Upstream - Iran Pt. 3: The Empire vs. Iran w/ Bikrum Gill

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

In this episode, part 3 of our ongoing series on Iran, we're joined again by Bikrum Gill for a conversation exploring sovereignty and imperialism in Iran. Our conversation opens with an unpacking of the intersections and distinctions of imperialism, sovereignty, colonialism, and capitalism in a theoretical sense. Once these foundations are laid, we then apply this framework to Iran, answering the question of why Iran's sovereignty is so threatening to the United States. We then jump into current events and explore the thread that ties together the US's assault on Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Palestine, etc.—and this brings China into the conversation. We talk about the construction of client states and why so many states in Latin America and West Asia have refused to intervene on behalf of Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and Palestine. Finally, we discuss the Israeli-US war on Iran and what the resistance to it looks like both regionally and within Iran itself.  Bikrum Gill is a faculty in political science and international relations and a scholar of international political economy. He's the author of The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism: Race, Nature, and Accumulation, published by Manchester University  Press.  Further resources: The political ecology of colonial capitalism Race, nature, and accumulation, by Bikrum Gill "Orders of Sovereignty: Internal Power and External Dependency in the Recognition of the State of Palestine," by Bikrum Gill "The "Second Sacred Defence": Solidarity, Sovereignty and the Politics of Anti-War," by Bikrum Gill Black Skin, White Masks, by Franz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth, by Franz Fanon On Contradiction, by Mao Zedong Vocal Politics: Why did the US and Israel launch their war of aggression against Iran? by Bikrum Gill The Long Twentieth Century, by Giovanni Arrighi  Related episodes: Listen to our ongoing series on Iran Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism / Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante Imperialism in the 21st Century by John Smith Alliance of Sahel States Pt. 3: Hyperimperialism and the Fight for Sovereignty w/ Mikaela Nhondo Erskog Listen to our ongoing series on Venezuela [UNLOCKED] Oil, Monopoly Capitalism, and Imperialism w/ Adam Hanieh Listen to our ongoing series on Cuba Listen to our ongoing series on Palestine Listen to our ongoing series on China Third Worldism and the Bandung Spirit w/ Pranay Somayajula Listen to our ongoing series on Mexico Intermission music: "Another War" by Carsie Blanton Upstream is entirely listener funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants—just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for Upstream stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support you'll be helping us keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going—socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. patreon.com/upstreampodcast For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Instagram and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

The Islamic Revolution challenges, at the moment that the United States thought it had one history that is coming into the end of history, it challenges the military basis and the economic basis of imperialism in the region. The Islamic Revolution is a material and ethical challenge to a U.S. imperialism that had drained wealth, continuing the tradition of British imperialism, drained wealth from majority world through violence and that had underdeveloped and de-developed those territories. So it's about trying to restore a sovereignty that can allow for a dignified form of development. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A show about political economy and society that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about the world around you. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond.

Like almost all anti-imperialist revolutions of the 20th century, the Iranian Revolution has been subject to an academic. economic and military onslaught by the United States and the Imperial Block elites. This onslaught, as we explored last episode, has primarily taken the form of economic strangulation in Iran. But when that didn't work as intended, outright military violence was introduced. And this war cannot be reduced to a deranged United States president, nor is it an inclination to bring democracy to Iran, far from it. The war is a war is a very important. a fight over the direction of development for the global south in the 21st century. And it's just

another front in the second Cold War between the United States and, well, the rest of the world. In this episode, part three of our series on Iran, we're joined by Bikram Gill for a conversation exploring sovereignty and imperialism in Iran. Bikram Gil is a faculty in political science and international relations and a scholar of international political economy. He's the author of The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism, Race, Nature, and Accumulation published by Manchester University Press. And before we get started, Upstream is entirely listener-funded. No ads, no promotions, no grants, just Patreon subscriptions and listener donations. We couldn't keep this project going without your support.

Subscribe to our Patreon for bi-weekly bonus episodes, access to our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, and for stickers and bumper stickers at certain subscription tiers. Through your support, you'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping keep this whole project going. Post-capitalist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's what you.

Robert in conversation with Bickram Gill. All right, Bickram. Thank you so much for joining us on such short notice. Oh, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely. Very smooth start on my end. I'd love it if to start, if you could introduce yourself for our listeners and just maybe talk a little bit about the work that you do. Sure. So I'm a faculty in political science and international relations. I am a scholar more broadly of international political economy. So within that, I do development studies. I look at the agrarian question, the relationship between agriculture and development. I've done a lot of stuff on the climate crisis. And I think my approach is one that really centers imperialism is a primary kind of question that structures the world system. And maybe imperialism versus sovereignty

as a primary contradiction or tension that structures all those questions I mentioned, whether it's agricultural and development in the south, whether it's the climate crisis, whether it's economic development more broadly, right? And I think increasingly I'm thinking about the relationship between sovereignty and development. And yeah, I can say I've not promoted it at all. So this is probably the most I've ever promoted it because obviously we've been living through this horrific genocide. It feels weird to promote anything. But I published a book in the fall of 2024. It's my first time ever mentioning it. So I'm doing it on your program. But I published a book titled The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism, Race, Nature, and Accumulation. That book

will have a lot of my kind of theoretical approach to some of these questions there. Amazing. Yeah. Thank you for bringing that into it too. We'll link to that in the show notes. And yeah, I'm sure that a lot of that book will kind of be talked about today, even though we're not explicitly talking about that book. We're talking more about what's going on in Iran. But maybe I'd like to start with some basic building blocks just to kind of help orient ourselves in the conversation. We've had on a variety of different guests to discuss imperialism more broadly. We've spoken about, of course, Lenin's work, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism with Brett O'Shea and Allison Escalante of Red Menace. We've had John Smith on for discussion on his book, Capitalism in

the 21st Century. We've had Michaela Nando Erskog on to talk about this concept of hyper-imperiors. in the context of the alliance of Sahel states, but also just more broadly, this idea of hyper-imperialism that was outlined by Tri-Continental. So just putting that out there to say that our listeners have had a long exposure to imperialism on our show and its various theorizations. But I'm wondering if you can share with us your understanding of imperialism. Like, what do you mean when you talk about imperialism and when you utilize it as a concept and how it's connected, interestingly? You've spoken about this too, how it's connected to capitalism and colonialism. Okay. So what I will do is, yeah, I think let me first, like, in the way you asked it,

discuss what I understand by imperialism, then I'll come to capitalism, then I'll come back to imperialism, because there's something specific of imperialism of the capitalist sort, right? Like, this is why we say capitalist imperialism. And I'm happy with the way you frame the question, because colonialism and imperialism, as I've been discussing over the past couple of years, is they are related, but they're distinct. And it matters, that distinction matters, and we're going to see especially for the relationship

between Zionism and imperialism. That's going to be an important distinction and relation and how they both relate to capitalism. So let me begin with imperialism broadly, generally. So I understand imperialism to be a structure. And I'll explain what that means in a moment, but it's a structure that determines how societies interact with each other. So we are individuals,

but of course we live on a planet, that has many multiple societies. So the question of international relations, or planetary relations, is not simply a question of individuals encountering one another, but of societies encountering one another, of societies that are often organized into forms of power or political community that today we call states.

So imperialism is a structure that determines how societies and states interact with one another. So when we can think about structure, this is different than the classical realist international relations, understanding, which is anarchy, which will say that states exist in a structure of anarchy. So a structure determines how you will behave. This is why a structural analysis is important. You can look at behaviors, but that might miss the structural question of what is shaping them.

So now, anarchy, the realist will say, shape states' interaction because there's no supras state. There's no supra. So in this context, it's a war of all against all. The question becomes, how do you find order amongst sovereign states when there's no super sovereign to enforce that order. And this will lead to things like the balance of power and et cetera. This structural analysis, the international system is, however, rather Eurocentric, rather Western-centric.

The way that I understand the international system in the modern era, it has been structured by imperialism. So this is one amongst many possible structure or structural forms that will structure the interaction of societies and states with one another. So imperialism, in contrast to anarchy, is a structure that systematically or organizes relations between states in such a way that denies or diminishes the sovereignty of some or many or the majority of those states in the interests of the imperial powers or the imperial power. Okay.

So it's a systematic relationship. That's important. I'll come back to that in a moment. It's not a one-to-one relationship. It's not simply colonized or colonized. It's systematic. It's systematic. And we'll think about what the purpose of that systematic relation is in relation to capitalism,

momentarily. So it's this sort of a structure. So that does something different to the questions we ask, right? So anarchy for realists poses the question, how do you establish order among states? If we put imperialism there, the question becomes, well, who is even sovereign? Who can be sovereign? Right? That's the prior question that putting imperialism first puts forward. So now, like I was mentioning, it's not the same thing as outright territorial conquest either. Okay, imperialism does not require territorial conquest. Colonialism does. Colonialism is about territorial conquest. Now, there's different types of colonialism. There's settler colonialism, right? And there's more of the colonialism, like of the kind of the British Raj in India. Now, colonialism is territorial

one-to-one colonial rule. It can be a component of imperialism, a necessary component, but like I said, imperialism is better understood as a broader system. This broader system can be regional, but imperialism of the sort we will discuss today is concerned with the planetary or world systemic scale. It encompasses the entire state system and it has historically. So that's how I understand imperialism maybe generally. And now, how does imperialism emerge?

