Flirting with Apocalyptic War in Iran
From almost all perspectives the ongoing war of aggression known as the ‘Iran War’ is one of the greatest international blunders in modern history, and far worse than this, poses the highest risks of stumbling into an apocalyptic warfare since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This joint unprovoked attack on a country posing no threat, falsely rationalized after the fact by considerations of regional security and humanitarian benevolence, unleashed by Israel and the United States while the ghastly genocide in Gaza continues and spreads. Israel is rapidly extending its Gaza combat tactics to the West Bank and southern Lebanon while the world is distracted by the ongoing global ripple effects and potential escalating violence in the Iran War.
This lethal chain of events is further aggravated by Trump’s narcissist theatrics, a personalized and bewildering brand of pathologic gaslighting geopolitics that should frightens the sane among us by its clear preference for raising escalation risks to the rooftops rather than reversing course to avoid being demeaned as ‘a loser’ or ‘spineless’ in the face of Iranian resistance. Embarking on such a war represents a colossal breakdown of strategic intelligence that failed to anticipate Iran’s refusal to bow to such aggressive militarism. Iran’s formidable retaliatory capabilities seemed to have been ignored altogether as well as its collective readiness to absorb suffering and devastation rather give in to a second devastating onslaught by Israel and the United States after enduring the 12-day Iran War in June of 2025.
Likely, one explanation for these miscalculations by the 2026 aggressors was a misinterpretation of the first Iran war, which Israel initiated on June 13, 2025, with finishing touches by U.S. in the form of major B-2 air strikes dropping huge bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities twelve days later. Iran’s soft response was evidently attributed to its weakness as well as an inflated assessments of the damage done to Iran’s nuclear facilities, military sites, and leadership infrastructure. Less than a year later, underestimating Iran’s recovery and greatly improved missile capabilities this second Iran War was initiated. Iran’s internal unrest and protests weeks earlier stimulated by decades of sanctions and externally promoted in various ways, apparently made this an irresistible time to launch a second Iran War under a pragmatically populist Trump urging the Iranians to seize the occasion of the war ‘to take back their country,’ ‘regime change’ by another means.
This message from such a discredited source fared no better than barrage of missile and bombing attacks. This second Iran War initiated by the U.S., joined by Israel, was particularly perfidious considering that conflict-resolving negotiations were underway between Iran and the United States, situated in Oman whose national mediator voiced his public optimism that the parties were on the verge of a broad conflict-resolving agreement. Such a crafty misuses of diplomacy as a prelude to war rather than a genuine search for a peaceful alternative undoubtedly deepened Iran’s suspicion that ceasefire diplomacy is just a pause before the next attack. Trump said as much in his April 1st triumphalist speech on this second phase of an increasingly undisguised undertaking to keep attacking Iran as long as its government is perceived as hostile to the regional strategies of Israel and the United States.
Confusion reigns at present. Whether the war is on the verge of dangerous escalation or a diplomatic reversal of course remains clouded by inconsistent signals from Washington. Trump issues a 48-hour ultimatum demanding Iran’s surrender or experience the destruction of its energy infrastructure, prompting Iran to make counter-threats of the same nature but directed at the entire Gulf region. After which, Trump suspended the threats shortly after they were issued with the apparently fake explanations that strong talks toward reaching a peace agreement with Iran were underway and going well. Iran quickly contradicted Trump’s these upbeat comments and disclosed its own far-reaching demands for a durable future, which seemed far from conveying a readiness to submit to the will of its aggressors. Iran’s apparent position on how to end the war was clarified the by the public release of carefully phrased requirements for a peace deal by an individual described as a high public official. Iran’s position was summarized as follows: firm guarantees that there will be no future repetition of attacking Iran by Israel and the United States; the closure of American military bases in the region; compensation for the damage inflicted on Iran; an end of all warfare in the region; a new legal regime for the Straight of Hormuz; and finally, a call for the criminalization of journalism hostile to Iran. [as reported in Palestinian Chronicle, March 22, 2026].
Western media ignored this Iranian disclosure of its ambitious vision of a durable peace not only for Iran, but for the entire region. It also seemed almost equally dismissive of Trump’s latest about face, mostly interpreting it as a cynical gesture to bring down oil prices and renew the confidence of stock market traders. In this regional setting Israel has continued with its campaign of regional violence despite incurring significant civilian casualties from missile strikes while the U.S. has kept deploying more and more ground troops closer to Iran.
A War of Aggression. Iran was attacked by the United States on February 28, 2026 without even the pretext of a plausible imminent threat to the national security of either Israel or the United States. On the contrary, the attack abruptly ended promising negotiations between the United States on its nuclear program, specifically on setting agreed limits on levels and amounts of enriched uranium production and stockpiles. This disruption of negotiations, followed an Israeli/US pattern previously displayed by Israel’s September 8, 2025 attack on the residence of Hamas negotiators in Qatar to discuss a U.S.-proposed ceasefire agreement on the future of Gaza. The timing of the Iran War is a more dramatic instance of a turn toward war and away from diplomacy while purporting to pursue conflict resolution goals, at least in the Middle East.
A Military and Political Failure. From any objective perspective the war has already proved an awkward military and political failure from the perspective of U.S. and Israel. Forgetting a repetitive lesson since the Vietnam War, as reinforced by subsequent experiences in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, clear military superiority wielded with destructive fury may still fail to produce political victory. Even Israel’s genocidal assault reducing Gaza to a wasteland did not result in achieving its prime objective announced on the eve of its assault, eliminating Hamas as a continuing source of resistance to Israel designs to subjugate the Palestine people. A clear secondary Israeli objective was to extend Israel’s territorial sovereignty over the river to the sea, thereby establishing Greater Israel, and in the process eliminating forever the Palestinian challenge. As with all forms of extreme addictiveness, these militarist phantasies are out of touch with the distinctive realities of. the contemporary world and with the agency of militarist geopolitics, a lesson that could have been learned from China’s dramatic rise in geopolitical status by relying on win/win economistic means.
In the setting of the Iran War the political failure of the undertaking has already been partially confirmed by the refusal of the European and Arab countries to heed Trump’s plea for NATO alliance naval help in opening of the Strait of Hormuz where 20% of the world’s internationally traded oil and gas pass through. As Ramzy Baroud has pointed out in a Palestinian Chronicle article published on March 22, this refusal to side with the aggressor does not express a moral or legal awakening by these governments, but rather reflects the pragmatic recognition that they have no incentive to be part of a failed undertaking that could produce an international disaster of even greater severity if the U.S. chooses to escalate rather than admit defeat and end their aggression.
The other sign of political defeat and miscalculation is the failure of internal opposition to the theocratic government of Iran to take the cue of this military attack to intensify, or at least renew their protest activities, with an expectation that attacks from without would result in the collapse of Islamic governance, paving the way for a second restoration of dynastic rule in Iran. The former Reza Shah’s son, also named Reza Shah, is waiting in the wings for this scenario to become realized. He has pledged his return to Iran to restore the dynasty of his father.as practiced by
Although some scattered protests have continued in Iran, the population as a whole has shown no disposition to take advantage of the war waged against its territorial integrity and political independence by the most powerful country in the world to mount their own struggle for reform. The idea that regime change in Iran might come about in the aftermath of widespread devastation, including the targeted assassination of the Supreme Leader deemed divinely blessed even by a significant proportion of Iranians that includes many opponents and reform-minded protesters is a further sign of the delusionary character of state propaganda in the attacking countries. Such a grim approach as practiced by the U.S. of decapitating the leadership of the adversary, and considering that a kind of political victory is to deprive any war of moral and political legitimacy, and more so for an unlawful war of aggression. The American attack on a girl’s elementary school in Minab, an atrocity killing over 1itima75, mainly children under 12 further alienated Iran’s civilian population. This has been a consensus view among respected independent external assessments of the motives of the attackers.
