3713. A Contribution to the Discussion of the Guardian's "Open Letter" on Iran

By Kamran Nayeri, August 30, 2026

Protest on the 40th day since the death of Mahsa/Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian who died after being arrested by the morality police in Tehran on September 22, 2022. 

On August 20, The Guardian published an Open Letter, “To Iran’s political prisoners, trapped ‘between two blades of a scissors’”, by 23 prominent leftists mostly from the United States and Western Europe: “We write to you from a place of deep solidarity, our hearts heavy with the knowledge of the struggle you face within Iran’s prisons: the torture, the systematic neglect, the enforced silence, and the brutal reality of sham trials and executions.”

The authors go further:

“And we stand in solidarity with you, as you are at the intersection of two sources of oppression.

“On one side, you face the Islamic Republic that, from its inception, enforced absolute social and political control based on an exclusionary ideology. It is a system that claims to counter imperial power while using its very logic of domination and systems of carcerality, torture and execution.

“On the other side, you face the aggression and violence of the very imperialist and Zionist forces the Islamic Republic purports to stand against.” (my emphases).

The Open Letter has ignited a much-needed public discussion.

This essay contributes to this discussion by examining aspects of the twin problems of how to defend Iran against imperialist and Zionist aggression while fighting for the release of political prisoners in Iran.  

As an Iranian American socialist since 1971 who participated in organized Iranian socialist movement (1975-1982) and organized socialist movements in the U.S. since 1982, I have firsthand experience in defense of Iranian political prisoners as well as participating as a leader of the Iranian Trotskyist movement and a co-founder of the Workers Unity Party in the Iranian revolution (1979-82) with the goal of helping the Iranian working people to form their own government based on their own grassroots organizations, in particular the workers and peasants shora (council) movements.

To proceed, I'll cite some notable earlier contributions focusing on the “scissors” analogy that frames the Open Letter.

Vijay Prashad, the executive director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, in “Against the False Symmetry of the Scissors: An Open Letter While Iran Resists an Illegal War of Aggression,” criticizes the “scissors” analogy:

“The central image, two blades of a scissors, is evocative but erroneous. It suggests that one of the blades is the Islamic Republic and the other blade is the United States and Israel, with the Iranian people being cut by the two of them. The error of the scissors is not merely that its blades are unequal. It is that the image makes the aggressor and the attacked appear as parallel sources of the same danger, stripping away the history and hierarchy that connect them. US imperialism is not simply one oppression alongside another. It is the force that has encircled Iran, devastated the region, armed Israel, imposed sanctions upon an entire population, and now brought war to Iranian territory. Your letter places the aggression and its target in the same moral frame.” (emphasis added)

Thus, the political framework Prashad uses is what was called Third Worldism in the 1960s and later “anti-imperialism,” which frames the main problem Iranian working people face as imperialism rather than the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic. Indeed, he considers the Islamic Republic regime (which he identifies with Iran as the country) to be an anti-imperialist force facing off against United States imperialism and Israeli Zionism. Thus, he praises the Islamic Republic policy of forming what they call the Axis of Resistance.

Farah Mokhtareizadeh, in “Who Names the World? Anti-Imperialism and Iran's Political Prisoners,” correctly points out:

“Prashad’s argument becomes more difficult when he moves from geopolitical asymmetry to political timing. There is a time to make demands and a time to act in solidarity, he suggests, implying that certain demands upon the Iranian state should recede while imperial war continues. The difficulty is that prisoners live both dangers in the same present tense. An execution sentence does not pause for war, and a prison door does not unlock because the state holding the key confronts a greater external power. The question becomes not whether Iranian repression exists but whether Iranians must postpone naming or resisting that repression until some safer political moment arrives.”

She notes that the scissors analogy was used by Keyvan Mohtadi, a labor activist and former political prisoner, on June 24, 2025, the day after Israeli bombing of Evin Prison, about the political prisoners held inside, including his wife, the labor organizer Anisha Asadollahi.

Thus, Mokhtareizadeh shows how opposition to imperialist and Zionist war and freedom of political prisoners are intertwined and reinforcing. 

The false scissors analogy

At the same time, Mokhtareizadeh’s example shows that the scissors analogy betrays political confusion among a considerable section of the left regarding Iran since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the U.S.-installed dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.  There can be no doubt that the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic and imperialism oppress the Iranian working people. However, were they not oppressed by Mohammad Reza Shah’s dictatorial regime and imperialism before the 1979 Iranian revolution?  Of course they were, as the 1979 revolution was anti-dictatorial and anti-imperialist. The scissors analogy refers to the fact that the 1979 revolution overthrew the U.S.-installed regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and because of the weakness of the working class and socialist movements, put the power in the hands of ayatollah Khomeini, who proceeded to create the Islamic Republic, which is independent of imperialism, by crushing grassroots movements of the working people unleashed by that revolution.

The 1979 Iranian revolution threatened the dominance of imperialism, Zionism, and reactionary Arab regimes in the Middle East. Contrary to the dominant view propagated by both the Islamic Republic and imperialism, the 1979 revolution was not an Islamic Revolution. It was an anti-dictatorial, anti-imperialist, national democratic revolution aspiring to democracy, freedom, and social justice.

