MAGA Imperialism: Peace through War in the Middle East
The Enemy: The Islamic Republic

After just over a month of war (April 1, 2026), the Iranian president Pezeshkian wrote an open letter to the American people asking them to consider, among other things, the following:

“Iran — by this very name, character, and identity — is one of the oldest continuous civilizations in human history. Despite its historical and geographical advantages at various times, Iran has never, in its modern history, chosen the path of aggression, expansion, colonialism, or domination. Even after enduring occupation, invasion, and sustained pressure from global powers — and despite possessing military superiority over many of its neighbors — Iran has never initiated a war. Yet it has resolutely and bravely repelled those who have attacked it.

“The Iranian people harbor no enmity toward other nations, including the people of America, Europe, or neighboring countries. Even in the face of repeated foreign interventions and pressures throughout their proud history, Iranians have consistently drawn a clear distinction between governments and the peoples they govern. This is a deeply rooted principle in Iranian culture and collective consciousness — not a temporary political stance…

“Relations between Iran and the United States were not originally hostile, and early interactions between the Iranian and American people were not marred with hostility or tension. The turning point, however, was the 1953 coup d’état — an illegal American intervention aimed at preventing the nationalization of Iran’s own resources. That coup disrupted Iran’s democratic process, reinstated dictatorship, and sowed deep distrust among Iranians toward U.S. policies. This distrust deepened further with America’s support for the Shah’s regime, its backing of Saddam Hussein during the imposed war of the 1980s, the imposition of the longest and most comprehensive sanctions in modern history, and ultimately, unprovoked military aggression — twice, in the midst of negotiations — against Iran.

“Yet all these pressures have failed to weaken Iran. On the contrary, the country has grown stronger in many areas…

“At the same time, the destructive and inhumane impact of sanctions, war, and aggression on the lives of the resilient Iranian people must not be underestimated. The continuation of military aggression and recent bombings profoundly affect people’s lives, attitudes, and perspectives. This reflects a fundamental human truth: when war inflicts irreparable harm on lives, homes, cities, and futures, people will not remain indifferent toward those responsible…

“Is it not also the case that America has entered this aggression as a proxy for Israel, influenced and manipulated by that regime? Is it not true that Israel, by manufacturing an Iranian threat, seeks to divert global attention away from its crimes toward the Palestinians? Is it not evident that Israel now aims to fight Iran to the last American soldier and the last American taxpayer dollar — shifting the burden of its delusions onto Iran, the region, and the United States itself in pursuit of illegitimate interests?

“I invite you to look beyond the machinery of misinformation — an integral part of this aggression — and instead speak with those who have visited Iran. Observe the many accomplished Iranian immigrants — educated in Iran — who now teach and conduct research at the world’s most prestigious universities, or contribute to the most advanced technology firms in the West. Do these realities align with the distortions you are being told about Iran and its people?

“Today, the world stands at crossroads. Continuing along the path of confrontation is more costly and futile than ever before. The choice between confrontation and engagement is both real and consequential; its outcome will shape the future for generations to come. Throughout its millennia of proud history, Iran has outlasted many aggressors. All that remains of them are tarnished names in history, while Iran endures — resilient, dignified, and proud.”

In short, then, he says Iran did not ask for America’s war, and as far as it is concerned war could have been avoided, but if America thinks it has to wage it, the Iranian people will prove that this war is unwinnable for America. First of all, Iran has always been great and beautiful, and that is why, secondly, America’s attempts to diminish it — starting over seventy years ago — were not only bound to fail but have actually made Iran — “one of the oldest continuous civilizations in human history” — even stronger than it ever was. Speaking in a kindly-intended admonishing tone to the Americans, basically nice people but beguiled by their government’s propaganda, he is talking about nothing less than the raison d’être of the state of Iran.

Iran’s raison d’être and reason for war: Anti-Americanism, the Shia way

With a lot of pathos, Pezeshkian invokes the greatness of modern Iran. In essence, what his history lesson is conveying is his nation’s stance that it is too great to allow foreign powers — including, and above all, the most powerful of them all — to attack Iran, seize its riches, and presume to dictate who should govern the country and how.

And there is some truth to his simplified lesson for unsophisticated Americans. For several decades, the modern history of US-Iranian relations was defined by Iran being gradually transformed into a powerful outpost for American money-making and strategic presence in the region. Under the last two Shahs, Iran became a key anti-Soviet ally which, under the lucrative direction of American corporations, supplied the US-created global oil market and earned a lot of money in the process. That revenue was channeled into ambitious projects aimed at developing Iran as part of the anti-Soviet West. What this brought the vast majority of the Iranian people was above all the destruction of their living conditions, which as a rule were already fairly miserable. Within a very short time, millions found themselves living in the slums of Tehran and other major cities to try and get a foothold in the national oil economy as day laborers. The Americans moved quickly to counter any Iranian attempts to curb foreign profits in favor of national gain, mainly making sure that their anti-communist outpost remained stable — and its ruler firmly in the saddle. To that end, they helped him gradually expand his security regime over a populace that was for the most part of no use.