Israel’s role in the Iran War together with Gazafication of the West Bank and Lebanon has contributed to its steep downward spiral into the dark abyss inhabited by rogue states. The U.S. is suffered the fate of a declining and irresponsible hegemon, less feared and certainly less respected after this exhibition of incompetent and dehumanizing warmaking that is causing worldwide hardships, forcing layoffs, freezing of prices, inflation, and supply chain disruption not only of oil and gas but of many essentials of societal normalcy, including fertilizers. These international ripple effects have caused their most harm to the least developed countries and to the most vulnerable sectors of all societies, including that of the prosperous attacking countries.
Ignoring U.S./Iran History.
Beyond this dangerous impasse caused by gross miscalculation, denialism (claiming victory when the opposite is the real story, and the one worth pondering, a tale of ignoble defeat), and obscured to some extent by Trump and Netanyahu threatening to climb even higher on the precarious escalating ladder. This geopolitical adventurism ignores suppressed history lessons. The U.S. has misplayed its diplomatic cards at least three times in the past when dealing with Iran. The first was in 1953 when the CIA engineered a coup against the elected leader, Mohamed Mossadegh who was neither Islamist nor Communist, but an economic nationalist who had taken public control of Iran’s oil industry from exploitative foreign ownership by legal means, infuriating a powerful coterie of Western corporate investors. The 1953 outcome was the restoration of the dynastic rule of Pahlavi Dynasty headed by the autocratic Reza Shah, and the subsequent reorientation of the Iranian state to Western ideological and economistic values.
The second time was in the aftermath of the Islamic revolutionary movement that led to the Shah’s abdication from the throne in early 1979 and the establishment of a theocratic state under the leadership of its first Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Khomeini. At this early stage, the Islamic leadership sought accommodation and normalcy in its relations with the West, but the pro-Shah Iranian community in the U.S. largely opposed any American accommodation with Tehran. Its influence was bolstered by Israel’s determined resistance to an American acceptance of the movement that drove the Shah from power. These anti-theocratic forces were later further reinforced by influential domestic pro-Israeli neocon hawks favoring by way of their advocacy of a so-called ‘Clean Break’ strategy, the restructuring of the Middle East to ensure the security of Israel and integration in the markets of neoliberal globalization, lobbying for punitive sanctions against Iran until such a result was achieved.
We will never know what might have happened had the U.S. not puts all its geopolitical eggs in Israel’s basket, but if this ‘road not taken’ had been explored, these decades of political tensions and costly military confrontations with Iran might have been avoided. Indeed, in retrospect little was learned from Iran’s moderate restraint when attacked just last June. Moderation was wrongly construed as a show of weakness, as was the Iranian receptivity to negotiations. Instead, Israel and U.S. waited impatiently for an opportune time to start a more robust war, exaggerating the impetus of the internal economic populist anti-government movement in Iran. This recent protest rising war was attributed to Iran’s alleged incompetence and corruption. It seems to have been misconstrued by Western propaganda designed to make U.S./Israel intervention appear humanitarian and liberating. As expected, this perception was promoted without considering the impact of sanctions designed to bring Iran to its knees by strangling the wellbeing of the population. abetted over the years by Israeli and US tactics of assassinations, destabilizing covert operations and alarmist propaganda about Iran’s nuclear programs (while altogether ignoring the relevance of Israel’s nuclear arsenal and aggressive war-threatening propaganda).
The third occasion was when the U.S. ended conflict-resolving negotiations with missiles and bombs not out of frustration, but in reaction to their evident promise of success. Again, Iran showed a willingness to negotiate, reinforcing frequent assertions by its own Supreme Leader of a principled rejection of the production of nuclear weapon, much less its use. Iran has reinforced this unilateral declaration with a public willingness to agree to a formal internationally monitored commitment along the same lines, or better by far reaching an agreement to establish a mandatory nuclear free zone throughout the entire region, which in the past Israel has as would be expected, ignored all such peaceably achieved denuclearizing initiatives.
But denuclearizing the region was never meant to be, at least up to now. As with past and present conflicts in the region, Israel has again twisted Big Brother’s arm so hard as to embark upon this failing warmaking project. Awkwardly, the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, admitted as much when he acknowledged that the U.S. launched the war to avoid what Washington considered a worse outcome if the U.S. had deferred acting until after Israel started the war, and lost political control over the military operations. Interestingly, Rubio never specified what he meant by such a comment, and has since walked it back out of existence.
No Exit? Or Safe Exit
Two images: A major course correction after mission failure, hidden by distraction or a continued ascent of the escalation raising risks of apocalyptic warfare. Trump’s diplomacy has been driven by the zigzags of his transactional narcissism often couled with personal enrichment schemes. This second Iran War already suggests that the Trumpist slogan Making America Decline Everyday (MADE) is far more descriptive of reality than the official marketing claim of Make America Great Again (MAGA). Even such a modification is too focused on the United States, overlooking the deadly global ripple effects of miscalculations made at the behest of the Trump/Netanyahu partnership, with even worse on the road ahead unless they quickly change course, accepting a ‘peace without honor’ as the least bad option.
At this time tensions and fears coexist with uncertainty as to whether a durable peace or a menacing escalation is the next stage in this latest Middle East war that should never have happened.
The media shift from questioning a war started in violation of international law and responsible statecraft to a focus on whether it is succeeding or failing is disquieting. It has made the discussion turning on issues of winning or losing rather than the underlying criminality of aggressive war, what the judges at Nuremberg had declared the ultimate war crime, the Crime Against Peace.
Lending respectability to the idea of ‘wars of choice’ as was done at the outset of the Iran War is a subversive notion earlier invoked to justify the Iraq War pf 2003. It is time for political leaders and opinion column journalists to learn that questions of war and peace should never be situated with in a realm of choice, as if pricing vegetables at a supermarket.
The Price of Empire and the Costs of War on Iran
Image by Hesan Mohamadi.
What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated U.S. military adventurism in the Middle East amount to? Some of the toll is already clear. Washington has squandered billions of dollars on a reckless war of aggression against Iran. A merciless campaign of aerial bombardment has driven millions from their homes. American and Israeli airstrikes have rained destruction on 10,000 civilian sites and already killed more than 3,000 people in Iran and Lebanon. Among the dead are more than 200 children, many killed in a U.S. strike on a girls’ school, a war crime that evokes the grim precedent of such past American atrocities as the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam or the 1991 Amiriyah shelter bombing in Iraq.
The latest war has also dealt a potentially fatal blow to our already battered democratic institutions. It’s a war neither authorized by Congress nor supported by the public. Instead, it was launched by a president who refuses to submit to the law or heed the will of the people, claiming in true authoritarian fashion that he is the law, and that he alone embodies the popular will.
Such democratic backsliding has, however, been decades in the making, a predictable result of longstanding imperial impunity. Yet we may rapidly be approaching a point of no return. Even George W. Bush, in launching his catastrophic wars of choice in the region, sought to manufacture consent and present the case before the United Nations. Today, there is neither the pretense of legality nor of legitimacy.