However, the Iranian people who lived under dictatorship had no chance to discuss what kind of society, economy, or state they wished to create after they overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty.  The labor movement, especially oil workers, played a significant role in the revolution, but it was politically unprepared to lead the revolution. The left was largely influenced by Stalinism, the ideology that envisioned a national democratic movement led by an anti-imperialist leader. The Tudeh Party held the totalitarian Soviet Union as the Actually Existing Socialism, and pro-China Stalinists (Maoists) held a similar view of the revolution. What is more, Stalinism of the Iranian socialist currents trained them as an undemocratic force. Here is an example: right after the victorious insurrection of February 9-12, two groups of Iranian Trotskyists merged in the Socialist Workers Party.  They planned to hold their first public meeting at Tehran Polytechnic (now Amir Kabir University) in central Tehran. A group of Maoists, Communist Union اتحادیه کمونیست ها), physically attacked and disrupted the meeting. The reason was Stalinism. Both Moscow and Beijing continued Stalin’s campaign against Trotsky and Trotskyism until the Soviet Union collapsed and China became the world's leading capitalist power! Meanwhile, Iranian labor and socialist movements never made defending democratic and political rights their central concern. Thus, when Khomeini declared mandatory Islamic dress for women who were government employees, the protest in Tehran included a rally in front of Tehran University and a march to Azadi Square, which was attacked by semi-fascist Islamic gangs and drew only 20,000 mostly younger women (at the time, Tehran had 3 million people). The labor movement and many leftist groups did not mobilize to participate in or defend it.

Political Islam and the Axis of Resistance

Thus, the power people took by months of mass struggle and three days of armed insurrection across the country was handed over to Ayatollah Khomeini, who began to institutionalize the theocratic capitalist Islamic Republic. In the early 1970s, while in exile in Iraq, Khomeini wrote a pamphlet titled Velayat-e Faghih (the rule of Islamic Jurists). He argued that Muslims everywhere are ruled by non-Muslims and demanded the formation of an Islamic government ruled by Islamic Jurists. The 1979 revolution gave Khomeini that opportunity to establish it in Iran, which he was able to do by deceit and by bloody repression.

Of course, consolidating the Islamic Republic required destroying grassroots movements of working people, including the workers’ shora (council) movement resulting from the 1979 revolution, suppression of oppressed nationalities, systematic oppression of women, as well as any independent political party. Thus, the 1979 Iranian revolution was destroyed through bloody repression by the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic, not by imperialism! (Nayeri, 2025, Chapter One, Chapter Two, pp. 51-56).

However, Khomeini’s vision required expanding the Islamic Republic's power among Shiites in the Middle East. This led to the formation of the Axis of Resistance. This created a new form of confrontation with imperialism and Zionism over their domination of the Middle East and their decades-long struggle to overthrow the Islamic Republic. Prashad mistakes this trajectory for anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism.

Rejecting Dependency School politics

By now it must be clear that how to stop imperialist and Zionist attacks on Iran and at the same time fight for Iranian people’s political rights, especially through building a movement to free all political prisoners, requires theoretical certifications. The “anti-imperialist” framework reflects the dominance of Dependency School (DS) in the 1950s and 1960s, which waned in the 1970s.

In the post-World War II period, anticolonial revolution swept much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It raised questions about their development. The Dependency School (DS) refers to a group of different theories that shared the idea that the backwardness of the periphery of world capitalism was due to imperialism. Thus, those who subscribed to DS theories framed their political theories on “anti-imperialism.” At the same time, Latin American nationalist economists formulated the initial DS theories (Nayeri, 2023B, Chapter 3), two prominent socialist dependency theories emerged: Paul Baran's Political Economy of Growth (1957; for a critique see Nayeri, 2023B, Chapter pp. 82-118) and Arghiri Emmanuel’s Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (1972, for a critique see Nayeri 2023B, Chapter 4).

However, DS theories did not jive with Marx's historical materialism, which focuses on modes of production and relations of production to understand society and history. Instead, both Baran and Emanuel focus on imperialism as an external force and the sphere of circulation to explain the periphery's economic backwardness.

By the late 1970s, the DS school began to decline as countries in the periphery of capitalism industrialized, beginning with South Korea and, by the new century, China, which is now outcompeting the United States as the leading world capitalist economy.

Thus, Parshad’s outdated, mistaken DS framework leads him to support the expansionist policies of the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic in the name of “anti-imperialism.”

From Marx’s point of view, capital is self-expanding value. Thus, capital will outgrow its geographical location, and each capitalist state would protect its capitalist interests outside its borders. That is sufficient to explain the economic basis of wars, including World War I and World War II.  In fact, Hilferding’s claim in Finance Capital (1910) that an era of finance capital (later called monopoly capital) and Marx’s labor theory of value, his theory of how the capitalist mode of production functions, is obsolete was based on his mistaking Marx’s theory of competition as being similar to the neoclassical theory of Perfect Competition (Nayeri, 2023B, pp. 11-45). Thus, Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), based largely on Hilferding’s work, is also mistaken. At any rate, in the same work Lenin identifies imperialism with the export of capital from advanced capitalist states to the periphery and views this as developing the forces of production there.  Thus, DS socialists have been wrong both in constructing their theories and in claiming they are Marxist.

Questions of program, strategy, and tactics

Still, many socialists would agree that the defense of the political prisoners in Iran must be put in the context of U.S. imperialism and Israeli Zionism to attack Iran.  This does not mean that defending democracy and freedom of political expression is subordinate to requirements of fighting imperialism and Zionism. In fact, I would argue in a moment that the two are intertwined and complementary. That is, the Islamic Republic has for almost half a century undermined effective struggle against imperialism and Zionism by attacking individual, democratic and political rights in Iran.