Pezeshkian presents today’s Iran as the practical lesson learned from this. The Islamic Republic of Iran, with him as president, is putting into practice the position that Iran cannot put up with this American imperialism, and does not have to. The Shia revolution was above all anti-American, and so is the state it resulted in. Pezeshkian represents a state arising out of the criticism that the shahs of the short-lived Pahlavi dynasty turned Iran completely into a victim of American imperialism; that they deprived the nation of the role it was supposed to play in the world, and squandered its great potential (measured by the standards of modern states and competition between states) by half selling it off to Western countries and half appropriating it for themselves. The state founded in 1979 was based on the conviction that giving the Iranian nation the place it deserved and utilizing its great material and human potential to make it great and successful was identical with opposing the USA, which had proven to be aiming at the exact opposite. When Pezeshkian informs Americans that all attempts by the USA to fight and diminish this Iran and again make it the object of its exploitation have not only failed, but actually made it much stronger in its resistance, then what he is saying is: his Iran exists only as an anti-American power, that is its raison d’être.

This anti-Americanism that has governed Iran since 1979 is of a peculiar kind.

Under the leadership of the Shia preacher Khomeini, national discontent with the imperialist way Iran was being treated and its consequences for the people and the nation came to be interpreted in religious terms. What mainly upset the believers rallying behind Khomeini was that the disruption of established ways of life due to the country’s being violently brought in line with imperialist interests also corrupted the people’s morality, which was basically what distinguished them and what they had traditionally lived by. So what had been destroyed was the faith community of the people, their piety, which they had kept up through the centuries, gratefully submitting to the guidance of preachers well-versed in the sacred texts, and joyfully anticipating their reward in the afterlife. And in the view of these religious critics, disorder had also taken hold on the other side of the earthly realm. Those ruling over the people according to God-given natural laws had stopped letting the mullahs show them how to exercise their weighty responsibility properly and give the people the kind of rule they ought to have. Rule should be strict and thus benevolent in compelling and enabling the people to live in a way that, as judged by the mullahs and ayatollahs — after studying the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet, and a lot of very deep thought — just has to please the All-Merciful beyond all measure.

Logically enough, the final and most crucial proof that these pious agitators were right to condemn the Shahs’ regime as a form of rule alien to the Persians’ Shia nature was the way this evil puppet of US imperialism actually treated them. Mullahs can be reasoned with on many matters; if they think about it long enough, even quite severe forms of poverty are not inherently a disgrace — they simply have to be justly administered; and capitalist profit-making is not automatically disqualified any more than agrarian feudalism. But when a secular ruler denies them — the appointed intermediaries between God and His humble servants—their claim to rule over the minds of the people, treats them with contempt, and ostentatiously introduces all kinds of new customs that not only objectively destroy old traditions but are expressly intended to do so, then the mood in the mosque goes sour. These men of God start equating the disrespect they are shown by the regime with the wretched state of the whole people and the nation, which really has a higher calling in every earthly and heavenly respect, while its resources are being squandered and its native customs corrupted by the puppets of godless foreign powers.

So those with a direct line to the Hereafter who were out to educate the people and their rulers gave themselves a clear mandate. Under such conditions — under the regime of rulers who had estranged both the people and themselves from God and were hostile toward His most zealous servants — it became a duty to put up pious resistance. They could no longer attempt to stand by secular rulers in their undertakings by offering religious counsel and admonitions; they instead had to incite the people to drive them out, not least by setting a personal example when it came to putting up resistance and making sacrifices.^[1]

This conservative, morally grounded view of Iranian affairs and the change that had to be made always included a perspective extending beyond Iran’s borders. This, too, is something Pezeshkian addresses in his letter to the American people. When he explains that it is deeply ingrained in Iranian culture to distinguish between foreign governments and their populations, this is not just the standard hypocrisy of modern statesmen, who always know how to frame their wars against other states as acts of service to these peoples they are subjecting to their collateral lethal care. Rather, he is referring to the fact that Iran, under Shia leadership, is out to care for others in a very special way: the mission these devout anti-Americans have given themselves extends to all Muslims. For, by virtue of their Muslim identity, the Iranian people belong to a broader community that is not confined to the borders of modern Iran but exists primarily and at least “in the region”: the Middle East region inhabited by a vast majority of Muslim Arabs. Upon closer inspection, these Arabs are being held in a state of tyranny and poverty by the irreligious, antireligious, and “materialistic” West pretty much as their Persian-speaking brothers and sisters are. Within their nation-states artificially created by Western colonialism and imperialism, they, too, have to endure the fate of being kept from a devout life by more or less infidel Western vassals. This applies in particular to the Shia in Iran’s vicinity who are sometimes the majority and sometimes a minority of the local population and invariably subject to either Sunni monarchies or secular, nationalist regimes that materially impoverish them, religiously suppress them, and politically marginalize them. From the outset it has been an integral part of Iran’s “revolutionary” agenda under its Shia leadership to help these Shia abroad fight for pious rule in the form of a regional movement of all Muslims within and for their communities.

