US-Israeli War on Iran Is Intensifying All of Global Capitalism’s Problems

This war is widening the deep systemic problems that were already present before February 28, says scholar Adam Hanieh.

By Ashley Smith , TruthoutPublishedApril 9, 2026

Smoke rises from the direction of an energy installation in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, on March 14, 2026.AFP via Getty Images

On February 28, the U.S. and Israel expanded their joint genocidal war on Gaza onto Iran as well as Lebanon. After weeks of assassinations and bombing, President Donald Trump agreed to a ceasefire on April 7. This war of aggression by the U.S. and Israel is part of a continued attempt to wipe out any and all opposition to their dominance over the Middle East and its strategic energy reserves.

But they underestimated the capacity of the Iranian state. In addition to launching missile and drone attacks throughout the region, Iran blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, disrupting the production and shipment not only of fossil fuels but also an array of other commodities vital to global capitalism. With fossil fuel prices spiking and stocks crashing, Trump called off his threat to wipe out Iranian civilization and agreed to a ceasefire with Iran.

But Israel has already violated it, Iran has re-closed the Strait of Hormuz, and the ceasefire seems in jeopardy on the eve of negotiations for a settlement of the conflict in Pakistan. As a result, the world stands at the precipice of a multidimensional economic crisis.

In this interview for Truthout, Adam Hanieh discusses the U.S. and Israel’s imperialist goals, the war’s impact on the economies of the Global North and Global South, and its consequences for the geopolitical order as well as class and social struggles in the region and around the world. Hanieh is a professor in development studies and director of the SOAS Middle East Institute, University of London. He is author of Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market. This interview was conducted before the ceasefire and has been edited for clarity and length.

Ashley Smith: Clearly this war has been a disaster for the people of Iran. But the Iranian state has launched an asymmetric counteroffensive, targeted countries throughout the region, and shut down the Strait of Hormuz, and thereby disrupted the world economy. Why did the U.S. and Israel launch this war to begin with? What are the two states’ different war aims? How do they diverge? As the war has clearly backfired, what will they do to salvage it?

Adam Hanieh: The war needs to be placed in the wider context of a weakening of American power and a global environment marked by a range of deep political, economic, and ecological crises. Under Trump, Washington has been trying to reassert its global strength through a mix of military coercion, sanctions, tariff threats, and pressure on weaker states. In that sense, this war is not an aberration but part of a broader attempt to demonstrate that the U.S. can still dictate terms in strategically vital regions.


“Any divergence between Israel and the U.S. is more a matter of emphasis than overall strategic goals.”

The Middle East remains absolutely central here because of its importance to energy and other commodity flows, as well as its substantial financial surpluses that are reinvested globally. In 2025, nearly 15 million barrels per day of crude passed through Hormuz, about one-third of global crude trade. Most of these go eastward to China, India, and East Asia. This helps explain why Washington sees the region as a potential lever over rivals.

I don’t think there are major differences in U.S. and Israeli war aims. Both wanted to break Iran’s regional capacity, degrade its military infrastructure, and weaken the network of the various organizations aligned with Tehran across the Middle East. Lebanon is crucial in this respect, because Hezbollah has long fought against Israeli aggression — in this regard, Israel’s horrific onslaught in Lebanon has not received the attention it deserves in most media coverage.

I think any divergence between Israel and the U.S. is more a matter of emphasis than overall strategic goals. Israel tends to want a more thorough remaking of the regional balance in its favor, while the U.S. needs to consider the wider system of alliances it has built up over the decades. But the overlap is far greater than the difference.

The U.S. clearly underestimated Iran’s ability to respond asymmetrically, especially around the Strait of Hormuz. As such, Iran has not needed to “win” conventionally — by disrupting shipping, targeting energy infrastructure, and widening the field of conflict, it has shown that it can impose enormous costs on the world economy. It’s obviously very difficult to predict what the endgame will be.


“Israel’s use of mass displacement and collective punishment are now completely normalized in the eyes of the world.”

I do not think either the U.S. or Israel can easily get the clean victory they wanted, but neither can they afford to admit defeat. So perhaps the most likely outcome is a coerced and highly unstable arrangement that involves some partial reopening of Hormuz, some claim that Iran’s military capacities have been significantly degraded, and continued pressure on Iran’s regional allies, especially in Lebanon.

Israel, with the implicit greenlight from the U.S., has also launched a war on Lebanon, continued its genocide in Gaza, and escalated settlement in the West Bank. What are its aims here? What will this dimension of the war mean for the Lebanese, Palestinians, and the rest of the peoples of the region?

Away from media scrutiny, the Israeli military continues its blockade, destruction, and killing in Gaza. In the West Bank, we have seen a massive acceleration in settlement and settler violence against the Palestinian population. In Lebanon, Israel is trying to break Hezbollah and at the same time create a depopulated buffer zone in the south through bombardment, displacement, and reoccupation.

The human cost in Lebanon has been enormous, with more than a million people displaced. To put this in perspective for a U.S. audience, this is proportionally equivalent to more than the entire populations of California and Texas combined. What this really demonstrates is the ways in which Israel’s use of mass displacement and collective punishment are now completely normalized in the eyes of the world.

This war has cut off oil and natural gas supplies to the world and is dramatically impacting countries throughout the world. But too many people accept a stereotyped view of the region as just a source of fossil fuels. How have the economies of the region transformed themselves over the last few decades? How has that changed their role not only in the region, but in global capitalism?

