This roundtable appears in our Spring 2026 issue under the headline “Imperial Anxieties.”
On Monday, April 6, Boston Review convened a panel of distinguished scholars of Iranian politics, history, and culture to discuss the war on Iran initiated by the United States and Israel in late February.
The following is an edited transcript of the event, moderated by Alex Shams. The panelists discuss the geopolitics of American and Israeli aggression, the long history of Western intervention in the region, reactions from within Iran and the Iranian diaspora, and the fate of struggles for freedom and democracy “under the boot of empire.”
Alex Shams:More than 3,500 people have been killed in Iran since this unprovoked war of aggression began, in addition to nearly 1,500 people in Lebanon. All of us on this panel have loved ones in the region, and I just want to start by acknowledging that this is a very difficult time.
As with the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have invoked vaguely preemptive rationales in response to unspecified “imminent” and “existential” threats from Iran, but this time the war propaganda has gotten far less buy-in than it did twenty years ago. Congress has not specifically authorized the use of force, as it did with the invasion of Iraq, and polls show that most Americans think the war should end and that it was wrong to use military force against Iran. We’ve seen both the United States and Israel give changing and inconsistent explanations of their goals, with no clarity about an endgame and apparent surprise that the Iranian government hasn’t fallen. What’s going on? How should we understand the aims and interests of the United States and Israel right now?
Ali Kadivar:I think we have to start by zooming out and taking a longer view, seeing the current war as a part of a broader pattern in Iranian history—major wars in which Iran has been invaded, with serious consequences for Iran’s political trajectory. Any Iranian living in the nineteenth or twentieth century, if they lived at least forty years, witnessed two major wars in their lifetime. I myself was born under the Iran-Iraq War; I have memories of bombs being dropped, missiles hitting cities, running into shelters. And by forcing the question of how to defend Iranian sovereignty, these wars have shaped political orders in Iran, crushing some and consolidating others.
The Constitutional Revolution that began in 1905 was one of these major projects. Under Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar, Iran’s response to territorial loss was to transform the political order by adopting a constitution, parliament, and rule of law—a nationalist and democratic response. But this order collapsed under external pressure in World War I, and then we see the rise of Reza Shah and the Pahlavi dynasty. This is a different political project: it modernizes constitutionalism, but puts aside parliament and the rule of law with the personalization of power. But this project also collapses during the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran in 1941. That prompts the rise of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who is strengthened following the British- and American-backed coup of 1953 but eventually falls with the 1979 revolution. Then comes the Islamist project, which is religious and authoritarian but populist in the sense that it relies on mass mobilization, born in response to foreign intervention. The Iran-Iraq War helps this project to consolidate.
Now, with this U.S.-Israeli war of aggression, we are watching the pattern repeat. The Islamic Republic faces a situation similar to the 1980s: more militarized politics, hardline elites with a siege mentality, suppression of civil society, and increasing arrests and executions.
Manijeh Moradian:To take it from a different angle, I think the United States and Israel have carried out genocide in Gaza, and they’re seizing on this opportunity to try to assert control over the region through any amount of violence that they can get away with. They committed war crimes in Gaza, and they’re committing war crimes in Iran. Carpet bombing cities is a war crime. Bombing civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Trump is obviously threatening to carry out even more war crimes, very brazenly and openly. The point is that the United States and Israel want to normalize this: they want the world to accept that this is the way it is, that they can get away with it, that they can do whatever they want. And the Iranian people are paying the price.
“The United States and Israel want to normalize this. They want the world to accept that this is the way it is, that they can do whatever they want.”
What makes this so challenging and devastating is that Iranian people are the targets of imperial war crimes and also ongoing systematic human rights violations by their own government. Iranians have been trying for a very long time to make change, and it’s here that Ali’s narrative of foreign intervention—how that has constrained and shaped different projects of resistance and state-making and society—is so important. Over the last several decades, we’ve seen, in one form or another, Iranians trying to make their society better, to make it less repressive, more equal, more livable. Protests, whether for reforms or for a different form of government altogether, have been met with intense state violence. Israel, the United States, and Iranian monarchists have swarmed like vultures to feed off of the despair, desperation, and helplessness that became widespread in Iran after the unprecedented scale of the crackdown on protesters in January.