So it is hardly surprising that the revolutionary Shia clergy has long seen their and their flock’s principal enemy to be — alongside the USA, the “Great Satan” — its regional outpost, Israel. And this repeatedly confirmed view is of a state that imperialism entrenched in the region in the course of conquering the traditional Islamic rulers there, so it could entrench itself there and establish its own eternal oppressive presence. It has a people imported from abroad who displace, combat, and oppress the indigenous Muslims with fundamentally wrong morals. It is a nation that exists only to do that, reproducing itself and constantly expanding. From the perspective of this critique, Israel’s destructive superpower policy in the region embodies everything about the West that warrants hatred and opposition. Conversely, the West’s greatest crime is creating and constantly supporting the State of Israel. Thus, it was inevitably clear to a Persian Shia — quite without any training in the Christian antisemitism of the West — that Israel was the “Little Satan” or, in oncological terms, a “cancerous tumor.”^[2] Complementary to this — as Pezeshkian’s avuncular talk with the Americans also indicates — the suffering of the Palestinians is, to the Iranians, the quintessential example of how imperialist Zionists oppress Muslims and deny them their right to a pious rule of their own. From the outset, this has given the theocratic state project not only its anti-Americanism but also its anti-Israel stance: a victory for Muslims can only be a victory over Israel — that much incompatibility has been clear.

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That is the goal Khomeini and his followers were pursuing after overthrowing the Shah, when they set about reshaping the nation they had seized by force, realigning the populace, and equipping them with a foundation required for and matching that goal. And they have come so far that they see themselves up to a confrontation with the US and Israel that has been forced upon them — definitely much too far not to see themselves obliged to defend what they have achieved even when threatened with total destruction. One major achievement is the crucial bone of contention: their nuclear program at its current stage of development.

Realizing Islamic Anti-Americanism through Shia national capitalism and theocratic democracy with the status of a nuclear-capable regional power

A modern state power — always subject to its Supreme Leader’s right to intervene

Following the Shah’s overthrow, Khomeini’s crew set about seizing power within the state the deposed god-king had left behind.^[3] The ideally suited form of government seemed to them to be a republic, in which the state organizes itself according to binding rules set down in a constitution. From the very outset, they attached great importance to the constitution itself being drafted and enacted as an expression of popular will.^[4] After all, the beneficiaries of their revolution were supposed to be the people, it was they who were to be truly represented in their various classes and strata, it was they who should receive justice. That is why, in Iran, parliamentary elections are held regularly and the president elected directly, with loose groupings and individual candidates standing ready to seek the people’s mandate, and the state placing great value on the people’s participating. Candidates are definitely supposed to represent differing views on how to govern properly, with the people’s material interests being politicized in this way in Iran as in the Western democracies. Those elected then share legislative and executive duties horizontally and vertically — from the parliament and president down to the local municipalities — again as prescribed by the constitution. In other words, they are elected to offices involving a fixed set of duties and powers independent of the specific person holding the office. These duties and powers revolve around administrating and shaping the nation’s material life, encompassing everything a modern state power has to take care of, from economic policy and trying to ensure proper money (which is central to this life in Iran too) to promoting public health and education. And official duties and powers of course also involve maintaining and safeguarding state power itself — as the monopolist on the use of force whose dictates are binding, which punishes infractions, and which secures its sovereignty over the nation’s internal affairs against the outside world. When it comes to administering justice and enforcing the law with judicial and police apparatuses all the way to a proper military, the Islamic Republic leaves nothing to be desired.

In the case of Iran, however, all of this is subordinated to the imperative — initiated through revolution and intended for the long term — to elevate the people to their true calling as a functioning community of devout Muslims and thereby join them with their rulers into a pious nation. That, after all, was the crucial starting point: society’s material pursuits, from the very top to the very bottom, had lost their loftier meaning, so the overarching task the mullahs set for their rule over Iran was to restore that meaning. They are trying to make sure this higher purpose — the higher unity of people and rulers — is organized within the state. And this, too, from the very top to the very bottom.

At the top of this structure is the Supreme Leader. However, he does not head a state apparatus oriented entirely toward him, as in a fascist dictatorship for example. Instead, he acts as the supreme power to withhold approval of everything that takes place, is decided, and is implemented within the levels and departments of the nation’s civil and military administration below him. Historically speaking, it took some time for Khomeini and his successor to consistently move toward amassing ever-greater powers for the Supreme Leader — usually in the wake of squabbles with their presidents and other high-ranking officials, sometimes through power struggles using force, yet never without formally enshrining such changes in the constitution. Religiously speaking, the business with the general formula “Velayat-e Faghih” (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist) had already been worked out as state theology and packaged into a nice doctrine before the seizure of power. Given the absence of the Hidden Mahdi — who was divinely ordained and empowered by virtue of his lineage to lead the faithful — the latter must be led by the most learned of all scholars, the “Sign of God” (which is what “Ayatollah” means), as these gentlemen understand themselves to be. He stands closest to God and is therefore most likely — or might be the only one — to know what God expects of a pious, institutionalized, perpetual revolution waged in His name. For exercising this arduous office he is assisted by an entire system of reviewing and correcting bodies, and meanwhile has them at his complete disposal. These bodies constantly measure what the various state bodies are doing to further the mundane course of material necessities, against the higher task of perfecting the people’s religiousness and morals (a goal never fully reached) and enabling the nation to fulfill its higher missions, not least those directed beyond its borders.

