Fascist Aesthetics Have Come Back with MAGA Politics

By Henry A. Giroux

February 7, 2026

Source: Socialist Project

ICE and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026. (“Agents Shoot Less Lethals on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis” by Chad Davis, CC BY 4.0)

What is most revealing about the MAGA aesthetic is its studied ugliness. On one side stands the grotesque excess of beauty-pageant femininity, plastic smiles, puffy lips, lacquered beach-wave hair, sharpened jawlines, and a hyper-sexualized nostalgia masquerading as “traditional values.” US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem exemplifies this aesthetic as a badge of cruelty. Carefully styling herself in a Barbie-doll register of hyper-femininity, she delivers media performances staged in front of prisons and other sites associated with the punishment and terrorization of immigrants. The effect is chilling: a glossy, pornographic aesthetic fused with images of confinement, state violence, and racialized cruelty. Beauty here does not soften power; it aestheticizes domination and makes authoritarian violence appear natural, even glamorous. This aesthetic of cruelty is not confined to clothing (heavy on tweeds), posture, or setting. It increasingly takes hold at the level of the face itself, where artificiality is no longer concealed but aggressively displayed.

As Inae Oh observes in Mother Jones, perhaps “the most jarring element of this burgeoning MAGA stagecraft is its unbridled embrace of face-altering procedures: plastic surgery, veneers, and injectable regimens of Botox and fillers.” Artificiality here is no longer a flaw to be concealed but a badge of belonging, a visual shorthand for power, wealth, and ideological conformity. As one Daily Mail headline bluntly declared, “Plastic surgery was the star of the show” at the Republican National Convention in 2024. The resulting look, widely disparaged as “Mar-a-Lago face,” signals a politics that treats the body as a surface to be engineered, disciplined, and branded, a mask of dominance and emotional vacancy masquerading as strength. The face becomes armor – hard, synthetic, and affectless – training its wearer to project authority while erasing vulnerability.

Traditional Feminine and Masculinist Style

If this surgically enhanced, hyper-feminized spectacle provides one face of the MAGA aesthetic, what Maureen Lehto Brewster has described as “an almost Fox News anchor look” that signals “dressing in [an] overtly feminine way to reassert patriarchal dominance,” its other face emerges in a parallel masculinist style that draws even more directly from the visual grammar of fascism. Shaved or tightly cropped hair, rigid posture, militarized clothing, and the revival of authoritarian silhouettes unmistakably echo twentieth-century fascist pageantry. Consider Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino’s long black trench coat, worn not for function but for theatrical authority. It is costume politics, a visual performance of domination meant to intimidate rather than persuade. As Arwa Mahdawi remarks in The Guardian, “the Zambian bum-stick chimps seem positively sophisticated in comparison.”

Together, these aesthetic registers do more than signal allegiance. They train bodies to feel power before thinking about it, rehearsing domination as posture, style, and presence, a lesson that now circulates with particular intensity across digital culture. This aesthetic hardens further in the digital sphere. MAGA men proliferate across TikTok, YouTube, X, and other platforms like a fever dream of authoritarian masculinity. They present themselves as strongmen-in-training: squared jaws clenched in permanent hostility, hyper-muscular bodies forged in gym rituals that double as moral theater, libidinal excess mistaken for strength, and rigid, armored postures that signal domination rather than confidence. Their movements are stiff and rehearsed, their bodies disciplined into what Wilhelm Reich once called crippling body armor, where repression congeals into aggression, and vulnerability is converted into cruelty.

Pedagogy of Violence

This is not merely a style; it is an embodied pedagogy of violence. These men learn power through posture, gaze, and gesture. Clenched fists, growling stares, and exaggerated physical presence rehearse domination as a way of being in the world. Misogyny and hostile sexism are not simply beliefs but bodily dispositions, ways of standing, moving, and occupying space that render women, queer bodies, migrants, and the “weak” as threats to be neutralized rather than human beings to be encountered. It is therefore no accident that this aesthetic and affective training culminates in the celebration of ICE, an updated Ku Klux Klan in military dress, where white supremacist terror is bureaucratized and legalized, folded into official policy, and normalized as the everyday practice of state power.

The MAGA aesthetic is tethered to Trump’s regressive theater of white masculinity, a spectacle of grievance, racial resentment, and performative cruelty masquerading as strength. These bodies are drawn to Trump because he licenses their rage. His performance of white supremacy, racism, and nationalist victimhood authorizes the conversion of fear into aggression and resentment into entitlement. What parades as confidence is, in fact, fragility armored with force.

The MAGA male aesthetic is saturated with an evolutionary fantasy of domination: a Hobbesian survival of the fittest worldview stripped of ethics, solidarity, and care. Etched into their faces is a sneer aimed at the “weak,” the feminized, and the racialized other is not incidental; it is central. Violence is already present, normalized through repetition. These bodies function as rehearsals for cruelty, training grounds for a politics in which empathy is viewed with disdain as a weakness, democracy is feminized, and power is proven through the capacity to humiliate, exclude, and harm.

What we are witnessing is more than bad taste or digital bravado; rather it is the corporeal staging of authoritarian desire, a fascist aesthetic that teaches men to feel powerful by hardening themselves against the claims of others. It is violence before the blow, domination before the command, pedagogy before policy.

The MAGA aesthetic is not accidental. Fascist movements have always understood aesthetics as pedagogy, as a way of training people to feel power before they are allowed to think about it. Walter Benjamin warned that fascism aestheticizes politics to mobilize the masses without granting them rights, replacing democratic participation with spectacle, ritual, and submission. Susan Sontag likewise observed that fascist aesthetics glorify obedience, hierarchy, and the eroticization of force, transforming domination into visual pleasure and cruelty into style. In Sontag’s terms, the spectacle does not merely depict power, it trains the eye to desire it. The MAGA look follows this script precisely. It abandons democratic appeal for spectacle, substituting ethical substance with visual aggression and emotional coercion. Its ugliness mirrors its politics: cruel, nostalgic, obsessed with hierarchy, and openly hostile to pluralism. What we see here is not bad taste but a deliberate visual language of authoritarianism, an aesthetic designed to normalize exclusion, glorify force, strip joy and imagination from public life, and prepare the ground for repression.

Nowhere is this aesthetic logic more nakedly visible than in Trump himself, whose body has always functioned as a political text. His appearance is not incidental to his power but central to it, staging domination, excess, and entitlement as visual norms. To read Trump’s look closely is to see how authoritarian values are worn on the body long before they are imposed as policy.

As Jess Cartner-Morley notes, “to critique the Trump aesthetic is not to trivialize abominations, because his values and beliefs run through both. It [begins] at face value, where Trump’s brazenly artificial shade of salmon reflects not only vanity,” but a grotesque misunderstanding of authority, as if a three-week Caribbean cruise tan were an appropriate look for a man entrusted with the gravest responsibilities of public office. His oversized suits and perpetually overlong ties do similar symbolic work. The ties hang like exaggerated phallic markers, extending well past the belt line, signaling not elegance but compulsion, a visual overreach that mirrors his politics. They do not finish the outfit; they dominate it. The result is a body styled not for restraint or dignity but for excess, spectacle, and domination, a supersized ego draped in fabric and color.