Too many people still imagine the region, especially the Gulf countries, as simply giant oil spigots. What this misses is that the Gulf economies have fundamentally transformed over the past decade or so. They are now much more than simply producers of crude oil — they are major players in commodities (e.g. chemicals, fertilizers, and aluminium), maritime and air transport, and global finance. This is important because many of the basic inputs into global manufacturing and trade now originate in the Gulf, and what happens in the Gulf can quickly cascade through global supply chains.

One clear example is fertilizer. The Gulf produces roughly a third of global ammonia and urea, and this is crucial to food systems far beyond the region. The Middle East also accounted for more than 40 percent of global polyethylene exports last year, which is a massively important basic plastic and is why the conflict has sent shockwaves through manufacturing as well as energy markets. So, while the region is still indispensable to global energy flows, it is also deeply embedded in industrial production and the movement of goods across Asia, Africa, and Europe.

A further part of this transformation lies in the Gulf’s role within global finance. Over the last few decades, the region’s large and persistent current account surpluses have generated enormous pools of capital, much of it channeled through sovereign wealth funds, central banks, and other state-linked investment vehicles. These funds are deeply embedded in international equity markets, real estate, infrastructure, private equity, technology, and debt markets, and they have become increasingly important sources of liquidity and investment at a global scale.

These financial flows have a longer history in relation to American power. Since the 1970s, Gulf oil surpluses have played a significant role in U.S.-centered finance through what is described as petrodollar recycling: the channeling of oil revenues into dollar assets, Western banks, and U.S. financial markets. This recirculation of the Gulf’s financial surpluses helped sustain both the dollar’s international role and the wider architecture of U.S. financial power. This relationship is another reason why the Middle East is such a vital region to global capitalism.

Given all that, how will the war impact the world economy? What key industries will be impacted? How will it affect global finance and the world’s main stock markets? Where is global capitalism headed as a result?

The war is already having a major economic impact through the closure of Hormuz and damage to related energy and logistical infrastructure. This can be seen in higher oil and gas prices that are likely to persist throughout the year. Countries such as India are already increasing coal-fired power generation in anticipation of gas shortages. And of course, energy shocks feed through into the cost of transport, food, and everyday consumer prices, pushing inflation higher across the globe.


“The war has deepened an already existing turn toward more militarized states and zero-sum economic and political competition.”

There is also a substantial risk of shortages and price increases to fertilizers, chemicals, and other Gulf-produced commodities. Poorer countries are especially vulnerable here, because they have less fiscal capacity and many states in the Global South are already suffering from high levels of debt. One way this vulnerability might appear is in agriculture and food supplies. India’s domestic fertilizer industry, for instance, depends on the Gulf for nearly 80 percent of its ammonia imports; prolonged disruption of these supplies combined with higher energy costs could really impact food security in the country.

We also need to consider what a deep downturn in the Gulf might mean for the region’s migrant workforce. Migrant workers make up around half of the labor force across each of the Gulf monarchies, and millions of households in South Asia, the Middle East, and beyond depend on the remittances they send home. In an extended crisis, these workers may lose jobs, face deportation, or simply find themselves unable to keep sending money home at previous levels. A sharp fall in remittance flows would have serious effects on surrounding countries. This is exactly what happened during the 2008 global financial crisis and again during the COVID-19 pandemic. In that sense, migrant labor is one of the key channels through which crisis in the Gulf is transmitted outward to the wider global economy.

The overarching point is that this war is widening the deep systemic problems that were already present before February 28. Long before this war, global capitalism was marked by weak growth, mounting public and private debt, and overcapacity in many sectors. The war is intensifying all of these problems and pushing an already unstable system toward a much more serious breakdown. I think the possibility of a crash on the scale of 2008 or worse is very real if the war continues.

The war has undoubtedly impacted geopolitics. Already, Trump has lowered sanctions on Russian fossil fuels, enabling Russia to sustain its economy amid its imperialist war on Ukraine. What will the war mean for other great powers like China? What will this war mean for other states and their strategies and policies?

Russia has benefited directly from higher oil prices and the temporary waiving of some constraints on oil exports. That helps Moscow sustain export revenues and, by extension, its war in Ukraine. China faces a more contradictory position. On the other hand, the country has been systematically building up its oil reserves for a number of years, and its more diverse energy mix helps to insulate it from any immediate supply shock.


“Prior to the war, many countries in the Global South were already facing what is widely acknowledged as the worst debt crisis in history.”

It is noteworthy that foreign capital has been flowing into Chinese stocks and bonds over the last couple of weeks, which indicates that investors appear to view China as a relative “safe haven” at this moment. But if the war continues for a lengthy period of time, China will face difficulties because of its heavy reliance on Middle Eastern oil and gas. Chinese independent refiners are already cutting output as the prices of sanctioned Russian and Iranian crude rise and margins are squeezed.

More generally, the war has deepened an already existing turn toward more militarized states and zero-sum economic and political competition. This is because the war intersects with the wider systemic crises that I mentioned earlier, and which are forcing all states to find ways to manage and navigate global instability. This means expanding military spending, stockpiling energy and food, border securitization, and framing the control of raw materials and industrial capacity as matters of national security.