Consequently, the permitted competition between politicized interests — represented by individual candidates and associations — is forever suspected of not representing the natural pluralism of legitimate Islamic interests within the pious community, but rather dividing it. From this point of view, there can be no parties in the plural, but only the one party — the Party of God, or “Hezbollah” — and it is led by the Supreme Leader as the community of his active supporters. Before candidates even stand for election, they are also vetted otherwise as to whether they align with the Shia spirit of the constitution. And the revolutionary Shia proviso still remains in effect after they have been elected. So bodies staffed by experts trained in theology and/or civil law also review the laws enacted by those elected, making sure they are constitutional. And a body called the “Expediency Discernment Council” is in turn tasked with making the final decision, should the various civil and religious bodies completely deadlock one another. This naturally raises the question of who is responsible for deciding who should be on this council, and that ultimately only serves to show once again that everything hinges on the Supreme Leader’s religiously inspired authority to make the final decision…

And that is why he needs — and has procured — a power of enforcement to render him truly independent of the other institutions he is supposed to be steering in their day-to-day operations, correcting their course to align with the purpose he embodies. This power resides in the Revolutionary Guards. True to their official designation, they make sure that when the leader of the Islamic Revolution issues a ruling on a matter of dispute or policy, he is heeded.^[5] They guarantee that its religious-revolutionary, anti-American substance is consistently upheld both within the Republic and vis-à-vis the Republic it is organized in. These Guards answer solely to the Supreme Leader and are accountable to no one else. They have their own budget, managed independently of the rest of the military’s finances, and have since expanded into a second army that enforces the Shia state agenda domestically while standing ready and equipped to defend it against external threats. It is fitting that the Revolutionary Guards directly operate certain sectors of the Iranian economy that provide the material base for carrying out the anti-American mission. They thereby make sure they get their share in the competition for the funds generated primarily through oil and gas exports, while simultaneously making sure the economy produces whatever the perpetual revolution requires for the Islamic elevation of the Iranian people and the anti-Western liberation of Muslims everywhere.

The professionally equipped, trained, organized and funded Revolutionary Guards have at their side — or rather, under their command — a militia force numbering in the hundreds of thousands. It bears the apt name “Organization for Mobilization of the Oppressed,” known as “Basij” for short. Likewise established immediately after the revolution, it was a way for the religious leaders to rally their active supporters and thereby give the idea of the one “Party of God” this form — as well. They were offering the impoverished targets of their Shia-inspired program of liberation the opportunity to join a movement themselves, with an eye toward their ultimate reward in the afterlife, to fight the enemies their leaders blamed for their earthly misery. Evidently, earthly life in Iran produces enough impoverished people to be receptive to this militant, activist interpretation of their misery even fifty years after the pious revolutionaries seized power. And it is equally evident that life in Iran makes sure these leaders never run short of enemies to send their miserable militia after. In the West, this provides the usual purveyors of enemy images with all the unnecessary evidence they need of how cynical and deceitful all Shia promises of popular betterment have always been. That is, it serves as proof that there is no alternative to what Iran is opposing and trying to be alternative to, and that any attempt to create such an alternative is a crime. In reality, it merely indicates just how appallingly normal conditions are even in a state governed by perpetual Shia revolution: state rule produces the misery of the masses, while simultaneously supplying them with interpretations of their situation such that the active sections of these masses can be productively used for keeping the antagonisms involved in rule and exploitation under control and turning them to the rulers’ advantage.

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For this is what “the mullahs” have succeeded in doing: they have embedded their project of religiously elevating the people and the nation in the state they took over; they shrink from no conflict that they face when organizing modern state rule around this project; and they certainly do not shy away from using the force required to defend it against internal and external enemies. The real material foundation for this is provided by the economy they have organized.

A modern capitalism — geared toward national self-assertion the Shia way

In 2011, the incumbent Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei used the term “resistance economy” to encapsulate the project he was leading and trying to realize economically. The immediate starting point was of course the specific state of the Iranian economy at the time — more than thirty years after the defiant Shia had seized power. It was the state in which it had been put by Western, and particularly American, hostility. The country faced a situation where — led by the USA—those Western powers dominating the global market were deploying even their civilian means for undermining Iran, a power that didn’t suit them, with the aim of breaking its large-scale resistance. They possessed the means for these highly effective efforts because Iran — even under Khomeini and his followers — never sought to, nor did it ever, simply withdraw from the capitalistically constituted and imperialistically organized global market. After all, these leaders’ criticism was never directed at the capitalist mode of production as such — whether national or international — but rather at consequences they saw as counterproductive for the nation, ruinous for the people serving as the nation’s foundation and resource, and corrosive to the people’s morals. That is why they did not reverse the reviled Shah’s first steps toward capitalist industrialization and anti-feudal agricultural reform, to go back to the good old days that only exist in legend anyway. Instead, they set out to turn what already existed in Iran and its established integration into capital’s world market into something different, something piously successful, or successfully pious.