How does it function to deny systematically sovereignty or diminish sovereignty? So there's two basis of imperialism, military and economic. So this is very important because when we get to Iran today, we'll see what is Iran's sin is that it's challenging those two bases,

through which sovereignty is denied on a systemic basis. So the first is military. Military power usurps sovereignty by applying greater force over a delineated territory. So an external power will apply greater force and deny or diminish the sovereignty of whoever was ruling that territory before. And you can do it through economics. and for Iran, this is very obviously important as well, how sanctions can be deployed as a way to deny and contain the sovereignty of a state. And so military power may seem quite self-evident, how that works, economic power. It is such that a state may be territorially sovereign, but it's not able to control the flow of economic goods into and out of its territory.

And that can constrain its policy choices, that can transform its options. It can restrain its sovereignty. So I just want to take a moment, if it's okay, just to briefly pause to elaborate on what I understand by sovereignty, just very quickly, because it's necessary to understand this denial or diminishment of sovereignty, which is really key to imperialism. So sovereignty, what I would like people to just think about is what it really entails is who holds decision-making power or what holds decision-making power over a clearly delineated territory. Okay. So there is a quantitative basis to sovereignty. So you can have a quantitative basis, which means essentially who has the most military force in a territory. That's the basis of who can decide.

Now that force also projects outward to other sovereigns to force them to recognize your sovereignty. That's one basis. Another basis of sovereignty is something a little deeper perhaps, which is a qualitative form of sovereignty. And a key question also of the state system is how do sovereigns come to recognize one another? So, you know, you can hold it in your territory, but you need other sovereigns to recognize you as a legitimate sovereigns. Otherwise, they can very well overwhelm you or seek to impose themselves. Now, that often is related to, of course, we can think about material interests, but it might be do you recognize the legitimacy of the form of life in that territory?

So we can understand if it's a capitalist form of sovereignty. and it's run by a capitalist logic, will they recognize another state if they introduce a form of life that's built on nationalization of resources? Or will they understand that to be a delegitimization of sovereignty? So they don't recognize it. So that form of life is a second level of sovereignty,

a deeper level, a qualitative form. Now, why do I say it's deeper? Because this is what that quantitative form ultimately seeks to defend. You're not simply defending power for power's sake, but what is it that's underneath it? This is a relationship that exists in that territory of how people organize their relations with one another in relation to land and their resources and their cosmological understanding. So this is a meaning-making question, the meaning of life in that territory and the reproduction of that form of life.

Now, that is very significant because that is where decision-making power can be rooted. It draws out of that. but the will to defend comes out of that too. So there's a qualitative and a quantitative form, and I think it's important to remember that because we can't understand Gaza, we can't understand Lebanon, we can't understand Iran,

we can't understand so much of the anti-colonial, anti-imperial struggles without understanding what's at stake in terms of the qualitative basis of sovereignty. So now you have these different forms of life, these different form, qualitative forms of sovereignty, and societies and states encounter one another. And I'm going to just briefly, before returning to imperialism, then I'll come back to capitalism, just one thing I want to mention is that somebody who's very influential on me,

Franz Fanon, not in Ruther to the Earth, which is the text I refer to most often, but in this earlier text, black-skinned white masks, he poses a distinction in terms of encounter. When people's encounter one another, when societies encounter one another, there is an opportunity to encounter one another through a gift or through conquest. So in different forms of life, suppose another part of the human story is migration and travel. When you encounter another, you can host another by provisioning a gift, right? And that gift is how you have reproduced your land and you help others survive on that land. So this is the gift.

But there's another movement that Phenon counterposes to the gift, which is conquest. So maybe I'm introducing that just so folks can think about the difference between, say, when the Europeans might arrive on the shores of the Caribbean. And they survive because of the gift that the Taino provisioned them. And that gift is because the Taino form of life created fertile soil. And then they share that wealth and that knowledge. But the Spaniards respond with the movement of conquest, Fennon would say, right? So these different forms of life, different sovereign forms that exist necessarily

because the planet is diverse. So our societies will be diverse. So it poses the question, how do we encounter one another? Now, let me just put that there for the second for the side on imperialism and sovereignty. Let's come to now think about how this relates to capitalism. So capitalism, the imperialism that has existed today is of the capitalist sort. Capitalism is a system that is premised upon primitive accumulation or enclosure. So this is built upon the dispossession of the working class.

And it creates, enclosure creates a proletariat, a dispossessed working class, and an ownership class, which is the capitalist class, which is a profit-seeking ownership class. And it runs entirely on market-based competition. That's why we produce things to generate profit out of the market, right? Now, the problem, though, is this relation is contradictory and it's actually irrational in a way. And I know that's going to sound counterintuitive,

but it's irrational because markets don't work properly if the majority of people have lost all assets, then they can't compete properly on the market, right? So there's something irrational there, but the main contradiction is between profits and wages. So this dispossessed class must get its wages from the market, from selling its labor on the market entirely. But by selling its labor on the market, the capitalist class wants to repress its wages. Now, by repressing its wages, it gets more profits, but now it's reduced its market size. Those workers don't have as much income now to buy goods on the market.

So how do you resolve this contradiction? higher profits, repress wages, reduce market sides. It's going to reduce the value of production. This is where imperialism has been absolutely necessary to stabilize this contradiction. So it's a imperialism helps stabilize it because it reduces the price of wage goods. It reduces the price of industrial inputs.

Because now if the labor and the core, reproducing it is the contradiction for capital, How do you reproduce an entirely dispossessed class? You've got to make sure it's eats. It has shelter all this stuff, but it has no means of getting that besides the market. So how do you reduce those costs? Well, you can do so through basically appropriating those type of goods from the colony and the imperial periphery. So what that means is you're wanting to underreproduce labor in the colony and the periphery.

You're wanting to underreproduce resources, which means when I take cotton or if I take, say, palm oil, I'm not concerned with reproducing the land that generated that or reproducing the people any. I will pay them less than what they need to reproduce their lives. I will underreproduce them. And that requires a denial of sovereignty on a national basis, on a total basis, right? And maybe your viewers or listeners are familiar with Ali Kadri's work.

You can think about this concept of under-reproduction as similar to what he calls de-development. So you're appropriating resources at prices below the labor that was required to produce them, right? Now, this can only happen with a diminishment of sovereignty. So this suggests, on the one hand, that capitalism's contradictions lead to imperialism, which is the position of Western Marxism

and even, to be honest, some third-world Marxists, but it's one with which I disagree. Capitalism would have never consolidated as a system without imperialism. So it's not capitalism emerges, and there's this contradiction, and it requires imperialism. They emerge together. at the same time. You have primitive accumulation in Europe happening at the same time as colonialism's happening in the Americas and elsewhere. And so they emerge together, but it is imperialism that is the

foundation. Without imperialism, those capitalist relations would have never stabilized and become expansionary. They would have collapsed on their own contradiction. So they emerge together is one thing I will say about the relationship between the two. Now, I want to take a minute to talk about this relationship, their contemporary emergence with one another, and especially how imperialism is the prior relationship in a way, because this will really help us understand what just happened in Iran, I believe. So the violent basis of capitalist imperialism, like I mentioned before, imperialism is founded on military violence and economic violence. So the moment of capitalist imperialism, we go back to the 16th century, where again, you have an encounter, as I was mentioning

before between sovereigns, between societies. And you have this, maybe like Phelon might say, this movement between a gift and the conquest. At this moment, European colonizes, the Spanish in particular, they actually reject the possibility of rational dialogue between two societies. Rational dialogue might look like how do two forms of life come to coexist with one another? How can they maybe, through rational dialogue and debate, come to develop either new cultural forms or figure out a way of coexistence, but the Spaniards, as we know, reject that, and they choose outright genocidal violence. And that violence becomes the basis of treaties with indigenous people. So when you hear Trump talking about, I'm going to smash you or sign the line, he's not

interested in discourse, right? Same thing with Biden. This is what motivates the escalation of the genocide after Alexa flood. They are simply trying to return to their violent basis to say any sort of treaty or framework has to happen on this basis where we will either kill you or you agree to our structuring demands. That's the basis of capitalist imperialism, this rejection, and this is why you'll see this again and again. Well, we're negotiating with you, but they're not actually negotiating, right?

They're just trying to renew the basis of imperialism as well. So now, this is maybe capitalism and imperialism. I want to talk now about the distinction between colonialism and imperialism and how they relate to one another. So as I mentioned, colonialism is a direct one-to-one basis. Imperialism is the systematic relationship of core and periphery, which the colony can serve, right? The colony can be a part of imperialism, but imperialism can function even after decolonization. You can have territorial independence, but you're still locked into systematic imperial relations that drain wealth,

that underreproduce your labor, underreproduce your territory in the service of the imperial core. So what matters most to imperialism here, let me provide a definition of imperialism in contradistinction to colonialism, especially under capitalism. What matters most to imperialism is not territorial control, which is colonialism. What matters most to imperialism is control over the flow of capital and resources between territories. That is pivotal. That's what's going to create economic dependency. So if you have achieved sovereignty over your territory,

but you have no way of accessing capital in technology and market, markets through which you can develop your resources and have national development, that's going to lead to dependency. It's going to lead to a loss of sovereignty and a value drain. And so under imperialism, it doesn't actually matter necessarily who owns the resource. The United States does not need to own your oil, but it needs to control the entry and exit of the oil, either out of your territory and into another, and then the re-entry of capital to your territory. We're seeing this in Venezuela very clearly. And I think another very important historical example would be the opium wars, right? Like the opium wars is essentially

the imperial powers using violence to transform the relationship with China. Who will control the flow of capital and goods into and out of China? That's why Hong Kong was such a pivotal choke point, right? It didn't matter if they had territorial control over all of China. What matters is that they maintained a price-setting power which allowed them to drain the value of goods. And then we can think about the tariff wars and everything today in that way. Now, although they're distinct, colonialism and imperialism do work together necessarily. So the colonizer historically has been the unrestrained, unregulated tip of the spear, or the unrestrained, unregulated component of imperialism.