There’s this word in Farsi, estisal, that is the word of the moment. It means despair. Despair can be mobilized to many different political ends, and unfortunately the most right-wing reactionary forces have been able to capitalize off and exploit it. People on the ground, having risen up over and over again, having been subjected to a massacre in January, are experiencing a moment of devastating defeat. Now they are being subjected to carpet bombing, the destruction of everything needed to live and to organize. At the same time, the Iranian government continues to hold thousands of political prisoners, to carry out executions of protesters, and to heavily surveil the population. I know I’m not alone in being very worried. It could get much worse if Trump makes good on his barbaric and maniacal threats.
Peyman Jafari:I think we have seen different rationales for this war exactly because making the real reason explicit would have been unhinged, even for Netanyahu and Trump. At the end of the day, from the Israeli perspective, it is really about eliminating any obstacle to its long-term project, which is the subjugation of the Palestinians. So this really starts in 1948 and continues through Israel’s invasion of Egypt in 1956 with Britain and France, and then the 1967 and 1973 wars. This had nothing to do with political Islam, or Islamism: Israel was at war with secular Arab nationalism. And Netanyahu, of course, has subscribed to the Greater Israel plan.
As for the United States, Israel has always been an outpost of American empire in the Middle East. From the imperial point of view, the agency of ordinary people in the Middle East—whether Egyptians, Iranians, Iraqis—is a problem: they can be a danger when they rise up for democracy, for social equality, and against autocratic regimes. But maintaining one state totally dependent on American empire gives you some kind of assurance about power projection in the region. The war is therefore also about resurrecting, or entrenching, American empire. We Iranians tend to think it is all about us, but I think it has to do with the imperial anxieties of the American elite.
The messaging has thus been aimed not only at Iran—we will crush you, we will use enormous amounts of violence, we will send you back to the Stone Age—but also at Europeans, at U.S. allies: you will be disciplined. Two months ago, at a meeting in London, the Belgian prime minister said, “Being a happy vassal is one thing. Being an unhappy slave is something else entirely.” The United States is making clear that this is the imperial hierarchy—the United States on top and then the Europeans. The war is also a signal to Russia and China that the United States is still the biggest military power. If its economic position has declined, the United States can compensate through sheer military might.
Naghmeh Sohrabi:I’ll turn the question around and look at it from the other side—not the aims of the United States and Israel, but the aims of the Islamic Republic. Ali drew an important historical line, but I would say there are significant differences between this war and earlier moments. One concerns the way the war is being fought. This war is unlike the early years of the Iran-Iraq War, when the Iraqis had boots on the ground in Iranian territory and the Iranians were pushing the Iraqis back. The current moment is much closer to the middle of that war, when it had become a war of attrition: Iran was continuing the war despite the fact that there were proposals to end it. And that’s because, as Ali said, there are political projects connected to continuing this war. The primary objective of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the survival of the system.
Iran’s response to the current war was entirely foreseeable. We have seen the Islamic Republic use the war to expand its own political projects, to make itself more stable and to continue to brutalize its own population. Something is lost if we simply characterize Iran’s response as resistance, or self-defense. This is the system resisting. This is the system fighting. The country is being bombarded as we speak, literally right now; the Iranian government cannot and will not do anything to control that. What it is doing is lighting the region on fire in reaction to U.S. and Israeli aggression as a way to keep itself going. I think we need to keep that in mind when we’re thinking about the various forces that have contributed to this moment.
Shams:Everyone on the panel today has at some point written about the distortions and misrepresentations of Iranian history and society in U.S. media and culture. I’d like us each to share an example along these lines that feels particularly relevant to understanding the current moment. If you could correct one major misunderstanding about Iran, what would it be?