The authors of the Open Letter write: “The Iranian authorities must stop their inhumane practice of death and incarceration now. And the US and Israel must end their barbaric wars and brutal sanctions that knowingly devastate our communities.” This formulation in the Open Letter leaves out the “regime change” agenda of imperialism and Zionism untouched. Not only was regime change the stated goal of the U.S./Israeli war against Iran, but it is the active foreign policy of the Trump administration, as we saw in Venezuela and now see in Cuba. What Trump was able to achieve in Venezuela was what has been called “the shortest war in history”: Nicolas Maudura and his wife were abducted, and Delcy Rodríguez, his vice president, agreed to govern in accordance with Marco Rubio's instructions in Venezuela (Pager and Kurmanaev, July 11, 2026). Neither should we stand quiet when the U.S. and Israelis assassinate leaders of the Islamic

Republic.

The public and the left in the West have failed to actively oppose Israeli genocide in Gaza backed by the U.S. and European imperialist powers! Why would it be any different in the case of sanctions and war against Iran that have been unfolding since the 1979 revolution?

The key question the Open Letter raises is how can a massive enough anti-war movement be built to stop the U.S./Israeli war against Iran?  At the same time, how can an effective movement be built to stay the hands of the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic?

The answer to the first question depends on mass radicalization among working people and youth. No sign of it on the horizon, although nobody really knows how and when such radicalizations unfold.

The answer to the second question largely depends on the working people and socialist currents in Iran for the simple reason that the Islamic Republic continues to enjoy a mass base in Iran that has gone along with its repressive policies.

To overcome this obstacle, a principled anti-imperialist vision to uphold the sovereignty of the Iranian people is the necessary framework for advancing the goals of enhancing political space in Iran and freedom of political prisoners.  

Building a movement of the working people in Iran to challenge the Islamic Republic

The great masses who made the Iranian revolution of 1979 aspired to democracy, freedom, independence, and social justice. Ayatollah Khomeini destroyed grassroots movements that aspired to this vision to install the clerical capitalist Islamic Republic. We need to take up those aspirations and develop them to address the needs of Iran and the world in the twenty-first century.

Earlier I argued that the Islamic Republic is NOT anti-imperialist, that it opposes U.S. imperialism and Israeli Zionism from the narrow vision of Islamic fundamentalism.

As socialists, we need to oppose imperialism and Zionism because they are manifestations of capital as self-expanding value, thus, the capitalist mode of production, mixed with ideologically backward colonial notions. The United States imperialism is the expression of Manifest Destiny, and Zionism is the colonial-settler ideology of occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Thus, to defend the sovereignty of the Iranian working people, socialists in Iran must oppose the U.S./Israeli war with a program of action of their own in sharp contrast to the current policies of the Islamic Republic. I would propose the following for discussion among Iranian working people.  A key lesson of the 1979 revolution was that people were united on what/who they did not want but not on what kind of society and economy they wanted and how it would be run.  

I propose the following as a conversation starter.

• ·       Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of religion, especially for the oppressed nationalities, women, and defenders of nature. End all forms of oppression of women; for empowerment of women in all levels of society and the state. For individual freedom. For culture and art for everyone. 
• ·       Freedom for working people to establish their own organizations, such as unions and shoras.  Jobs for all.  For minimum wages and salaries tied to inflation; for an affordable life consistent with human development for all. For an end to child labor. Free quality public education for all. 
• ·       Freedom of all political prisoners. End all forms of torture and capital punishment now!
• ·       No arbitrary arrests, presumption of innocence until proven guilty by a jury of one’s peers, and the right to due process. Dissolve the Islamic courts.
•       Separation of religion and state; the right of the people to vote and to elect the representatives of their choice.
• ·       The right to form committees of people's representatives that would be responsible to the people themselves and not to the state.
• ·       The right to arm the people and organize a people's militia; dissolve all repressive armed forces of the Islamic Republic.
• ·       The right of the mass organizations of the people to administer all the affairs of the towns and provinces.
• ·       The right to liberation and voluntary cooperation of all the peoples and nationalities living in Iran. The right of self-determination of oppressed nationalities.
• ·       The right of Iran to political and economic independence from imperialism.
• ·       For workers’ control and management of all state industries and all enterprises that refuse to serve the interests of their workers and the working people in general.
• ·       For a constituent assembly organized by the movements of working people to draft a new constitution. For a workers’ state. 
•         For solidarity with oppressed people and nations; for a democratic secular Palestine where Palestinians and Jews and others live together as equals.  
• ·       For the right to clean air and water. For the rights of nature to prosper without human exploitation. For an economy and society free of nuclear hazard and fossil fuels. For a green economy.  For a society at peace with itself and at peace with nature

The future Iranian revolution needs to be an ecological socialist revolution because of the existential world ecological crises: catastrophic global warming and climate change, the Sixth Extinction, recurrent pandemics, and nuclear holocaust. I propose Ecocentric Socialism as a vision to aspire to (Nayeri, 2023A, especially Chapter 19).

