Like many of you, I have been glued to the news since Trump’s bizarre announcement early Saturday morning that the USA is once again at war with Iran. Given the assassination of the Supreme Leader, the amount of bombing, Iran’s retaliation across the Middle East including its targeting of American allies, and the Orwellian promises from the Trump administration that they will bomb Iran as long as is necessary to achieve peace, I think it’s fair to assume we are in for a longer onslaught with further reaching consequences than the brief Iran-USA war of last summer. That means we’re going to have to find a way to talk about the war in a manner which welcomes the complexities of murderous regimes attacking one another, a task which, typically, we Leftists fail in.

How the West Helped Create the Islamic Republic

The bare facts of this conflict are extremely important. Iran holds 13% of the world’s oil reserves and is the third-largest OPEC producer. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalised Iran’s oil industry in 1951, leading to a British and American-backed coup in 1953 which reinstated the pro-Western Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as an absolute monarch, reducing the power of the parliament. Through the Consortium Agreement of 1954, Western oil companies were granted 50% ownership of Iran’s oil production.

However, in 1973, the Shah re-nationalised Iran’s oil industry after a consortium of British, American, French and Dutch oil companies refused to double the country’s output to 8 million barrels of oil per day. The Big Oil majors packed up and left, and diplomatic relations continued smoothly enough, facilitated by the fact that Iran was now one of the fastest growing economies (and militaries) in the world and rife with Western influence. American soft power had effectively infiltrated the cultural landscape of Iran.

But less than a decade later, the country was in turmoil. The Shah’s rule had degenerated into a corrupt autocracy: 10% of the country was striking against the monarchy, and the Imperial Army was massacring people on the streets. Iranians continued to march, defiant. From Paris, ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, exiled for his opposition to the Shah’s modernising reforms, became the face of the revolution, promising Iranians to both end the corrupt Western influence of their country and maintain the principles of equality which had promulgated a cultural renaissance in the extremely diverse country.

The history books in both the West and the Middle East tell us that the ayatollah took back Iran from the West in 1979. However, in 2016, newly unsealed CIA documents revealed the the ayatollah had been in direct communication with President Carter’s administration, seeking American support to facilitate his return to Iran with the understanding he would protect America’s interests. These documents show that the American government actually “helped pave the way for Khomeini’s safe return to Iran and rapid rise to power”, which quickly led to the creation of the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime known for its violent and genocidal oppression of dissent.

What Trump and Netanyahu Want in Iran

Iran has been subject to international sanctions on and off since 1979, crippling its economic development and oil export trade. Of course, none of this actually helped the Iranian people, who were subject to massacres and genocides in the 1980s. Obama’s administration eventually tried a new tact with Iran, offering reduced sanctions, including waiving the sanctions on Iran’s oil, in return for Iran limiting its nuclear activities. The JCPOA deal was signed in consort with China, France, Germany, Russia and the UK. A third party confirmed every 90 days that Iran was complying with the deal until mad-dog Trump claimed in 2018 that Israeli intelligence proved Iran was lying about limiting its nuclear weapons programs and withdrew the United States from the Agreement.

Trump re-introduced harsh sanctions by late 2018, including sanctions on countries that trade with Iran. Importantly, Iran was placed on the Financial Action Task Force Blacklist in 2020, effectively castrating the country’s ability to participate in the global economy. The FATF blacklist blocks nations from accessing the SWIFT banking system, making it extremely difficult to send and receive money even if Iran finds a workaround to American sanctions.

Sanctions on China, too, led to the People’s Republic developing a relationship with Iran, eventually becoming the dominant buyer of Iranian oil. In 2021, the two countries signed a 25-year partnership deal. Buying more than 80% of Iran’s shipped oil through a shadow fleet of tankers and then refining it through small “teapot” refineries, China has deftly navigated Trump’s sanctions whilst providing Iran with the majority of its $53 billion oil export revenue. On top of that, because of the shadowy export and refinery system, Iran offers its oil at a reduced rate to the rest of the market, making it a bargain for China at just $8–10 a barrel.

Iran’s shadow revenue hasn’t been enough to mitigate the sanctions, though, which have culminated in a severe and sustained economic crisis in Iran, with inflation reaching almost 50% and unemployment skyrocketing. In January, Iranians poured out into the streets in protest against the regime. This, like all other revolutionary activity under recent Iranian regimes, has been met with acute and absolute violence. 2024 saw executions climb to 975. In 2025, that number shot up to 2038. The National Council of Resistance in Iran estimates executions this year have already surpassed 2000.

Trump has used both Israel’s unverifiable claims about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme and the revolutionary activity as evidence for launching this latest attack. However, given the last regime he toppled was Maduro’s Venezuela which also sold the majority of its oil to China, the foreign policy of Trump’s second term seems nothing less than a thinly-veiled attack on the world’s second superpower, a superpower nimbly side-stepping the USA at every turn (Trump’s recent oil embargo on another Chinese ally, Cuba, saw the Chinese solar panel industry flood in to fill the energy gap).