Jafari:The idea that this war was inevitable—that everything had to lead to this point because of Iran’s domestic politics of authoritarianism and repression and its foreign politics of power projection in the region, its support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria and beyond. No doubt, these things are very problematic. But we have to understand that these policies did not emerge in a geopolitical and historical vacuum. International politics very much shaped these issues and foreclosed alternative paths and developments.
“We still hugely underestimate the impact of the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The perception of an outside threat made it much harder for Iranian reformists to fight back and organize.”
To give just one example, we still hugely underestimate the impact of the 2001 and 2003 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. At the time of these invasions, there was a vibrant reform project gaining ground in Iran, but the invasions helped conservatives undermine reform. The perception of a threat from outside aggressors—and the resulting militarization of Iranian politics—foreclosed that development and made it much harder for Iranian civil society to fight back and organize.
So, we have to think about these moments where change was possible in terms of foreign policies. Western leaders often reduce the region’s problems to Iran’s role in the “axis of resistance.” It’s important to remember where that term comes from: it was coined as a foil to George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech in 2002, when he named Iran alongside Iraq and North Korea as targets of the War on Terror. That speech, and the foreign policy that grew out of it, pushed Iran to closer alignment with Iraqi militias, Hezbollah, and other groups in order to consolidate that “axis of resistance.” The point is that Iranians have been fighting for democracy on their own, and these foreign interventions have made that harder, not easier.
Moradian:There are so many misunderstandings. If I can only correct one, it would be the idea that the Islamic Republic is anti-imperialist, and that the only way to oppose imperialist war is therefore to support the Islamic Republic. This idea still circulates on the left in the United States and other parts of the world. I want to take it head on, since it feels like one of the many elephants in the room.
Iranians should obviously not be forced to choose between obliteration by the most powerful foreign militaries in the world and submission to a violent authoritarian state. Anti-imperialism as it has been practiced and preached by the Islamic Republic—as a tool for shoring up its power and crushing internal dissent—has done great damage by severing anti-imperialism from the ideas of freedom and justice that were once its animating force. I think we urgently need an alternative. In particular, we need a feminist approach to opposing genocide and war.
There’s a widespread misconception that feminism is a Western invention, when in fact, different forms of feminist politics arise from lived experiences and material conditions of oppression all over the world. Yes, there can be right-wing, pro-war uses of feminism; we need to counter those with an anti-imperialist feminism of the kind that has emerged in Iran, Palestine, Iraq, and all over the Global South over the past several decades. This is not a new thing. Third World or Global South feminists have long had to theorize and organize at the intersection of postcolonial authoritarianism and the relentless pressures of imperialism.
In the context of Iran, only a feminist analysis, I think, can account for the ways that imperialist Western aggression through sanctions and war have exacerbated domestic repression, enriched a ruling oligarchy at the expense of everyone else, and justified violent crackdowns in the name of national security. Feminists have long explained that there’s more than one source of oppression in the world, more than one form that bears down on people, their bodies and lives and futures, and that it’s both possible and necessary to refuse all of the structures of militarism, patriarchy, and domination imposed from above. In short, anti-imperialism without feminism can easily collapse into support for authoritarianism, but feminism without anti-imperialism becomes cheerleading for empire. The record of Iranian history is very clear: there can be no freedom or democracy under the boot of empire.
At the same time, we have to confront many Iranians’ skepticism of anti-imperialism by clearing up the misconception that it means viewing the Iranian people as pawns in a geopolitical game, with no concern for their suffering at the hands of their own government and no solidarity with their aspirations for a more democratic society. But again, to do so, we need to reclaim anti-imperialism from the Islamic Republic and refashion it into a feminist antiwar framework. Anti-imperialism has to become bound to the preservation and defense of life against mass death, whoever is perpetrating it. And I think that was really the spirit of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that emerged in Iran in 2022. One of my biggest concerns right now is to make sure that its legacy not be left to die under the rubble.