They tackled this by first building upon the Pahlavi Shahs’ having opened Iran up as a source of oil for global capitalism. They never wanted to abandon this role but sought to transform it into a source of funding for their own project. This, however, could not be had without rebelling against that role in one crucial way: putting the management of the nation’s oil resources under national control. Capitalist nations abroad would not let that pass without resistance — ideologically branding it a grave crime that confirmed the absolute necessity of the “final battle” against communism they were taking up at the time — yet ultimately, they accepted it. This was due in no small part to the fact that Iran, in its own way and for its own purposes, was merely following a certain development that was already occurring in the global oil market and not making it less useful to its creators and primary beneficiaries. The latter did have to learn this though. First of all, to all companies buying oil as an energy source or basic chemical feedstock and factoring the price into their capitalist calculations, it makes no difference who gets the money — whether it is still Anglo-American or Dutch capital provided with access to Middle Eastern oil fields through colonial force, or a nationalized oil company. They pay the price because it pays off. Their profit calculations factoring in energy costs simply do not show how much of the energy bill is revenue and profits for oil corporations and how much goes to the state authorities permitting Western oil majors to extract and sell the oil under their political control. Secondly, these multinationals remained in demand even in anti-Western Iran, expropriation and nationalization notwithstanding. Precisely because the new “pro-people” economists in Tehran were still dependent on oil export revenues to fund their revolutionary projects relating to the national economy, they needed the technology belonging to the capital-rich oil majors that they themselves lacked. Thus, Western corporations remained valued business partners for Iran’s new economic policymakers, operating under conditions that, while altered, continued to be profitable.^[6]

Consequently, Iranian oil — and later gas — remained a sought-after commodity on the global market, with demand actually continuing to rise. For alongside the long-established buyers, a few new ones have entered the scene as the world has been opened up to capitalism, particularly in Asia — most notably China and India. Together, they have not only driven a massive surge in global demand for oil and gas, from which Iran was able to profit. Their demand also liberated Iran’s pious oil economists from their totally one-sided reliance on Western markets. This has also proven to be an effective means for circumventing Western sanctions on the oil sector. Thus, despite all sanctions, Iran is able to leverage its partly inherited and partly newly expanded position as a key supplier of the commodity that remains vital to capitalist energy needs, for securing the funds required to operate as a financially strong customer on the global market, procuring whatever a modern economy — especially one under constant siege — needs for its survival and its “resistance.” This goes so far that even in times of a US president determined to ruthlessly wield his country’s dollar power and impose the most crippling sanctions, Iran is too firmly entrenched in the global oil and gas market to be sanctioned out of it.

Iran’s role and power as an oil and gas supplier have been the enduring foundation for financing the other areas of the country’s national economy. For these areas, the Shia economic plan is to stop the nationally unproductive enrichment of a few domestic or foreign private entities alongside the ruinous impoverishment of the populace, and start utilizing the people in such a way as to reconcile everything. The populace are to make a living in a manner befitting and conducive to their higher moral calling, and the pious men’s state power over the people is to be strengthened, so that these men are effectively able to commit the populace to the proper way of life and to protect them from their internal and external enemies.

In keeping with the state’s needs for their capitalist development and pious education project, Khomeini’s heirs have established the corresponding rules that they claim to have either found exactly as such in their religion or — employing the intellectual effort of drawing conclusions from ancient doctrines for modern times, a practice highly valued in Shia Islam — deduced from old teachings to match contemporary demands. Economically speaking, the issue is to steer the profit-seeking interests of private money-owners — which Khomeini and his successors have not prohibited, but licensed — to serve the greater national whole. On one hand, this goal can never be reached once and for all: the competition for profit that has been unleashed subject to an overriding condition constantly yields results that run counter to having a flourishing capitalism that enriches the rulers’ power while simultaneously reproducing the people as the foundation and instrument of the rulers’ pious project.^[7] But, on the other hand, that doesn’t matter. After all, the mullahs seized power precisely so they could put this program of theirs into practice — time and time again. The fact that this national/pious capitalism project is increasingly suffering from the hostility it meets with from the West may well exacerbate its objective economic contradictions, but it certainly does not shake the resolve of the “mullah regime” when it comes to the question of what purpose the national economy under its administration has to serve — or its conviction that the economy is capable of doing so under wise leadership. After all, it came to power with an anti-imperialist stance itself; and this it maintains and sees as accordingly vindicated. The logical result is that, as its program of seeking to harness capitalist enrichment as a resource for its anti-imperialist project has been progressively combated by the USA in particular, the regime has increasingly given its program the form of a "war capitalism" geared toward defense that is making itself largely independent of the hostile West and in crucial areas actually self-sufficient.