The other likely consequence is a renewed doubling down on fossil fuel production. Faced with supply disruption and price volatility, governments will move to lock themselves more deeply into existing hydrocarbon dependence. This means more oil and gas deals, the expansion of liquefied natural gas infrastructure, subsidies to domestic hydrocarbon production, and the rolling back of environmental regulations. Obviously, this just deepens the likelihood of future wars in the Middle East and elsewhere and worsens the accelerating climate emergency.

Finally, how will this war impact the people of the region, the Global South, and the Global North? How might it shape class and social struggles that have swept the world in the last couple of decades? How will ruling classes and especially the new authoritarian right in various countries likely respond?

As with all major crises, the impacts will be experienced very unequally. The most immediate and catastrophic costs are being felt in Iran and Lebanon through loss of life, displacement, destroyed infrastructure, and the massive ecological consequences of the war. For the wider Global South, the war is likely to mean higher food prices, higher transport costs, depressed trade, and worsening debt pressures.


“The key question is whether popular anger can be turned against the system that produced this crisis, rather than channeled into a politics of national chauvinism and fear.”

We need to remember that prior to the war, many countries in the Global South were already facing what is widely acknowledged as the worst debt crisis in history. In the Global North, the effects will be different but still severe. We are already seeing a renewed cost-of-living squeeze and expectations of much higher inflation over the coming year.

All of this will sharpen social antagonisms and may well open the way to renewed potential of mass protest. We should remember that the last two years have already produced a profound political radicalization among millions of people across the world, above all around the horrors of the genocide in Gaza. For many, Gaza has stripped away any lingering illusions about the existing order. It has brought into sharp relief the realities of a system that offers only war, obscene levels of inequality, climate collapse, and permanent insecurity.

Of course, this does not automatically translate into progressive politics. Crises of this kind can generate solidarity and new forms of internationalism, but they can also be seized upon by ruling classes and the authoritarian right. The danger is that a crisis produced by imperial war is re-coded as a justification for greater repression and renewed militarism. We can see this in the rush to frame the war in the language of national security. So, the key question is whether popular anger can be turned against the system that produced this crisis, rather than channeled into a politics of national chauvinism and fear.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Ashley Smith


Ashley Smith is a socialist writer and activist in Burlington, Vermont. He has written in numerous publications including Truthout, The International Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, ZNet, Jacobin, New Politics, and many other online and print publications. He is currently working on a book for Haymarket Books entitled Socialism and Anti-Imperialism.

 

The backlash against the backlash: Socialist feminism & left politics in a time of reaction

By Diana O’Dwyer

Published 8 April, 2026

First published at Rupture.

After every crisis of capitalism comes protest and social upheaval — of a progressive or reactionary character. The 2008 crash was followed by a decade of progressive mass movements: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, feminist movements for abortion rights and against gender-based violence, and revolutions and near-revolutions like the Arab Spring. In Ireland, we saw mass movements against water charges, for marriage equality and abortion rights and progressive legislation on gender recognition. Just like in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, when the civil rights movement was followed by second-wave feminism, the gay rights movement, the movement against the Vietnam War and May ‘68, the mass movements of the 2010s sparked other mass movements.

Unfortunately, both waves of progressive mass protest were also followed by, first, a global economic crisis and then a conservative backlash. In the 1970s and ‘80s, this meant the oil crisis, Reagan, Thatcher and neoliberalism. In the 2020s, the Covid crisis accelerated a growing far-right backlash and ushered in a new phase of reaction across the world. If you were looking to pinpoint a date when the anti-feminist backlash took off, it would probably be Trump’s first election as US President in November 2016. A rapist running on an anti-choice platform, Trump promised to overturn Roe v. Wade. This ultimately happened in June 2022, shortly after the Depp vs. Heard trial sounded the death knell for #MeToo. Trump’s second Presidency has put the backlash into turbo drive. The most powerful man on earth is again a known rapist. DEI programmes have been decimated, reproductive rights are under attack and traditional gender roles are being forcibly reaffirmed.

The seeds of the backlash were already there pre-Covid, but lockdown isolated people from real life, and the algorithm enticed them into noxious online echo chambers. This created the perfect environment for a paranoid conspiracy theory pipeline, leading from Covid denialism and anti-vax propaganda to racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. We all have friends, family members or co-workers who have lost their minds since Covid - their brains swamped by a never-ending flood of shit.

To paraphrase Marx and Engels, no matter how much progress we make under capitalism, short of a revolution, we cannot finally rid ourselves of the “muck of ages” — it will re-emerge in various forms until the whole rotten system is overthrown. This is painfully apparent in two of the main fronts in the current anti-feminist backlash — reproductive rights and the family — and gender-based violence.

Reproductive rights & the family

Historically, fascists were notorious for burning books. Now they want to burn contraceptives as well. It was reported in July1 that the Trump administration had decided to incinerate nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives earmarked for USAID programmes in Africa. A State Department official referred to them as “certain abortifacient birth control commodities from terminated Biden-era USAID contracts” because the stocks included IUDs and emergency contraceptives.2 This is connected to the dismantling of USAID — but the reason the Trump administration wanted to burn the contraceptives rather than sell them or give them away is clearly ideological. Blocked by laws in Belgium (where the contraceptives are stored) that prohibit incinerating reusable medical devices, the plan now seems to be to allow them to expire. Planned Parenthood estimates this will lead to 174,000 unintended pregnancies and 56,000 unsafe abortions.