That's necessary to introduce and maintain the terror through which de-development and under-reproduction and the drain of wealth becomes possible. Okay, so think about the second. in the frontier, how they operate with outright unregulated violence. This is the role that colonialism may play, but colonialism then introduces a contradiction, the settler. It can destabilize the whole system, right, because it doesn't allow for any sort of stabilization if the imperial power seeks at a moment to stabilize relations either with those they're colonizing or with neighboring states because the settler is so

unregulated necessarily, okay, to introduce that denial of substance. sovereignty. So now that contradiction can be resolved in a couple of ways. You can have a decolonization that leaves in place imperialism. So if the settler is unrestrained and unregulated, the people of the territory, like in Algeria, you can kick out the settler, right? But then imperialism remains in place. Or the settler can win, like the Americans do against British imperialism. But the settler, like Franz Fanon argued in wretched of the earth, the settler transforms imperialism into an even greater monster. And this is not to say imperialism was ever good. It's not. It's just that the settler colonial component of it radicalizes and further deepens and intensifies its genocidal logic, right?

And that's why I think we'll be, maybe we can come back to it later on, but I think that's one way to understand the relationship between Zionism and imperialism today. It's not about Zionism controlling the American government or even the American government using Zionism as a proxy. That may have been how it started in the 1970s, but it's about this intermatched relationship where maybe Zionism is transforming the imperial body today as well. So, yeah, I think that's kind of maybe how I would understand. That's a very long answer.

I'm sure you were not expecting that for answer to what, but it was a big question, and I think it'll help us maybe set the frame for the rest of the discussion. Maybe I'll just conclude it by bringing it together on capitalism, because this will come to some of the later points in the discussion, so the problem for it is that it's founded in dispossession, both at home and in the colony. And it's ruled by a profit-seeking capitalist class. A more rational system could generate wealth in more sustaining ways that do not require this denial of sovereignty,

such as China's system today. China's system today is not built on a universal dispossession of land. In fact, it's built on the opposite. okay. This is why China's being able to offer something else to the world and why the imperialism is targeting it so intensely. And we can argue perhaps Iran as well is built on a different structural basis. So yeah. All right. Well, yeah. No, thank you so much for all of that. I think it's super, super important for us to kind of orient ourselves towards what you are explicitly going to be unpacking in the conversation that we're about to have on more so focused on Iran. And like I said,

we've had a lot of different discussions about imperialism, so it's helpful to know exactly what your perspective is when you use these different terms. I'm going to ask you to answer quite a what might sound like a very basic question, but I think a lot of liberal analysis and when we're sort of absorbing a lot of what comes out of the mainstream, it just simply ignores when analyzing what's happening right now, the U.S. Israeli War on Iran, which is what exactly are we talking about when we talk about Iranian sovereignty and why is it such a threat to the United States? And I know you kind of talked a little bit about this already in your first question and maybe a little bit more of a theoretical realm, but maybe if we could dive just a little bit deeper into

this specific example and unpack what's going on there. Okay. Yeah, it's going to take a little while to work through this as well because maybe it's a simple question, but it's a big question. Because I think to understand what we're talking about when we talk about Iranian sovereignty and particularly why it's such a threat to the United States, then we have to understand U.S. imperialism. And we have to understand the particular historical moment of U.S. imperialism when the Islamic revolution happens. So, like, that's something I think we can work through it, slowly if necessary, but I think it's important, like you're saying. So just to repeat, so sovereignty, again, when we talk about Iranian sovereignty, sovereignty means it's about territorial control,

but it's also about the flow of resources and capital into and out of a territory. This is really pivotal. And it's also about a form of life. Okay, so let's think about those three registers. The Islamic Revolution in 1979 constitutes, and it's a revolution that's ongoing. So I think in hindsight, we will understand revolutionary periods are not one, two, three years. So we're still in the context of 1979. We're still living in this time.

So it's a reassertion of sovereignty on both. of those grounds, territorial and the flow of resources and capital into and out of Iran, and the third one, that form of life. It's a reassertion of sovereignty. And because of that, it threatens the U.S. imperial order. So I'm going to come back to Iran momentarily. But let's think about that U.S. imperial order. U.S. imperialism really consolidates in the post-war era. Now, there's a much longer history of U.S. imperialism. You know, we can go to the Philippines, we can go to Cuba, we can can go to the Spanish-American War, even you can go to the U.S. World and quote-unquote War of Independence and what it meant for its relation with

indigenous peoples. But it really consolidates and becomes the imperialism post-World War II. And in fact, Iran at that time plays a really key part of this consolidation. So the primary resource that matters in the 20th century capitalist world economy is oil. Oil is going to power the entire industrial economy. Every good is going to be indexed to the price of oil. The control of the oil is pivotal. And so when the United States is left standing after World War II as the only major economic power,

the Soviet Union will rapidly come on to compete with it, but all other countries pay a major cost in World War II. The United States doesn't because it's protected by those two oceans, right, the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean. So it comes out very strong. And because of maybe that strength, the United States is the primary force that actually is hostile to any idea of international law, even post-World War II. It speaks about international law, but it really behaves in a much more way that where it imposes itself through force. This has always been the case.

There was something else that was possible after World War II. There was a different world that could have come into being if the demands of decolonization were taken more seriously. So U.S. imperialism consolidates after World War II. Now, what's one opening moment of U.S. imperialism? Well, as we all know, in Iran in 1953, in the early 1950s, as elsewhere, the call across the third world was sovereignty, not just a name, not just an identity, but materially, over resources. And in Iran, there's a movement to reclaim sovereignty, and what this means is real economic sovereignty over oil wealth.

And not simply controlling oil, but also controlling and getting a fair price for the sale of oil in the world market and the recycling of that wealth back into Iran for the purposes of Iranian national development. Now, we know what happens there. We know the United States conducts a coup d'etat working with the British intelligence agencies because it was the Anglo-American oil company, of course, that Mossadegh, the leader of Iran at the time, was trying to nationalize. Which is now BP. Yeah, which is now BP, precisely. So this is a moment in which now the United States doesn't go in and take over Iran, actually. It comes in, obviously, the Shah of Iran is kind of made maybe into a proxy or a vassal or a comparador, however you want to understand it, but they don't have territorial control. But they certainly have not lost control over the flow of oil.

Now, Iran might seem to have sovereign control, but they will do nothing with that oil that's independent of U.S. interests, right? after that. So now that's not just the only thing that happens. The next year what happens is Jakabar Benz is overthrown. And all he was trying to do was a reassert sovereign control over land that wasn't even being used properly by U.S. fruit companies in Guatemala. And then the U.S. conducts a long proxy war. It leads to a massive civil war.

Again, they don't go in and colonize Guatemala. And you can't anymore because of the history of decolonization in the 20th century. So it matters. The great anti-colonial struggles changed how imperialism could function in the 20th century. So U.S. imperialism doesn't go for direct territorial control because it can't. Because of the success of the Chinese Revolution, the Soviet Union, and the Cuban Revolution, right? What do they do to Cuba? They put sanctions on Cuba.

Again, because Cuba's sin is that it nationalizes resources and it redistributes land. It takes land that's held by U.S. plantation companies, fruit companies, and a redistribute. use those. So they're challenging the very basis of imperialism. Now, the United States then in the 20th century will always intervene when there's a threat to the control over the flow of resources. So this is a rule. But what really to understand the Islamic Revolution and sovereignty of the Islamic Republic and the threat it poses, we have to understand what happens in the 1970s to capitalism. And we have to understand what happens to capitalism and what happens in West Asia in particular. So in the 19th,

By the 1970s, the contradictions of capitalism have really escalated in the post-war era. So you have increasing competition amongst capitals. So capitalist firms on a national basis are actually competing with one another. So you have German and Japanese and American firms increasingly competing with one another and eating into one another's profits. And actually, U.S. firms are losing in this competition. So they're being German and Japanese automotive engineering are out competing American. and it introduces a crisis of profitability, an over-accumulation crisis.

So there is nowhere for capital to reinvest where it can realize more profits. Because you're having these saturated markets, you're having this intensified competition. And then that other contradiction we spoke about before is also intensifying. Labor is strong, unions are strong, wages are high. So all of these are converging to create this crisis of over-accumulation and profitability. and one key way that the United States overcomes this is through projecting power in West Asia. So I won't go into too much detail on this. I have elsewhere and people can go look into this, but a key moment happens here.

And this is the relationship between imperialism and Zionism is in 1973. Of course, we have the 1973 war, the Yom Kippur War. And during this war, the United States plays a pivotal role in massively airlifting weapons to Israel. through which it's able to roll back the gains that Egypt and Syria had made. Through this projection of power, the United States is able to establish itself as the ultimate security guarantor in the region. And by doing so, it's able to shift Egypt from the Soviet sphere to the American sphere, and it's able to project a power through which it's able to consolidate a relationship between oil and the dollar. So what this means is now, we have the emergence of the petro dollar.