All of this is engineered by a president who wears ill-fitting designer suits, commandeers cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center to impose a politics of vulgarity, and casually announces imperial ambitions, from Greenland to Venezuela. It would be easy to dismiss him as a narcissistic clown. That would be a mistake. He is a demagogue who despises democracy, targets people of color, revels in violence, and has worked to create a personal Gestapo-like police apparatus unaccountable to law. He has elevated staggering levels of inequality and white supremacy into governing principles, funded the genocide in Gaza, and aligned himself on the global stage with war criminals. He appears most animated when humiliating others or inflicting pain. He is the embodiment of an ugly ideology clothed in an equally ugly aesthetic. And in ugly times, such symbols are not incidental; they are warnings. 

Henry Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.

Bondi Beach Reappraised: A Turning Point in History

by Dan Lieberman / February 6th, 2026

Writing an article that references the murders of innocent people is difficult. Concerns of invading privacy, of not being sufficiently empathetic to the tragedy, and of clumsily using the deceased for undeserved purposes hampers the narrative. By treading softly and expounding sincerely, the screams of anguish heard at the Bondi Beach massacre diminish, the reverberations to its aftermath increase, and the aftermath emerges as a turning point in history.

Bondi Beach is not new to the American public. Bondi Rescue, an Australian television program, which follows the daily lives and routines of the professional lifeguards who patrol Bondi Beach, has been available on You Tube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video. Simple rescues from swimming accidents have exploded into deadly actions that no reality TV can duplicate.

The deadly action at Bondi Beach, on December 14, 2025, cannot be rationalized and cannot be deemphasized. Nevertheless, it has been insufficiently studied. Was it a single unrelated act or did events excite extremists who enlarged upon previous conflicts between two factions? A YouTube video, Bondi Beach Palestinian Protest and Israeli Counter Protest, 7 September 2025, provides clues. On that date, a small group of Bondi Beach citizens, which included Jews Against the Occupation, displayed signs on the beach that protested the genocide and waved two Palestinian flags. A few counter protestors gathered at the top of the stairway entrance to the beach. From observations of a video of the event, nobody on the beach confronted the protestors. The protestors and anti-protestors soon met face-to-face and engaged in serious scuffles. The police immediately intervened and no violent confrontations occurred. From the top of the stairs, an uncalled for rhetoric, including “arrest them,” “terrorists,” and “Bondi Beach is ours,” emanated from the growing number of counter protestors.

The beach protest grew in size, scope, and intensity. As the morning progressed, other groups joined the genocide protest and more Palestinian flags appeared. Coincidentally, the number of counter protestors increased and Israeli and Australian flags appeared. Some people on both sides welcomed confrontation and others enjoyed combative words that invited confrontation. If police did not keep the sides separated, they would have seriously harmed each other. For two hours, the police cordoned both sides and they were able to disburse without incident.

SKY News Australia reported, “Pro-Palestine and pro-Israel protesters have clashed at Sydney’s Bondi Beach as police were forced to intervene in several scuffles.” This report is an example of how almost all the protests have been carelessly reported. This demonstration, as others, was a demonstration against a genocide and not directly a pro-Palestinian demonstration. The counter demonstrators approved the genocide. Because the Palestinians are victims of the genocide and Israelis are the perpetrators, it is natural that the Palestinians are favored and the Israelis are condemned. The counter demonstrators, those who challenged the genocide, favored the perpetrators and demonstrated hatred for the Palestinian victims. The misuse of demonstrable nouns has skewed the understanding of the demonstrations. Protesting against genocide is an honorable activity and has no counter arguments; counter demonstrations come from those who are dishonorable and favor the genocide. This is not semantics; this is the reality and establishing the reality, by using correct words, is essential for knowing the truth. Care should be taken in properly identifying demonstrations against the genocide and characterizing those who glorify the genocide.

Another event that brought tension and dissension to the Bondi Beach community occurred from threats made to an Australian couple who had previously spoken and written against the genocide on social media and opened a store in Bondi Beach. Protests occurred in front of the store, with shouts of “Bondi Beach is Jewish.” Threats were made upon the lives of the store owners. Efforts to gain support from authorities did not materialize, and I believe the couple vacated the premises and left Bondi Beach.

Counter-demonstrators modified the arguments from arguing genocide to arguing “who controls Bondi Beach?” Knowing that tensions will be aggravated by appearances of demonstrators on the beach, why have a huge Hanukkah celebration by a Jewish contingent of more than 1000 participants, which could be interpreted by extremists as an “in your face” message that said, “Jews control the beach?” And who organized the celebration ─ ultra-orthodox Chabad that actively raises funds for the IDF, has purchased drones and body armor for the Israel military, and strongly approves the concept of Greater Israel and not abandoning stolen lands. The insignificance of the Hanukkah holiday added to the inanity of having a huge beach celebration. Hanukkah is a minor holiday in Judaism and its strappings are a modern concept.

All Jewish holidays are described in the Hebrew Bible and, in all Jewish holidays the observers attend synagogue. Hanukkah does not appear in the Hebrew Bible and has no synagogue observance. It appears in the Septuagint, the Greek interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, which is not used by modern Jews, and in the Books of Maccabees, which are part of the Catholic Bible. Why Jews celebrate Hanukkah and what they are celebrating has been elevated for chauvinist and political purposes; the Zionists need heroism from ancient history to bridge the gap between the Jews as occupiers and the Jews as occupied.

Just as the history of Masada has been twisted from a “complex, mixed group of refugees, local fighters, and possibly brigands, whose story is far more nuanced than the myth” to a band of Zealot Jews going to heroic death before succumbing to Roman rule, the history of the Maccabees has revisions. At Masada,

…the dominant faction was indeed “the bandits,” who, as noted by Josephus, sometime after the destruction of Jerusalem went down from Masada to Ein Gedi in a raid. They killed hundreds of women and children at the balsam plantation there after the workers fled, and disrupted production of the precious fragrance. It was an effective raid designed to damage Roman interests in the region.

The moment that they damaged the balsam production, they affected empire finances… We know that the revolt happened during a period of weakness in the Roman Empire. They needed money. And it seems [the raid] crossed a red line for the Romans, so they sent their soldiers to destroy the perpetrators.

At Hanukkah, the history of the Maccabees has been erroneously portrayed.

Portrayal as the first victory of an oppressed society in defeating its oppressors is disputed by the historical narrative.

• The Akkadian Empire vs. Sumer (c. 2334 BCE) ─ The world’s first true multi-ethnic empire was formed, unifying Mesopotamia under Akkadian rule and ending Sumerian political dominance.
• The Mycenaean Greeks vs. Palace Kings (c. 1200 BCE) ─ Collapse of elite rule during the Bronze Age collapse.
• Roman Republic (509 BCE) – Romans overthrew their last king, Tarquin the Proud, establishing a republic.
• Athenian Democracy (508 BCE) – Cleisthenes’ reforms followed the overthrow of the Athenian tyrant Hippias.
• Rebellion Against Qin Dynasty China (209–206 BCE) ─ Rebel leader, Liu Bang defeated his rivals and founded the long-lasting Han Dynasty, which adopted a more moderate Confucian system.