Building a movement to free all political prisoners in Iran

My experience in a successful campaign to free political prisoners in Iran dates to the 1970s, as in the Committee for Artistic and Intellectual Freedom in Iran (CAIFI). Formed in New York in 1973 to defend Reza Baraheni, the well-known Iranian author, poet, and literary critic of Azeri origin, and a founder of the Writers Association of Iran, who was arrested, tortured, and held in prison. CAIFI challenged the ultra-left sectarian view of the Confederation of Iranian Students (dominated by Maoists and nationalists), who did not believe political prisoners could be freed through mass work, and in some cases they did not even consider defending political prisoners they did not hold to be “revolutionaries.” CAIFI, by contrast, believed in defending all political prisoners regardless of ideology, selecting a few prominent political prisoners to draw public attention to the plight of all political prisoners and building the broadest possible coalition through democratic organizational methods. CAIFI won over the support of some prominent liberal and leftist Americans, including Kay Boyle, Daniel Ellsberg, Ramsey Clark, and Angela Davis, a former political prisoner and signer of the Open Letter, who supported CAIFI.  CAIFI gained momentum when, under international pressure, Baraheni was released, traveled to the U.S., and agreed to be a keynote speaker at CAIFI-sponsored events, attracting even more support for its campaigns.  In just a few years, CAIFI became the most successful defender of the Shah's political prisoners.  CAIFI's mission was finally accomplished when the February 1979 revolution freed all the Shah's political prisoners.

CAIFI was formed in the United States, the main supporter of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's dictatorship, where public opinion mattered. The Islamic Republic’s mass base is inside Iran. Thus, it is necessary to build a defense committee inside Iran, building on CAIFI and other successful defense efforts.

References:

Nayeri, Kamran. Whose Planet? Essays on Ecocentric Socialism. 2023. 

___________. Toward a Theory of Uneven and Combined Late Capitalist Development. 2023.

___________. Between Dreams and Reality: Essays on Revolution and Socialism. 2025.

Pager, Tyler and Anatoly Kurmanaev. “How Marco Rubio Is Running Venezuela From Afar.” The New York Times, July 11, 2026.

3686. The U.S./Israeli War Against Iran and The Future of Life on Earth

 By Kamran Nayeri, March 16, 2026

A neighborhood in Tehran after U.S./Israeli bombings. Photo credit: The New York Times

“In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e., of world economy and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital, not a single communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country.” Leon Trotsky, The Third International After Lenin. 1928.

When I first read this passage in 1972, it resonated with me for two reasons: I realized how deeply modern human society is interconnected within the capitalist world economy, and because I understood why Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution is revolutionary and Stalin’s theory of “socialism in one country” was counterrevolutionary.

Years later, I learned that the theory of finance capital (imperialism) of Hilferding on the basis of which Bukharin and Lenin theories of imperialism are constructed to explain the origins of World War I was a mistaken break with Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode of production, which has important ramifications for understanding the nature of capitalism (Nayeri 2023B, Chapter 4), hence what would be needed to transcend it to reach socialism (Nayeri, 2025, Chapter Six). Since 2009, I have learned that human society itself is deeply embedded in and depends on the web of life. This would require us to develop new theories of capitalism and socialism grounded in an integrated theory of society and nature. I have developed  Ecocentric Socialism as such a theory (Nayeri, 2023A; Chapter 19).

This essay provides a different framework for understanding the war Israel and the U.S. have launched against Iran on February 28, 2026, not just from the mainstream analyses but also from what is presented by much of the Left.

The war must be opposed not just because it is unjust, illegal, and disruptive of the capitalist world economy, and has been causing untold number of working people in Iran and the Middle East misery or that it is a Zionist and imperialist war against Iran, but because it is yet another facet of the crisis of anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization of which the U.S., Israel, and Iran are all integral parts and it that it has and will have vast adverse implication for the future of life in in the region and in the world.

*     *      *

The essay further develops the analyses presented in two more recent writings. In “The Dead End of U.S./Israeli War Against Iran (Nayeri, June 22, 2025),” I analyzed the 12-day war that Israel started on June 13, 2025, to argue that the actual goal of Israel's and the U.S. 's war was to reverse the gains of the 1979 Iranian revolution. That revolution overthrew the U.S.-installed regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the Shah), which had become increasingly dictatorial and despised by the millions of Iranian people. The Shah’s regime was part of the anti-communist Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) alliance and a supporter of the colonial settler states of South Africa and the Israeli apartheid regimes.

I further argued that the Islamic Republic, while independent of Western imperialism, was a counter-revolutionary force that by the summer of 1982 consolidated itself by brutally destroying all independent grassroots organizations that emerged from the 1979 revolution. The Islamic Republic was the brainchild of Ayatollah Khomeini, who in the early 1970s wrote a pamphlet advocating the creation of an Islamic government ruled by Velayat-e Faghih (Islamic Jurisprudence) to unify Muslims (at least Shiites). This vision requires expanding the Islamic Republic's power across the Middle East.

Thus, there has been, since 1979, an ongoing conflict between the U.S. as the leader of Western imperialism, Israeli Zionism, and the Islamic Republic; all three are expansionist, reactionary ideologies backed by state power and struggling for domination in the Middle East.

In  “Foreign Policy of the Second Trump Administration” (Nayeri, February 16, 2026), I argued that the rise of the White supremacist Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement with Trump as its leader represent a reaction to the relative decline of U.S. imperialism and an end to the so-called Pax Americana (American Peace; some called the American Century) as China has been able to industrialize and surpass the United States as the leading capitalist power. Concurrently, the European economies have been experiencing slow growth for some time. Thus, the world dominance of European civilization that began five hundred years ago has come to an end, as Asian civilizations, especially China, rise up.

