Contrary to what the world was expecting, Iran hasn’t responded to the latest attack by “Israel” with massive retaliation, and has instead indicated it seeks not to carry on the cycle of counter-attacks. This is because the strikes “Israel” just carried out were so absurdly tiny and unable to do damage, it’s apparent that the Zionist state has done what the imperialist media accused Iran of doing: taking military action purely for the sake of political theater, rather than for genuine deterrence.
Many are surprised that the Zionists have acted this timidly, given that Netanyahu is a desperate politician who needs endless war to stay in office and avoid prison. And I was surprised too when I learned about the de-escalation yesterday; the other night, when the reports of the new “Israeli” strikes came out, it felt like this was the beginning of a gargantuan explosion. Yet peace has been reached in this respect, which shows just how weakened the Zionists and the imperialists have become.
This is a repeat of the story that we’ve been seeing unfold throughout more and more fronts of international tensions over the last couple decades. This is the story of Washington and its proxies posturing menacingly towards one of the countries which challenges international monopoly capital, then that country gaining too much leverage for the imperialists to want to provoke them. It’s happened on the Korean Peninsula, where the DPRK’s attainment of nuclear weapons has made the U.S. and so-called South Korea unable to follow through on their threats. It’s happened in Ukraine, where the imperialists in the long term have no choice but to let Russia hold onto the lands it’s captured. We’re likely seeing it happen in Taiwan, where Washington has good reason to expect it would lose a proxy war with China (especially now that it’s been unable to beat Russia).
That Iran has managed to outmaneuver the U.S. and “Israel” in this way, despite it being the only one among these anti-imperialist countries which lacks nuclear weapons, further shows the constraints the hegemon finds itself in. Though this certainly isn’t the first time we’ve seen a non-nuclear country deter a U.S. invasion, with Washington having been forced to give up its plans for aggression against Cuba. More recently, the empire has had to let its hopes for invading Venezuela die as well. The factor that’s made even these countries so easily able to dissuade Washington from destroying them is the rise of multipolarity. The emergency of an international order where Moscow and Beijing can act on a relatively equal footing with Washington, and thereby normalize acts of defiance against the hegemon.
Writes Hugo Dionísio about how the power balance has shifted:
Iran’s response signaled that it is prepared to give a decisive response to what it considers to be an escalation of abuses by Zionism and its supporters, and that it will not continue to tolerate genocidal disrespect from the Zionist entity that controls Israel. This behavior on the part of Iran, previously unthinkable and intolerable by the “international community”, now finds a space of legitimacy that is absolutely revealing of how the world has changed in these years of growing multipolarity. Sanctions no longer carry the same weight, since Iran — like Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua — has learned to be self-sufficient, transforming aggression into a force of opposition; nor does the West now dominate the global South with the force it used to; nor do the U.S. and its vital space still constitute that military power that everyone was afraid of. Today, powers like Iran can afford to raise the stakes and corner the arrogant West.
Faced with this overwhelming reality of an anti-U.S. bloc that’s capable of existentially threatening the Zionists and imperialists, the “Israelis” have effectively announced a surrender within their battle against Iran. Like would have been the case for a wider conflict with Iran, this has accelerated U.S. hegemony’s decline, except in a different way.
But just because a wider war has been averted, we can’t expect the remainder of the empire’s collapse to not involve massive violence. Because at the same time that the “Israelis” were coming up with such a restrained plan for Iran, they invaded Rafah, and did so with the tacit support of the Biden White House. No one should take seriously Blinken’s token words of pseudo-opposition towards the invasion, as the administration’s actions say the opposite. Says the leader of Hamas Ismail Haniyeh: “Israel did not agree to a ceasefire, and what it wants is to retrieve its detainees then resume the war, which will never happen. Washington’s position regarding the invasion of Rafah is deceitful, and we will not fall into the trap of job exchange between Americans and Israelis.”
In immediate terms, this obviously means an historic amount of bloodshed and mass trauma for the Rafah population which the “Israelis” are collectively punishing. In the long term, that Washington has been willing to back this latest genocidal crime is an extremely ominous sign for the future of the broader U.S. sphere of influence. It means our government intends to respond to the decline of U.S. global primacy by escalating its violence against the peoples who it can still get away with waging war against.
As we see our government’s proxies deliberately murdering non-combatants, we need to keep in mind the historical phenomenon where the means of violence which a given empire commits abroad ultimately come to be used against that empire’s own people. Zionism’s innovations in police repression have already been brought to U.S. law enforcement, and there’s precedent for the U.S. government bombing entire neighborhoods in response to political threats towards it. We can’t just resist the invasion of Rafah; we need to act as if such a threat of state violence exists towards our own communities. Because it absolutely does.
What should we do with this information? We can’t fall into pessimistic leftism, where somebody who’s learned about the brutal realities of systemic injustice can only think about what to lament and to fear. We need to do the equivalent of what the global anti-imperialist forces have done, and render our enemy unable to subdue its targets. We have to preemptively make our organizations unable to be shut down by the next counterinsurgency maneuvers the state is going to direct towards us. Then we need to use these orgs as a means for freeing the country’s people from the rule of our capitalist state, whose dictatorial nature can only get more brazen as this process advances.
The Zionists and the imperialists haven’t decided against provoking Iran into war because they care about peace. They’ve done so because they’re cowards who only want opponents that can’t defend themselves. The slaughter of Rafah civilians that they’ve perpetrating at this moment is their way of trying to get this sadistic kind of satisfaction. But even as they expand the genocide against Palestine to an unprecedented scope, the enemy they’re fighting on this front isn’t truly helpless.
The Palestinians have Hamas, and the other armed organizations that make up the anti-Zionist resistance coalition. The “Israelis” haven’t managed to destroy Hamas, because Hamas and its partners have been able to take advantage of the innate strengths that a guerrilla movement has when it acts with strategic ingenuity. Like the Russians, the Iranians, and the other victors against the empire, these fighters have outmaneuvered the hegemon. Their stories show that the USA’s people can prevail in our own struggle against the imperial state, even when that state has come to fully import its tools from abroad.
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