This literal destruction of reproductive rights is going hand in hand with the rise of a reactionary pro-natalism — championed most notoriously by Elon Musk, the slayer of USAID, who has fathered fourteen children with at least four different women. Outside of Musk’s tech bro weirdness, pro-natalism is more usually associated with the valorisation of marriage, the traditional nuclear family and rigid gender roles. It is intrinsically bound up with racism; its raison d’etre is to avoid immigration - the only other way to grow the labour supply.

The “tradwife” phenomenon is part of this. Sophie Lewis3 analyses it as an attempt to escape the “double shift” of paid and unpaid work. Women’s participation in the workforce has meant they end up doing two jobs instead of one, while their wages are swallowed up by housing and childcare costs. People cannot afford to have children until their 30s or 40s and so end up having fewer children or none at all. Parents, especially women, are exhausted by this double shift.

The far right’s response to this crisis of biological and social reproduction under capitalism is to blame it on feminism — just like they blame the housing and cost of living crisis on migrants. They say that a man’s wage used to be able to support the whole family. But now, because of feminism, everyone has to work. So it’s feminism that is destroying families, driving down birth rates and driving up the cost of housing because mortgages are now based on two incomes rather than one.

This narrative exploits a sense among some men that they are being brought down to the level of women or even below — for instance, through the decline of male manual labour and feminisation of professional jobs. Of course, this ignores the fact that women are still significantly poorer than men. The hourly gender pay gap is around ten per cent but the lifetime earnings gap is much wider; women take more time out of the workforce for childcare and are more likely to work part-time. Women also do twice as much housework as men, even when both are working full-time.

Men’s loss of privilege is in no way absolute; it’s just less than it used to be. This sense by men of a loss of privilege relative to women and a desire to reassert that privilege is fuelling the rise of the far right — just like a loss, or perceived loss, of relative superiority among white people is fuelling racism. Right-wing demagogues fan the flames of this fratricidal resentment, identifying it as the perfect way to prevent working class solidarity against the billionaires they represent.

Richard Seymour writes that the “loss of distinction” is experienced by the supporters of the far right as a massive impoverishment, “tantamount to the downfall of civilization”.4 Women or black and brown people doing less badly than white men than they used to might not sound like a good enough reason to burn things down. So conspiracy theories like the “Great Replacement” are required to link it all into one great big imaginary disaster. That’s why the language of the far right is so ludicrously apocalyptic.

The politics of gender-based violence

Lurking barely below the surface of the backlash is the threat of violence. The far right cynically exploits increased concern about gender-based violence to justify pogroms against “military-aged” foreign men. Yet those involved are often perpetrators of violence against women themselves. Half of those arrested recently for racist rioting in the North of Ireland had previously been reported to the police for gender-based violence.5

Reported rates of gender-based violence are on the rise, too. This is partly due to greater awareness post-#MeToo, but the apparent proliferation of sexist attitudes since the 2010s suggests it’s also a real increase. Some studies have found worsening sexist attitudes among young men. For others, it's not so much that young men have become more sexist but that young women have become more progressive.

Research by Women’s Aid has found that 67% of young men hold, or don’t disagree with, traditionalist sexist attitudes about masculinity, compared to 40% of men overall.6 This includes beliefs like: “men who don’t dominate in relationships aren’t real men”; “Men should use violence to get respect if necessary”; “A man’s worth is measured by power and control over others” and “Real men shouldn’t have to care about women’s opinions or feelings”. Feminists often point to the growth of the manosphere as increasing sexist attitudes among young men. A study by Dublin City University7 found that within hours of setting up a social media account more than three-quarters of content recommended to 16-18 year old males on TikTok and YouTube was masculinist, anti-feminist or otherwise extremist. Big tech companies know that people watch extreme content for longer, which means they see more ads and buy more stuff. So the proliferation of the manosphere is directly driven by the attention economy big tech profits from.

Beyond the instinct to rubberneck, something else in the manosphere is appealing to young men. Women’s Aid describes influencers like Andrew Tate as “discuss[ing] themes around traditional masculinity, independence, and resilience”. Part of the reason this resonates is that the economics of late capitalism have robbed young men of autonomy and control over their own lives that would have been taken for granted in previous generations — for instance, being able to move out of their parents’ house. The average age for moving out of home is now 28.8

Men have also lost economic control over women. Increased female participation in the workforce has made women less financially dependent on men, which makes it harder for some men to form or maintain relationships. On top of this, women have more sexual freedom due to changes in attitudes towards sexuality. A Gallup poll last year found that 29% of Gen Z women in the US identified as LGBTQ+ compared to 11% of Gen Z men.9 In this context, manosphere content around working out, physical and emotional strength and dominating over women may give men back a sense of control.

As with reproductive issues, the far right speaks to real issues and anxieties but provides reactionary, sexist solutions: restoring traditional gender roles, returning women to the home, using male violence supposedly to protect us, denying us economic and biological freedom. Instead of addressing real economic causes and providing affordable housing or public childcare, the far right’s “solution” is to restore distinction and division among the working class and leave the class system intact. Ours is to abolish both distinction and the class system by fighting oppression and exploitation at the same time. That is the only way to unite the working class and end the rule of capital.

The backlash to the backlash

After several years when the far right seemed to be growing almost unopposed, there is now a growing backlash to the backlash. In the last year, we have seen renewed movements on gender-based violence, including protests in support of Nikita Hand, marches of thousands on International Women’s Day and smaller marches against the manosphere to the headquarters of social media companies. Women are also to the forefront in countering racism and in the Palestine solidarity movement, including through groups like Mothers against Genocide. An exit poll10 from the General Election last November showed twice as many women as men voted for People Before Profit, with 7% of women voting for the Social Democrats compared to 4% of men.