We have an arrangement with Gulf states that they will sell their oil in U.S. dollars. That means the Germans and the Japanese might outcompete the Americans, but they have to buy their oil in U.S. dollars, which means they have to keep the U.S. dollars reserve currency, which is going to introduce a financial monetary power for the United States. And sorry, I should say it wasn't just Germany and Japan. That was the problem. Southern states and the global south were also industrialized. So this means anybody who's eating into profitability of U.S. firms, now you've got to hold. U.S. dollars, this is going to introduce a financial monetary power, but the United States will project an exercise in the 1980s through structural adjustment

and so on, right, through which they're going to drain interest payments. The emergence of financial capitalism, let's say, in the 1970s, is really built upon the power of the U.S. dollar, which is backed by oil, which is backed by military power. And Israel and Zionism is a key projection of power here. And not only this, it also introduced. introduces a new mode of accumulation. So it's not just that the United States jumps out of real production in the 1970s, goes into the finance and it goes to Wall Street Road.

It also goes into militarized accumulation. It starts to generate profits through war. And again, the relationship with Zionism is pivotal to it. So you have a transformation or some sort of growth in a particular direction of U.S. capitalism in the 1970s. And at the base of it is this military power in West Asia. And it is projected through, like we were talking about colonialism, this unrestrained, unregulated Zionist power. So it's this leading force through which it is necessary for the United States to be able to maintain.

They don't need to own the oil fields in Saudi, but they need to make sure they maintain sovereign control over how that oil flows to the world economy. And then the other component of this, though, so the United States is consolidating its capitalist imperialism and Zionism through this is able to start to project more power. against the Palestinians. So we should obviously, it goes without saying, that Israel is a settler colony that's built upon the theft of Palestinian land and the genocide of Palestinians from 1948 until today and even earlier. So they escalate their war against Palestinian resistance also at this time. So not only is the United States established military and economic power in West Asia

through Zionism and its relationship with Zionism, Zionism is able to deepen its colonial hold over the Palestinians. It's able to, by 1982, it starts to attack and eliminate and weaken Palestinian armed resistance. So I haven't mentioned this, but a key component of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism is the ability to challenge the military basis of that power. So that's guerrilla warfare, armed resistance. Without that, you're begging for your sovereignty. That is the real way for you to reclaim sovereign power. So the Islamic Revolution happens at a point in history where it looks like, you know, the United States has established full spectrum.

dominant. The Soviet Union's entering into decline. This equation in West Asia I just spoke about it seems like you're having to seemingly collapse or the end of the PLO armed struggle. So this is where the Islamic Revolution enters. And it's a revolution that we have to understand that is not coming out of the sky. It's not coming out of nowhere. It's coming out of this experience of what happens in 1953, of being denied sovereign control over its resources, right? of being denied sovereign control, even the question of the form of life in Iran, right? We know under the Shah different forms of Islamic expression were severely repressed. So we have a westernization of Iran that's happening.

We have a loss of control over resources that happens. And this is understood by the protagonists of the Islamic Revolution as a state of humiliation. It's a state of basically having surrendered and bowing down to a foreign power. So this is like what's fueling and motivating it. But what's also distinct is the Islamic Revolution is not simply a national question of restoring sovereign power over the resources of the Iranian territory. It understands that the sovereignty of Iran is inextricably linked to the rest of the region and potentially the whole world. So this is why the revolution is not simply about establishing independence and sovereign integrity for Iran, but about defrable. feeding Zionism in the region and defeating U.S. imperialism regionally, and it really centers the

Palestinian struggle for that reason on one level. Now, on a deeper level, and I have to mention, you know, a really brilliant scholar on Hizbullah and the access of resistance more generally. Amal Sade, you know, she's been working and thinking a lot about, you know, a lot of her works on Hizbullah. She's been thinking about Iran more recently. And in addition to what I've just spoken about right now, she's been thinking about the significance of the significance of the of the theological grounding of the Islamic Revolution. So in the sense that it's not simply that it is very significant, the role that Palestine plays for the achievement of regional sovereignty.

And, you know, Araghi, the foreign minister, just a couple weeks ago, again, came back to the centrality of Palestine. The Palestine is the primary question. But there is also another basis. You know, I was talking to Amal recently, and she was saying that in the constitution of the Islamic Republic, there's a commitment to fighting on the side of the oppressed everywhere. wherever they are, right? There's a commitment in the Constitution enshrined to opposition to imperialism

or a foreign power, even having a military base, whether it's Soviet Union, Russia, or the United States, like no military base in Iran, right? So there's a deeper kind of commitment to a sense of dignity, to a sense of fighting for justice that I don't know much about myself, but what I'm learning is that this is rooted in a certain set of Shia principles and a certain understanding of the history of a, say, a Karbalah mode of sovereignty that's oriented towards justice and so forth, right? And so this is something that I think is very distinct. But what all of this means is that the Islamic Revolution challenges at the moment that the United States thought it had one history that is coming into the end of history, it challenges the military basis and the economic

basis of imperialism in religion. It's going to challenge that oil and dollar relationship by insisting on sovereign control over oil resources and on insisting on total regional sovereignty, it challenges the military basis because at the very moment that there's an all-out attack on the PLO, you have the Islamic Republic entering in as a source of strategic depth, as a source of military cooperation of knowledge diffusion, of technical and practical cooperation with resistance forces in the region, which is what enables a reconstitution of armed struggle in the region, right? It's not like, and I would agree with Amal and others who would say that his bullet is not a proxy of Iran,

but nonetheless it is the case that they move, and I know we're going to talk about this later, perhaps, but they move together, and Iran provides a key source of strategic military and economic depth to those who continue to resist. So I think the challenge that it posed to U.S. imperialism at this moment was that it reasserted sovereign control over its territory. It challenged the ability of imperialism to control. have sovereign control over the flow of oil across the world economy. It challenged and it refused to accept the genocidal conquest of Palestine, understanding it both in material terms, but in more qualitative terms, whether it's theological, whether it's ethical.

I mean, theological is ethical, but, you know, in those sort of terms, it understood all of those, and it launched a material challenge to it. I mean, that's what we have to understand. The Islamic Revolution is a material and ethical challenge to a U.S. imperialism, that had drained wealth, continuing the tradition of British imperial, drained wealth from majority world through violence, and that underdeveloped and de-developed those territories.

So it's about trying to restore a sovereignty that can allow for a dignified form of development to all peoples. I'm glad you brought up that piece about the centrality of justice and the Islamic Republic being oriented, so specifically towards Palestinian liberal. I want to bring in a quote from a piece that you've written that I was looking at when I was doing a little bit of research for this episode, which you sent me. So you've you've written about what Iran could have looked like if it had normalized relationships with the U.S. and Israel like many other Gulf states have done in West Asia. And if it had cut ties with Hezbollah and Hamas, for example.

And the answer is simple. So you write, quote, Iran could rapidly become one of the well. wealthiest and most developed states in the world owing to its combination of hydrocarbon wealth, a large, highly skilled and educated population, and its favorable location for international trade. It would be praised in Western media as a, quote, moderate state and not a, quote, regime. It would enjoy trade deals, foreign investment, and the full benefits of integration into the global economy. But as you write, the Islamic Republic shows a different path. And this is specifically because it's orientation towards solidarity with Palestinians and justice.

I don't know if there's anything else you wanted to add to that. Yeah, I think so. I think it's a really good question as to the why. And I think the real door to answer to that question would be opened by people in Iran, in the Islamic Republic, I think who understand it much more deeply than I would. But I think what I would just say is, you know, the other path seems much easier. So why would they? You know, like I really understood when I wrote that.

Iran could be far wealthier than Saudi Arabia. And I think it's very funny when at that point about a moderate state and not a regime. Like you never hear anybody talk about Saudi Arabia's regime. It's reserved for the enemies of imperialism. So why would they forego potential so much wealth and endure so much suffering, right? And which divides the society. I think we have to remember if we go. back to Mao's question on contradiction. Yeah, there are divisions in Iran, but the primary force

that generates those is imperialism, because the Islamic Revolution has never been given a chance. It's like Cuban Revolution was never given a chance to develop in the way that it might have. It was immediately put under sanctions in war from the outset, right? So why would it not take the so-called easier road? Because I would say on the first instance, on one level, on the structural or technical level, you know, it's true that if Iran was to become like Japan or Saudi or something like this, you know, and subordinate itself entirely to the dictates of imperialism, it would be wealthy, but it would have been at the cost of the real basis of its sovereignty, even on a technical level. So you see Japan was, let's take the example of Japan. Japan was accelerated. In the 1980s,

there was an assumption not to the extent, but the way China has spoken about today. There was some reference that Japan was going to outstrip the United States, right? In 1987, the United States simply imposes the Plaza Accords on Japan. And it says you have to adjust your currency in the way that we demanded it. And since the 1990s, Japan's economy has been stagnant. You know, it's simply got put in its place. So even if it benefits you, it's always going to limit how far you can go. And similar thing happens with South Korea and the Asian Tigers in the late 1990s. You have a financial crisis that comes that's largely engineered by U.S. hedge funds, right, by U.S. vulture funds.

And so, like, this is a way in which you may be granted wealth, but it can also be taken away or undermined at any time. And I think the experience post-Mosededka in 1953 had a profound impact. But not just this, I do think, and I'm not the one to talk about it, but the impact of what Amal is calling the Karbala model of sovereignty, right? This idea of fighting for a just world, of awaiting for the return. turn of the Imam, the hidden imam, to bring justice to this world. This also, I think, is something that really drives the leadership of the Islamic Republic. You know, like, I think there's been

debates recently about is Iran capitalist or not, but I think one thing that's really important is that the governance structure of the Islamic Republic is that it has in its constitution at its head, you know, a learned leader, a deeply learned jurist, right? A deeply learned class that elects the leader. And this leader, is informed by a certain set of ethics, right, that refuses an undignified, humiliated life. So I think that's something that we have to also keep in mind. There's something of the structural and technical level, but there's also something at an ethical or theological level.