The costs associated with this latest criminal war, measured in human lives; the misappropriation of national resources; and the erosion of the rule of law will only continue to mount. Yet there is also a less visible, less immediate price tag for such wars. If the history of American interventions in the region offers any guide, the full bill will likely not become apparent for months, years, or even decades. When it finally arrives, however, it will carry a familiar name: blowback.
For that reason, it’s important at this moment to recall the lessons Washington appears determined to forget. From Afghanistan to Iran, Iraq to Libya, the record is unmistakable. Yet as long as the historical amnesia that grips this country’s political establishment remains unchallenged, the same cycles of escalation and reprisal will undoubtedly persist in the years to come, threatening to once again draw the United States (and much of the world) ever deeper into the abyss of forever war.
Oil and the Engine of Empire
While the post-9/11 “war on terror” is often invoked as the starting point of U.S. militarism in the Middle East, the roots of conflict there stretch back nearly a century. The violence and instability unleashed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented less a rupture with the past than a continuation of long-established patterns of U.S. policy. The seeds of the forever wars had, in fact, been planted decades earlier in the oil-rich soil of the region.
Direct American involvement began in the previous century in the years between the First and Second World Wars. By that point, petroleum had become not merely a valuable commodity but a strategic necessity for sustaining a modern industrial economy. The vast oil reserves discovered in the United States had propelled the American economy to global prominence and played a decisive role in fueling the Allied war effort during World War I. Yet policymakers in Washington understood that domestic reserves were finite. As petroleum became synonymous with power, economically, militarily, and politically, the United States increasingly turned abroad to secure new sources.
The Middle East emerged as a critical frontier in that search, drawing the region ever more tightly into the orbit of an expanding American empire. In 1933, Standard Oil of California secured an exploratory concession with the conservative monarchy of Saudi Arabia. The agreement created the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), laying the groundwork for the 1945 U.S.-Saudi oil-for-security partnership that would become central to Washington’s future influence over the region’s geopolitical order.
Over the years, the insatiable thirst for oil only drew the United States ever deeper into the region. By 1953, American intervention assumed more overtly coercive forms. That year, in coordination with British intelligence, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s popular prime minister, who had committed a cardinal sin in the emerging Cold War years. In 1951, he presided over the nationalization of his country’s oil industry in an effort to return sovereign control of its resources to the Iranian people by wresting them from the exploitative grip of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the precursor to British Petroleum.
Despite his staunchly nationalist rather than communist credentials, a fact understood in Tehran, London, and Washington, Mossadegh would then be cast as, at worst, a dangerous proxy of the Soviet Union and, at best, a threat to regional stability (as in, American hegemony). The coup that followed ended Iran’s fragile democratic experiment, secured continued access to Iranian oil for Western companies, and restored the Shah of Iran to power. His regime would then be sustained by a steady outward flow of oil and a nearly endless influx of U.S. weaponry. With CIA backing, his secret police, SAVAK, would terrorize and torture a generation of Iranians.
Yet Washington celebrated this new arrangement, claiming that Iran had been transformed into an “island of stability,” and a cornerstone of the “twin pillar strategy,” in which Washington would outsource regional Cold War policing to compliant authoritarian allies in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Such subversion of nationalist movements and support for despotic monarchies, as well as the increasingly unequivocal backing of Israel, would generate intense backlash. Among the most visible early expressions of that was the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, demonstrating how U.S. policy in the Middle East could reverberate domestically.
But the first unmistakable case of blowback arrived in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution. In that country, discontent had been simmering beneath the seemingly stable façade of the Shah’s rule for years. When the monarchy collapsed after months of protests and repression, the Islamic Republic would fill the political vacuum, drawing on the theological language of Shi’ism and the political rhetoric of opposition to the Shah, the United States, and Israel.
In the U.S., those developments were largely stripped of their historical context. Americans were instead cast as the innocent victims of irrational fanaticism. Why do they hate us? was the refrain that echoed across the Western media and the answers offered rarely confronted the long history of intervention and exploitation. Instead, they defaulted to a supposed civilizational conflict with Islam, which was portrayed as inherently antagonistic to “Western values.”
Such explanations obscured an uncomfortable reality — that the U.S. had repeatedly undermined democracy across the region (as well as in other parts of the world) to advance its own interests. As a Pentagon commission report in 2004 acknowledged, the problem was not that people “hate our freedoms,” as President George W. Bush had reductively claimed, but that many “hate our policies.” In other words, the attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, 2001, were the ultimate, if deeply disturbing, expression of blowback.
Revolution and Counterrevolution in the Persian Gulf
Those widely resented policies from Washington were reinforced by its overreaction to the 1979 upheaval in Iran. That country’s new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, sought not only to transform Iranian society internally but envisioned the Islamic Republic as the opening move in a broader anti-imperialist struggle across the Middle East. For Washington and its reactionary regional allies, the specter of such potential revolutionary contagion posed a profound threat.
In January 1980, in an attempt to contain the Iranian regime, President Jimmy Carter articulated a new foreign policy position that placed the U.S. on a collision course in the region. The Carter Doctrine declared the Persian Gulf a “vital interest” of the United States, warning that any attempt by an outside power to gain control would be repelled by “any means necessary, including military force.” In that fashion, Washington asserted an explicit claim to a protectorate thousands of miles from its shores. The United States, Carter made clear, was prepared to send soldiers there to ensure uninterrupted access to oil.
The strategic reorientation that followed proved violent and far-reaching, while marking a shift away from East and Southeast Asia as the principal theaters of Cold War conflict. As Andrew Bacevich observed in his book America’s War for the Greater Middle East, if you were to measure U.S. involvement by the number of troops killed in action, the transformation was striking. From the end of World War II to 1980 almost no American soldiers were killed in the region. Since 1990, however, virtually none have been killed anywhere except in what Bacevich termed the “Greater Middle East.”
Measured in American lives alone, the subsequent costs would number in the thousands. Measured in civilians killed across the region, the toll would be vastly greater. Over the past several decades U.S.-led or -backed wars have contributed to the deaths of millions of people and the displacement of tens of millions more, producing one of the most devastating population catastrophes since the end of World War II.
Proxy Wars and the Escalation Trap
The American shift toward the Middle East ensured that the United States would become deeply entwined in a cascade of conflicts. As regional actors moved either to defend a fragile status quo or exploit the upheavals that followed, Washington began instigating new conflicts in the region.
In Baghdad, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein opposed the new government in Tehran on ideological and strategic grounds. The emergence of a revolutionary Shi’a state next door threatened his Sunni-dominated Ba’athist regime that ruled over a Shi’a majority in Iraq. At the same time, Saddam sought to exploit what he perceived to be Iranian weakness, pressing longstanding revanchist claims to the oil-rich borderlands of southwestern Iran.
Saudi Arabia viewed these developments with similar alarm. In the capital Riyadh, policymakers feared that revolutionary Shi’ism might threaten the legitimacy of the kingdom’s Sunni Wahhabi monarchy. The call for a Shi’a revolution also raised concerns about unrest in its oil-rich Eastern Province, where Shi’a workers faced economic exploitation and near colonial conditions. Similar anxieties reverberated across the other Gulf monarchies.
The United States responded by doubling down on support for the remaining pillars of its regional order, Saudi Arabia and Israel, while seeking to contain and roll back the perceived threat posed by Iran. Still interpreting regional upheaval through the prism of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers also expanded their involvement elsewhere. In Afghanistan, the CIA launched the largest covert operation in its history, channeling weapons and support to the Afghan mujahideen resisting the Soviet Union’s occupation of that country that began in December 1979.