We can also see signs of a backlash to the backlash in recent positive election results for the left in Ireland and internationally. Catherine Connolly won the Presidential election by the largest ever margin, running on a progressive left platform that opposed imperialism and war, championed the “meitheal”11 and spoke out against the rise in anti-immigration sentiment as “misplaced” “anger … channelled to the wrong people.”12

Die Linke performed unexpectedly well in the German elections in February, running on an economically left, anti-far right platform13 and outpolling Sahra Wagenknecht’s economically left but socially conservative BSW. Hundreds of thousands of people in Britain are signing up to join Your Party and the leftward-moving Greens. Zohran Mamdani has just won the New York mayoral election on a cost-of-living-focused left platform, which included universal free childcare as a core demand and defended trans people’s right to healthcare.14 Rather than deciding “woke is dead” and throwing trans and racialised people under the bus, like some on the left have been tempted into doing, Mamdani’s success showed that it is possible to “bake in” socially progressive politics alongside a “bread and butter” left economic programme. Significantly, in addition to increasing turnout, he flipped 15% of Trump voters into supporting him.15

A notable feature of the backlash years has been a growing political gender divide internationally, from Ireland16 to the US, Europe and South Korea. This can be seen as a problem for the left because we obviously need both men and women to succeed — especially in relation to the global ecological crisis. It’s also a massive opportunity: to recruit more women and redress the historic gender imbalance across most left activist organisations.

There are also reasons to be hopeful that the gender divide is more a case of young women politicised by a decade of feminist movements moving left, than it is of young men moving right; that young men have mostly been more apathetic than radicalised.17 This is important because it means organisation and mobilisation can move young men leftward, like it has young women.

Mamdani’s election is interesting here, bucking the trend by attracting roughly equal support from women and men18 while also winning 81% of LGBTQ+ voters.19 What unites all of these recent left electoral successes is a massive youth vote. Die Linke was the most popular party for 18-24 year olds,20 62% of young voters under 30 chose Mamdani,21 and two-thirds chose Connolly.22 After several years of almost uninterrupted gloom and a seemingly inexorable drift to the far right, there is reason to be hopeful again, if we keep on fighting.

• 1

  Carter Sherman, “Trump Administration to Destroy Nearly $10m of Contraceptives for Women Overseas.” The Guardian, 18 July 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/18/trump-administration-destroy-contraceptives-usaid-africa 

• 2

  Lauren Kent, “Barred from Burning $9.7 Million in Birth Control Bought for USAID, the Trump Administration May Now Be Running down the Clock.” CNN, 26 October 2025. https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/26/europe/usaid-contraceptives-belgium-trump-intl.

• 3

  Sophie Lewis, “Double-Shift: Dialectic of the Tradwife.” Dilettante Army, 26 April 2023. https://dilettantearmy.com/articles/double-shift-dialectic-of-the-tradwife.

• 4

  Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization. Verso Books, 2024.

• 5

  Luke Butterly, “Almost half NI race rioters reported for domestic abuse”, The Detail, 7 August 2025. 

• 6

  Core Research and Women’s Aid. Evolving Manhood - Attitudes, Influence, and Well-Being Among Irish Men. 2024. https://www.womensaid.ie/app/uploads/2024/11/Evolving-Manhood-Core-Research-and-Womens-Aid.pdf.; Women’s Aid. “Women’s Aid at 50: New Research Shows Young Men Moving to the Right in Attitudes towards Women and Manhood, While Violence and Abuse Is a ‘fact of Life’ for Too Many Women.” Women’s Aid, 21 November 2024. https://www.womensaid.ie/get-informed/news-events/media-releases/womens-aid-at-50-new-research-shows-young-men-moving-to-the-right-in-attitudes-towards-women-and-manhood-while-violence-and-abuse-is-a-fact-of-life-for-too-many-women/.

• 7

  Dr Catherine Baker, Debbie Ging, and Dr Maja Brandt Andreasen. Recommending Toxicity: The Role of Algorithmic Recommender Functions on YouTube Shorts and TikTok in Promoting Male Supremacist Influencers. DCU, 2024. https://antibullyingcentre.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/DCU-Toxicity-Full-Report.pdf.

• 8

  Caoimhe Gordon, “The Box-Room Generation: Figures Reveal Average Age in Ireland for Moving out of Family Home – and How Other EU States Compare.” Irish Independent, 30 September 2024. https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/the-box-room-generation-figures-reveal-average-age-in-ireland-for-moving-out-of-family-home-and-how-other-eu-states-compare/a1984219310.html.

• 9

  Jeffrey M. Jones, “LGBTQ+ Identification in U.S. Now at 7.6%.” Gallup Inc., 13 March 2024. https://news.gallup.com/poll/611864/lgbtq-identification.aspx.

• 10

  Mark Coughlan, “Charts Provide Key Insights into Exit Poll Data.” RTE.ie, 29 November 2024. https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2024/1129/1483866-the-exit-poll-three-key-charts-to-understand-the-initial-details/.

• 11

  A traditional form of cooperative labour carried out among neighbours in rural areas.

• 12

  RTE Morning Ireland debate, 17 October 2025.