And I think that's where we can understand that Iran has not abandoned Palestine, because they feel a sense of religious duty to the liberation of Palestine, the liberation of Alaksa, the liberation of Al-Quds. You know, so these are, I think, very important things to keep in mind as to why I didn't choose that path. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Bickram Gill. We'll be right back. Another war. I can't wait to hear what this one's for.

I can't wait to find out what we'll win. Bring evil to an end. Settle up the score. Another war I can't wait to send our young promises of lower interest loans Manufactured homes Ain't that worth killing for I'm screaming out to sea

There's a sweet democracy Rainin down like bullets and debris At your door Savages beware We'll bomb you till you free Starve you to you to your favorite. That was another war by Carcy Blanton.

Now back to our conversation with Bickroom Gill. So let's hop in a little bit more deeply into sort of what's going on currently right now. all of our phone screens are basically, you know, just images of what's going on in Iran, stories about what's going on in Cuba, Venezuela, Lebanon. And this question that we're talking about, it's not limited to Iran, right? It's limited to all of these states that are in some way, shape, or form trying to exercise sovereignty. What is the U.S. is calculus right now in terms of all of these different wars and conflicts? I think most people are used to hearing about, you know, most mainstream outlets more so progressive or on the left might be talking about the Gussano lobby or this or that inclination that Trump has. When I listen to democracy now, it's a lot of trying to get into Trump's head. And, you know, we know that capitalism is a force that works through individuals, of course, but there are much deeper processes that are taking place. So maybe if we could talk a little bit about in your perspective,

what is the thread that ties together Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. And what is the U.S.'s goal here? Yeah. So I think that's a good way that you framed it because it's hard not to focus on individual personalities right now, especially because of Trump. And you know, I think there's a way in which the whole Epstein, like, I guess exposure, leads people that way, but it need not because, and maybe we'll have time to talk about this later on or not. but, you know, the Epstein framework or what people call the Epstein regime actually is a logical

outgrowth of that capitalist imperialism that we spoke about, right? So it is also systematic. It's not an individual, I think, I like the way you put it. It's not like it's not a curiosity or an inclination of individuals. It is systematic, right? So now, why is it doing right now? I know you may have a question later on about China, but I'm going to introduce China here as well because I think that's a part of understanding the U.S. calculus. So I think at the one level, at a base level, it goes back to what I've been talking about imperialism is. The United States is looking to reassert control over the flow of capital and resources between territories. They're not necessarily seeking to take over territories.

And they're seeking to do so in a particular setting, a setting which is shifting that structure we started off by talking about imperialism. There's a structural challenge to imperialism today. And it's coming, let's say, for simplicity's sake, it's coming from two intra-related forces. one, I think it's fair to isolate China to say that the rise of China is such a world historic force. It's transforming the world system on such a scale. And China is an anti-imperialist force. It's challenging imperialism at its basis. And it's out-competing the United States.

And the United States simply cannot compete with them. That might remind us of 1970s. But we'll see there's something different about China. It's not Japan and Germany either. It's not the same form of competition there. It is very different, right? because of the different structural basis of the Chinese state. And then the other thing that is compromising U.S. imperialism, it's related to what I just talked about,

but it's the way in which, say Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, the states you mentioned, maybe Zimbabwe, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, other states that are under sanctions, the way in which they have actually responded to sanctions, the contradiction of imperialism today is it deepens their cooperation with one another. And they are asserting greater control over the flow of resources in their relations with one another. So that both of those are eating into then the power of imperialism, right? And it's going to eat into their profits. So I think this is the primary motive because in withstanding imperialism and charting more independent relations between one another,

they reduce their dependency on U.S. imperialism. So, you know, if Cuba sends doctors to Venezuela and Venezuela is provisioning oil and, you know, you have these different type of relations emerging, they're breaking the chains of dependence, which is increasing their sovereigns. space, but that's disrupting the flow of surplus value to the imperial core, which is going to bring capitalism to a crisis, which is going to generate more inflationary pressures in the capitalist core, right? To control inflation, you need to make sure you have an imperialist prop as Prabatha and Utsipadneik have argued, right? So I think there's a challenge they're facing and they're trying to restore something in attacking Iran and Cuba and Venezuela. Now Cuba, I would say

it's like an anchor since 1959, right? It's like something that maybe has been isolated, but it acts as a constant anchor. Whenever there, in the region especially, there are attempts or movements that erupt to reclaim sovereignty. Cuba is always there as an anchor to provide solidarity, to provide a model, et cetera, right? And I would say the other thing that Cuba threatens the United States about

is in a similar way of the Haitian revolution in the 19th century. Cuba stands as a model on the doorstep of America. The life can be very different, right? You don't have to go bankrupt when you get sick. You don't have to work your whole life and not be able to get basic goods. So that's why they want to fail the Cuban project, but also because Cuba can transform the relations between states, right? It's an anchor in that way. So I'll come back to that in a second.

But I think one key element that the United States is working against here is China. Now, China has a superior economic system. It's much more rational. It has a market system. It has actually a much more rational market system than the United States. We need to look no further than the rapid advance of its electric vehicle sector in the last six, seven years, really through a state-led approach, through a planned approach, how they shifted a glut of capital out of the real estate sector into sectors at the leading edge of the economy now. And, you know, the combination of a state-led approach with, I think, you know, introducing markets in a particular way has made China much more, rational and much more productive in Western economies.

They build out infrastructure in a more rational way. They have a composite economy where that is planned, that directs resources in a more rational way. So they have been producing, and then China over time has been moving up the value chain, producing higher value technologies. Even now, they are the world leader in capital goods production, which Germany used to be, right? They're producing semiconductor chips.

In other words, China is moving to the commanding heights of the world. economy. So that matters because, you know, even you can industrialize, right? But what really matters is the commanding heights. So if you control the semiconductor machines or the lithography machines, then you still can impose dependency on other states because you might produce capital goods, but you still need these core technologies. And China is challenging those on all those levels. And they're out-competing the West. They're more rational, less wasteful. Now, this might sound similar to the challenge of the 1970s for the United States. And it is, and I'll come to why it's different,

but the Chinese understand this as well. So they understand how central the control over oil is to U.S. power. And for the last two plus decades, that is why China has put in such a push to renewable energy. Now, there's two reasons. China genuinely believes in climate science and that they're impacted by the climate crisis, but also they understand that what gives the United States its power

is not the innovative nature of its economy or its productivity. It's its ability to control oil, right? Now, this might seem like it's just Trump, but we have to understand this was the policy of Biden and Obama as well. Obama was the one who first doubled down on U.S. oil, right? He's the one who renewed the U.S. oil sector. So I think China understands that as the basis of U.S. power through which they will hold China in a dependent position,

to which even if China comes to own and produce more and more productively, that they will always be bound to drain value to Wall Street because of this relationship between the oil and dollar. Because when they purchase oil, they'll have to go through U.S. banks and use U.S. dollars. So this is why China has invested so much, I think, on one level, on renewables. And they have refused to submit to U.S. financial dictates. That example I gave of Japan in 1987, a similar attempt was made on China after the financial crisis in 2008.

And China refused. constantly hear this, they complain about China's currency, how China sets its currency, but China refuses to abandon this currency sovereignty. And they did again after the financial crisis, which is when Obama starts talking about a shift to Asia. We need to pivot to Asia. So again, this is not about an individual. This is a structural crisis that generates, I think, different individual personalities. Like Trump might say one thing, but why is he operating in another way? Why is he back to the same script? We need to to understand the systemic nature of this.

But China is even a bigger challenge than what Germany and Japan represented in the 1970s. It's not simply that. China's rise has renewed the Bandung Project of the 1950s. So we have to remember, in 1955, Afro-Asian states came together and said, okay, we're getting formal political sovereignty, but we need economic sovereignty.

So in some ways, I would like people to think about maybe the Bandung moment is a contrast to Westphalia. So some people will say very often, well, China is simply seeking to make the Westphalia order, the European order of sovereign states, actually real and consistent. But what's different about Bandung is Westphalia doesn't talk about economic sovereignty in the way that Bandung does. Westphalia is actually built on the denial of economic sovereignty to the colonies. So Bandung is a very different project that's proposed in the 1950s by Afro-Asian states who are saying we're free and independent, but we can't control our resources because we're dependent on.

the colonial countries for investment, for markets. So they set the terms of trade with us through which they drain value. China's ability from the 1980s onwards to rapidly develop and to generate surplus value. Again, and they don't develop through colonialism. They develop, they develop through a mix of socialist market policies. Now, there's a lot that could be said there, but I would direct people to maybe Samir Amin's work on this and Giovanni Eriki's work in Adam Smith and Beijing. it goes into much more detail in terms of how China was able to so rapidly develop.

But the point for us to keep in mind is by the 21st century, China now possesses a major, major portion of world trade surplus, of world financial surplus, economic surpluses. And this is the difference between China and Germany and Japan. China starts to recycle those surpluses into the global south. So it renews Bandung, you see, so it renews the spirit of Bandung, but now you actually have a material basis for Ben, And this offers the countries of the South more policy autonomy. Now, why does this matter? We have to remember from the late 1970s or early 1980s up until the 2000s, this was the era of neoliberalism, of structural adjustment,

where global South states were forced to take loans from the IMFM World Bank, right, for the reasons I just said, they might have formal sovereignty, but they remain in conditions of economic dependency, which lead them to high indebtedness, to get out of debt, to pay their teachers, to pay their nurses, they need to take out loans. But to get those loans, the IMF and World Bank imposes conditions on them.

