their business. The accusation was not entirely fair — the book's own authors admitted munitions makers were not the sole cause of American involvement — but it captured something real about the profit motive in warfare. The Senate convened the Nye Committee to investigate. Senator Gerald Nye declared that the committee had found men "striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself."
Ninety years later, the accusation deserves updating. The merchants of death have new products and new distribution channels. They don't sell weapons. They sell confusion.
Consider what happened in March 2026, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat in a Jerusalem café and held up his hands.
Rumors had circulated for days that Netanyahu had been killed in Iranian attacks and that footage of him at press conferences was AI-generated. His response was to post a live video of himself ordering a cappuccino, sarcastically declaring he was "dying for coffee," and spreading his fingers wide to show he had exactly five of them. Within hours, the café video itself was declared a deepfake. The café released photographs proving Netanyahu had visited. Those photographs were disputed. A serving head of government had to marshal documentary evidence of his own corporeal existence, and the documentary evidence was itself contested.
Who profited from this spectacle? Not Iran, which generated some of the original disinformation. Not Israel, whose leader spent an afternoon proving he was alive. Not the United States. The primary beneficiaries were the anonymous accounts, content creators, and platform operators whose revenue models run on engagement — and nothing generates engagement quite like a story about whether a prime minister is alive or dead.
To understand how we got here, it helps to trace how media and warfare have intersected over the past sixty years — because the current information environment is not simply an extension of what came before. It is a reversal of it.
Vietnam is remembered as the first television war, and correctly so, though the legend has been somewhat embellished. Film from the battlefield had to be physically transported home before broadcast — nothing was truly live. And Walter Cronkite's famous 1968 editorial declaring the war "mired in stalemate" did not, as the mythology has it, single-handedly turn the country against the conflict. Public opinion had already been shifting; what Cronkite did was legitimize dissent, making opposition to the war acceptable to mainstream Americans who had previously deferred to official optimism. The photograph of a naked child fleeing a napalm strike, the footage of the Tet Offensive, the nightly body counts — these did not create opposition to the war so much as make it impossible to sustain the gap between official narrative and visible reality.
The Gulf War of 1991 produced the opposite effect, and understanding why matters. CNN broadcast the opening bombardment of Baghdad live, in real time — green-hued night-vision footage of tracers and explosions that viewers described as looking like a video game. The coverage emphasized precision, technology, and American capability. Retired generals served as expert commentators. Anti-war voices were nearly absent. One observer reported that college students watched CNN's war coverage and cheered and placed bets as if it were a football game. Public support for the war surged at the start of the air campaign and stayed high through the conflict's swift conclusion. The lesson the military drew was that controlling the information environment was as important as controlling the battlefield.
These two eras, different as they were in outcome, shared one critical feature: a common factual baseline. In both cases, a relatively small number of institutional gatekeepers — the three networks, wire services, a handful of major newspapers — determined what most Americans saw and when they saw it. Editors and producers made judgments that were fallible and sometimes corrupted by access journalism and official pressure, but they were at least trying to describe reality. When those institutions failed — when official optimism about Vietnam collapsed against visible evidence — the failure was legible. There was a shared world of facts to be contested.
That world is gone.
The social media era did not simply accelerate the existing information environment. It replaced the economic logic that governed it. Television news was a business, but its revenue came from audiences who expected the content to be real. Advertising rates depended on credibility. The incentive structure, however imperfectly, pointed toward accuracy as a commercial value.
Platform engagement economics point elsewhere. X's revenue-sharing program pays creators based on engagement. YouTube, Telegram, Substack, Instagram, and the broader attention economy each have their own versions of the same logic. Shocking, emotionally provocative content about missile strikes, burning aircraft carriers, and killed world leaders generates more engagement than corrections and verified reporting. The marginal cost of AI-generated dramatic footage is now essentially zero. The New York Times identified more than 110 distinct AI-generated images and videos in the first two weeks of the Iran war. A single post purporting to show ballistic missiles over Dubai — which actually showed footage from a 2024 attack on Tel Aviv — was viewed more than four million times before it was identified as false. The accounts posting this content collected advertising revenue from every view. The disinformation was not incidental to the business model. It was the product.
The Trump administration's decision to mix Call of Duty game clips with actual footage of US strikes was not, in this context, an aberration. It was the Gulf War aesthetic — war as exciting, technological, winnable — taken to its logical conclusion in an environment where the line between entertainment and documentation had already been dissolved by years of engagement-optimized content. The Iranian government's response, an AI-generated video mimicking Lego animation, was the mirror image. Both sides had accepted that the information environment was a performance space rather than a factual one.
The cruelest irony belongs to Iran. Carnegie Endowment analysts documented what they are calling the liar's dividend problem: Iran's years-long investment in state disinformation has contaminated the information space so thoroughly that its legitimate grievances — civilian casualties, damaged civilian infrastructure — are now met with reflexive skepticism by international audiences. The regime spent years flooding the zone with fabricated content. When real atrocities occurred, the world had already been trained not to believe Iranian claims. The most prolific disinformation producer in the conflict became its own biggest victim.
This is the structural logic of what the merchants of confusion have built. Disinformation is not a stable equilibrium. It is a commons tragedy. Every actor that floods the information space with noise reduces the signal value of any claim — including true ones. Iran loses the ability to document its own suffering. The US loses the ability to project a coherent narrative. Netanyahu has to prove he is alive with café receipts. Anonymous engagement farmers profit from all of it, because their revenue comes from the volume of attention rather than its accuracy.
The Nye Committee's central finding was that a financial interest in warfare had distorted the political process for deciding when to wage it. The question the 2026 Iran war raises is whether a financial interest in informational chaos has done the same thing to the epistemic commons — the shared factual baseline in which democratic publics form judgments about war and peace.
The arms industry at least produced something auditable — ships, guns, munitions that could be taxed and regulated. The confusion industry produces nothing except more confusion, and it is structurally resistant to regulation because every proposed remedy collides with the legitimate interests of free expression.
The Merchants of Death had their Senate hearing. Nobody is convening a hearing for the merchants of confusion. But the profit motive is the same. The product has simply gotten harder to see — which is, of course, the point.