Portrayal as a rebellion against Seleucid oppression has detractors.
The Priestly class, which maintained the Temple, favored Hellenism and its Greek culture; the middle class Pharisees intended to maintain traditional Judaism. These forces clashed in a Civil War which brought the Seleucids (Greeks) and Ptolemy’s (Egyptians) into a battle for control of the area.

Portrayal as liberation of the Jewish people might have been otherwise.
Israelis glorify the Hasmoneans for purifying the Temple and liberating Jerusalem, but the Hasmoneans behaved as a bloodthirsty clan whose members turned on each other. Later high priest and ruler, John Hyrcanus, forced Idumaeans, who wished to maintain their land, to be circumcised and adopt Judaism.

Portrayal as a Maccabee victory against the Seleucids has been contradicted by archeology.
Recent archeologic discoveries, described in the conclusion of The Rise of the Maccabees, A.M. Berlin, indicates that the Seleucids, after ending their war with the Ptolemy’s, vacated Judah to defend Damascus. The political and military vacuum allowed Jewish tribes and the Maccabees to occupy and control the area.

Bondi Beach Reappraised ─ A Turning Point in History
Actions against the genocide and sympathy for the Palestinian cause have escalated rapidly during the last three years. Using the hockey stick reference, they are approaching an inflection point, where the asymptote becomes nearly vertical, rapidly involving more people and more frequent demonstrations, and arriving at a turning point in history. The demonstrations in Australia have brought the world perspective close to that turning point — solidifying how it is represented, how it is perceived, and how it achieves victory.

Unlike the United States, where demonstrations against the genocide have featured college campuses and a younger generation, with law enforcement and government colluding to suppress the protestors and charging them with fabricated anti-Semitism, the Australian demonstrations against the genocide have been more widespread. All age groups have participated, efforts by law enforcement and government to limit the demonstrations have failed, and the public has quickly and successfully acted against provocative charges of anti-Semitism and nefarious attempts to relate the anti-genocide demonstrations to attacks on the Jewish community.

Posed as a holiday celebration for gift giving to children, the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach seems to be an attempt to overshadow the anti-genocide protests, to convince Australians that those favoring the genocide hold the high ground, have been the victims in history, and have the resilience and perseverance to unite and overcome oppression and adversity. This has always been the Zionist duplicity — never compromise, play the victim, twist history, win, win, win, and in the words of Ariel Sharon, “Seize the high ground,” physically and morally. If the provocation causes an eruption of murderous activity from extremists, capitalize on the moment with additional charges of anti-Semitism.

The strength of the demonstrations in Australia, and the success in refuting the charges of anti-Semitism applied to them, places Australia as the focus of the anti-genocide movement. Stitching the movements from several nations together into one fabric, by magnifying the national movements into a coordinate international movement that moves the Asians, Middle Eastern, Africa, all European, North and South American, and Pacific Island peoples to rally voices protesting the genocide, chains and isolates the genocide deniers.

Keeping the protests confined to stopping the genocide of the Palestinian people, with no mention of “Free, free Palestine,” which can be a subject of other protests, enables legal action against those who contest the genocide. A present French probe examines Elon Musk’s X social media violation of laws that contain “denial of crimes against humanity.” A September 16, 2025 report by the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the occupied Palestinian territory including East Jerusalem and Israel “recognised that genocide has been committed, and continues to be committed, against Palestinians in the Gaza strip.” Human rights agencies, nations, and institutions have certified the genocide and indicted Israeli officials for committing “crimes against humanity.” Legal means exist to indict those who speak out in favor of the genocide of the Palestinian people, which is more deadly than other genocides. Other hundreds of genocides that have occurred throughout history, either extinguished memories of peoples, decimated cultures, killed a massive number of lives, or displaced peoples. The genocide of the Palestinian people attempts to do all.

The Zionists are willfully extinguishing existence of Palestinian life and culture in the present, past and forever; erasing all identification and memories, as if the Palestinians never existed, and ordering their replacement with a fraudulent history that has the Jews as a continued presence in the lands of Judah and Samaria. We know of

• Hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed and buried.
• The total destruction of Gaza, levelling it to non-existence.
• Palestinian towns, such as Ashkelon, Jerusalem, Acre, Jaffa, and Hebron either completely Judaized or slowly being converted into Israel appearances.
• Recent expropriation of 182 hectares (450 acres) at Sebastia, a West Bank site of Roman ruins, “an aggression against Palestinian landowners, against olive trees, against tourist sites and a violation of the history and the heritage of Palestine.”
• Golda Meir’s famous remark, “A land without people for a people without land.”
• The constantly uttered, ”There never was a Palestinian state.”
• Replacement of the historical and archeological records with myths and fabrications that make 1,000 B.C. seem like yesterday. Contemporary Jews are intimately linked with ancient Hebrews, who had no birth certificates, no land deeds, and disappeared from history 2500 years ago. Israel is made to appear as a successor to a Hebrew civilization of Judah and Samaria, which was nothing more than hilltop villages that, maybe, in small locations and various times had a minor monarch. The principal feature of the Hebrew “civilization” is that it left nothing of value to future civilizations.

The struggle to prevent the complete annihilation of the Palestinian people contends hundreds of millions of voices against hundreds of thousands who carry arms. Distressing that few nations have joined the struggle and few nations show tendency to join the struggle. The intensity of citizen voices asymptotically multiply and approach a level where sound becomes a weapon, where decibels are so great, the sound wave can pulverize a wall and cripple those who shield themselves behind the wall; a wall of indifference crushed by those who make a difference, a genocide prevented by a turning point in history.

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Dan Lieberman publishes commentaries on foreign policy, economics, and politics at substack.com.  He is author of the non-fiction books A Third Party Can Succeed in America, Not until They Were Gone, Think Tanks of DC, The Artistry of a Dog, and a novel: The Victory (under a pen name, David L. McWellan). Read other articles by Dan.

 

The Iranian Protests Explained

Daniel Falcone

 February 2, 2026

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Protests in Tehran on 8 January. Photograph Source: Standardwhale – CC BY 0

In this interview, international relations scholar Stephen Zunes and Middle East historian Lawrence Davidson help to unpack the Iranian protests and explain their relevance within the context of U.S. and Israeli national interests.

Daniel Falcone: Jeffrey St. Clair of CounterPunch, recently cited filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s insistence that change in Iran must come from the will of the people, not from outside intervention. As U.S. and Israeli involvement tends to strengthen hardliners, how do you explain the balance between international solidarity and the risk of external actors undermining Iran’s sovereignty and social movement?

Lawrence Davidson: One has to ask what these terms, international solidarity, and risk from external actors, mean in today’s international environment. If international solidarity means, for instance, the solidarity of reactionary countries that have somehow made an alliance to change the internal behavior of a third nation, that is obviously problematic. In this case, international solidarity is the manifestation of just these external actors. If the United States intervenes in Iran at this time, it would not be to the benefit of the Iranian people, it would be for the suppression of anti-Zionist sentiment in the country through the introduction of the Shah’s adult son. This would probably lead to something like a civil war in Iran. If, however, international solidarity means the sentiment of people rather than governments, this has not proved very effective, as we can see in the case of Gaza.