• 13

  Die Linke, ‘Kurzwahlprogramm’,https://www.die-linke.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Kurzwahlprogramm_Linke-BTW25_englisch_A4.pdf

• 14

  Gillian Branstetter, “Democrats Can’t Blame Trans People for Their Own Failures”. The Nation, 7 November 2025. https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform

• 15

  Kabir Khanna, “The Voters Mamdani Added to the Democratic Coalition in New York: CBS News Analysis - CBS News.” CBS News, 11 November 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-news-analysis-the-voters-mamdani-added-to-the-democratic-coalition-in-new-york/.

• 16

  Conor Little,“The Gender Divide in Young People’s Political Opinions in Ireland.” Irish Politics Forum, 13 January 2025. https://politicalreform.ie/2025/01/13/the-gender-divide-in-young-peoples-political-opinions-in-ireland/.

• 17

  Lydia Saad, “U.S. Women Have Become More Liberal; Men Mostly Stable.” Inc, Gallup., 7 February 2024. https://news.gallup.com/poll/609914/women-become-liberal-men-mostly-stable.aspx; Cas Mudde, “The Real Story Isn’t Young Men Supposedly Voting Far Right. It’s What Young Women Are up to.” Opinion. The Guardian, 21 May 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/21/young-men-women-far-right-online-politics-centre-left; Sherman, “Young Women Are the Most Progressive Group in American History. Young Men Are Checked Out.” US News. The Guardian, 7 August 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/aug/07/gen-z-voters-political-ideology-gender-gap.

• 18

  Kiko Llaneras, Sebastián Casse, Daniele Grasso. “Who Voted for Mamdani? The New York Election in Seven Charts.” EL PAÍS English, 5 November 2025. https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-11-05/who-voted-for-mamdani-the-new-york-election-in-seven-charts.html.

• 19

  Matt Tracy, “Mamdani Dominated LGBTQ Vote in Mayoral Race, Exit Polls Show.” Gay City News, 5 November 2025. https://gaycitynews.com/mamdani-dominated-lgbtq-vote-mayoral-race/.

• 20

  Lily Parsey, “Demographics Aren’t Destiny: A Look at the German Election Results.” ILCUK.org.uk, 12 March 2025. https://ilcuk.org.uk/german-election-results-2025/.

• 21

  Kiko Llaneras, Sebastián Casse, Daniele Grasso. “Who Voted for Mamdani? The New York Election in Seven Charts.” EL PAÍS English, 5 November 2025. https://english.elpais.com/usa/2025-11-05/who-voted-for-mamdani-the-new-york-election-in-seven-charts.html.

• 22

  Excluding undecideds or spoiled votes. Daniel Murray and Megan O’Brien, “Exclusive Red C Poll: Humphreys Humbled as Connolly Set for Commanding Presidential Victory.” The Business Post, 22 October 2025. https://www.businesspost.ie/politics/exclusive-red-c-poll-humphreys-humbled-as-connolly-set-for-commanding-presidential-victory/.

The Myth That Won’t Die: ‘War Is Good For The Economy’ – OpEd

April 5, 2026 
MISES
By Carlos Boix




War is the ultimate government intervention. It is the excuse for all kinds of evils to be imposed on the governed. From confiscation through taxes and inflation to restriction of freedom of speech and the redirection and even nationalization of whole industries, nothing increases state power such as war.

As the state is predatory and produces nothing of use, it is the ultimate impoverishing situation. From an ideological point of view, it is even worse, mixing love for one’s culture and homeland with the state itself. It reduces individual’s resistance to loss of liberty and creates in their minds the myth of the protecting government.

There is also another insidious idea that a lot of people hold: That is that war has economic and other benefits, not to certain individuals or groups, but to the community at large. It is worth examining these supposed benefits to show that no, war does not benefit the community, it is just death and destruction.

Economic Stimulus

As with all government stimulus, this is just a redirection of resources. Instead of adapting to current resources, what a war stimulus does is to increase money and credit at unprecedented levels to pay for exorbitant government spending. This just means that real resources are taken from the community in the form of inflation and taxes and spent away on things the community does not want.

It is similar to getting all your savings and any credit you can get and spending it. For a while it appears that you are more affluent, until those resources are spent. Fiscal stimulus causes the same waste of savings and capital which, for a while, look to have stimulated the economy. But this is just spending. Soon there are not enough resources left and reality asserts itself. Once enough resources have been wasted, there are not enough to sustain the party, no matter how much money the government prints. If it continues to print, they create a hyperinflation period. If they stop, we get a recession.

The way the stimulus is done is also important. As it is done through banking credit, the temporal analysis of entrepreneurs is completely altered. A decrease in interest rates makes it look as if there are more resources saved. The problem is that the way entrepreneurs experience this is generally with an increase in demand. Those who do not respond—seeing it as unsustainable—will struggle to meet demand and will lose clients to other businesses and will still be hit hard in the downturn. Hence, most entrepreneurs will have to ride the wave and try to adapt when the crash comes.

This situation does not increase resources or make the community better off, it will waste resources and impede sustainable improvement. Overall, the community will be poorer afterwards. The idea that this kind of stimulus is positive is completely misguided.

Full Employment

When we visited Berlin, we were told the story of Communist Berlin, in which a person was paid to make a note every day of the clocks in Alexanderplatz. This is the problem with the obsession with unemployment. Employment by itself should not matter, but employment on what. If people are exchanging their work for money but not producing goods valued by others, that amounts to wasted resources, money, and labor.