The anti-American political economists have firstly expanded this into a system of rules requiring constant adjustment, intended to ensure that the national economy and its key agents actually deliver what the agenda requires of them.^[8] And, secondly, they have advocated that these key agents — I.e., those who work with money rather than just for money in a Shia monetary economy as well — should not merely behave like capitalists but, of their own accord, view their economic activities as a service to the national cause and act accordingly. With alternating areas of emphasis, the leadership has managed the waves of ‘privatization’ and their aftermath, such as aligning strategically vital privatized economic sectors as needed for national “resistance,” in such a way that more and more religious foundations, on the one hand, and the Revolutionary Guards (the core force and guarantor of its anti-American, pious raison d’état), on the other, have become the decisive economic agents operating key parts of the Iranian economy under their own control.^[9] Thus, Iran’s leadership has not only secured ever-greater means, powers, and bodies for enforcing its will over society through political and police measures; it has also made sure that within society and its economy the revolutionary anti-American purpose that this national money-making system lacks on its own is anchored personally and institutionally. As the mutual hostility between the USA and Iran has intensified, this has increasingly translated into transforming the entirety of Iran and its material existence into a “resistance economy”: a form of national capitalism that is sustained by being integrated into the global capitalist market yet must remain immune to the economic hostility that Iran faces from the global economic superpower.

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Here, too, the leaders in Tehran, perpetually at odds with one another and ultimately deferring to the Supreme Leader’s final word, have achieved a great deal. Not when it comes to their people’s material prosperity; they treat their people as basically befits their kind of project — as a resource for a program whose protagonists derive from their "pro-people" ethos a clear conscience vis-à-vis every hardship they decide to inflict upon those entrusted to their pious guidance. For the likes of Khomeini and Khamenei, too, the ultimate criterion for distinguishing between halal (permitted) and haram (forbidden) when it comes to state-organized or -moderated economic impoverishment of the populace is whether or not it serves to strengthen state power.^[10] And in this area there are some undeniable successes to report, particularly given the existential challenges posed by US imperialism and its allies:

• With its extensively developed oil and gas sector, Iran possesses a long-term source of foreign currency that — even during periods of US sanctions — meets the need of nations that dare and can afford to circumvent US demands to isolate Iran from the global fossil fuel market. This goes so far that even under Trump, the US factors Iran’s role as an oil and gas supplier into its calculations when managing war and its consequences.
• This provides the Tehran leadership with the means for maintaining foreign relations that allow it to import existentially important goods, despite being excluded from the international payment system (SWIFT) and despite other primary, secondary, and “whatever” sanctions.
• These goods serve primarily to advance the development of an economy that is self-sufficient in key areas. This applies, firstly, to the foundation of all its successes — the petroleum sector itself — where Iran has reported it has become largely independent of Western capital and technology. Here, as in other areas, a significant factor is that the ban on access to the global market effectively shields the country from the competition that inevitably accompanies the privilege of ‘participating on the global market.’ If the industrial base is in place, the externally imposed prevention of this competition can be utilized as a starting point for promoting various kinds of domestic production. Secondly, it applies to the national armaments industry, whose production is not merely more or less independent but is on a technological level appropriate to the country’s defiant stance. Iran now possesses such an industry, manufacturing key military components on a large scale itself, including more complex technologies like missiles and drones.
• The country is so successful at this that it also sells the products of its armaments industry abroad. The export of drone technology, in particular, makes Iran’s costly efforts to establish a largely autonomous armaments industry more economical. It also — at least partially — offsets the loss of foreign currency revenue that Iran has to cope with due to the heavy sanctions on its oil exports.

In this way, Tehran’s regime over its people has paid off. The population, on the other hand, has been severely impoverished due to the sanctions, the broader strategic strangulation, and the country's efforts to assert itself against these pressures. But the Shia state power has used its economy to put it in a position to fulfill its religiously grounded claim — to be responsible for the fate of fellow Arab-Muslim peoples in the region and protect them from America and Israel — by achieving the status of a regional power.

A regionally significant state power — for liberating the great community of believers

The Shia revolutionaries have never confined their anti-imperialist struggle and fighting spirit to Iranian territory. Indeed, their Shia community in the strict sense extends beyond the citizenry of modern Iran. Its neighbor Iraq, for instance, has two pilgrimage sites and centers of Shia piety, Najaf and Karbala, which are in turn training centers for the Shia clergy and produced a great many of the Iranian clerics and legal scholars whose numbers surged following the revolution. Furthermore, as mentioned above, Shia are also found in other countries across the region, where they generally not merely lack access to the levers of state power but are marginalized as minorities — or in some cases even as majorities — by Sunni or secular rulers.

With the seizure of state power in Iran, the Shia struggle for liberation — directed against US imperialism, Israeli domination of the region, and pro-Western vassal regimes — acquired a dual character. Religious anti-imperialism now took on the form of establishing, developing, and asserting Iran as a regional power pursuing this mission. As they were increasingly able to stabilize their own state, the leaders of the Islamic Republic sought to establish themselves and the country they governed as a beacon, a political and military reference point within the region. And not only for Shia and other Muslim liberation movements inspired by the Iranian model, but also for states — such as Syria — whose leaders saw a fundamental need to alter the status assigned to them by imperialism within the region. Thus, the Iranian state has attempted to counter the US-led global order: by forging alliances and positioning itself as an open partisan and active supporter of various Shia or sometimes even Sunni groups, liberation organizations, and states in the region that shared its anti-American stance. Together with these allies, those wielding Iran’s considerable state power have been able to launch an armed resistance against the US and its creation, Israel — a state which they firmly believe is carrying out the US mandate of oppressing the indigenous Islamic population on the ground. The “Axis of Resistance”^[11] has come about as the practical expression of Islamic resistance to the “Great Satan.”