The Arab and Muslim peoples have either chosen not to or could not in any practical way act to support the Palestinians. I’m afraid that the conclusion here is that in the present circumstances, there is no balance between international solidarity and external actors. The power of institutionalized external actors overwhelms practical terms, the power of popular solidarity.

Stephen Zunes: While the United States and Israel have tried to take advantage of the unrest, the protests this round, as well as previously, have been homegrown and not the result of imperialist machinations. Iran has had a long history of widespread civil resistance going back to the late nineteenth century with the tobacco strike against imperialist economic domination, through the Constitutional Revolution the following decade, through the revolution in the late 1970s that brought down the U.S.-backed Shah. The outspoken support for the protests by the U.S. and Israeli governments have probably been counter-productive, feeding the regime’s false narrative that they are a result of foreign backing. Israel and the United States have a lot of power in terms of blowing things up and killing people.

They do not have the power to get hundreds of thousands of angry Iranians into the streets or even to steer the direction of their protests. The people who have given their lives on the streets were fighting for their freedom, not for foreign powers. Threats of military action by the United States and Israel have also likely strengthened the regime, since people tend to rally around the flag in case of outside threats and most Iranians across the political spectrum do not trust either country.

Given the U.S. support for even more repressive regimes in the Middle East, don’t think the Trump administration cares about the Iranian people. Bombing Iran to ostensibly support the uprising would be a tragedy. People would certainly be reluctant to go out onto the streets while they are being bombed. Most of those calling for U.S. military intervention appear to have been from the Iranian diaspora, not those on the streets. Although some Iranians within the country may have been desperate enough to want to risk it as well, let’s remember that it was not the eleven weeks of NATO bombing that brought down Milosevic in Serbia. It was the massive nonviolent resistance of the Serbian people that took place more than a year later.

It is possible that the United States and Israel might prefer the current reactionary, autocratic Iranian regime to a democratic one, which would still be anti-hegemonic and anti-Zionist but have a lot more credibility. A democratic Iran would still be nationalistic and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but less likely to engage in the kinds of repression and provocative foreign policies that would give the United States and Israel an excuse for some of their militarism. Solidarity from global civil society, by contrast, is important and appropriate. Despite claims by some to the contrary, many prominent pro-Palestinian voices from Bernie Sanders to Peter Beinart to Greta Thunberg have been outspoken in their support for the Iranian popular struggle as well. People will certainly tend to protest more when their own governments are actively supporting repression and mass killing, as with Israeli violence in Gaza and the West Bank, than when their governments are opposing the repression and mass killing.

Same as during the Cold War—it is quite natural for Americans to be less involved in protesting Communist repression we could do little about than repressive rightwing governments backed by Washington, where we might have more impact. As a result, this line about “where are all the protests on U.S. campuses?” has been unfair (particularly since most were still on winter break). And although some sectarian leftists really have become apologists for the reactionary Iranian regime or have exaggerated the Israeli role in the uprising, they are fortunately a small minority.

Ultimately, international solidarity is important, but it must be from sources that genuinely support the principles for which a popular movement is struggling. The movement in Iran, as with similar movements against autocratic regimes elsewhere, is fighting for freedom, democracy, and social and economic justice. Since neither the U.S. nor the Israeli government supports those principles, the Iranian regime—quite accurately in this case—can observe that U.S. and Israeli backing of the resistance is about advancing U.S. and Israeli strategic objectives, since these right-wing governments support regimes with even worse human rights records and they themselves are undermining democratic principles in their own countries. Indeed, some statements of support have played right into the regime’s hands.

Daniel Falcone: It seems that the participation of bazaaris and the poor and working class makes these protests distinct from earlier movements dominated by students and the middle class. How does this class composition alter legitimacy and the political stakes for the regime?

Lawrence Davidson: Their participation reflects the economic circumstances now. Those circumstances are, in turn, the product of externally imposed economic sanctions and incompetent internal management. Certainly, the participation of the bazaar keepers and the poor and working class in the protests is significant. No matter who comes out on top here, you’re going to see some sort of reform take place. The probability that it is the government that comes out on top is a function of the remaining loyalty of various contingents of the military. And a lot of this has to do with the economic stake of the Revolutionary Guard Corps in the status quo. As long as the military components of the regime stay loyal, the addition of bazaar keepers and the lower classes in the demonstrations cannot change the government. 

Stephen Zunes: I find it rather significant that the bazaaris, traditionally a backbone of support for the regime, have been in the leadership of the resistance, as is the fact that there has been significant poor and working-class participation in the protests, unlike some previous movements, which have been disproportionately students and those from the educated middle class. The Iranian military, like the military in Egypt and some other autocratic systems, has their fingers in all sorts of economic enterprises at the expense of the common people. As a result, their brutal response to the protests was not just ideological, but from a desire to protect their vested interests.

It is also striking how quickly the protests went beyond economic issues. Most Iranians want at minimum much greater democratization/accountability within the current system and an increasing number clearly want regime change, not just because of economic hardship, but because they are simply tired of the repression.

Daniel Falcone: Although U.S. led sanctions have crippled Iran, there are also problems of systemic corruption and mismanagement by the Iranian state. Protesters increasingly reject both. Do you see this moment as one in which economic grievances lead to demands for democratization?

Lawrence Davidson: The economic problems come from both factors you mention. The Iranian theologians did not understand the intricacies of modern economic institutions or the importance of international trade. Thus, they could not manage a national economy, particularly one under outside stress. At the same time, American sanctions were designed to destroy that economy and impoverish the Iranian people. The two factors, working simultaneously, opened the way for corruption. And then there is the Revolutionary Guard capturing control of important parts of the economy. It is a mess. Democracy? I think we are a long way from that. We are probably closer to a military coup with the mullahs kept as front men.

Stephen Zunes: U.S.-led sanctions are unjustifiable (since Iran was honoring the nuclear agreement when Trump reimposed them) and they are hurting the economy. But my sense is that both the regime and Washington, for different reasons, are exaggerating the importance of the sanctions in sparking the rebellion. It is the regime’s corruption, mismanagement, and lack of accountability that are the bigger problems. The sanctions have provided the government with an excuse to deflect attention from their lousy economic policies, but that justification is now wearing thin. The economic problems are systemic, so changes at the Central Bank and minor adjustments in fiscal policies will not satisfy most protesters. The regime’s crony capitalism is being seen increasingly as beyond repair under the current system.

Daniel Falcone: UBC Professor Jaleh Mansoor eloquently defended the circulation of protest images as a form of democratic solidarity, while also warning about reactionary diaspora fantasies that reduce Iran’s future to either the Islamic Republic or a restored monarchy. How do you see media circulation distorting an understanding of the protests?

Lawrence Davidson: I do believe that the images should be shown as widely as possible, just as should the ones from Gaza. However, the problem is that they are often shown with either few or misleading explanations. Western commentators do not understand much of the context of happenings in Iran, much less the history. This is the price of a corporate press. The ignorance and biases of editors, if not reporters, are shown over and over. In our lifetime the best example is during Vietnam.