The Soviet intervention itself was shaped by the shockwaves of the Iranian Revolution. Leaders in Moscow feared a militant Islam on their southern flank that might embolden similar currents within Muslim-majority regions of the Soviet Union.
In Iraq, the U.S. publicly tilted toward Saddam Hussein while simultaneously engaging in illegal weapons sales to Iran, with the funds received being rerouted to bankroll another American-backed war in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Civil War, worsened by Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, created the conditions for the rise of Hezbollah, which presented itself as a defender of marginalized Shi’a communities against Israeli military aggression and sectarian violence.
By 1986, after escalating regional violence and spill-over, the administration of President Ronald Reagan took a step that paved the way for what would, in the next century, become Washington’s “War on Terror.” In April of that year, Reagan launched airstrikes in the dense heart of Tripoli on the home of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, holding him responsible for acts of non-state terrorism abroad, including support for armed movements from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Irish Republican Army.
That operation marked a significant escalation in the region and its justification would later be formalized as the Bush Doctrine: the claim that Washington could wage preemptive war anywhere against any state accused of supporting terrorism inside its country or outside its borders. That doctrine was no less illegitimate, illegal, or dangerous in the 1980s than it would become two decades later. As Daniel Ellsberg observed then (a point he would continue to press throughout his life, including after President Barack Obama ordered similar strikes on Libya in 2011), it seemed that the U.S. had “adopted a public policy of responding to state-sponsored terrorism with U.S. state-sponsored terrorism.”
In each instance, deeper involvement in the region produced deeper backlash. The U.S.-backed Afghan jihad helped give rise to Al-Qaeda in 1988 and paved the way for the Taliban’s seizure of power in 1996 and the failed 20-year American war in Afghanistan. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the Gulf War of 1991, which laid the groundwork for the criminal 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The instability that followed not only expanded Iran’s regional influence but contributed to the emergence of the Islamic State. In Lebanon, the power vacuum that Hezbollah came to fill resulted in the 1983 barracks bombing in Beirut, the deadliest day for U.S. Marines since Iwo Jima.
The Lesson Not Learned
The pattern is difficult to ignore, despite our government’s persistent efforts to do so. Many of the actors Washington came to identify as its principal adversaries emerged either in direct response to U.S. policies or had themselves once been cultivated by Washington in pursuit of short-sighted strategic aims. In case after case, conflicts initiated or intensified by the United States appeared to subside, only to reemerge in new, more volatile forms. Intervention produced instability; instability served to justify further interventions; and the cycle only repeated itself thereafter.
There is little reason to believe that Donald Trump’s war against Iran will prove any different. By now, the historical record should make that clear, which is why we must oppose the violence being carried out in our name, as it is wrong, criminal, and immoral. We must oppose it for the sake of our common humanity, but also for our own sake.
After all, history tells us one thing: when we wage unjust wars that terrorize distant populations in far-off lands, the violence rarely remains confined there. Sooner or later, in one form or another, it returns. Violence begets violence, and imperial war has a way of boomeranging back upon those who initiate it. We reap what we sow; the chickens, in time, invariably come home to roost.
This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.
Lesson from the Iran War: Making Enemies Makes Us Poorer
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Our Secretary of Defense (or War) Pete Hegseth seems to be having a really great time killing people in Iran, but his live action video games come at a big cost — not just in lives, but in budget dollars. To be clear, the main reason to oppose this pointless war is its impact on the people of Iran and elsewhere in the region. But it also has a huge economic cost that is seriously underappreciated.
The short-term cost is the shortage of oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and other items that would ordinarily travel through the Strait of Hormuz. This shortage has already sent prices of many items soaring. The impact is not just on the goods themselves; there is a large secondary impact due to higher shipping costs, and if fertilizer supplies are not resumed soon, higher food prices due to lower crop yields. This is a big hit to people in wealthy countries, but it is life-threatening to people living on the edge in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
But in addition to the short-term cost, there is also a longer-term cost insofar as we are making new enemies and therefore will have higher bills for military spending long into the future. We already got the first taste of this as the Trump administration floated the idea of a $200 billion special appropriation to cover the cost of the war.
The Military is Really Big Bucks
There is remarkably little appreciation of how much money is at stake with wars and the military. This is because the media have a deliberate policy of uninformative budget reporting. They just write huge numbers in the millions or billions, knowing they are completely meaningless to almost everyone who sees them.
It would be virtually costless to provide some context for these numbers, for example, expressing them as a percentage of the budget. That would take any competent reporter ten seconds and add maybe ten words to a news article. This would tell you that the $200 billion (2.7 percent of the budget) Trump wants for his Iran war is a relatively big deal, while the $550 million (0.008 percent of the budget) Trump saved us by defunding public broadcasting was not.
It is striking to see that Congress might be willing to quickly cough up this money when it has refused far smaller sums that could have made a huge difference in the lives of tens of millions of people. For example, the extension of the COVID relief enhancement of the Earned Income Tax Credit would have cost around $40 billion (0.6 percent of the budget) annually. Extending the more generous Obamacare subsidies would have cost $27 billion (0.4 percent of the budget) annually.
And it is important to remember that these increased costs are not likely to be just a one-year expenditure. The military budget was 3.0 percent of GDP in 2001, before the war in Afghanistan, and projected to fall to 2.7 percent over the next several years. Instead, we got the Afghan War followed by the invasion of Iraq. By 2010, spending was up to 4.6 percent of GDP. The difference between actual and projected spending comes to almost 2.0 percent of GDP, or more than $600 billion annually in today’s economy.
The Peace Dividend
In contrast to the Trump administration’s efforts to seek enemies, in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States looked to diffuse tensions with the Soviet Union and saved a huge amount of money on military spending as a result. Military spending hit a post-Vietnam War peak of 6.1 percent of GDP in 1986. It then fell sharply as Presidents Reagan and Bush I negotiated arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It was down to 4.7 percent of GDP in fiscal 1992, when the Soviet Union collapsed. It continued to fall through the 1990s, when the United States faced no major enemies.
At that point, Russia was actually a limited ally. There were many people in the foreign policy establishment who wanted to keep it that way, looking to accommodate post-Soviet Russia in a post-Cold War world.
Instead, we took the direction of expanding NATO eastward, incorporating the former East Bloc countries into NATO, starting with Hungary. Eventually, all the former East Bloc countries were added to NATO, and then former Soviet republics such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were added. In 2008, George W. Bush pushed for the addition of Ukraine and Georgia as well.
It is worth noting that it was not pre-ordained that NATO would be expanded eastward. NATO was formed as an anti-Soviet alliance. With the Soviet Union out of business, it was reasonable to think that NATO would be disbanded.
This was not just the dream of fringe peaceniks; many fully credentialled cold warriors also argued against expanding NATO eastward. This list includes Jack Matlock and Richard Pipes, both of whom held high-level positions under Reagan. It also included George Kennan, the godfather of the Cold War doctrine of containment. Even Henry Kissinger opposed including Ukraine in NATO.
It’s not clear whether Russia would have developed into a hostile state and potential enemy if NATO had not continued to exist and expand eastward. We can all share our speculations on that counterfactual, but one thing that is not debatable is that having a major enemy is costly.