This is the problem with public employment. Instead of a positive, it is a waste of resources. The government necessarily takes resources from the productive sphere—real resources that people demand—and redirects them to uses that people do not demand, such as filling forms, making military uniforms, or making munitions.

So yes, the government could tax or inflate enough to employ everyone in an economy, but that employment would take resources from the community, not add to them. They would just be wasting potential. This kind of use of employment just makes everyone poorer. This is what war full employment looks like.

At the beginning it gives the impression of full employment, but when the war finishes, the subsequent spike in unemployment is not because the government is not spending, but because the community has been depleted of resources.

Technological Advances

The idea that war fosters innovation and advances of technology is contrary to reality. It comes from those eager to justifywar and see positive inventions against an imaginary counterfactual in which these innovations did not happen. Very few compare wartime to peacetime innovations. Those who do have shown that, at best, the rate of innovations is altered but changes little overall, and, at worst, there is a decline in inventiveness.

But here is the catch. This innovation is misallocated. Instead of innovations to better serve the customers, innovation during wartime serves the government and is intended to improve weapons and destructive power. Weapons and destructive power do not improve the quality of life of the people.

By redirecting research mainly to military use, there is a huge opportunity cost that few take into account. If we take the null effect on overall innovation and the focus on military innovation during wartime, we can safely say that wartime produces a reduction in technological advances and improvement of production effectiveness.

Social and Political Change

A typical example of beneficial social change is the entry of women in the workforce, wrongly attributed to the wartime economy during WWII. I say wrongly attributed because if we study labor market changes in countries that did notparticipate in WWII, such as Spain, we can see the same trend of female participation in the labor market. This is just another private social trend that people attribute to government intervention. The reality is that these social changes were already happening and defenders of war attribute them to government and to war itself.

Another counterfactual is the comparison with other wars. Why did WWII change the social status of women but the Franco-Prussian war of the 1870’s did not? Or even earlier wars?

Political change is sometimes presented as a benefit of war. How this is even argued is a mystery, but the idea is that war can topple an oppressive regime and create something better. Recent events show the contrary. Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are all examples of wars that have either not caused a regime change or caused a chronic unstable civil war that has made the situation worse for the population.

In those countries in which regimes were, say “benign,” wars created an ideological shift towards more state power, the acceptance of more state intervention, and less individual freedom. Some people consider this a positive but, to me, all these are negative effects. Politically, war only benefits the government.

Conclusion

War has no positive effects. Mises wrote, “What distinguishes man from animals is the insight into the advantages that can be derived from cooperation under the division of labor.” And, “The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging commodities and services, fight one another.”

This new war between the governments of Israel, the US, and Iran will be just like all other wars, negative in all its aspects.

About the author: 

Carlos Boix graduated 2001 as a veterinarian from the Complutense University in Madrid, Spain. He moved to England and worked as a vet for 10 years before moving back to Spain to set his own business and study for a Masters degree. He later sold the business and moved back to the UK where he currently works as a veterinarian. His interests in economics and history started a long time ago and he discovered Austrian Economics and the Mises institute after the 2008 crisis.

Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute

The Mises Institute, founded in 1982, teaches the scholarship of Austrian economics, freedom, and peace. The liberal intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) guides us. Accordingly, the Mises Institute seeks a profound and radical shift in the intellectual climate: away from statism and toward a private property order. The Mises Institute encourages critical historical research, and stands against political correctness.

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The Existential Crisis of Mainstream Economics

Walden Bello

 March 30, 2026

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Shuttered machine shop, Portland, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Had I not read Angus Deaton’s Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, I would not have learned that one of the most devastating blows to the economics profession was delivered by the film Inside Job, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 2011. The movie directed by Charles Ferguson tried to explain the 2008 global financial crisis in popular terms, and it succeeded, garnering $7 million in revenues against a budget of $2 million.

Not bad for a documentary, but very bad for economics, some of whose leading lights were caught on camera denying their role in framing policies that triggered the crisis, continuing to espouse the deregulation that brought on the crisis, thinking there was nothing wrong in accepting six-figure consulting fees from Wall Street and promoting policies it favored, engaging in selective amnesia, or lying through their teeth.

In one scene, Glenn Hubbard, former chair of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, then dean of Columbia University’s School of Business, gets upset and threatens to end the interview when asked whether as a researcher or policymaker he has disclosed his multiple links to the financial industry. This display of tantrums was, however, not as bad as the response of John Campbell, head of Harvard University’s Economics Department, when asked the same question; he was simply tongue-tied.

Unlike the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, Inside Job did not destroy economics, though in Angus Deaton’s account, “the movie did great harm to the public image of economists who were seen as benefiting mightily from an economy that they were claiming to research in a neutral, scientific way.”

There is probably no one better qualified to discuss the crisis of mainstream economics than Deaton, one of the leading experts on the economics of health and inequality, a former president of American Economic Association, and a Nobel Prize winner. He is about as mainstream as one can get, though of the center-left variety, probably owing to his training at Cambridge, which apparently not only produced spies for the Soviet Union but also economic iconoclasts like John Maynard Keynes.

A Discipline Captured by Special Interests

Deaton does not beat around the bush. The profession brought the calamity on itself because a great many of its members have been bought by powerful interests to produce the research and policy proposals that would benefit them. Though Deaton would be more measured and courteous in the way he would put it, that is essentially the theme that runs through this book. There may be some who really believe that the untrammeled market is the best way to allocate resources, but for most that belief is sweetened by the financial support, in the form of grants and consultancies, of powerful special interests.