And then they have to pay back interest payments. So there's a wealth drain out of the African continent, out of South America, out of many Asian countries. There's a wealth drain in the form of interest payments for 20, 25 years. They force these countries to reduce the support they give to their small farmers, to reduce the supports they give to public education. In the 2000s, with China's now emerging as an alternative source of finance and a recycling of wealth back, it enables countries like Malawi and Zambia and Philippines, which do this in the opening years of the 21st century to say no to the AIMA,

to say no to the World Bank, which is going to disrupt the Wall Street kind of financial imperialist power, through which they were draining wealth from the global self. So it's already opening up more policy space, the ability for, And they actually reintroduce Farmer Subsidy programs in 2005, like Malawi, right? They'll reintroduce these supports, Zambia. They'll reintroduce these because they're getting

an alternative structural framework with which to locate their development programs. So this is a major problem, right? And it's going to only accelerate afterwards. Now, so on the one hand, they have this problem. How do you contain China? Like, how do you contain this massive world historic force that is changing the rules of the game.

And at the same time, you have, as we talked about Iran, and then Venezuela has a Bolivarian revolution that rejects U.S. imperialism. You have Cuba, and these states start trading with one another. They start supporting other sovereign projects, creating increasing space to reduce that dependency, to establish sovereignty over the movement of goods and capital between their territories,

so they can reproduce the form of life that is significant. so they can sustain their territories in a meaningful way. That is what is at stake today, right? Either servitude and serving the interests of a totally unregulated, unrestrained, Epstein sort of class, or returning to peoples across the world, the rights to reproduce historically, culturally, theological, significant forms of life in their territories, just forms of life, right?

So this is, I think, one thing that the United States is trying to disrupt. There's a major challenge to the financial wealth drain. And they start to attack in the 2010s, Iran and Venezuela. You know, they impose maximum pressure sanctions on Venezuela and Iran. And China and Russia step in there to support these countries. They support Venezuela's oil nationalization campaign. And, you know, for many people who often will feel disappointment at the inability of, say, China to stand up to the United States, I think that has to be put next to the fact that China lost billions of dollars in Venezuela in the 2010s.

And Russia did as well, helping to stand up the nationalization program in the face of maximum pressure sanctions, right? In the face of the United States collapsing oil prices in 2014, 13, right? You know, leaning on its oil producing partners. So there's a way in which I think the concern, their calculus with attacking Venezuela and Iran and Cuba is to reassert control over those oil flows. especially to impose dependency on China, right? Or to make China dependent on them, I should say, right? And we hear them explicitly saying this. Like Venezuela, we don't want you sending oil to China.

You heard Trump saying that the lead up to the attack on Iran, we're going to stop Iran from sending oil to China. Now, in doing so, you're trying to reimpose an equation on China. You might outcompete us productively. You might be having a superior economic system, but we will always control the principal source of energy that powers your economy. Now, that is actually even still a fool's game because China's rapidly shifting towards a renewable-based future, right? But this is what the United States is doubling down on, even in relation.

But what I will say is those sanctions failed. The maximum pressure sanctions campaigns, they weakened Venezuela and Iran, and much more so Venezuela, I think, as we're seeing. But they failed, which is where they return to the military question. In the refusal of Venezuela or Iran or Cuba to surrender by economic strangulation, imperialism returns to its founding military basis. And they did that in Venezuela, and they're trying to do it again in Iran. But what they failed to recognize, especially in the case of the Islamic Republic, is how much the Islamic Republic itself may have learned from the June war,

how much itself may have learned from the past two and a half years, from the past 46, 47 years, right? So I think that's why they're being challenged. to restore the basis of imperialism, particularly vis-à-vis the rise of China, but also in terms of how they themselves represented that challenge. Yeah, absolutely. And they're threatening to do the military, the pivot to more military outright violence against Cuba as well. So it seems like the U.S. has been able to bully or convince many states, both in Latin America and also in West Asia, to somewhat abandon the states on the sort of spear tip of fighting for regional sovereignty, right? Cuba and Venezuela and Latin America, Iran, Palestine, and West Asia.

Why do so many of these states sort of refuse to really go all in and take up these causes, you know, especially when China is a growing alternative to U.S. dominance? Like, I can't help but think about Mexico and Shinebomb and her unwillingness really to really push hard against what the United States is trying to impose in terms of putting a split between them and Cuba in terms of the oil sales, for example. So there's that question and this question of why these states are not willing to go all the way. And then also what alternative developed mechanisms does China offer and what mechanisms has the U.S. utilized to ensure this loyalty and submission.

Yeah. So, okay, I would say, what I would say in response to these questions is the United States, in some ways, it stands alone as a global-scale military power. So when you're asking,

why do so many of these states refuse to take up these causes? I think there's two components. Like, the U.S. is a global military power, and I'll explain that in a minute. And the other point is the U.S. has engaged in a form of client-state construction, right, of establishing, like I was saying,

imperialism under the United States and more generally is not necessarily direct territorial control, but you can exercise indirect control. And they often do this through constructing client states. And for good or bad, China does not engage in that, right? China's foreign policy principles are based on principles of peaceful coexistence. Whether you want to critique it or not, you have to understand that it's really committed to this idea of non-intervention. It opposed, for example, it joined the Islamic Republic in opposing Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait

in 1991. but it refused military intervention as a response to this, right? So it really, really is opposed to the principle of non-intervention, but the United States is not, right? So now, how does that help us answer your question as to why don't regional states or why are they kind of bowing to U.S. pressure? So the United States is imposing itself militarily, let's say in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Now, I will say, before I forget, this is contradictory, because it's also exhausting itself. You know, there's a hubris, there's a godlike, feature the United States feels today, that it can go anywhere and smash anybody and impose itself, but it's also introducing a crisis into its own capabilities and capacities, right? And we're seeing that vis-a-vis the Islamic Republic right now, we're seeing that the outcome of its attacks on Yemen last year and then, you know, like shifting resources to Venezuela and now moving back. But in Latin American American care in the Caribbean, it imposed itself as a military power that nobody in the region could

stand up to. So it alone stands as a military power on a global scale. And so it says we are only one that can guarantee you security. So this is like a security guarantee it provides that China cannot compete with. Now, why do those particular states, not Mexico, I'll come back to Mexico in a second, but why do say the Gulf states? Why is that so appealing to them? Well, because these states aren't rooted in a deep legitimacy. So they are basically client states that are constructed for U.S. imperialism,

for it to be able to maintain control over oil, for it to maintain military power, as we're seeing now, that if there's a challenger like Iran, those Gulf states functioned to protect Israel, right? They have those systems in place to protect them. So they're not rooted in a deep popular legitimacy. So the security question is preeminent to them. And so the United States is the only state in the world today. Russia, I think, has tried to compete with the United States on that level, but on a planetary scale, it's the United States alone that operates as a global-scale military power. So I think it projects power that brings states in line, particularly certain constituted states that it has constructed as client states.

So I think that's one component of it. Now, it is still not in the interest of those states to follow the United States because they would get more of China like you're suggesting, right? China is the one state that can introduce real investment capital that can help you achieve your state's aims of economic development, whether it's Mexico or Saudi Arabia. It is China alone that can do this. But I think what the United States does is it doesn't promise security necessarily. It doesn't say, well, okay, look, China might give you an economic benefit or it might provide you with an economic foundation, but we give you a military one. It doesn't actually even just say that because who is the United States protecting these states against itself, right?

So it basically starts operating like a protection racket, right? It's like, okay, you know, look what we just did in Venezuela. You want that to happen to you? It's like a mafia type of move. We're going to shake you down. Otherwise, we're going to break your legs. So they're offering protection, but essentially against themselves. Actually, maybe people will be interested in this, but there's somebody who's also quite influential on me.

Giovanni Eriji, he has a book to the long 20th century. And he actually argues that there's been four cycles of accumulation, three cycles of accumulation, perhaps, in the history of capitalist world system. And at each cycle, the declining hegemon or imperial power, one sign that marks it is that it shifts towards a protection racket type approach, right? Because it doesn't have anything to offer in terms of positive public goods for states to follow its lead. So it starts doing this sort of mafia type of move.

And I think that's one way to understand how it brings states in line, that it threatens to bring violence to them, right? And it's openly doing this. And I think so you combine that with the way it works with these comparador classes to construct client states. And I think that's one way.

Now, China, I think though to understand this, we can understand China does offer an alternative. And we see this particularly in West Asia recently, but across the world, like I was saying, China gives more policy autonomy, but China can offer a scale of investment and a time of investment that the United States can. You're not going to get U.S. firms entering and offering 30-year projects. You know, that's something that you require a form of state financing for it. So the Chinese public banking system, the Chinese state firms, the way they're able to carry projects over a longer scale speaks to the infrastructure needs of the global south and other countries and the way the United States simply cannot.