The Iran Nuclear Deal and Trump’s War
President Obama negotiated an agreement to restrain Iran from developing nuclear weapons in 2015. While there were issued raised with the monitoring of the deal, rather than trying to work through these problems, Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. That decision, along with Biden’s failure to restore the agreement, created the conditions under which a second Trump administration, could be pushed by Benjamin Netanyahu into this war. The war has already proved incredibly costly for the country and the world, and the costs could well go far higher.
But apart from this war, Trump seems determined to raise military spending even further. He has said he wants the country to spend 5 percent of GDP, or $1.5 trillion a year, on the military. This comes to $12,000 per household. That’s real money.
That is a lot of money to spend for no obvious reason. It means less money for health care, childcare, education, and many other items that people care about.
The question people should be asking is who is this spending supposed to defend us against? Perhaps Trump has Russia in mind, but he is supposed to be good buddies with Putin. Besides, Russia’s GDP is less than a quarter the size of the US economy. Do we really need to spend an amount that is more than 20 percent of Russia’s GDP to protect us against them? Can our military be that inefficient and corrupt?
Maybe Trump is thinking of China. That would be a problem, since China’s economy is already one-third larger than ours and growing far more rapidly. If Trump’s plan is to have a New Cold War with China, that is one we are likely to lose, especially since he just told all our allies to go to hell.
As with the Iran War, Trump’s push towards a newly militarized economy does not seem well-considered. Or at least it doesn’t seem well-considered as a defense strategy. If the point is to put taxpayer dollars into the pockets of his family and friends, it can work out just fine. Until there is evidence otherwise, we should assume this is Trump’s real agenda for his big military budget.
In addition to reducing our security and jeopardizing the well-being of people around the world, Donald Trump’s belligerence will cost us a huge amount of money. But at least his family and friends will get even richer. Who knows, maybe he will even get the Nobel Peace Prize this year.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
With his war on Iran, Donald Trump has already landed a quadruple axel of political self-destruction: notching the most unpopular US war effort in modern history, splitting his own political coalition, seeing his approval rating dip below Joe Biden’s, and, for the first time, falling underwater with white working-class voters.
Trump is peering over the edge of an electoral cliff come November, with the likely possibility that he drags the country and world into a completely avoidable and self-made economic crisis before then, all as the public seethes over his neglect of their core concern of affordability. It’s hard to see how the president could make this any worse for himself — but his crack team has found a way to pull it off.
The Trump administration’s genius next move? Make even deeper cuts to domestic programs to funnel even more obscene amounts of taxpayer money into this idiotic war.
Trump’s 2027 budget request — cooked up by his Office of Management and Budget director, lifelong anti-government zealot Russell Vought — envisions a massive 44 percent hike in military spending, taking the defense budget to a hard-to-believe $1.5 trillion. With Trump’s near-trillion-dollar military budget last year, the United States was already spending more on the military than the next nine of the world’s biggest military spenders combined. But this increase would mean US taxpayers would be footing the bill for a military budget that’s more than double that of the next five countries combined. (To underscore the absurdity, only two of those five are US adversaries.)
To reach this cartoonish number, Trump plans to make further pitiless cuts to the domestic programs Americans rely on during this period of runaway cost of living, amounting to a 10 percent cut to nonwar agencies. Here’s just some of what Trump and Vought are planning:
- ending a $4 billion program helping low-income people afford their energy bills, just as Trump is set to make those bills skyrocket;
- by that same token, cutting tens of millions of dollars worth of renewable energy programs, which elsewhere in the world are helping countries weather the spike in fossil fuel prices;
- eliminating nearly $400 million for homeless assistance and another $529 million for assistance to poor or homeless people who have HIV, specifically;
- cutting $234 million to steer worker protection agencies away from what the budget document calls “harsh penalties” on employers who cheat and steal from their workers;
- killing $4.2 billion of funding for electric vehicle chargers, to make it as inconvenient as possible to switch from a gas-guzzler while Trump sends pump prices soaring;
- ending nearly half a billion dollars of funding for public transit, which the countries feeling the effects of Trump’s war earliest are desperately asking their citizens to use more in the face of looming fuel shortages;
- eliminating a $659 million Department of Agriculture program that funds local projects in poor rural areas;
- canceling $449 million worth of programs funded by the Economic Development Administration, which similarly pays for a variety of projects in economically struggling areas;
- cutting $386 million of funding for cleaning up ongoing contamination from the US military weapons program during the Cold War;
- and slashing $1.4 billion from the Internal Revenue Service, so that while the ordinary taxpayer is robbed to pay for a war they didn’t ask for, rich people can have an even easier time dodging their taxes.
In some ways, this does amount to an “America First” budget: that is, throwing Americans under the bus first to finance yet another president’s vanity war on a faraway continent.
Of course, given that it’s Vought, and given that it’s this particular administration, all of these cuts will be lazily justified as an attack on “woke” and “wasteful” programs — the same reasoning they used to disingenuously and pointlessly put hundreds of thousands of people out of work, make it harder to get your Social Security benefits, and slash Medicaid and food stamps, to name a few. But to the majority of Americans, who aren’t easily distracted by the shiny objects of Trump and Vought’s anti-woke buzzwords, most of this is not going to sound very appealing.
Besides the fact that this is essentially a political suicide note in budget form, there’s also the fact that Trump’s own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, just pointed to this exact kind of thing as a prime example of the Iranian regime’s own villainy. “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” he told George Stephanopoulos this past Monday.
Two days later, his president was saying this:
We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare. . . . It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.
A lot of this extra money will, in practice, be disbursed as handouts to military contractors to replenish equipment and resources that were damaged, destroyed, or expended in this needless war — some of which have dramatically lost their usefulness in the era of modern warfare, as revealed in the current conflict. If you’re wondering how much the continuing war effort is going to cost you personally, start your calculations with this: last month, the Pentagon asked Congress for a massive $200 billion, a sum bigger than the total amount the US taxpayer has footed for four years of the war in Ukraine, and roughly a quarter of the cost of a decade of direct US fighting in Vietnam, or about two years’ worth of the war in Afghanistan.
The keen-eyed reader might also notice that this sum outstrips the almost certainly inflated amount ($150 billion) that Elon Musk claimed to have “saved” by dismantling the federal government with his Department of Government Efficiency (or “DOGE”) project.
Trump spent three years complaining about US wealth being siphoned out and spent on Ukraine. Before that, he spent years charging that politicians had wasted the country’s treasure on foreign adventures instead of fixing the problems at home.
After all that, Trump has become the most over-the-top caricature of the indulgent warmongers he once pretended to despise: not someone who prioritizes endlessly bombing random countries over Americans’ well-being, but someone actively and eagerly prepared to make Americans’ lives worse and more expensive so he can do it with abandon. It’s a project he and his team are so committed to, it seems, that they’ll happily steer headfirst into political oblivion to keep it going.
Trading Places: Americans Walk a Mile in Iranian Shoes
In 2006, I returned to Northwest Indiana and reconnected with family and friends after processing out of the United States Marine Corps. As a combat veteran, the transition to the civilian world is, at first, particularly jarring. One of the primary things that becomes very apparent upon returning to the civilian world is the virtually impossible task of explaining the brutal realities of war to generations of Americans who’ve never served, hence never experienced the horrors of war. The disconnect, while completely understandable in the absence of a draft, is profound.