Sohrabi:For me, the biggest misunderstanding that has led to this moment is this undying idea that Iran is a totalitarian state, and that it has been the same for forty-seven years. Iran is not a totalitarian state; it never has been. It’s an authoritarian state, and those are very different things. What I mean is simply that the mainstream image in people’s minds about Iran—the image that, for example, persists in the Western press and in the pro-war diaspora media—is that Iran is a top-down, consistently repressive state that wants to and can control every aspect of people’s lives. But that has never been the reality of Iran. The population continues to claw open space for their own rights, to come up with new ideas. The Iranian intellectual scene is full of people—even at this moment, as the bombs are falling—who are trying to come up with ways to be in dialogue with each other and come up with new ideas to expand their rights for when the bombs stop falling.
This conceit of Iran’s essential unchangingness is premised on the idea that as long as you have clerics in charge, or you have an Islamic Republic, or a theocracy, or whatever you want to call it, it’s just more of the same, namely constant, top-down brutality. In fact, the Iranian political system has changed in important ways since 1979—from its first decade, under the Iran-Iraq War, to the period of reconstruction under President Hashemi Rafsanjani, which gave birth to the reform movement. According to every single measure, these changes have resulted in a different Iran—a different system of governance, a different economic system, a different role for the press, different ways that people interact with the state, different ways the state exercises violence on its population. Yet every time there was an election—and all of us were invited to comment as pundits in Western media—every response we got from the U.S. policy establishment was, it makes no difference if people vote or not; this is not a free and fair electoral system, and the only context where votes matter is in a free and fair electoral system.
That’s not empirically true, but the idea never broke through the U.S. government discourse about the Islamic Republic. So we got to this point, three years after the Woman, Life, Freedom movement—which has radically changed what Iran looks like by getting rid of the veil as a visual marker of the country—when the Trump administration thought it could just get rid of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and somehow the same old unchanging system was just going to collapse as a result. It didn’t, and it was never going to.
Kadivar:A major misconception in foreign policy is that Iran is the biggest sponsor of terror in the world and the major source of instability in the region. It’s not that the opposite is true—the Islamic Republic has indeed engaged in destabilizing acts; its support for Assad has been especially appalling, and in Iraq, the Iranian military fought with ISIS while terrorizing some Sunni communities. But Iran is not the only actor in the Middle East with dirty hands.
In reality, the biggest source of instability in the region is the United States. Its invasion of Iraq led to waves of wars and civil wars that still continue. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed in the ensuing violence, and ISIS emerged out of the power vacuum created by civil war. Close U.S. allies are other major sources of instability. The ongoing genocide against Palestinians committed by Israel—called the “only democracy in the region,” with the “most moral army in the world”—is now expanding to Lebanon. The United Arab Emirates has its hands in the bloody civil war in Sudan; Saudi Arabia was bombing Yemen and starving Yemenis for a while a few years ago. Meanwhile, Turkey has supported Sunni extremist groups in Syria, where former fighter Ahmed al-Sharaa has become president. The issue is not that Iran has been a source of instability. The issue is that Iran has pursued a different regional order than the one desired by the United States. It’s not necessarily a better order or worse order. Both orders have been authoritarian and exclusive, violent to those that are not defined to be included.
Another refrain is that Iran uses proxies, as if that were the invention of the Islamic Republic. Of course this isn’t true—it’s ridiculous to have to say so, but this perception of Iran is so widespread. Think of the conflict depicted in Lawrence of Arabia—that’s a proxy war where Britain worked with Arabs to bring down the Ottoman Empire. The United States has a long history of proxy work, of course: the Contras in Nicaragua, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. So yes, Iran has worked through proxies, but it did not invent this policy. It’s a practice that both imperial actors and regional actors have long been using, and we have to think about the Middle East as a region. It’s just too simplistic to say everyone is doing good except for one rogue state that is destabilizing everything. It just doesn’t add up.
Shams:I want to turn to what’s happening on the ground in Iran. Naghmeh, you’ve been translating articles by Iranian intellectuals and cultural figures on your blog, These Are the True Things, as well as for Boston Review. Can you tell us about that project? What are you hearing these days? How are people in Iran experiencing this war right now?