Crucially, this is also an attack on justice. Trump is working in concert with his fellow mad dog in Jerusalem, Netanyahu, whose genocide of the Palestinians has spilled into a mass destabilisation campaign in the Middle East, keeping Israel at war so he cannot be tried for his war crimes. Together, Netanyahu and Trump are trying to provoke not just regime changes, but a mass regional change to protect their own positions, restrict China’s global reach, open Middle Eastern resources up for Western exploitation and ensure Israel sees no retribution for its illegal murder of more than 75000 Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children.

The Enemy of Your Enemy is Not Your Friend

I wanted to provide all this context because the question I’m interested in is: How do we talk about what’s happening in Iran? When I logged into LinkedIn this morning, the first post I saw was an inter-Leftist attack, whereby a degrowth researcher publicly accused a prominent degrowth academic of “colonial solidarity” by simply mentioning the Iranian regime’s violent reputation when expressing solidarity with Iranian people. This struck me as completely absurd—as absurd as the photographs which have flooded in from every corner of the Western world of people taking to the streets to either celebrate America’s invasion or defend Iranian sovereignty.

The Wall Street Journal published a beautiful essay on the Left’s confluence of Iran with the Islamic Republic this weekend, written by Iranian-American writer Dinar Nayeri. In it, she argues that Leftist discourse reveals a groupthink binary of Islam, to the extent that she, someone who fled the regime as a child with her mother and sister, has been accused of perpetuating Islamophobia just for criticising Iran’s theocracy. She questions why the Left’s solidarity campaign has not extended to Iran, warning that, when faced with evidence of the execution of women who dared protest against the regime by its Morality Police in 2022, “Western-educated Iranians like me are still hearing some of our peers (otherwise well-informed, humanitarian writers and academics) parroting Islamic Republic talking points: that the diaspora is ill-informed, fearmongering, manipulated by Trump or Israel or racist, imperialist right-wing forces.”

Importantly, Nayeri writes that when she started making videos on social media on the complexity of the situation in Iran and criticising the regime, her algorithm sharply banked right. It is a tragedy of negligence if the only political position to welcome critiques of dangerous religious regimes is that which supports dangerous religious regimes. The Left is acute and accurate in its critique of Trump’s fundamentalist Christian, autocratic and corrupt government, as it is Netanyahu’s exploitation of Jewish fundamentalism to achieve his political goals. Why, then, do we fail to apply the same lens to Islamic fundamentalism? For example, why is an attack on women’s reproductive rights understood as an attack on women’s liberty when perpetuated on American soil—but not Iranian soil? Why is women’s autonomy a fundamental prerequisite for political liberation for all in the West—but not the Middle East? The right to choose free of coercion is the cornerstone of democracy—so why do Leftists tie themselves in knots trying to argue that, elsewhere, women are free to choose their position of inequality?

The Left’s adherence to moral purity over moral clarity creates intellectually lazy and ethically dishonest positions, positions which fail to hold up under scrutiny (which is why certain questions and topics must be banned to begin with) and creates a pipeline towards the right. There is no primordial evil in this conflict against whom we cast ourselves in righteous defiance. The Iranian people have the right to self-determination, a right not granted under the Islamic Republic and a right that Donald Trump obviously has no interest in granting if the regime falls, evidenced by his pathological disinterest in the American people’s right to self-determination. It is our moral imperative to hold two distasteful truths to be self-evident: the two enemies at war are both enemies of liberation. This is the only way we can see beyond the limited horizons of capitalist realism and envision a better world. Solidarity must always belong with people, not regimes and, as such, criticism must not be diluted by the patronising belief that some groups cannot defend against their own victimisation. It is not progressive or righteous to cast our brothers and sisters, wherever they are, as eternal victims dependent on the foot soldiers of Western benevolence.

The truth is, the Middle East has been just as much a source of revolutionary politics over the past few decades as it has been a source of despotic regression. This week’s upcoming episode features journalist Matt Broomfield on the anarchist, feminist revolution in Rojava, a political experiment that outstrips any Western equivalent in its progressive nature, and its success. In the episode, we discuss the moral quandries provoked by existential threat, quandries the Kurds effectively navigated in Rojava, and which Western Leftists trip up over repeatedly. Truth in the trenches is an altogether different beast to the truths with which we placate our sensibilities.

We will never be our own source of revolutionary thought and action if it is more acceptable to take aim at one another rather than take aim at violent regimes. Every public squabble erodes the common ground upon which we stand; we cannot take any stand in support of our brothers and sisters if there is nothing beneath our feet.Email