Unless one is motivated to go to an alternate, more accurate source one will get a distorted picture. It is a curse that has always been with us. The wealthy Iranians in California can be as delusional as they wish but there will be no restored monarchy short of an American invasion and occupation of Iran. That is not going to happen. Thus, the Shah’s son will stay in LA. 

Stephen Zunes: The greater the circulation of imagery of the people’s resistance and the regime’s repression the better. Care should be given as to how they are presented, however. Like protest coverage elsewhere, the media tends to disproportionately show dramatic photos of vandalism and arson even though overall the protests have been overwhelmingly nonviolent. Indeed, violence is used by the regime to increase its already horrific repression even more.

Similarly, the monarchists are certainly a small minority of the protesters, though both the regime and the Western media (for different reasons) like to highlight them. Although there is something of a nostalgia among better-off Iranians from the pre-revolutionary days—like there is by some Russians for the Soviet era—it is more of a sign of how bad things are now than how good things were then. The Shah was one of the most repressive dictators in the world, and the inequality and corruption under his rule was terrible. Despite some protesters with signs or chants calling for a return of the Shah, the reality is that most Iranians on the streets in recent weeks have been fighting for democracy. In addition to the small number of monarchists, there have also been communists, moderate Islamists, secular liberals, and lots of other folks. People are fed up. Based on my time in Iran a few years ago and my following the situation in that country for decades, I can say with confidence that most of the Iranian people are both anti-regime and anti-monarchist.

Daniel Falcone: Masoud Pezeshkian has taken a conciliatory tone. Are hardliners likely to prevail if the protests intensify? And do you see any viable path for change within the current system?

Lawrence Davidson: There is a story going around that some government people went to the University of Tehran. They asked the protesting students what they wanted. The answer was “we want you to leave.” This was a mistake on the part of the protesters. They gave those with more power than themselves, no way to retreat. I see no path to meaningful change. I do think that once the government retakes the streets, there will be minor positive alterations in their behavior.

Stephen Zunes: Pezeshkian is a relative moderate, but he is not nearly as powerful as the mullahs or the military. Iran’s authoritarian system is a series of complex overlapping loci of power which represent varying interests, unlike some authoritarian regimes centered around a single autocrat, whose social base is thinner. As a result, I am not surprised, though quite disappointed, that the regime appears to have successfully and violently suppressed another round of protests.

Another problem is that the Iranian regime is the first government to face a massive civil insurrection that initially came to power themselves through a massive civil insurrection. Just as regimes that have come to power through guerrilla warfare are better at engaging in counterinsurgency, the Islamic Republic has unfortunately developed better mechanisms than did the Shah (or Mubarak, Ben Ali, Milosevic, Marcos, Suharto, etc.) to suppress civil resistance. I do believe the regime’s days are numbered, however. I just can’t say when or predict what will replace it.

This first appeared in FPIF.

Daniel Falcone is a historian, teacher and journalist. In addition to CounterPunch, he has written for The Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, The Nation, Jacobin, Truthout, Foreign Policy in Focus and Scalawag. He resides in New York City and is a member of The Democratic Socialists of America.

Ron Paul: 

Will He, Or Won’t He? – OpEd

February 2, 2026
By Ron Paul

For the past month, Americans have been wondering whether President Trump will attack Iran, or whether the massive military build-up in the Middle East is just another bluff. President Trump claims that the decision is his alone to make.

Thus far, President Trump has made little effort to explain to the American people – or to Congress – why launching a war against Iran is in our national interest. Instead, he wanders from one reason to another, hoping something will stick. First it was a “nuclear threat” even though he swore that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last summer. Then, after the CIA, Mossad, and UK’s MI6 launched a regime-change operation in the form of violent protests in late December, the excuse for war became the Iranian government’s crackdown on the insurrection. But before that could be used as the excuse, the Iranian government was able to quash the uprising. So President Trump returned to the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, while adding in the presence of Iran’s ballistic missile program.

Even by the low threshold for recent US military actions overseas, these arguments are unconvincing. That is why Americans are so skeptical. In a major poll last month, seven in ten Americans said they oppose any US military action against Iran.

When it comes to matters of war, where billions of dollars and countless lives are at stake, “will he, or won’t he” is a terrible question to have to ask. More than 250 years ago we rose up against a system where the king claimed the power to take us to war on his royal decision alone. Our Founding Fathers well understood the folly of concentrating so much power in the hands of one person and placed the power to take the country to war in the hands of the people’s direct representatives, Congress.

This Constitutional obligation has not only been usurped by the Executive Branch. Much blame must be reserved for Congress, which has allowed itself to become a doormat for whoever occupies the White House when it comes to war powers. Members of the president’s own party – regardless of which party it is – are terrified of going against “their” president and members of the opposing party are silent because they don’t want to be accused of not “supporting the troops.”

The media is reporting that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will make yet another trip to Washington – his sixth in one year – where he is expected to again pressure President Trump to launch a war on Iran. Last time he was in the US – in December – the regime-change protests in Iran were launched. What does he have up his sleeve this time?

How can it be that a foreign leader has more say on whether we go to war than the US Congress?

Here’s what we do know. Whether Trump launches a war or not, the massive military build-up in the Middle East has already cost us billions of dollars. Those are billions that instead of helping to actually make America great again will only make the military-industrial complex “greater.” All the American people will see is the continuing destruction of the dollar and with it more inflation and a lower standard of living at home. And, of course, we will see a “war supplemental” spending bill on top of the trillion-dollar military budget for the year.

This article was published at Ron Paul Institute

Ron Paul
Ronald Ernest "Ron" Paul (born August 20, 1935) is an American physician, author, and politician who served for many years as a U.S. Representative for Texas. He was a three-time candidate for President of the United States, as a Libertarian in 1988 and as a Republican in 2008 and 2012.

Op-Ed 

Trump’s Back-and-Forth Threats on Iran Are

 

Psychological Warfare

As Trump threatens Iran yet again, Congress continues to abdicate its responsibility to rein in war.

By Hanieh Jodat , 

Truthout

January 30, 2026

Donald Trump speaks during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (off frame) at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 29, 2025. The two leaders discussed Iran, with Trump saying that if Tehran rebuilt its nuclear facilities, the United States would "knock them down."Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images

As Iranians rise in protest, Donald Trump’s rhetoric has become a study in contradictions. One day, he threatens “very strong action” against the Islamic Republic to defend Iranian protesters; the next, he praises the very regime he condemned and suggests the possibility of negotiations. His language and behavior are driven by self-interest, not genuine concern for the Iranian people. This theatrical show of menace and bravado is a calculated move, shaped by political ambition, military considerations, and the shifting tides of his support base. While Trump performs on the world stage, ordinary Iranians are left to face the consequences. Parents search mortuaries and hospitals for their loved ones, their grief and struggle reduced to the backdrop of a geopolitical drama.

The protests, which began on December 28, erupted in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar and rapidly spread across the country. While these protests have been organic, they are not spontaneous. They have been fueled by economic collapse: Iran’s currency has lost close to 90 percent of its value against the dollar in a year, and inflation is skyrocketing. People from all income groups and generations joined in, making a variety of demands that increasingly included the downfall of Iran’s current regime.