Sohrabi:The idea came out of my own shortcomings. I noticed I was treating Iran basically like a primary source, reading texts produced there and incorporating them into my own writing for the information they contained. I thought, why are we not treating the analyses coming out of Iran on a par with our own analyses, particularly since those analyses are based on the lived experience of the people there? Why can’t we let these voices speak for themselves? Lived experience qualitatively changes the kinds of analyses that we produce. The day I had that realization, I started translating.
Most of what I’ve translated has been analytical rather than personal reflections, such as investigative journalism, analyses of Iran’s economic or political challenges published on various scholars’ social media accounts, and so on. But today somebody reached out and shared a beautiful, heartbreaking letter they had written to a friend. I translated it because the writer just wanted to be heard—and I think when you’re in a situation like Iranians are in now, simply getting the chance to be heard, even if the world is doing nothing to stop the bombs from falling, matters.
As for what I’m hearing, two things stand out. One is what Manijeh just mentioned: the notion of estisal. Loosely translated, the word means desperation, but there’s a deeper sense that gets lost in that translation, and the idea now has a very specific historical association. It started to be used widely after the Twelve-Day War last year, and then again after the government’s killing of protesters in January. The people I follow and translate are interested in estisal because they’re thinking past the war. What they’re saying is that we need to confront this sense of desperation that led so many Iranians to support the war in hopes that it would topple the government—both as a political issue and also even within our families, because a lot of families have been torn up over this.
Second is the notion that you can walk and chew gum at the same time: you can be simultaneously against the Islamic Republic and against this war. It is exasperating that so many feel we have to pick one of these things over the other, when the people who are actually experiencing the violence—which has been going on not since the outbreak of war on February 28 but before that in January, and before that in December, when the rial fell, and before that during the Twelve-Day War, and before that during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement—are able to say that being antiwar isn’t conditional on the Islamic Republic’s actions and that we can oppose both the war and the government at the same time. It behooves us to learn and do that simultaneously.
Shams:Peyman, you’ve written extensively about social and worker movements in Iran. Can you walk us through what was happening before this war, especially the protest movements on the ground, and broadly how things have unfolded since the end of the U.S.-Israeli attack last June?
Jafari:Iran has a rich history of social movements and struggles; multiple waves of protests have arisen during the last four decades around political, social, cultural, economic, and ecological grievances, and sometimes these issues have overlapped and converged into movements.
Broadly speaking, we can distinguish three formations. First are workplace-oriented protests. Neoliberalization in Iran has meant that many workers face temporary contracts, low wages and pensions, and rising living costs. Groups that have protested include teachers, bus and truck drivers, workers in large industries such as steel and oil, as well as retirees, who have been a constant fixture on the streets in the last few years. (In fact, these include some of the main groups that have opposed both the Islamic Republic and the war—the national teachers’ union, the bus drivers’ union of Tehran, and the union of the Haft Tappeh sugarcane factory in southern Iran have all explicitly taken a position against the war.) Second are social movements outside and beyond the workplace, active around issues such as gender equality, environmental degradation, and academic freedom—the student movement, for instance. And third are street protests, sometimes converging with social movements and economic protests in revolts that target the political system as such.
In 2017 and early 2018, inflation sparked protests. In 2019, protests were triggered by a fuel price hike. Late 2022 saw the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which was converging on many of these issues. And in January this year, mass protests were triggered by the devaluation of the rial and rising inflation once again.
There is so much to say about each of these formations and their interactions, but let me highlight one issue that has shaped all three: external threat in the form of sanctions and war. Economic sanctions imposed by the United States have exacerbated corruption, mismanagement, and social inequalities, triggering several revolts. At the same time, they have empowered and strengthened political and military elites while undermining movements’ organizational capacity and transformative potential. And as a result, movements don’t figure as centrally as they should in opposition to the Islamic Republic. This partially stems from estisal, that sense of frustration, which has led many Iranians not to see any way out but war.