However, now the “Axis” has to deliver in return: effectively support Iran — that proud vanguard and protecting power for those oppressed by imperialism — as a regional power capable of asserting itself against the West and its local “puppets.” For in being such a power, Iran has developed special imperatives that shape its calculations with respect to adversaries, allies, and everyone in between, and that factor in the regional realities that US imperialism creates in its efforts to contain and roll back Iran as such a power. Historically, this began right after the Islamic Revolution, when Iran was compelled to wage a costly, almost decade-long war of attrition against Iraq. For that war, Iraq was equipped and financed by a coalition of states interested in using the far better-armed proxy — Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — to put a swift, ignominious end to the Shia specter in Tehran. That attempt obviously failed; instead, it gave Khomeini’s Shia revolutionaries the opportunity to mature into genuine statesmen — men prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of their people to enable state power to assert itself, after originally setting out to liberate these people from imperialist oppression to lead a life on earth pleasing to God.^[12]

In the period that followed, Tehran’s pious leaders have continued to factor the constellations of global and regional imperialist competition into their power-political calculations. They have learned to view their oppressed Shia allies in the region also through the lens of how to use them as leverage to assert strategic Iranian interests.^[13] Conversely, they assess the oppressive regimes of the Sunni Gulf monarchies or secular Arab dictatorships also in terms of the opportunities for cooperation they offer for bolstering Iran’s power.

Even in its dealings with the USA, Iran has more to offer than just fundamentalist anti-Americanism. As the dominant anti-American power in a region that America traditionally defines and claims as its own special strategic preserve, Iran calculates how much hostility toward the USA it can actually afford and how much it can simply not do without. For an Iran that has matured into the power that has a say in the violent affairs of the region, liberation from US hegemony means precisely this: forcing the hated USA to recognize it as this anti-American regional power that cannot be eliminated. This contradiction has come to a head with the current war and the diplomacy that is half accompanying it and half ending it. And it is no coincidence that this contradiction revolves around the nuclear issue for Iran as well.

The nuclear weapon: The necessary and necessarily contradictory insurance policy for anti-imperialism in the name of God

It is inconsistent with the religious agenda of liberation espoused by the pious men surrounding Khomeini and his successors to adopt and appropriate the instrument of imperialist dominance over the world of states: the military ability to cause mass destruction of enemy populations, the natural environment, and material wealth. The distinction between foreign governments and their peoples that President Pezeshkian articulated — framing it as part of Iran’s cultural heritage — is rooted in the fundamental premise that what Iran’s leaders are out to liberate is “man” himself. While created by God, he is regrettably being constantly deprived by evil earthly powers, their representatives, and their accomplices of his relationship with God, lived out within a community united in faith. This is indeed the opposite of identifying human masses with the hostile power that, according to this worldview, is oppressing them too. So it is not surprising that such pious anti-imperialists identify and condemn the nuclear weapon as the embodiment of imperialist global hegemony, this kind of weapon being its perfect instrument.

On the other hand, given the USA’s hostility to their pious uprising and subsequent project to establish a Shia regional power, the revolutionary leaders quickly realized that they could not leave it at rejecting the nuclear weapon on religious grounds. Iran needs “the bomb” if it is to survive and assert itself as a regional power. It does not need it to destroy the homeland of the Jews, as Israel’s government and friends claim in view of Iran’s declaration of hostility. Such an act would not just be forbidden by God, it would — as Iran’s leaders are well aware — result in their own state being immediately blown to bits by the vastly superior nuclear power, the USA. Their purpose is a form of defense essential for Iran as an autonomous — and autonomously respected — anti-American power. They are out to act as a sovereign protector of what they have achieved at home and of a circle of dependents in a region that the USA controls politically and militarily as its exclusive, incontestable domain — a region dominated by an American monopoly on the use of force that will fundamentally not tolerate the Islamic Republic. If Iran succeeded in acquiring a nuclear weapon it could counter America’s intent to destroy the “mullah regime” with the threat to inflict sudden, unstoppable damage of unprecedented magnitude upon the surrounding states the USA occupies and has effectively appropriated. For America — the supreme, supraregional power — that would be even more politically damaging than if its Iranian adversary continued to exist.

The ability to wield this means of deterring even the nuclear superpower from eliminating the Islamic Republic is worth an enormous material outlay to the country’s rulers, along with political and economic costs that are scarcely smaller. By building up a complete nuclear industry — a success that testifies to the country’s industrial capabilities and the army of scientists and technicians mobilized for the task, earning the envy of its neighbors — they have procured what they need to take the final step toward producing a nuclear weapon using their own resources. This has brought them — in addition to the US sanctions long in place — the hostility of the united West, extensive political isolation, the seizure of financial assets, as well as military strikes, acts of sabotage, assassinations of key personnel, i.e., quite a bit of terror carried out through a division of labor between the US and Israel. Iran has withstood all of this and fortified its military-nuclear-industrial complex against attacks, including very severe air strikes.