The shift of the center of world power in the past has been marked by violence and wars. When Germany and the United States industrialized and surpassed Britain as the dominant industrial capitalist power, the world witnessed the bloody inter-imperialist World Wars I and II, which ended with the United States' supremacy.

Thus, we live in a very dangerous time for the following reasons.

First, the inter-imperialist rivalry is increasing and can lead to a world war in which the main contenders are nuclear states.

Second, regional wars, such as the Ukraine and Iran wars, as terrible as they are, can easily escalate into a world war. Three weeks into the US/Israel war against Iran, it has already spread to the rest of the Middle East and effectively closed the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, damaging the world economy. The war is threatening the Gulf states that depend on desalination plants for their water on the non-polluted Persian Gulf, which is open to shipping to bring in their food and export their oil.

Third, the world faces existential ecological crises such as catastrophic climate change, the Sixth Extinction, recurrent pandemics, and nuclear holocaust. To address these crises, a coordinated response by all countries, especially the most powerful, is required. Instead, we face increased rivalry and hostility among capitalist states.

Fourth, the only historical agency to act in the interest of humanity and life on Earth is the working people. If they are not organized and mobilized to act in the interest of all life on Earth, the existential crises we face can lead to the collapse of civilization and possibly the end of humanity. However, only democracy from below would allow the widest public discussion necessary to adopt the actions needed to address the crisis of anthropocentric, industrial capitalist civilization. However, increased rivalry among capitalist states and certainly this war tends to limit working people's democratic participation in deciding their own future.

Israel/US relations

Ervand Abrahamian (2026), a well-regarded historian of the Middle East, has argued that since the Obama presidency, the U.S. political class has relegated its foreign policy to Israel. This view has been shared by others, including Mazzatti et.al. 2026). Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the Trump administration “was pulled into this war” after Israel began attacking Iran in the early morning of Saturday, February 28 (Stein, March 2, 2026).  Abrahamian argues that the US's dependency on Israel is reflected in the fact that it has Middle East specialists in its foreign policy decision-making teams.

I would argue that there are more ideological/political reasons for the US following the Israelis' lead in the Middle East.  In his first term as the President, Trump tore up the 2015 agreement between the Islamic Republic of Iran and a group of world powers: the P5+1 (the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China—plus Germany) and the European Union. Although that agreement held up well in opening the Islamic Republic's nuclear industry to international inspection. Trump's action fulfilled Benjamin Netanyahu's opposition to the agreement. In response, the Islamic Republic resumed uranium enrichment to 60 percent. They viewed this as their bargaining chip to remove sanctions. Instead, the US and its European allies increased the sanctions, and tensions increased.

Christian Zionism and Trump’s second term presidency

The U.S. played a central role in the creation of the State of Israel in Palestine in 1948, at the time of colonial revolution and Arab nationalism, to serve as a Garrison State. The concept of the Garrison State was introduced in a seminal, highly influential 1941 article in the American Journal of Sociology by political scientist and sociologist Harold Lasswell, who outlined the possibility of a political-military elite composed of "specialists in violence" in modern states.

The animosity of Israel with Palestinians and Arab neighbors manifested in a series of wars in which weak Arab neighbors were defeated, and Israel took ever more territory in Palestine and beyond.

Since the 1960s, the alliance between Israel and the United States has grown in economic, strategic, and military aspects. The U.S. has played a key role in ensuring good relations between Arab nations and Israel. In turn, Israel provides a strategic American foothold in the region as well as intelligence and advanced technological partnerships. Relations with Israel are an important factor in the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

The importance of Israel in the U.S. Middle East policy was underscored by Senator Joseph Biden, a self-described Zionist, who argued the annual U.S. aid to Israel is a “good investment” and that if there were no state of Israel, the U.S. would have to create one!

As Sharp (2025) writes in a report for the U.S. Congress:

“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. Successive Administrations, working with Congress, have provided Israel with assistance reflective of robust domestic U.S. support for Israel and its security; shared strategic goals in the Middle East; and historical ties dating from U.S. support for the creation of Israel in 1948. To date, the United States has provided Israel with $174 billion (in current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding.

“Over the last two decades, including during Israel's ongoing conflict with Hamas, American public attitudes toward Israel, as expressed in public-opinion polling, have shifted somewhat when compared to previous eras. Though lawmakers continue to vote in favor of U.S. assistance to Israel, there have been calls from some political and ideological groups to reevaluate the long-standing U.S.-Israeli assistance relationship.

“In 2016, the U.S. and Israeli governments signed their third 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on military aid, covering FY2019 to FY2028. Under the terms of the MOU, the United States pledged to provide—subject to congressional appropriation—$38 billion in military aid ($33 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants plus $5 billion in missile defense appropriations) to Israel. While negotiations over the next MOU have yet to start, U.S. and Israeli experts and government officials have already started to formulate proposals to shape future U.S.-Israeli military cooperation.

“Since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and Israel's subsequent conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, Congress has provided emergency supplemental military assistance to Israel and appropriated funding beyond the annual MOU terms for joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense programs. In April 2024, Congress passed P.L. 118-50 (Making emergency supplemental appropriations for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, and for other purposes). That act included, among other things, $3.5 billion in FMF for Israel. The act also included $5.2 billion in defense appropriations for missile defense ($4 billion) and Israel's new laser defense system, Iron Beam ($1.2 billion). (Sharp, 2025)”

There is also an overlooked religious/ideological basis for the current U.S. unqualified support for Israel: Christian Zionism. Christian Zionists are evangelical Christians who espouse the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land as a precondition for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. “During the 1980s, as the Republican Party forged alliances with the emerging religious right, Israel would become a core cause for the GOP. (Goldman, 2025).”