The Woman, Life, Freedom movement is a case in point. It seriously limited the ability of authorities to enforce hijab rules in public space. But it has not gotten the kind of attention it deserves, both inside and outside Iran, not only because of estisal but because of a reactionary politics dead set on liberation from above instead of from below. The monarchists, especially, tried to sideline the movement because it offered an inclusive and emancipatory alternative to their own vision. Rather than dismissing such movements, we need to take them seriously and discuss how they can challenge the Islamic Republic more effectively. What kind of small victories can we win that will raise the confidence of the movement so it draws in more people and gains momentum? While the fall of the Islamic Republic is the end goal, it is important to think about concrete steps in between and provide the organization and leadership necessary to move these movements forward.
Shams:Speaking of Iranian support for the war, I’d like to broaden the picture and discuss the global Iranian diaspora. People around the world who have been following the war on social media have seen videos of diaspora Iranians dancing in celebration. They’ve also seen videos of Iranian civilians being killed on the ground. Meanwhile, Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the Shah deposed in the 1979 revolution, has gained global visibility as he positions himself as a leader of the Iranian opposition. Manijeh, you’ve written a great deal on the history of the diaspora, and especially the Iranian left; help us understand these different reactions at this moment.
Moradian:The Iranian diaspora is deeply polarized. The loudest voices are the ones with money and access to mass media, so the segments of the diaspora that are committed to Zionist and monarchist ideologies have had the biggest platforms. Satellite TV stations like Iran International and Manoto, watched widely in the diaspora but also in Iran, have been perpetuating a kind of pro-war, pro-Israel, anti-Muslim, pro-Shah propaganda for a very long time, and over the last year, through the June war and the January massacres, it has gained a new kind of momentum inside Iran it didn’t have before. It’s been profoundly disturbing to see so many diaspora Iranians in the grip of a right-wing frenzy, cheering for war, utterly aligned with Trump and Netanyahu in callous disregard for the actual human beings in Iran.
“Anti-imperialism without feminism can easily collapse into support for authoritarianism, but feminism without anti-imperialism becomes cheerleading for empire.”
But aside from all this and the “Make Iran Great Again” insanity, there’s an even larger swath of the diaspora that supports this war simply because they and their families have, in one way or another, suffered at the hands of the Islamic Republic. In other words, they support the war because they don’t support the Islamic Republic. I think the key question comes back to this: How do we develop a political alternative that can respond to the real, legitimate grievances that people, in this case in the diaspora, have against the Islamic Republic, and channel that anger and hopelessness away from support for imperialist war?
There are people trying to do this. I’m a member of Feminists for Jina, a global network formed to support the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising that has consistently opposed the U.S.-Israeli wars on Iran, in June and now. We had a very long meeting yesterday trying to figure out how to keep raising our voices against war and state repression simultaneously, how to organize more people to take action, and I know we’re not alone. I’ve seen many efforts in different registers to demand an immediate end to this war. I’ve seen petitions for ceasefire proposals in the UN. Some may be critical of that, but people are trying; it’s one arena of struggle. Maybe it’s pointless—we’ve seen the whole world let the genocide in Gaza happen. But silence doesn’t seem like a good thing either. I’ve seen efforts to launch social media campaigns around war crimes. And almost every day, I get messages from Iranians in the diaspora saying, What do we do? How do we organize? Can we have a teach-in? Who’s doing what? Connect me. I want to oppose this war.
There is thus a big political opening for a meaningful antiwar movement. The sheer scale of the destruction happening in Iran will push more and more of the diaspora to want to take a stand against it. But again, they won’t want to do so in a way that seems like support for the regime. How, then, do we create the organizing spaces, the campaigns, the initiatives, online and on the ground, in the United States—the country that’s doing the bombing—where we can unite against this war and bring people together while foregrounding an ethics of liberation and self-determination? I think getting serious about this is our only hope of shifting the discourse and the sentiments in the diaspora away from these truly frightening right-wing forces, these fascistic elements across the globe, and toward something that can respond to the multiple crises threatening the future of Iranians and us all.