After all, how does one even begin to explain what a human body looks like after being hit with an M2A1 .50 caliber machine gun, or following an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) detonating? The melted flesh, exposed bones, brain fragments, and coagulated blood. The black emptiness in the eyes, if the eyes remain intact. The rotten smells. The meat of war. The part of war no one really discusses these days. The sort of stuff hidden from Americans by the corporate press and the Pentagon.
During the Vietnam War, images of firefights, bombing campaigns, executions, and burning villages were beamed into American households. Tens of millions of Americans tuned in each night for updates on the war. Hundreds of journalists were on the ground, talking with GIs, writing columns, and witnessing the war up close and personal. Investigative journalists broke important stories. Today, almost none of that is true. The corporate news doesn’t show Americans the carnage and death unleashed on Iranian civilians as a result of American and Israeli missiles and bombs.
The same was true, for the most part, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The perspective of ordinary Iraqis and Afghans on the ground was rarely featured in the nightly news casts at the time. The caskets of dead U.S. soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen were also hidden from Americans, who only saw what the Pentagon and the Bush Administration approved. The thousands of veterans who returned with life-changing injuries remained in the shadows or were used as props by those in power to justify continuing the war effort.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, Americans remain largely sheltered from the day-to-day realities of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). This is why groups such as Veterans For Peace (VFP), Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), and Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) have spent so much time over the last quarter century simply describing the sheer terror and often whitewashed atrocities of modern war: in the absence of a draft, a very small percentage of Americans experience the human toll of never-ending war.
Think about that: twenty-five years of nonstop war, drone strikes, bombing campaigns, cyber attacks, torture, CIA black sites, drone strikes, assassinations, coups, occupations, failed states, refugees, and history-altering geopolitical ruptures that will haunt the world for decades to come. For those of us who live in the belly of the empire, shielded from the human consequences of war, it’s even more important to put ourselves in the shoes of those on the receiving end of Uncle Sam’s aggression.
Over the years, I’ve brainstormed and reflected on how anti-war activists, veterans, and others opposed to the U.S. Empire could better convey their message to a broad audience. Here, I believe creativity, literature, art, movies, and music have the potential to play a vital role in helping Americans better understand the realities of empire, militarism, and the chaos and brutalities of war. After all, what better way to convey the concept of empire to a casual audience than by watching a film such as Star Wars or Dune?
Fortunately, today, unlike the initial stages of the Iraq War, the majority of Americans are opposed to the U.S. and Israel’s illegal and unprovoked war against Iran. This is a positive development, and one we should build upon and strengthen. For this essay, I’ll attempt to reframe U.S.-Iranian relations in a way that allows American readers to put themselves in the shoes of the Iranians — not in the aim of focusing on the individual, subjective experience of war, but to imagine about how American society, culture, political and economic systems would look today if the U.S. endured the same sabotage, violence, and chaos Iran has over the past 73 years.
How would Americans feel about their place in the world if they had experienced the same struggles, death, and destruction the Iranians have suffered at the hands of the U.S. Empire? How would Americans view Islam? How would they feel about the Iranian people themselves? How would our government structures change? What would our economic system look like after decades of sanctions? How about our media, culture, social relations, and so on?
A Quick Note
It’s impossible to adequately include every aspect of U.S.-Iranian relations in this short essay. It’s equally impractical to include the civilizational history of the Persian people, their experiences regarding the Ottoman Empire, or the British Empire. For the sake of time and readability, the story in this essay begins in 1945 and focuses primarily on U.S.-Iranian relations, although the role of Israel is also explored, albeit not necessarily adequately or exhaustively.
I’ve taken the liberty of using various North American, Latin American, and Caribbean nations as stand-ins for countries throughout Western Asia and North Africa. For instance, I use the Dominican Republic as a stand-in for Israel, not for any political, cultural, or economic reasons, but due to its relatively similar geographic proximity to the United States. The same is true of both Canada (standing in for Iraq) and Mexico (standing in for Afghanistan), which are used because they’re bordering nations in the way that Iran borders Iraq and Afghanistan.
I think geography is important, fascinating, and often a decisive element in major political, economic, cultural, and military struggles. Surrounded by two major oceans, most Americans understandably have a hard time imagining how close these countries are to one another. They might not understand the true size of a country like Iran or Pakistan. They might not know that Iran borders both Afghanistan and Iraq. They probably don’t realize how close Iran is to Dubai. It’s not like our media or education system properly informs the public about such things.
The Tables Turned on 73 Years of Belligerence: A Brief & Crude Overview
Imagine Iran emerges from World War II (1945) as the most powerful nation in the world. They have the world’s most powerful military, the largest economy, and unprecedented global reach. In 1953, the Iranian intelligence services overthrow U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and replace him with a dictator who does Tehran’s bidding. Whereas Eisenhower had planned to use the profits from the U.S.’s various industries to help poor and working-class Americans, Tehran had other ideas. They made sure to put their guy, we’ll call him Dictator X, in power to make sure that Iranian corporations and geopolitical interests were properly represented in Washington, D.C.
Dictator X, supported by oligarchs in the Middle East, proceeds to clamp down on all political activities, unleashing secret police forces, torturing and killing students, religious leaders, and political dissidents across the United States. Dictator X consolidates every media platform in the country. Journalists are jailed, tortured, and killed. Christianity is demonized, and Christian values are either completely destroyed or culturally and politically ostracized. Wealth inequality explodes. Political corruption and state repression become the norm. And all of this continues for the next 26 years.
In 1978, a series of strikes and protests sweep the U.S. Dictator X clamps down on protesting Americans and sends many to jail; his security forces torture and kill thousands of others. Eventually, a central figure emerges, a Catholic leader. We’ll call him Father Z. He becomes the figurehead of the New American Revolution. Understandably, after decades of repression and brutality, all Iranian influence is rejected and condemned — socially, culturally, politically, and economically. In February 1979, the revolution succeeds, and Dictator X is toppled. Later that year, American students take 52 Iranians hostage for 444 days.
In September of 1980, a dictator to the north, we’ll call him Dictator Y, controls Canada and invades the U.S. with Iranian support. Iran provides billions of dollars of economic, military, and technological support for Canada’s invasion. Iran also provides military intelligence. During the war, Iran furnishes Canada with chemical weapons, which Canada uses against American forces, but also against opposition groups in Canada. Americans are outraged. From 1981-1986, Iran also sells weapons to the U.S. and uses the profits to fund pro-Iranian forces in Yemen, who are fighting against a socialist government, and to secure the release of Iranian hostages in, let’s say, Jamaica (it seems contradictory and absurd to arm a nation while simultaneously arming its rival, invading nation, but that’s precisely what the U.S. did during the Iraq-Iran War).
As a result of the eight-year war between Canada and the U.S., there are between 5 and 10 million casualties (numbers adjusted for population differences). Following the war, Iran imposes strict sanctions on the U.S., causing shortages in food and healthcare equipment. In 1990, Iran goes to war against Canada, the nation it had formerly armed and supported. Between 50,000 and 150,000 Canadians are killed during the war. In 1995, Iran imposes a total trade embargo on the U.S., preventing the U.S. from developing economically. Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, Iran consistently engages in clandestine operations in Canada, cultivating resistance to the Canadian regime and looking for opportunities to assassinate Dictator Y.