Iran’s uprising was met with brutality by the government, which shut down communications and cut Iranians off from the outside world. The strategy was not only to stop the protests, but to erase them from public view.

The human costs of these protests have been catastrophic. Across Iran, morgues and mortuaries have overflowed with the number of dead bodies, and hospitals have been collapsing under the weight of injuries. Trucks carrying body bags have been turned away and abandoned at gates, as facilities ran out of space to hold the deceased. The estimated number of casualties has varied substantially due to internet shutdowns. According to the Iranian government, more than 3,000 people have been killed, while the Human Rights Activists News Agency has verified over 6,000 deaths. Ongoing investigations into an additional 17,000 cases could raise the death toll substantially. Meanwhile, according to Amnesty International, tens of thousands of people, including children, have been detained by Iranian authorities.

Amid the crackdown, Washington has drifted into an all-too-familiar and dangerous posture, one that threatens war and bloodshed at the cost of Iranian lives. At the beginning of the protests, Donald Trump warned Iran’s government that if there were casualties, he would send “help” to Iranians in the form of “very strong action.” Yet just a few days later, he commended Iran’s government for ostensibly stopping a spate of executions while raising the possibility of diplomatic talks.

Iran’s Protesters Are Caught Between State Repression and Foreign Intervention
Both Trump and the Iranian government are treating Iranian protesters as political pawns.
By Alex Shams , Truthout January 15, 2026

While Washington sends these mixed rhetorical signals, outlets including Al Jazeera and Reuters have continued to report on U.S. military assets being repositioned in the Middle East, allies placed on heightened alert, and American personnel being withdrawn from some locations. Additionally, the U.S. has begun moving a massive armada, led by carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, towards Iran. This naval operation adds roughly 5,000 additional troops to the region, where more than 30,000 American servicemembers are already stationed. This development comes as Trump has vowed that Iran’s resistance to come to the negotiating table over the nuclear program could provoke an attack “far worse” than the previous strike.

Furthermore, the U.S. has told the UN that “all options are on the table” for an attack. In response to this threat, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a warning on X that any attack on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would be “tantamount to a full-scale war on the Iranian nation,” adding that any unjust aggression would be met with a regrettable response.

When we peel back the layers of Iran’s current crisis, we must recognize that the frustration of the Iranian people is the outcome of 47 years of the regime’s oppression, corruption, and mismanagement, as well as decades of coercive U.S. policy. For the past eight years, unilateral sanctions have weakened Iran’s civil society, pushing the middle class into severe poverty. Against the backdrop of growing economic hardship and pain, internet blackouts have hampered employment and commerce by transforming an already collapsing economy into an instrument used for collective punishment.

While Trump and GOP leaders suggest the United States is preparing for an attack on Iran, the grounds for war are being prepared without congressional authorization, public debate, or clear disclosures from media about the implications of such a war, despite the common understanding from analysts that such a war would be disastrous.

During Iran’s 12-day war with Israel, the U.S. and its allied countries framed the war as limited and presented the ceasefire as a way to stop further escalation. But the death and destruction in Iran told a different story: More than a thousand Iranians were killed by Israel and the significant financial loss of the war will be felt for years after the fragile ceasefire.

U.S. military escalation is often minimized and downplayed publicly until it suddenly erupts into a catastrophic regional crisis. Before the Trump administration assassinated Iran’s high-ranking Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in 2020, the American public was reassured that the threat of war would be limited. But within hours, the region came close to catastrophic war as a result of a single executive decision.

We’re watching the same thing play out again today. Trump’s language yo-yos between demands for diplomacy and threats of intervention, all to be interpreted alongside incoherent military movements. Meanwhile, mainstream media coverage ranges from whether war will or will not happen, rather than asking why escalation is the first option. This all has real-world consequences. According to Reuters, oil prices are fluctuating as markets closely track U.S.–Iran tensions. After all, the global market understands how devastating a regional war would be for global supply chains. Now imagine how that devastation will impact people in Iran, as well as people in the United States.

Inside Iran, the situation is grim. Iranian leaders have accused the United States and Israel of provoking unrest, a claim Washington denies. Meanwhile, figures on the right boast of interference; former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even stated that Mossad agents are “walking beside” the Iranian people at protests. This rhetoric weakens the organic movement organized by the people of Iran and gives the Iranian state an excuse to double down on repression.

Time and again, we have seen the brutality of U.S. militarism. The U.S. claims to stand with the people of Iran, but in reality, it imposes hardships on them, making daily life unbearable. Unilateral sanctions imposed by Trump after abandoning the 2015 nuclear deal devastated Iran’s civilian population, restricting medicine, food, and basic necessities for families already suffering from starvation as the regime used those very sanctions to tighten its grip and enrich its leaders.

The Trump administration has shown that it does not care about human rights. But if Washington were truly concerned, it would loosen its grip on Iran’s economy and allow civil society to strike and continue organizing for a political system that best fits the needs of people within the country. For years, unilateral sanctions have hollowed out civil society by restricting banking, driving inflation and criminalizing financial networks. The shortage of cash flow restricts Iran’s civil society and labor from organizing — forcing survival over political action. Furthermore, Iranians abroad no longer have the ability to help their families financially due to banking restrictions as a result of sanctions.

The U.S.’s desire to intervene has been a failed and disastrous strategy, and history shows this — from Afghanistan and Iraq, to Libya, Yemen, and Venezuela. And while Republicans and some of the more hawkish Democrats are ready to escalate at any given moment, there is little to no oversight. Since the War Powers Resolution was enacted in 1973, U.S. presidents, well before Trump, have ignored its parameters, raising the fundamental question about a system that wages war without accountability, law, debate, or consent. Congress has not meaningfully debated the prospect of a serious war with Iran, just as it failed to do before the 2003 invasion of Iraq or recent intervention of Venezuela.

The U.S. people have not been asked for consent. Polling has consistently shown that a majority of Americans oppose another war, yet decision makers in Washington have used vague claims of national security to continue a policy of secrecy and keep debate from happening out in the open.

According to multiple major news outlets, a strike by the Trump administration was seriously considered earlier this month and then pulled back at the behest of Israel and key Gulf allies. There have also been concerns that the United States does not have the sufficient regional assets to defend against an aggressive response from Iran.

Hearing these piecemeal news updates, especially alongside Trump’s bluster, is not reassuring for Iranian Americans with family ties back home. This is psychological warfare. Such inconsistency, coming from a nuclear power, should not reassure us — it should alarm us. The very notion that at any moment a catastrophic war could break out in the Middle East underscores how fragile and undemocratic U.S. foreign policy is.

It is important to note that if Trump chooses to de-escalate and show restraint, it will not be a reflection of his commitment to supporting the Iranian people. It would instead be a thoughtful calculation that the economic, political, and military costs of intervention would outweigh Washington’s interest. The case for de-escalation is helped by the polls that have shown that majority of U.S. voters do not support another endless war; it is in Trump’s own best interest to refrain from entering into another catastrophic war in the Middle East.