The way the Chinese are at the leading edge of transforming the world economy towards renewables, this is something that speaks, for example, or spoke to Saudi Arabia's so-called Vision 2030, which is in shambles right now. it's kind of collapsing in many ways, but it was China alone that could provision that investment capital. And so, you know, and this is something, if you want to answer your question, the alternative development mechanism that China offers. So, you know, Saudi Arabia was in a war with Yemen, or not a war, it was attacking Yemen for eight years, okay, because the Yemen project of Ansar

law is the same as the Islamic Republic in many ways. It's about the national question of reasserting sovereignty, but it understands that this is inextricable from the regional question. You cannot separate the two. So this is a threat to Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia is another key pillar of U.S. imperialism. So the United States and the UK back the Saudis in attacking Yemen. And for eight years, they're attacking Yemen, trying to defeat this challenge to the regional imperialist order, right?

But they're unable to do so. And all the United States can offer the Saudis is more weapons. And, you know, we know that doesn't work. like Ansar Allah only gets up and fires deeper and starts, you know, like imposing war costs. And this is where China offers an alternative. What China says is, well, what if we have, and China's position is the integration of Iran into the region. So to integrate Iran into the region and to have a development piece, so China speaks about a development piece or a global development initiative.

It doesn't think that security and sovereignty of states will be secured through the U.S. war on terror or military approach. It will happen through regional economic integration. Through something like the Belt and Road initiative, creating synergies that distribute value evenly along the way. And that's something they offer to Saudi. They say, if we have an integration with Iran, that can bring the war in Yemen to the close. You'll never have a military solution.

And we are the one state that can offer you the type of investment capital you are looking for to build whatever city you're trying to build. However you're trying to transition your economy, it is us alone that can do this. So what happens in the summer of 2023 is the Saudis potentially are going to start selling their oil in the Chinese currency. So you have a massive, massive transformation happening. And I think it is not possible to understand the United States doubling, tripling down under Biden and Trumps. Like you were saying, it's not about an individual personality, doubling, tripling down on violence, on coming into the region and committing a genocide of this nature against Gaza, escalating the violence and escalating the violence and less.

Lebanon, even expanding the violence to Qatar getting hit. I think that's a good example of a potential protection racket type approach. And then I think introducing to Saudi Arabia and these other states, again, trying to bring them back into a military architecture. So I think China offered an alternative development mechanism, but I think we saw last year Trump go to Saudi Arabia in May of 2025 and offer the Saudis an enormous amount of military equipment, military munitions, large-scale weapons, like just really hyped it up even more. And you saw Saudi going back into the U.S. orbit in that way.

But I think that's at stake. If I was to say, if you're saying, like, what is the difference here, right? So China's coming in with this global development initiative. It also has a global civilization initiative, again, that speaks to this idea of coexistence rather than domination, which is where Western imperialism kind of begins and ends, right? So I think that's how I would understand why regional countries are converging apparently around the U.S., right? I think the U.S. is threatening in a way, even their friends and allies. And then China, for better or worse, does not engage in client state construction.

And that seems to be a disadvantage, but I guess, you know, we would have to see. So I'd like to end with coming back directly to Iran and sort of the current war on Iran. So maybe if you could just talk a little bit, maybe focusing a little bit more on the military side of things right now. Like what is the U.S. is short and medium term strategy here? There's a lot of different like chaotic stuff coming out of the Trump administration, right? And so I don't know how much of that we can take without a grain of salt or many grains of salts. But what do you think that their strategy is here? What are the cracks in their strategy?

and what is Iran's strategy in resistance? And maybe if you could also talk a little bit about, I know you mentioned before we hit record that you've been talking to some comrades in Iran about what the experience is on the ground right now in terms of overall resistance because all we hear about in the West is people celebrating that they're being bombed.

So maybe if you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah. So I will say that I don't think the United States anticipated this tort. sort of response from the Islamic Republic. Now, I think, and I wrote, actually, I wrote a pretty long thread on, on Twitter slash X about this. I think it's vocal politics, this new sort of, I think they turned it into some sort of like slideshow or something that people can find.

But so a lot of what I'm going to say now is going to draw from that. But like the short, medium-term strategy of the United States, I think the first thing that I would put on the table here is that I actually genuinely think that the United States and the Israeli state, they were in a moment of panic. And I think we're starting to see that more clearly now. You know, it seems like it's propaganda when they kept saying, we need his bullet to disarm, Hamas to disarm. And it seems like they're just saying these things to deflect or whatever, right? But in fact, if we look at it from a different position that perhaps they recognize that they're incapable of disarming the resistance in the region. You know, they did this this horrific genocide in

front of us for two and a half years. Yet the Palestinians have refused to surrender. They're refuse to lay down their arms, and the same thing in Lebanon. Hezbollah continues to hold his arms. And this is the reason that they attacked Iran in June. This is the reason, you know, I didn't mention this before when I said what the threat it poses. Or I did, but let me return to this, right? The threat that Iran poses, that it won't abandon Palestine. It simply refuses to abandon Palestine.

And they understand Iran to be the source of strategic depth and support for resistance across the region. So they think, okay, if we can't get them, to disarm in Lebanon and Palestine, if we can take away the only state in the world, the single state in the world that offers material support, not to Palestine in the abstract, but to Palestinian resistance, which is the basis of real Palestinian sovereignty. Again, to stop begging for sovereign recognition, right, to stop asking and begging and depending on the United States, but seizing that into your own hands. This is what the Palestinian resistance in Gaza, what the resistance in Lebanon represents.

Okay. So they understand that Iran is helping backstop this. That's why they target Iran with the sanctions that don't work and then in June. And this is why you have to understand that for decades, they keep saying Iran is a day away from nuclear. Iran is a day away. Right. What that signifies is the fear that they have, right, of a sovereign power that will not subordinate themselves coming to possess destructive capabilities equal to theirs, which means they will not be able to. continue their genocidal colonial project in the region. So they target Iran in June. And what people forget is in the last days of that war, Iran was coming on very strong. Iran was hit very strong at first, but it absorbed the blow, and then they were coming on strong. And it was Israel and the U.S. that asked for the ceasefire. Right? It was them.

And since then, I think the reality is Western media keeps parroting this thing. Iran is teetering. Iran is almost going to collapse. So what do we see during that war? Iran come on strong. and we saw national unity. We saw so much cohesion. Even people within Iran who may have disagreements over this or that policy,

disagreements over this or that nature of the republic of the state, you saw this major, major unification. And so what has happened since that war in June is you've had Iran replenishing its arsenal at a rate that appears to be faster and more sustained than how the United States and Israel are replenishing suppose what, you know, it's been all, it's been spoken about quite widely, their interceptor missiles, for example, right? But also they experienced a offensive missile shortage due to their

attacks on Yemen last year. This is what I'm saying. The U.S. is a global military power, but there are contradictions. The U.S. might achieve tactical gains, but it's not thinking on a long-term strategic horizon, right? Because, again, it is flailing about in somewhat of a desperate state because the world is tilting in a different direction, right? So I think, like, after the war, there's a replenishment of the arsenal of Iran in relation to this. And then there's something else that I mentioned in that threat I wrote is there is a strategic question here that I think the Israelis are aware of. I don't know if Trump is aware of it because I think Trump is an expression of that Epstein disease that comes out of capitalist imperialism, right? But there's

an awareness that time is almost up, I think, on what we might call the legitimacy of the U.S. Israeli expression, let's say, of capitalist imperialism today. We know that Western elites are, again, in a disgusting way, continuing to line up with these monsters, right? We see that even after those girls were slaughtered, those girls and boys, those young students were slaughtered in that school. I'm sorry, this is really like, it's shocking and it shouldn't be, you know, that they slaughtered hundreds of children, they maimed them. And people like Mark Carney, who are frauds and

Albanese in Australia, Kierstomber, who pretend like they care about internet. Their response to the massacre of children was Iran can never have nuclear weapons. That is their response. So now Western elites are part of this, and it's not a conspiracy. They are part of, it can represent many things, this sort of Epstein type of class. They are all enmeshed in this profit-seeking, sort of grotesquely consuming class, and they want the world to be maintained in this way. So that's why, even in the face of the slaughter, they say they're standing with them.

But I think publics in their country are not holding that same line anymore. It's very clear that in the United States, for example, how long can you depend upon this formula? When you see the polling coming out, especially amongst younger populations, and when you see what's happening in the Democratic Party, which has been a servant to Zionism for its whole history since the state of Israel was created.

You have in the Democratic Party increasingly this entering into their primaries, this entering into the election, right, that, you know, getting funded by APAC is now harming candidates more, right? You see the governor of California, he's not a principled person, Gavin Newsom, he has, but the fact that he's saying now Israel is an apartheid state, the fact that he's saying to revisit it, It's not what he believes. It's what he thinks he needs to say. And one can say, well, he'll abandon that, but nobody's even ever said that before. Like, who's run in a Gavin Newsome way on that sort of platform?

So I think that's a sign. I think increasingly probably, you know, if in the midterms, if Trump loses badly, are you going to be able to conduct this war in six months or eight months when we're in midterm season? So you have these two converging forces, a rising strength of Iran, a crisis in the military industrial complex for Israel and the U.S. and a legitimation crisis that's only deepening. So this was the window with which they could strike. And I think they believed that there's a sense of panic that is there.

But it combines with a hubris. That's a funny combination. How can you have hubris and panic at the same time? But because they took out Venezuela, and that was easy. We just went and we hit Maduro really hard. And then, you know, the regime, so-called what they call the regime, we were able to pivot it and shift it, and we were able to establish control over oil flows,

which is what we really wanted, right? We don't mind, actually, maybe Venezuela can develop more. We don't need to keep them in a certain way, but we just can't have them in an independent relationship of China or Cuba, and they're able to achieve this. So similar with Islamic Republic, I think their aim is to put in place a leadership. It doesn't have to be a quote-unquote regime change that they're asking for,

to have a strong strike, you take out Kameni, and the consequence will be something similar to Venezuela. Now, Iran's resistance, that part of the question you ask is really pivotal here. It is what has cracked their strategy. So what did Iran learn from the 12-day war in June? What did Iran learn from, say, its partners in the axis? It learned very powerful lessons that those who have hubris do not understand that those they seek to attack can also learn lessons.