In 2001, Protestant Christian terrorists attack Iran, killing thousands of its citizens. The U.S. has absolutely nothing to do with the attacks, nor do American Catholics, who’ve long been at odds with Protestants. Yet, immediately following, Iran labels the U.S. a member of the ‘Axis of Evil’ and vows to stop the U.S. from ever developing a nuclear weapon, even though Iran has thousands of nuclear weapons and remains the only country in the world to have ever used them. In 2001, Iran invades Mexico, kicking off a war that will last for another 20 years. In 2003, Iran falsely accuses Canada of possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) and subsequently launches a war of aggression, invades Canada, and topples the government, breaking apart the social and cultural fabric of Canadian society, plunging it into a protracted civil war.
As a result of the occupation, Canadians experience immeasurable economic, political, and social misery, resulting in between 500,000 and 1,000,000 casualties. The U.S., rightfully angry and threatened, provides material support for Catholic militias in Canada who are fighting against the Iranian Empire. Iran accuses the U.S. of ‘state-sponsored terrorism.’ In 2005, U.S. leaders attempt to create better relations with Iran, but Iran rejects the offer. Instead, the Iranian Empire conducts covert operations and various other actions against the U.S., including sanctions against U.S. financial institutions, causing even further harm to the economy and misery for ordinary people.
During this period (2001-2014), or what Iran calls its ‘Global War on Terror,’ the Iranian Empire also engages in drone strikes, bombing campaigns, and special forces operations in Cuba, Jamaica, Guatemala, Colombia, and Venezuela. As a result, tens of millions of people are displaced and become refugees. Millions of people are slaughtered. Governments are toppled across South America. Terrorist groups, many of whom are funded or supported by Iran, form and wreak havoc throughout the Western Hemisphere. North and South America are plunged into a never-ending cycle of violence, civil war, and economic chaos.
In 2015, the Iranians negotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with the U.S., which limits the U.S. nuclear development program in exchange for sanctions relief. U.S. political leadership denounces the development of nuclear weapons and maintains that all U.S. nuclear enrichment programs will be aimed at civilian usage. In 2017, a new president takes power in Iran, posing a greater threat than ever before. He, unlike his predecessors, removes the gloves and makes no appeal to international law or international norms. In 2018, the new Iranian president imposes the harshest sanctions to date, withdraws from the JCPOA, causing not only immense harm to the U.S. economy but also heightening tensions between the two nations.
In 2020, Iran kills the highest-ranking four-star general in the U.S. military who was visiting Canada at the time of the assassination. People in the U.S. are outraged, as are many of Iran’s allies throughout the world. In 2021, a new Iranian president comes to power, but nothing fundamentally changes. In 2023, Iran’s closest ally in the region, the Dominican Republic, invades Haiti and conducts a genocide. Catholics throughout South America, and people throughout the world, are horrified. Yet, Iran continues to provide military and financial support for the Dominican regime, the most bellicose government in the region, and one of the few that obtains nuclear weapons.
In 2025, the former President of Iran is once again elected. This time, however, he’s even more unpredictable, angry, and unhinged than ever before. In April of that year, Iran engages in good-faith negotiations with the U.S. government, offering concessions in the hope of normalizing relations. From January through June of 2025, the Dominican regime, fully backed by the Iranian Empire, attacks the U.S., infiltrates the U.S. civil society with spies, and kills U.S. military leaders, politicians, and American scientists.
The Dominican Republic has been in constant violation of international law for many decades, but always backed and protected by the Iranian Empire. Despite all evidence, the Dominican regime insists that the U.S. is developing nuclear weapons, a claim it’s been making for the past three decades. In June of 2025, the Dominican Republic and the Iranian Empire launch what’s called the Twelve-Day War, bombing U.S. nuclear sites. As a result, the U.S. severs ties with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). U.S. hospitals, apartment complexes, and government facilities are bombed and destroyed. Many in the international community condemn Iran’s actions, but they offer nothing more than critical words.
Nine months later, in February of 2026, the Dominican Republic and Iran launch an all-out war against the U.S. — in violation of international law. The international community does nothing to stop Iran and the Dominican Republic. In the first days of the war, the U.S. president, who is also the leader of the Catholic Church, is murdered, along with many of his family members. A schoolhouse for young girls is hit with Iranian missiles, killing over 140 children.
Thousands are killed, including military, political, and religious leaders throughout the country. Schools, hospitals, military installations, energy infrastructure, apartment complexes, and various other cultural, religious, and civilian sites are incinerated. The Iranian regime expects or at least hopes that Americans will rise up against our government, but instead, Americans rally around the flag and the government in opposition to foreign attacks and aggression. Prior to the war, Iran and the U.S. were engaged in negotiations, but unfolding events prove that the negotiations were never genuine and simply bought time for Iran and the Dominican Republic to develop a plan of attack against the U.S.
During this period, the Dominican Republic also invades Haiti, taking a significant portion of Haiti’s geographical territory and killing thousands in the process. As the world’s largest oil exporter, the U.S. shuts down its production facilities to negatively impact the global economy in the aim of getting Iran to cease its war efforts. The Iranian regime, incapable of admitting defeat, maintains its bellicosity and continues to support the Dominican Republic in its efforts to destabilize the U.S. and potentially overthrow the U.S. government and replace it with a government aligned with Iranian and Dominican interests. The other option is total collapse and balkanization — an end result favored by the Dominicans, and tolerated by the Iranians. Overall, the situation is bleak. Entire nations in the Western Hemisphere have been destroyed over the past 25 years, with millions of casualties and refugees, creating an unstable and extremely violent context.
Further Reflections & Clarifications
Invariably, some readers will take issue with my crude summary of the past 73 years of U.S.-Iranian relations. However, my aim isn’t to provide an exhaustive and tirelessly nuanced history of the past seven decades, but, rather, a simple, readable, and hopefully useful thought exercise for ordinary Americans who might not understand the depth of U.S. aggression towards Iran, or who might have never thought about what our government and society would look like if the U.S. had endured what Iran has for the past seven decades. Political empathy is a fertile ground for cultivating genuine solidarity.
Many of my coworkers, neighbors, friends, and family who are not die-hard activists or experts in U.S. foreign policy consistently ask me: “What is our (the U.S.’) history with Country X?” In the course of regular social interactions and conversations, there’s never enough time to provide a complete history of any country, region, or war. Hence, I’ve tried my best over the years to distill the most important aspects of U.S. foreign policy in a manner that allows whoever I’m talking with to come away from the conversation with a better understanding of why the U.S. shouldn’t bomb, invade, or destroy whatever country Uncle Sam is threatening.
Furthermore, and this is a topic for a future essay, most people do not have the time to examine every aspect, every nuance of U.S. foreign policy, nor do I think it’s necessary that people do. People can only take in so much information. Here, I think the left makes the mistake of thinking that people should know, or need to know, every detail of every issue. Is this war necessary? Does this war help the people it’s claiming to help? Are you willing to fight and die in this war? How about your kids, siblings, nieces, and nephews? Do you think there’s a better way to solve international disputes? Do you think the U.S. should meddle in every region around the world? Those are the sort of questions I like to ask ordinary people about U.S. foreign policy.
The point, in my mind, is to empower people. Once people understand the fundamentals of why the war is wrong — morally, politically, etc. — the most important next step is to empower them with the idea that they can make a difference and potentially stop the war. Ideally, we would have an existing anti-war movement large enough and powerful enough to prevent wars before Uncle Sam launches them. But we’re not there right now.
At work, I’ll usually reference just one instance of U.S.-Iranian relations to highlight the insanity of U.S. foreign policy. For instance, if someone brings up the current war, I’ll say something like, “Can you imagine how Americans would feel if the Iranian equivalent of the CIA had overthrown our government back in 1953?” Or, “Can you imagine how Americans would react if the Iranian government helped Canada invade the U.S. and provided the Canadian military with chemical weapons to use during the invasion?” Make it personal. Make it relatable. I’ve found that’s a good way to get people to think about how they would feel if the tables were turned.