Shams:I want to take us back into Iran and to the question of oil. All eyes have been on the Strait of Hormuz. Shutting it down and impacting global oil markets appears to be Iran’s main strategy for spreading the pain globally. At the same time, the United States and Israel have attacked Iran’s oil installations, including in Asaluyeh, which hosted a major workers’ strike in January. Peyman, can you expand on the role of oil in this conflict, as well as the oil workers on the ground who are so often forgotten in these discussions?
Jafari:Let me start with the oil workers. They played a pivotal role in the 1979 revolution, but as Naghmeh pointed out, Iran has changed. The 1980s saw widespread repression, but the oil workers’ strike in 1997 helped revive the labor movement in Iran. More recently, in 2022, oil and petrochemical workers in Asaluyeh and Mahshahr staged strikes in solidarity with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. It is therefore perversely ironic that American and Israeli bombs—weapons that are supposed to be liberating the repressed people of Iran—have been falling on Asaluyeh and Mahshahr. At least five workers died yesterday in Mahshahr, and dozens more have been taken to the hospital. Thousands of workers have lost their jobs, both in Asaluyeh and in the steel factories of Ahvaz and Mahshahr. And these were impoverished communities to begin with.
So many communities depend on the petrochemical industry. These are civilian economic infrastructures, and harming them harms the larger population. For instance, Asaluyeh is home to the South Pars gas field, which delivers 70 percent of the consumption gas for the Iranian population. Over the last few decades, Iran has invested a tremendous amount in its petrochemical industry, which is now responsible for over 40 percent of its non-oil exports. Targeting this infrastructure has only one goal: the economic implosion of Iran.
On this score, it’s worth recalling the “dual-use” argument invoked as a rationale for these attacks: the idea that, since infrastructure provides fuel to Iran’s military, it is a legitimate target. The concept of dual use was introduced in order to protect civilians. But the United States and Israel have reversed the logic: if something is primarily for civilian use but has some kind of military use, too, they justify it as a legitimate target. The same reasoning has been applied to universities and other academic institutions.
Putting all this together, I think it’s hard to deny this war is aimed at making postwar reconstruction impossible. The goal is to create a situation comparable not to Iraq in 2003 but to Iraq in 1991. Following the Gulf War, sanctions, cruise missile attacks, and bombardments led to a decade of social devastation and political chaos. And as it was then, the main victims of economic implosion and a failed state will be ordinary people and the undermining of their democratic struggles.
Shams:And now the United States and Israel have bombed one of Iran’s main steel plants—more evidence that the goal isn’t just to weaken the government but to deindustrialize Iran more broadly. Ali, in your recent article, “The Factory Was Always the Target,” you describe how the United States has long sought to undermine Iran’s quest for industrial independence. How do you understand what we’re seeing today within the broader fate of U.S. global dominance?
Kadivar:You’re right, Iranian infrastructure has been intentionally targeted. The steel plant; the Pasteur Institute, where Iran produces millions of doses of its own vaccines each year for domestic consumption and export; Sharif University of Technology was bombed today, too. What we are seeing is the deliberate destruction of Iran’s industrial capacity and productive capacity, and all of it has a long historical shadow. This is where the historical arc I opened with matters.
The history of the steel plant is particularly revealing. Iran first attempted to build its own steel plant in the late 1930s under Reza Shah as part of his modernization programs. He couldn’t get help from Britain or the United States, so he contracted with the Germans to build a steel plant in Karaj. Construction began, but then came the Anglo-Soviet occupation in 1941 and the deposing of Reza Shah. Even after the war, the Allies intercepted materials at sea and refused to let construction continue.
“It’s becoming clearer and clearer to masses of people that you can’t just order a nice, clean war that takes out whoever you don’t like and creates the political order you’d like.”