We know that what’s underway is purely calculation, not thoughtful restraint. As history once again repeats itself, the lesson of the past two decades is clear: Wars begin when we normalize the idea that violence is the better option.


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.

Hanieh Jodat
Hanieh Jodat is a political strategist and a key strategist with Defuse Nuclear War, an initiative of RootsAction. She also serves as the Chair of Progressive Democrats of America – Middle East Alliances, focusing on fostering dialogue and progressive policies on critical global issues.

The Guardian joins the cheerleading for a war of aggression against Iran

Corporate media doesn't represent humanity's interests. It promotes the interests of billionaires and their hangers-on, who make huge profits from a war machine in constant need of excuses to kill

By Jonathan Cook

February 1, 2026

Source: Jonathan Cook Substack

International law is absolutely clear. If the US attacks Iran, it would be a war of aggression and the “supreme international crime”.

The job of even supposedly liberal media like the Guardian is to persuade you this is not what is at stake. To disbelieve your lying eyes.

Look at this astonishingly dishonest headline and subhead from today’s paper:

“Threat of US-Iran war escalates” intentionally obscures the truth: that it is the US doing the “escalating” – and that its escalating is entirely illegal.

“Trump warns time running out for deal” makes it sound as though Trump has some kind of authority to make this “warning”. Hey, Guardian, maybe he’s doing it on behalf of his Board of Peace.

The truth is he has no such authority. That resides with the United Nations. What Trump is doing is not a warning; it’s a threat – an utterly illegal threat of aggression.

In any case, Iran has been trying to drag the US back to the negotiating table ever since Trump unilaterally tore up their original deal eight years ago. Time is only “running out” because the US has decided it now needs a pretext to launch an illegal war of aggression. Why is the Guardian not making that clear in its headlines?

Instead, it has turned reality on its head. Trump, according to the Guardian, is the one supposedly trying to secure a deal – that’s the very same Trump who tore up the original deal, has refused to return to negotiations and instead bombed Iran last summer – in another illegal act of aggression.

“US president says armada heading towards Iran is ‘prepared to fulfil its missions with violence if necessary’”. That is just the Guardian’s way of obscuring the fact that Trump is preparing to break international law by waging a war of aggression, the “supreme crime”.

The Guardian’s headline and subhead both present an act by the US of supreme illegality as though it is some kind law enforcement measure. This isn’t journalism. It is cheerleading for an illegal war in which Iranian civilians will inevitably pay the heaviest price.

We have to stop thinking that any corporate media represents the interests of humanity. They promote the interests of the billionaire class and their hangers-on, who make huge profits from a war machine that needs constant excuses to kill.

Corporate media doesn’t hold these billionaires to account. Its sole function is to serve as their public relations arm.

The BBC Pushes The Case For An Illegal War On Iran With Even Bigger Lies Than Trump’s

The UK state broadcaster streams disinformation into our living rooms – deceptions that not only leave us clueless about important international events but drive us ever closer to global conflagration

By Jonathan Cook

January 31, 2026

Source: Jonathan Cook Substack

Here is another example of utterly irresponsible journalism from the BBC on tonight’s News at Ten.

Diplomatic correspondent Caroline Hawley starts by credulously amplifying a fantastical death toll of “tens of thousands of dead” from recent protests in Iran – figures provided by regime opponents. Contrast that with the BBC’s constant, two years of caution and downplaying of the numbers killed in Gaza by Israel.

The idea that in a few days Iranian security forces managed to kill as many Iranians as Israel has managed to kill Palestinians in Gaza from the prolonged carpet-bombing and levelling of the tiny enclave, as well as the starvation of its population, beggars belief. The figures sound patently ridiculous because they are patently ridiculous.

Either the Iran death toll is massively inflated, or the Gaza death toll is a massive underestimate. Or far more likely, both are intentionally being used to mislead.

The BBC has a political agenda that says it is fine to headline a made-up, inflated figure of the dead in Iran because our leaders have defined Iran as an Official Enemy. While the BBC has a converse political agenda that says it’s fine to employ endless caveats to minimise a death toll in Gaza that is already certain to be a huge undercount because Israel is an Official Ally.

This isn’t journalism. It’s stenography for western governments that choose enemies and allies not on the basis of whether they adhere to any ethical or legal standards of behaviour but purely on the basis of whether they assist the West in its battle to dominate oil resources in the Middle East.

Notice something else. This news segment – focusing the attention of western publics once again on the presumed wanton slaughter of protesters in Iran earlier this month – is being used by the BBC to advance the case for a war on Iran out of strictly humanitarian concerns that Trump himself doesn’t appear to share.

Trump has sent his armada of war ships to the Gulf not because he says he wants to protect protesters – in fact, missile strikes will undoubtedly kill many more Iranian civilians – but because he says he wishes to force Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear programme.

There are already deep layers of deceit from western politicians regarding Iran – not least, the years-long premise that Iran is seeking a nuclear bomb, for which there is still no evidence, and that Tehran is responsible for the breakdown of a deal to monitor its civilian nuclear power programme. In fact, it was Trump in his first term as president who tore up that agreement.

Iran responded by enriching uranium above the levels needed for civilian use in a move that was endlessly flagged to Washington by Tehran and was clearly intended to encourage the previous Biden administration to renew the deal Trump had wrecked.

Instead, on his return to power, Trump used that enrichment not as grounds to return to diplomacy but as a pretext, first, to intensify US sanctions that have further crippled Iran’s economy, deepening poverty among ordinary Iranians, and then to launch a strike on Iran last summer that appears to have made little difference to its nuclear programme but served to weaken its air defences, to assassinate some of its leaders and to spread terror among the wider population.

Notice too – though the BBC won’t point it out – that the US sanctions are a form of collective punishment on the Iranian population that is in breach of international law and that last year’s strikes on Iran were a clear war of aggression, which is defined as “the supreme international crime”.

The US President is now posturing as though he is the one who wants to bring Iran to the negotiating table, by sending an armada of war ships, when it was he who overturned that very negotiating table in May 2018 and ripped up what was known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

The BBC, of course, makes no mention whatsoever of this critically important context for judging the credibility of Trump’s claims about his intentions towards Iran. Instead its North America editor, Sarah Smith, vacuously regurgitates as fact the White House’s evidence-free claim that Iran has a “nuclear weapons programme” that Trump wants it to “get rid of”.

But on top of all that, media like the BBC are adding their own layers of deceit to sell the case for a US war on Iran.

First, they are doing so by trying to find new angles on old news about the violent repression of protests inside Iran. They are doing so by citing extraordinary, utterly unevidenced death toll figures and then tying them to the reasons for Trump going on the war path. The BBC’s reporting is centring once again – after the catastrophes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere – bogus humanitarian justifications for war when Trump himself is making no such connection.

And second, the BBC’s reporting by Sarah Smith coolly lays out the US mechanics of attacking Iran – the build-up to war – without ever mentioning that such an attack would be in complete violation of international law. It would again be “the supreme international crime”.

Instead she observes: “Donald Trump senses an opportunity to strike at a weakened leadership in Tehran. But how is actually going to do that? I mean he talked in his message about the successful military actions that have definitely emboldened him after the actions he took in Venezuela and earlier last year in Iran.”