Another approach I’ve found useful is comparing the U.S. Empire to the evil empires portrayed in popular films and TV shows. Many of the younger folks I encounter at work or in my neighborhood have watched the recent Dune films, so it’s easy to draw analogies: the U.S. is basically the House Harkonnen. The Spice is oil. And the Fremen are the insurgents and rebels in the Middle East who are fighting back against the evil empire. Yes, of course, the story is more complicated than that. The story in Dune is more complicated than that, but it’s an easy way to get people thinking about the power dynamics between the various forces involved.
The same is true when I speak to older generations — people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. They remember the original Star Wars movies. The Ewoks take on the Galactic Empire, and they win using rudimentary weapons, whereas the Empire has the most advanced weapons in the universe. Sound familiar? According to George Lucas, the Ewoks were inspired by the Viet Cong resistance, who fought against and eventually defeated U.S. troops in Vietnam. Of course, everyone knows the situation in the real world is far more nuanced and complex than the plots of popular movies, though, to be fair, some films are quite intricate. But that’s missing the point. If we’re hoping to get ordinary Americans to think about the human impact and broader consequences of U.S. wars of aggression, we should use popular cultural references that virtually anyone can recognize and understand.
In the short term, it looks like Trump and Netanyahu are hellbent on escalating their criminal war against Iran. As the situation deteriorates and as the Iranians fight back, Americans will be bombarded with anti-Iranian propaganda. The corporate press will frame the Iranians as the aggressors. The Trump administration will blame economic instability and pain on the Iranian regime. Just remember to sit back and ask: how would our government react if the roles were reversed? How would you feel if you were living in Tehran, as opposed to Michigan, Florida, or Texas?
In Tehran, the expected signs of wartime breakdown are largely absent.
The conventional logic of war tends to follow a simple assumption: sustained external pressure leads to internal fracture. In the case of Iran, much of the prevailing analysis particularly in Western policy circles has followed this line, suggesting that military escalation combined with economic strain would deepen domestic divisions and potentially destabilize the state.
Yet developments inside Iran point in a different direction.
Rather than triggering collapse, external pressure appears to be producing a form of internal consolidation socially, politically, and strategically that complicates expectations about the trajectory of the conflict.
From within Tehran, the most immediate observation is not breakdown, but continuity under strain. Daily life has not stopped. Shops remain open, people continue to work, and public spaces remain active, even as currency volatility and intermittent internet disruptions reshape daily routines. These disruptions are real, but they have not translated into visible societal disintegration. Instead, they have pushed people to adapt. Households are adjusting consumption patterns, work routines, and expectations about the near future. The system is not static it is recalibrating.
Equally notable is the absence of large-scale outward flight. In many conflict environments, early phases of escalation are accompanied by attempts to exit whether through migration, asylum-seeking, or capital flight. In this case, such patterns have remained limited. Reports from European institutions indicate no significant surge in Iranian asylum applications, while anecdotal evidence suggests that some members of the Iranian diaspora have considered returning, rather than leaving. This does not imply uniform support for the political system; rather, it reflects a shift in prioritization. Under external threat, political disagreement appears to be temporarily subordinated to a broader sense of national continuity.
Iran has seen something like this before.
During the Iran–Iraq War, participation in national defense cut across ideological and religious lines, involving not only the political base of the state but also minorities and groups otherwise marginal to the governing structure. The current moment reflects a similar dynamic: external pressure is reconfiguring the boundaries of political identity, shifting emphasis from internal divisions to collective endurance.
However, framing this solely as “national unity” risks oversimplification. What is emerging is not merely cohesion, but strategic adaptation at multiple levels. Socially, this adaptation is visible in how risk is managed in everyday life through precautionary economic behavior, altered communication practices, and an implicit acceptance of prolonged uncertainty. Politically, it is evident in the recalibration of expectations: rather than anticipating a rapid resolution, many appear to interpret the conflict as an extended process in which outcomes will be determined over time.
This temporal shift is mirrored in Iran’s military and strategic posture. Contrary to the expectation that Iran would front-load its capabilities in the early stages of escalation, its operational approach has been characterized by restraint in initial deployment combined with a gradual intensification strategy. Rather than exhausting high-end capabilities at the outset, Iran appears to have relied on lower-cost systems such as drones and short-range projectiles deployed in repeated waves. The objective of such an approach is not immediate decisive impact, but cumulative pressure.
This method aligns with a logic of attrition that extends beyond the battlefield. Repeated, lower-cost attacks can impose sustained demands on defensive systems, particularly when those systems rely on finite and expensive interceptors. Over time, this dynamic introduces an economic dimension to military engagement, where the cost asymmetry between offensive and defensive measures becomes increasingly relevant. In this context, the conflict is less about singular exchanges and more about the depletion of capacity across interconnected systems.
The Strait of Hormuz plays a central role in this broader strategy. Often discussed in abstract strategic terms, its significance in the current conflict has become operational rather than theoretical. Restrictions on maritime transit whether partial or selective have already introduced friction into global energy flows, contributing to price volatility and uncertainty. For Iran, this represents a form of leverage that operates simultaneously in economic and geopolitical domains, allowing the country to extend the impact of the conflict beyond immediate military engagements.
What seems to be emerging, then, is a layered strategy in which military actions, economic pressure points, and societal adaptation are interconnected. The conflict is not being waged solely through kinetic exchanges, but through the management of endurance both domestically and across the broader system in which Iran is embedded.
Early in the escalation, public statements from US leadership emphasized maximalist objectives, including the possibility of forcing a decisive outcome. Over time, however, the framing has evolved. Subsequent statements have focused more narrowly on specific constraints most notably limiting Iran’s nuclear capabilities while acknowledging the complexity of achieving broader goals. This shift does not necessarily indicate a change in ultimate objectives, but it does suggest an adjustment in the perceived feasibility of different outcomes under current conditions.
Such adjustments reflect a deeper issue: the difficulty of translating external pressure into internal fragmentation within a system that is structured for resilience under constraint. If external actors operate on the assumption that increased pressure will linearly produce internal collapse, they risk misreading the adaptive capacity of the society they are engaging with. In the Iranian case, pressure appears to be reinforcing certain forms of internal alignment while simultaneously pushing strategic behavior toward longer time horizons.
For policymakers, this presents a challenge. Strategies premised on rapid destabilization may not only prove ineffective but could also generate countervailing dynamics that strengthen the very structures they seek to weaken. Understanding the distinction between internal dissent and external resistance becomes critical. A society can contain significant internal disagreements while still exhibiting cohesion in the face of perceived external threat. Failing to account for this distinction risks conflating political diversity with structural fragility.
The current conflict thus illustrates a broader point about contemporary warfare in interconnected systems. Outcomes are not determined solely by territorial control or immediate battlefield performance, but by the ability of actors to absorb pressure, manage resources, and shape the environment over time. In this context, Iran’s approach combining societal adaptation with a calibrated strategy of attrition suggests a model of engagement that prioritizes endurance over rapid escalation.
Rather than collapsing under pressure, the system is adjusting to it.
And in that adjustment lies the central strategic reality that external actors must contend with: the mechanisms designed to compel change may, under certain conditions, produce a different kind of stability.