“A major impetus behind the movement is the belief that the Jews’ return will lead to the Second Coming of Jesus. Christian Zionists also believe that by blessing and supporting Israel, considered both as the collective Jewish people and the modern state, they themselves will be blessed by God.” (Comstock, January 23, 2026).

With the Republican Party in power in Washington since the 2024 elections, Christian Zionism holds sway in Washington.: 83% of Republicans view Israel favorably, compared with 33% of Democrats. Republicans in Congress are pushing to use the biblical terms “Judea and Samaria” instead of the West Bank. Evangelical Christian Zionists continue to call for support of the Israeli right and of settlers in the occupied territories. 25 to 30 percent of Trump supporters are estimated to be Christian Zionists (Stanley, February 5, 2025).

Trump's second administration includes Christian Zionists in key posts, including the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Paula White-Cain, Trump’s personal pastor for over two decades, is a Christian Zionist. She has a long history of vocal support for Israel. She was influential in Trump’s decision to relocate the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2017 and the push to sign the Abraham Accords to get more Arab states to recognize Israel in 2020.

Trump picked two Zionists who have personal and business ties to him, Jared Kushner (son-in-law) and Steve Witkoff, to represent the U.S. government in negotiations with the Islamic Republic. These were not negotiations but a series of meetings to convey an ultimatum to the Islamic Republic that if it did not accept Trump’s demand, Iran would be attacked. Thus, Abbas Araghchi, the Islamic Republic's foreign minister and the negotiator, complained at every opportunity that the Iranian side would respond only if treated as an equal and that the U.S. side was issuing demands rather than negotiating, which requires concessions on both sides to reach a The Netanyahu government's strategy for dominance in the Middle East

Benjamin Netanyahu, currently wanted by the International Criminal Court for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, has been the longest-serving prime minister of Israel. This is not an accident: as a colonial-settler regime, Israel has been systematically aiming to capture more land of the historic Palestine, hence it has built an apartheid state in which Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens.

Netanyahu has been a driving force for these Zionist policies. He used Hamas’s rebellion against the Israeli-imposed open prison policy on Gaza to wage a genocidal war there and, at the same time, encourage building of settlements in the West Bank.

On April 12, 2025, Iran entered negotiations with Trump’s administration aimed at reaching a nuclear peace agreement. Trump set a 60-day deadline for Iran to reach an agreement. After the deadline passed without an agreement, Israel attacked Iran on June 13. Lazar (June 13, 2025) wrote in Times of Israel about how these negotiations were used by Israel and the U.S. to give the Islamic Republic a sense of security before a surprise attack.

In his second term, emboldened by his return to the White House, Trump has pursued gunboat diplomacy, using U.S. military superiority to advance the U.S. sphere of influence and support the U.S. economy.

The US joined the Israeli war against Iran on February 28. Netanyahu had assured Trump that, with the Axis of Resistance weakened with the fall of the Ba'athist regime in Syria, degradation of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and being deeply unpopular among a large part of the population inside Iran, it was possible to overthrow it and install a regime favorable to Washington and Israel. This would ensure U.S./Israeli domination of the Middle East.

Thus, the current U.S./Israel war against Iran is the continuation of the Israel/U.S. genocidal war in Gaza. After it became clear that the Islamic Republic would not crumble with the onset of this war and there would be no mass uprising against Iranians who would welcome the invading Israeli and American militaries, the Gaza strategy to carpet bomb Iranian cities was adopted, leading to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by the Iranian forces. The success of the asymmetrical war strategy that was developed after the eight-year-long war with Iraq has kept the Zionist and imperialist forces at bay, creating a deadlock in the war.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has quickly pushed oil prices above $100 a barrel and forced governments to tap their strategic reserves to keep their economies running. If the Strait of Hormuz is mined, it may take months before shipping through it returns to normal. These factors tie the hands of Israel and the U.S. from their plans to massively bombard Iran.

The resistance by the Islamic Republic in this war has further weakened the United States as a declining power.

The crisis of the anthropocentric industrial capitalist civilization

War is a continuation of politics with violent means. Politics is concentrated economics. For five thousand years, civilizations have been built on the expropriation of nature by the exploitation of the working people. In the capitalist epoch, wars are driven by the laws of motion of capital. This undercurrent for wars is wrapped in old ideological motives. The Crusades (1095-1291 AD), a series of military campaigns launched by the papacy against Muslim rulers to recover and defend the Holy Land, were encouraged by promises of spiritual reward. Trump’s war against Venezuela, dressed as a war against drug cartels and for democratic elections, proved to be for a subservient government in Caracas and control over Venezuela's oil. The Zionist appeal to the bible and Moses is for taking over the land of Palestine from its people.

Yet the ever-increasing wealth of the ruling classes and nations is only possible by further degradation of the natural basis of life on Mother Earth. Thus, the Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran wars are not just social crises but also the intensification of existential ecological crises worldwide.

The fossil fuel industry, on which the Gulf states and Iran rely, remains the largest contributor to catastrophic climate change, accounting for 59-65% of emissions from 1990 to 2019.

Middle Eastern countries will also be among the early victims of climate change.