Both Trump and Netanyahu have spoken of regime change, but we shouldn’t forget this has already happened in Iran—several times. In 1921 Reza Shah rose to power through a coup supported by Britain. The occupation in 1941 led to the removal of the head of state and the installation of a regime the UK and Soviets supported, although they still didn’t support Mohammad Reza Shah’s industrialization policies. In 1951 came the democratically elected premiership of Mohammed Mosaddegh, the secular prime minister. But when he nationalized oil, we saw a similar response from the West: instituting sanctions and embargos on Iranian oil, and refusing to provide technicians and parts for an oil industry that Iranians now wanted to run on their own. And then Mosaddegh was toppled in 1953 and the Shah was reinstalled, essentially as an American client. He posed no threat—Iran’s nuclear program also hadn’t started—and again tried to pursue industrialization, requesting a loan from the World Bank twice. He was turned down both times. Iran had to go to the Soviet Union to get support to build a steel plant in Isfahan—the same one that was just bombed.
The pattern couldn’t be clearer. Four governments, with different regimes and different ideologies, but the same response from the West every time: refusing Iranian industrialization. There’s no hard-coded reason it has to be this way—no reason that Iran and the West cannot work together. It’s just the geopolitics of modern imperialism. For more than eight decades the United States has insisted on being the global hegemon, which entails keeping other countries from becoming independent and pursuing their own policies. It lost that bid with China, and it doesn’t intend to allow another major power to rise if it can help it. But what is Iran? It’s a large country with a big population. It’s sitting on vast resources of oil and gas. It’s educated in terms of geopolitics. It has connections to the subcontinent, to Central Asia, to the Caucasus, to the Middle East. For all these reasons, the U.S. foreign policy establishment simply can’t tolerate Iran’s independence, whether political or industrial and developmental.
Shams:I want to end on a different note. For so many people, this moment really feels hopeless. Where do you see alternatives to the darkness of the present emerging? Do you see reasons for hope in this moment?
Sohrabi:I’m just going to be honest: I’m heartbroken. It didn’t have to be this way, for all the reasons that have been laid out. And I’m heartbroken not just for the thousands of people who have died and their families and friends but for the 92 million people in Iran who are scared all the time. The whole country hasn’t slept for over a month. It’s obvious but bears repeating: the vast majority of Americans simply can’t imagine what it feels like to live under aerial bombardment. The fear is not only that you’re going to die; at least when you die, it’s over. The fear is that the bomb will fall two streets over. That sound is something you never forget. As one of the authors I translated said, it continues to live in your body. I think it’s going to be really dark when this war is over—dark economically and dark politically. But the Iranian people haven’t given up hope, and as long as they don’t, I’m not going to either.
Kadivar:One positive development may be the discrediting, in the eyes of large segments of ordinary people, of fantasies like regime change—the brute reliance on geopolitical pressure and imperial intervention. All this was sold as an easy project. The idea was that Trump would simply take out Khamenei, bomb the navy and air force and more nuclear sites, and the regime would collapse; a plane would bring Reza Pahlavi back, and Iran would be just like before 1979. A lot of AI-generated videos have circulated depicting just this. But it’s becoming clearer and clearer to masses of people that you can’t just order a nice, clean war that takes out whoever you don’t like and creates the political order you’d like. We can have hope that this type of delusional politics is being recognized for what it is.
Jafari:It’s frustrating to be asked to come up with solutions, right? There are a bunch of pyromaniacs setting the world on fire, and then we are asked to put out the conflagration. Nevertheless, it’s important to try to exercise agency. Mutual aid, people helping each other and trying to survive practically, is one area providing some hope for what is possible. On a more political level, we can take antiwar activism very seriously and organize it independently from the Islamic Republic. Getting out in the streets and opposing the war helps demonstrate who’s really antiwar, both in the United States and in Iran.
Moradian:I keep going back to the famous Gramsci quote: the old world is dying, and the new struggles to be born, so it’s producing these “morbid phenomena,” fascism and war and genocide. I think hope has to be grounded in a sober assessment of how we got here—the fact that this wasn’t inevitable. Embedded within that feeling of estisal is experience of struggle despite it all: war, sanctions, the internal repression. What gives me any kind of hope is that Iranians have been struggling for freedom and self-determination for a very long time. This is a moment of defeat, but it won’t last forever.
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