However, Iran’s leaders have not taken the final step toward having an operational nuclear weapon. It can be left open whether they have not done it yet because there is still something missing: to them, this is a political decision:

“We are not after nuclear weapons. And this is not because they are telling us not to pursue these things. Rather, we do not want these things for the sake of ourselves and our religion and because reason is telling us not to do so. Both shar'i and aqli [related to logic and reason] fatwas dictate that we do not pursue them. Our aqli fatwa is that we do not need a nuclear weapon either in the present time or in the future. A nuclear weapon is a source of trouble for a country like ours… (Khamenei, 2015)

It is not hard to discern Iran’s rational basis for renouncing — with at most partial insincerity — the deterrent weapon that it nonetheless wants to be able to have. The state is contending with an enemy that under no circumstances will tolerate within its own domain such a deterrent in the hands of an anti-American regional power. Iran’s leaders have no choice but to take the global power’s declaration seriously — which it has repeated countless times, with increasing urgency since the Obama presidency — that it will use whatever force is necessary to prevent completion of an Iranian nuclear weapon.^[14] That is one reason why it has maintained a significant military presence in the region ever since Obama’s threat. Furthermore, Israel’s decimation of all partners and protégés in the “Axis of Resistance” not only confirms how brutally serious the situation is, but also puts the Islamic Republic increasingly on the defensive.

America’s threats have caused Iran to adopt a remarkable dual strategy. On the one hand, the ongoing harm and existential threat it is facing are all the more reason to further develop its military capabilities in general, and its nuclear-industrial capacities, with the option of acquiring nuclear arms, in particular. Despite the rising cost, it weathers the — anything but “cold” — state of war America has imposed on it and the region, vigorously backed by Israel. More precisely, regardless of growing discontent, it has its people weather it. At the same time, it makes its pursuit of the prohibited nuclear deterrent the subject of a diplomatic deal it proposes to America. Iran offers to commit voluntarily — but under rigorous international inspection — not to complete its nuclear program (which it claims was never intended to be a nuclear weapons program anyway) in exchange for the US and its allies reversing their categorical rejection of the Islamic Republic and credibly cementing this by the West lifting its economic sanctions and the global power providing security guarantees. With US President Obama, the Iranian government actually succeeded in securing such a deal — the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)” — agreed upon by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany, the EU, and Iran itself. From the US perspective, however, this agreement was intended solely to prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb, not to substantially ease the West’s repressive grip on Iran’s conditions for survival. Consequently, this deal did nothing to spare Iran from America’s constant threat of war and the continued barrage of harm inflicted by many means including military and terrorist ones. On the other hand, it did nothing to halt Iran’s efforts to work toward acquiring a nuclear deterrent after all. This, too, was only logical. Just as US hostility did not and does not originate with Iran’s desire to procure a deterrent for self-defense, but rather with the agenda of a Shia regional power seeking respect from the super-regional power, America, so too is Iran’s decision to forgo acquiring a nuclear bomb a diplomatic offer to the USA (aimed at ending its existential hostility) only for as long as Iran is forgoing something it is actually capable of. Conversely, as long as Iran is still capable of what it is using as diplomatic bargaining leverage, America will not waver in its determination — let alone its power — to dominate the region and eliminate Iran’s Shia anti-Americanism.

In the first half of his second term, President Trump is putting an end to this state of affairs — which for Iran is precarious and for the USA absurd — just as he promised at the start of his first, and set in motion by withdrawing from the Iran deal. Iran is powerless to prevent its top three tiers of leadership from being eliminated, and its military assets from being largely destroyed. It is also questionable how much remains of its uranium enrichment industry and its ominous 400-kilogram product. Israel has been unleashed to dismantle Iran’s Shia cosmos, without hindrance. The state thus finds itself on the defensive in a fundamentally different way than before. It is no longer trying to defend the status of being a regional adversary to the USA; instead, it is fighting for a shred of respect by making itself felt as a disruptive factor in the global energy market, the export business and imports of key Arab neighbors, and global economic growth. Should it use military force against US assets in the region, it can expect further devastating blows from the overwhelmingly present superpower.

This is not the end of diplomacy. It is coming to life, with a very clear distribution of roles. Now that the Iran deal no longer exists, there is an offer of a deal from the American side. Iran would sign an agreement to capitulate, merely acknowledging what is already the case as far as the US is concerned. In return, the US would shift all Iranian options for state autonomy to participating in a general Middle Eastern peace. Iran would renounce the use of force, explicitly ending its hostility towards Israel, and thereby implicitly recognizing Israel’s extensive practice of anti-state terror as justified. There would be a general ban on the use of force, which Trump is expressly claiming is America’s due.^[15] For Iran, this would mean abandoning its doubly-grounded anti-American raison d'état, and thus deliberately destroying itself as a Shia state power, protector and leader responsible for at least the region. The real alternative to this is for the Islamic Republic to continue to exist with its undermined claim to power, under constant threat of being wiped out as a state by a bombing war that can be resumed on an unpredictable scale at any time as America sees fit. The expenditure of munitions would certainly be just a trivial problem.

Either way, entering the idyllic world of MAGA-style global peace will turn the Islamic Republic into a different Iran.

© GegenStandpunkt 2026