“The countries of the Middle East, especially Arabic-speaking ones, are among the world’s most exposed states to the accelerating impacts of human-caused climate change, including soaring heat waves, declining precipitation, extended droughts, more intense sandstorms and floods, and rising sea levels. But the consequences will be felt unevenly across the region. Resource-poor countries that lack adaptive capacities like infrastructure, technology, and human and physical capital will suffer more acutely, especially as global warming contributes to the degradation of rural livelihoods and jeopardizes food security. The effects will magnify preexisting inequities and decades of unsustainable government policies, particularly those related to water and land management” (Wehrly, 2024).

Francis and Fonseca (2025) add:

“Model projections for the ‘business-as-usual’ climate change scenario indicate that half of the population in the Middle East and North African region (roughly 600 million people) could be exposed to recurring super- and ultra-extreme heatwaves, which will feature air temperatures up to 56 °C and higher lasting for several weeks at a time, in the second half of this century21. Even though the aridity in the MENA region has significantly increased in recent decades, extreme rainfall events may be more impactful in a warming world.”(Francis and Fonseca, 2024).

The working people, the only social force that can stop this madness, must demand an end to the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran and organize ourself to discuss and adopt alternative for a better world in which humans would live in peace with each other and with the rest of life on Earth.

 

References:

Abrahamian, Ervand. “Can Iran Survive? An Urgent Discussion on the US-Israel War on Iran” Verso Books, March 20, 2026.

Berman, Lazar. “How an Israeli-American Deception Campaign Lulled Iran into a False Sense of Security.” Times of Israel. June 15, 2025.

Francis, Diana and Ricardo Fonseca. “Recent and projected changes in climate patterns in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.” Nature. May 4, 2024

Comstock, Frannie. “Christian Zionism.” Britanica. January 23, 2026.“

Goldman, Shalom. “Christian Zionism hasn’t always been a conservative evangelical creed – churches’ views of Israel have evolved over decades.” The Conversation. April 2, 2025.

Mazetti,  Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Tyler Pager, et al. “How Trump Decided to Go to War.”  The New York Times, March 2, 2026.

Nayeri, Kamran. Whose Planet? Essays on Ecocentric Socialism. 2023A.

_____________. Toward a Theory of Uneven and Combined Late Capitalist Development. 2023B.

_____________. Between Dreams and Reality: Essays on Revolution and Socialism. 2025.

_____________. “The Dead End of U.S./Israeli War Against Iran.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism. June 22, 2025.

_____________. “Foreign Policy of the Second Trump Administration.” Our Place in the World: A Journal of Ecosocialism.  February 16, 2026.

Olmsted, Judith. “Let’s Just Do It: How Netanyahu Convinced Trump to Bomb Iran.” New Republic. March 2, 2026.

Sharp, Jermey M. “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: Overview and Developments since October 7, 2023.” May 28, 2025.

Stanley, Tiffany. “Why conservative American evangelicals are among Israel’s strongest supporters.” Associated Press. February 5, 2025.

Stein, Chris. “US strikes on Iran triggered by Israel’s plan to launch attack, Rubio says.” March 2, 2026. The Guardian.

 Wehrey, Fredric. “Introduction” in Frederic Wehrey, et.al. “Climate Change and Vulnerability in the Middle East,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Jul 6, 2023.

3309. How Britain Helped Islamic Republic of Iran to Destroy the Pro-Soviet Union Tudeh Party

By Mark Curtis and Phil Miller, Maverick Insider, January 21, 2020

Nouraldin Kianouri, Secretary-General of Tudeh Party "confessed" on television to a plot against the Islamic Republic.  Many Tudeh leaders and rank-and-filers, as well as Fedayeen Majority leaders and rank-and-filers, were arrested tortured and executed in the 1983 wave of repression. 

The UK’s secret intelligence service, MI6, worked with the CIA to provide a list of alleged Soviet agents in Iran to Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic regime, which took power after the overthrow of the UK-backed Shah in 1979. The information was used by the regime to execute leading members of the Iranian communist party, the Tudeh.

The British files also highlight how at least one Foreign Office official considered how the UK might benefit from the forced confessions given by Tudeh members at the time, which were believed to be extracted under torture.

The files suggest British policy was motivated by the desire to curry favour with Iran’s new rulers, rather than concerns over Cold War geopolitics or Soviet influence in Iran, which was recognised to be minimal.

The hit list

The list of Iranians allegedly working for the Soviet Union in Iran was provided to Britain by Vladimir Kuzichkin, a major in the KGB who defected to the UK in June 1982, as reported by the New York Times and London Times in 1986. The information gleaned by MI6 from Kuzichkin – who was responsible for maintaining contacts with the Tudeh party, the main leftist organisation in Iran established in the 1940s – was also shared with the CIA, and passed on to Tehran.

The Iranian regime proceeded to round up over 1,000 members of the Tudeh party and eventually executed as many as 200. The party was banned and forced underground.

Britain’s senior official in Iran at that time, Nicholas Barrington, states in his memoir that Kuzichkin’s information simply “found its way” to the Iranian authorities after the Russian’s defection, without specifying the British role.

Files from the time – when Barrington was head of the British Interests Section in Tehran since Iran and the UK had cut full diplomatic relations – suggest that British officials supported Iran’s repression of the Tudeh.

Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 9 May 1983. (National Archives)

‘A significant step’

As Iran’s crackdown was under way, Barrington met a senior Iranian official on 5 May 1983 seeking British views “on his government’s action against the Tudeh”, which, he said, was evidence of “Iranian independence of the big powers”.