So what are some of the lessons they learned? So Iran now made sure to emphasize continuity in the face of military attacks. It's a form of deterrence in and of itself. So you take out the head of state, a revered figure, a revered leader, who is the ultimate commander. If you take out that figure, but the republic is still able to demonstrate continuity, which they did immediately. There was simply no crisis that came to the Islamic Republic with the martyrdom of Syed committee, right? So you don't have any, let's say, strategic advance that happens there.

Now, the Western media keeps saying this, but they keep saying it out demonstrating it. They keep assuming there's a crisis. But everything we can see is Iran stood up and maintained a coherent posture. And it struck back even stronger blows from before. So I think strategically, they're showing the limits of military power. You can damage. So Iran is less concerned with necessarily, I mean, at the strategic level they are. So, you know, they're saying this is unforgivable. We are not going to stop until we get accountability. But they're not so concerned if Israel is going to say, oh, we did this massive bombing today and look what we hit.

You know, they're not going to say, okay, that's going to require a tactical response. But they want to show whatever you're hitting is not achieving strategic objectives. And they've shown that very clearly. Now, on the military field itself, Iran has also advanced its destructive capabilities. So I think they are introducing a different type. type of deterrence now. Okay. So one is to demonstrate strategic continuity, but another is that they are demonstrating that we can impose mutually assured destruction upon this whole system. So we're not just fighting a one-to-one colonizer, this whole imperialist system, which includes not necessarily

what Iran calls our brothers in the Gulf states, but the bases in those states, the military bases, right? So they have demonstrated that if you think you can destroy our our state, well, we will simultaneously demonstrate that we can destroy yours as well. This is like the mutually assured destruction deterrence doctrine, right? And I think they have accelerated and introduced the development of both weapons in the form of hypersonic missile and anti-ship missiles through their relations both endogenously, because Iran has a really strong industrial military production sector, but also through their relations with Russia and China.

And I think, I mean, that's one thing we had to remember. I didn't get to it before, but the 25. year agreement between China and Iran signed in 2021 has a military cooperation component to it. So when you see, and this has been commented on quite widely, but the level of targeting that Iran has demonstrated, you know, like the precision of targeting in different places, taking out the radar systems in the way they have, this is, I think, both an expression of the strength of the Iranian domestic military production, but also these relations that it holds.

So I think, like, that was a second component. So one, they demonstrate strategic continuity. A second one, they accelerate the development and introduction of weapons and surveillance and targeting that demonstrates mutually assured destruction. And they very clearly have done this. They have shifted to Chinese navigation systems, again, which makes maybe communication more independent from the U.S. and the Zionist forces. So I think, you know, on the military question, they're demonstrating this in real time.

And you see how they systematically took out the THAAD radar. system across the region, which is now opening up more space for their missiles, right? And alongside that, you know, what we didn't get to, but this question on the access of resistance, we're seeing a new access now. We're seeing a renewed access of resistance. We're seeing, Ansar Allah has not even entered in to this conflict yet, but just the seeming coordination between Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic. And it's not really coordinated in a centralized sense, because another lesson that the Islamic Republic has learned from those that it moves in access formation with is the value of a decentralized mode of commanding control, right?

So you have this kind of movement between centralization and decentralization. So that's happening, but even still, there's some sort of harmony that's been achieved between Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic over the past several days, right? So you're having a return of Hezbollah, clearly understanding, you know, they might have seemed weak over the past year, like they had been weakened. And, you know, to some degrees they had been significantly weakened. But in other ways, they were absorbing Israeli blows, perhaps, and waiting for this sort of opportunity with which to strike. And now it's very clear you're seeing the United States and Israel having a lot of difficulty on these two fronts.

So they're really encountering difficulties with Hezbollah because of how many resources are diverted to fighting Iran. So I think that is kind of the United States, I think, was expecting something else. when they struck Iran. I don't know if necessarily, I think they were thinking, okay, maybe it will have to go along, but I think they were hoping for and expecting something.

But now I think what they're seeking to maintain, and you hear the Israelis saying this, they're seeking to maintain chaos. This is something that Giovanni Ariki talks about in the long 20th centuries, that in moments of transition, it can lead to a new hegemon, it can lead to a new system,

either it can lead to a new imperialist power or can lead to something else. And in his final book, he talks about China, potentially creating a different type of world system, not on its own, but again, in concert with the global south as it's rising, right? But Regi also says that could be counteracted by systematic chaos. And his concern is that the United States possesses such destructive military power that it would prefer to burn up the whole planet than to make space for actual rational coexistence,

which is where we started our conversation. Western imperialism is built on denying those really rational conversations to actually negotiating in good faith. It's built upon a genocidal violence which you force others to sign deals on your terms, not on mutually beneficial win-win terms. That's what's at stake in the world today, right? So even whether it's the Chinese project or what the Islamic Republic is, is how do you generate a world of difference of mutual beneficial relations or this world of domination, right?

And you can see that this is something that they did not get immediate, but maybe they are going to prefer endless chaos now. And if it's not necessarily everybody in the United States, the U.S. Israeli wing, it's not that Israel's control in the United States, not that Israel is simply an attack dog of the United States, there's this merger between the settler edge of imperialism and the imperialist body as a whole. And you're seeing that people like Pete Hegeseth,

I don't know what Trump really believes or doesn't, but that sort of wing is very clearly all in on endless chaos. They don't seem to have a problem with that. So I think that's the dangerous territory that we've emerged into. But I think on the other hand, it may be dangerous, but it seems as though the initiative in many ways is with the Islamic Republic. It is with the access more generally. So I think this is what I would understand.

And what I would end with, though, is that what I would end with is the speech that the foreign minister of Iran, Abbas Arachi gave at the Al Jazeera Forum, I think, in Doha, shortly before the United States attacked, he returns us to the question of Palestine. So he talks about world order and the transformation of world order. He said nothing is possible. Why would he say this? If Iran abandons Palestine, like I mentioned in that article, like you asked, Iran can have everything from the Americans.

So why does he return to Palestine? It has to do like we were talking about with both the material, technical, and ethical and theological foundations of the Islamic Republic. Otherwise, how can anybody explain this? So he returns to Palestine and he says, there is no future for any world order, multipolar or otherwise, without a reconstructed Palestine, without a rebuilt Palestine, right, to which justice and accountability has been given.

So the world needs to center on Gaza for what has happened. And he's bringing us back there. So that is, I think, a key part of their strategy. Now they're saying they want to ceasefire from us. we will not give it until this war comes to a total end. That's what was said by Iraqi today. So what is he implying by this world coming to a total end? I think that has serious implications for Gaza.

It has serious implications for Lebanon. So I think they're not wanting to return to a status quo because they see what that can do. And maybe, okay, so I lied, what I really will end on then. We should always end on Palestine, but what I didn't get to is what you mentioned, what we're hearing from comrades and people we know on the ground in Iran, and we're seeing images coming up, that we are seeing another part of Iran's strategy and resisting, right, is this question of national and social cohesion.

We have to remember the strategy of imperialism is always that it unifies itself on the basis of breaking and dividing those that attacks. Right. So it wants, you know, a lot of like Western leftists, particularly like anarchists, they fall into this trap of celebrating volcanization. They want to break and smash states because the states they live in are never subject to being broken and smashed, right?

Like they unify. Europe was divided. in January over Greenland, but then they unify over Iran. This is the pattern of imperialism. Western unity is always found in the Scramble for Africa, the opium wars. Just this week, you see this disgusting display of Western unity in the service of genocidal forces. So on the one hand, they're doing that, and they're trying to divide Iranian society. Deep in the divisions, like all society are going to have fault lines and divisions, but they're trying to play them up in a particular way.

the opposite actually happening on the ground. And I think the martyrdom of the leader, Saeed Kamenei, had a profound impact on this in many ways because it was demonstrated to people who might be feeling frustrated with the economic conditions of Iran. Now, those are generated in the first and last instance by sanctions, even the corruption in Iran and even the wealth inequality, which have a domestic class component that we can't overlook, but the primary question that structures those is economic sanctions and endless war against Iran. So whatever this is, content there is. The meaning, you know, the commitment that their leader demonstrates to their country, to defending their country by not fleeing or not hiding, by accepting martyrdom,

has also provided a unifying impact. And we're seeing people up all night on the streets across Iran defending their country, doing what they can to keep mobilized in a spirit of defense of the republic. And those who are doing so continue to believe that there is an inextricable relationship between the liberation of the Islamic Republic from imperialism and the liberation of Palestine. They do not chant those slogans that you hear in the diaspora, no to Gaza, no to Lebanon, my heart is only for Iran. That's what, when you see people holding up these signs of Trump and Netanyahu, the people's on the streets in Iran defending their country against the most brutal forces in the world today, they continue to stand on the side of the

oppressed, on the side of those who've been on the front lines bearing the highest, fighting imperialism in Palestine and Lebanon, and now they have joined them in Iran. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Bikram Gill, a faculty in political science and international relations, and a scholar of international political economy. He's the author of The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism, Race, Nature, and Accumulation, Published by Manchester University Press. Please check the show notes for,

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