Take the case of the minimum wage. Rigorous experiments by a number of well-regarded researchers have produced results that by now should have yielded no opposition to the fact that raising the minimum wage does not create unemployment. But half the profession still believes it does, and there’s no shaking them from this belief, whose main bankroller is the fast-food industry that sees the false doctrine as useful to keep the wages of its hamburger flippers low.

Health care has probably been the key battlefield over social policy over the last two decades in the United States, and no one knows more about the health industry than Deaton, whose Nobel Prize was earned largely by his studies of the relationship among health, poverty, and inequality. The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was, overall, positive in that it brought insurance coverage to around 20 million formerly uninsured people. But it was a Pyrrhic victory since the best solution to escalating medical costs, the single-payer or public option, was not even allowed to be discussed, and insurance companies were allowed to continue to hawk deceptive policies to an unwary public.

Research and the experience of European countries demonstrate clearly that a single payer national health system would radically reduce costs and would also keep inequality down because all share the risks of ill health and “prevent unequal burdens of sickness to turn into inequalities of earnings.” So, what keeps this seemingly rational solution from being adopted? An unholy alliance among the insurance companies, the medical establishment, Big Pharma, politicians in the pocket of business, and, of course, the legions of economists employed directly by them or paid as academic consultants.

In the United States today, life expectancy is falling as suicides, drug addiction, alcoholism, and heart disease are inexorably on the rise, contrary to the trends in other First World countries. One thing is clear. The terribly expensive and massively inefficient system of politically protected private health system is not equipped to deal with the “deaths of despair” and other manifestations of the health crisis in the richest country in the world.

Meritocracy and Inequality

The crisis of the health system is but one of the trends that have made the United States no longer the land or promise but of inequality. The gaps in earnings, health, and welfare have come to be increasingly caused by unequal opportunities available to those with a college education and those without one. Like Michael Sandel, Deaton argues that meritocracy, which used to be seen as an antidote to inherited income, wealth, and privilege, has instead been turned into a major cause of rising inequality. Those who have benefited from “passing the exam” believe they deserve their privileges because they earned them while seeing those who “failed the exam” as having only themselves to blame.

This sharply rising inequality owing to meritocracy has had destabilizing political consequences, with those without college degrees, who Hilary Clinton famously called the “deplorables,” becoming the angry base for Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Despite its anti-democratic consequences, there has been no lack of economists who, either out of belief in the market, antipathy to any sort of government intervention, or being bankrolled by wealthy capitalists, can be found to argue that inequality is not a problem, such as Martin Feldstein, chair of Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Harvard’s Greg Mankiw.

Likewise, there are still many big-name economists who either deny or downplay the impact of climate change, such as Bjorn Lomborg, Thomas Schelling, Robert Fogel, Douglass North, Jagdish Bhagwati, or Vernon Smith.

A Profession Divided Against Itself

In sum, economics is a profession that is split almost in half along political beliefs, but with one side propped up by the power structure, which makes its views influential but very questionable. One half of economists “are concerned with efficiency and believe in the power of markets to promote it, and are concerned that attempts to interfere with the market will compromise current or future prosperity.” The other half, to which Deaton belongs, are also concerned about efficiency and believe in the power of the market to promote it, but are also concerned about inequality “and are willing to use redistribution to correct the failures of the market, even at the expense of some loss of efficiency.”

But beyond these differences, the whole profession is to be blamed for the central problem of mainstream economics, which is that the discipline has become “unmoored from its proper basis, which is the study of human welfare.” Both conservative and liberal economists, in other words, continue to frame economics the way Lionel Robbins defined it, as the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends, which has rightfully earned the discipline the description of being the dismal science. For both schools, efficiency remains the prime consideration. Rather, the economic problematique should be, according to Deaton, the way his fellow Cambridge economist Keynes defined it: “how to combine three things: economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.”

But there is one other, major problem, which, surprisingly, Deaton fails to see as a problem. Both conservative and liberal economists are fundamentally attached to the value of economic growth because “it makes it possible for everyone to be materially better off.” With economic growth having become a central cause of the climate crisis, it is hard to believe that a sensitive mind like Deaton’s would miss its relevance to the crisis of the profession that he otherwise deals with so brilliantly in this book. But I guess everyone has their blind-spot.

Needed: A Bigger Meteor

It has been some 16 years since Inside Job appeared during the depths of Great Recession, and things have gotten worse for the profession. Deaton concludes that the narrative of mainstream economics is “broken and has been broken for several decades,” and “neither conservative nor progressive economists have a solution.” Saving economics is not going to be simply a matter of theoretical or policy adjustments but a total overhaul, including learning to think like sociologists (something that I, as a sociologist heartily endorse) and “recapturing the philosophical territory that used to be central to economics.”

Deaton is right about the scale of the task needed to make economics relevant to contemporary society, but he is being optimistic or naïve since he is still in a minority of economists who can admit that their discipline is in crisis. Looking back at the last century, I think that the Global Financial Crisis was not strong enough to bring the discipline to its senses and that no less than a much bigger meteor, like  the Great Depression of the 1930s, is needed to cut economics from its servitude to capital.

Walden Bello, a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus, is the author or co-author of 26 books, the latest of which are Global Battlefields: Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2025), Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury, 2019), and Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Halifax: Fernwood Press, 2019).