Imagine if you can – and you can’t – the BBC dispassionately outlining Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to move on from his invasion of Ukraine into launching military strikes on Poland. Its correspondents note calmly the number of missiles Putin has massed closer to Poland’s borders, the demands made by the Russian leader of Poland if it wishes to avoid attack, and the practical obstacles standing in the way of the attack. One correspondent ends by citing Putin’s earlier, self-proclaimed “successes”, such as the invasion of Ukraine, as a precedent for his new military actions.

It is unthinkable. And yet not a day passes without the BBC broadcasting this kind of blatant warmongering slop dressed up as journalism. The British public have to pay for this endless stream of disinformation pouring into their living rooms – lies that not only leave them clueless about important international events but drive us ever closer to the brink of global conflagration.

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Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook is a British independent journalist, who has covered issues of Palestine and Israel for much of his over 20-year career. He formerly wrote for the Guardian and Observer newspapers and is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

The Iran Escalation Machine: Narratives, Sanctions, and the Normalization of Force

by Sophia Gonzalez | Jan 29, 2026 | ANTIWAR.COM

U.S. policy toward Iran is frequently sold as a reaction to urgent threats. In practice, it behaves more like a system: narrative escalation, economic coercion, covert pressure, and then the steady normalization of “military options.” The pattern repeats because it is institutionally convenient. It compresses debate, rewards maximal claims, and makes restraint look like failure.

Start with the information environment. On Iran, the line between verified reporting and advocacy often collapses. Casualty figures circulate fast, harden into “fact” faster, and then become emotional fuel for punitive policy. In the current cycle, official Iranian sources have cited a death toll around 6,000 during unrest, while Iran International has promoted numbers in the tens of thousands, including claims around 36,500. A gap that large isn’t normal uncertainty. It should trigger basic questions about method, sourcing, and incentives.

A serious media culture should demand transparent sourcing and methodological clarity from any outlet circulating extraordinary claims about Iran – because inflated or opaque reporting narrows debate and makes coercive policy feel inevitable.

Once the narrative is locked in, the next step is usually sanctions, marketed to Americans as a humane alternative to war. That framing is false. Sanctions are a form of economic warfare, and their most reliable impact is not “behavior change” among elites but predictable harm to civilians: disrupted medicine supply chains, overcompliance by banks and vendors, inflation shocks, and the slow deterioration of public health. Human Rights Watch has documented how “maximum pressure” sanctions and financial restrictions undermined access to essential medicines and threatened Iranians’ right to health, despite nominal humanitarian exemptions.

The United Nations has also been unusually explicit that sanctions’ human impact is often amplified by overcompliance – companies and financial institutions refusing lawful transactions out of fear. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that unilateral sanctions and overcompliance pose a serious threat to human rights in Iran, and U.N. experts later highlighted cases where overcompliance affected access to life-saving medicine.

The most damning evidence is quantitative. A peer-reviewed study in The Lancet Global Health estimated that unilateral sanctions were associated with an annual toll of 564,258 deaths (with wide confidence intervals) over its study period. Even if readers debate model assumptions, the core implication holds: economic strangulation can be war-like in its human cost. If Washington wants to claim human rights as a guiding principle, it cannot treat sanctions as morally clean simply because suffering arrives through shortages and delayed care rather than explosions.

This is also why the sudden humanitarian vocabulary that often accompanies pressure campaigns should be treated skeptically. U.S. officials can speak the language of women’s rights and freedom while advancing tools that predictably intensify hardship, increase polarization, and reduce the space for negotiated outcomes. But the incentives driving U.S. pressure campaigns are often material as well as ideological: leverage over energy, trade, and strategic geography. Venezuela is a useful reminder of how quickly “moral” narratives can sit alongside resource-centered outcomes – Washington simultaneously charged Venezuela’s leadership with “narco-terrorism” and related crimes, while U.S. policy in practice increasingly moved toward controlling Venezuelan oil flows and distribution. That is not a critique of women’s rights. It is a critique of instrumentalizing rights language as branding for coercion.

Covert pressure belongs in the analysis as well, not because it explains everything, but because it changes the incentive structure around instability. Israel’s history of clandestine activity targeting Iran’s strategic capabilities is widely reported, including sabotage and covert operations designed to weaken defenses and increase vulnerability. The Associated Press has described multi-year preparations, including smuggled systems and data-driven target selection, and ProPublica has reported on efforts to recruit Iranian dissidents for inside-Iran missions.

None of this proves that every protest or every violent incident is “foreign-made,” and it would be analytically sloppy to claim that. But it does establish a sober baseline: when unrest erupts, sophisticated actors have both capability and incentive to exploit volatility, intensify chaos, and steer events toward outcomes that make diplomacy harder and punitive policy easier to sell.

Terrorist violence is part of this landscape too. Iran has suffered mass-casualty attacks claimed by the Islamic State; Reuters has reported on ISIS’s claim after the Kerman bombing, and has also covered ISIS-linked cases and prosecutions. Recognizing violent opportunism does not negate real grievances or economic pressures. It simply prevents Washington from laundering coercion as “solidarity” while ignoring the covert and violent tools that cluster around flashpoints.

The strategic logic behind Washington’s “hardball” is not mysterious. Realist analysts like John Mearsheimer have argued that U.S. leaders understand the risks of direct confrontation with peer competitors such as China and Russia, and therefore often seek demonstrations of resolve against states they assume are more pressure-sensitive. Whether one agrees with Mearsheimer or not, the warning is relevant: when Washington needs an arena to perform strength, the Middle East is repeatedly treated as available – and Iran is framed as a permanent emergency rather than a state with which negotiation is possible.

This is where war talk becomes reckless. A conflict with Iran would not be “surgical.” It would be systemic. One reason is energy and shipping risk. Roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration has documented comparable figures for recent years. Even limited escalation can spike risk premiums, shipping costs, and inflation. A wider conflict would create incentives for retaliation and miscalculation that pull in multiple countries and damage infrastructure.

Americans should ask who pays – not in slogans, in invoices. War and war-footing politics expand executive power, widen surveillance, and turn “emergency” into governance. Randolph Bourne’s old warning remains intact: war is the health of the state. A foreign policy that normalizes coercion abroad reliably produces coercion at home.

The alternative is not naïve idealism. It is restraint. It means treating inflated claims with skepticism and refusing to let unverifiable extremes collapse debate into inevitability. It means acknowledging that sanctions are not a humanitarian tool but a coercive one with measurable civilian harm. And it means prioritizing de-escalation and durable diplomacy over the ritualized march from narrative panic to economic warfare to military options.

Iran is not an “emergency” that requires Americans to suspend judgment. It is a country Washington can choose to negotiate with, or choose to pressure until conflict becomes self-fulfilling. That is a political choice. The costs, if we choose wrong, will be paid by civilians first and by liberty eventually.

Sophia Gonzalez is an American activist and political analyst focusing on U.S. strategy, Middle East affairs, and global security. A peace and human rights advocate, she writes to challenge interventionism and promote diplomacy. Find her on X (@SophiaGnzlz) or contact her at Gonzalez.initial@gmail.com.