Barrington replied, according to his memorandum on the meeting: “I said I had never doubted this independence. The latest Iranian [actions] seemed to me a significant step.”

The Iranian official then mentioned to Barrington a “confession” forced by the new regime which had aired the previous night on Iranian television by a Tudeh member who had previously been jailed for 24 years under the Shah. The activist was said by the Iranian official to have previously revealed nothing “despite all the Savak’s tortures” – referring to the former regime’s brutal security service.

Barrington commented: “I said, half in jest, that perhaps the Islamic Republic’s torture was more effective than that of the Shah.”

By this time, Barrington and other British officials were well aware of Iranian repression. On the same day he met the Iranian official, Barrington had informed the Foreign Office in London of the “destruction of the Tudeh”.

He noted that “it is widely believed that some [Tudeh members] have already suffered the death penalty and the rest will do so soon”. He added that “the public have been taking the law into their own hands” in dealing with Tudeh members and “no doubt scores will be settled and some comparatively innocent will suffer with the guilty”.

 Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 5 May 1983. (National Archives)

 Telegram from Nicholas Barrington, the UK’s senior official in Iran, to the Foreign Office in London, 5 May 1983. (National Archives)

Earlier, in February 1983, when Iran arrested a number of Tudeh members, Barrington commented that “it looks as if the regime are making a determined effort to root out the Tudeh”. By April, Barrington was informed by a Hungarian diplomat that “several hundred” Tudeh members were in prison, who were expected to be dealt with by a military court.

Barrington did not lament the Iranian regime’s actions, but rather saw them as an opportunity. He wrote that fellow European heads of mission “felt that it was time for Western European and like-minded countries to keep their lines open to Iran”.

No evidence could be found in the 1983 files that UK officials did anything other than approve of this severe repression.

Barrington later wrote in his memoir that “there was money to be made” in Iran where “an important part of our work was maintaining British commercial links with Iran and promoting exports”.

By July 1983, another British official in Tehran, Chris Rundle, told the Foreign Office that “some rank-and-file members are being executed and there are rumours of large-scale executions”. He added that the “best estimates here are that about 80% of the Tudeh members in Iran have been arrested, the rest having gone into hiding or escaped”.

Extracted confessions

The Iranian regime’s aim to destroy the Tudeh party was made easier by the forced “confessions” it extracted from two key figures – Noureddin Kianouri, the party’s secretary-general, and Mahmoud Etemadzadeh, editor of the party newspaper.

On 30 April 1983, after nearly two months in jail, Kianouri and Etemadzadeh appeared on television, saying that the Tudeh had worked against Iran and spied for the Soviet Union. Barrington noted that, “The pressures, or threats, in detention must have been great judging by the appearance of the two men.”

A British file from its embassy in Moscow noted a report from Pravda – the official newspaper of the Soviet regime – claiming that the confessions “had been extracted by Gestapo-like methods inherited from the Savak”.

Despite this, the head of the Middle East and North Africa department in the Foreign Office, Oliver Miles, suggested that the “admissions” on television might be useful to Britain. He noted that “there could well be references to friendly parties in other countries which we might be able to make use of”, such as the Tudeh’s relations with the Syrian Communist Party.

Miles also noted: “Libya and Algeria also have tolerable relations with Iran, and it is just possible that something interesting might crop up in that connexion [sic] too”, before adding, “I should be grateful if whoever is principally concerned with studying the material could bear this point in mind”.

Memorandum by Oliver Miles, head of the Middle East and North Africa Department, Foreign Office, 6 May 1983. (National Archives)

Three days later, Barrington reported: “Tudeh cadres are being rounded up in the provinces.”

On 4 May 1983, when Iran expelled 18 Soviet diplomats, Barrington noted: “The action against the Tudeh has received the seal of Khomeini’s approval…he praises the revolutionary guards, the other security forces and the judiciary for ridding Iran of the Tudeh, which he referred to as a mottled snake which had been working to overthrow Islam”.

‘A major landmark’

Barrington told the Foreign Office in May 1983 that due to the destruction of the Tudeh “a major landmark has been reached in Soviet/Iranian relations and perhaps also in the history of Communist parties overseas”.

Yet the files suggest that Britain’s support for Iranian repression of the Tudeh cannot be principally explained as a Cold War episode to counter Soviet influence. Officials did not fear the Iranian regime would turn to the Soviet Union since it was implacably opposed to its communism.

There were various sources of friction between Iran and the Soviet Union at this time, notably Moscow’s arming of Iraq, with whom Iran had been at war since 1980. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 had also resulted in millions of Afghans fleeing into Iran.

Neither were the Soviets prepared to go to great lengths to support the Tudeh. Barrington stated in a July 1982 letter to London – by which time Kuzichkin was in the UK passing on information – that while the Islamic regime was in power in Iran, the Russians were “prepared to play it cool and ditch the Tudeh Party, if necessary”.

Barrington went on to receive a knighthood and became Britain’s High Commissioner to Pakistan.

Formal approval for working with the CIA to pass Kuzichkin’s information to the Iranian regime was probably made by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, foreign secretary Francis Pym and head of MI6, Colin Figures.

An unsuccessful attempt was made to contact Sir Nicholas Barrington for a comment. DM

Mark Curtis is editor and Phil Miller is staff reporter, for Declassified UK, a journalism organisation investigating UK foreign, security and intelligence policies. They tweet at @DeclassifiedUK, @markcurtis30 and @pmillerinfo