The global power of the British empire, which at its height encompassed nearly a quarter of the world’s population and its landmass, was not overturned by one single event alone but through a succession of ruptures, of economic crises, wars and revolutionary mass movements, against a backdrop of decline. And so it is the same now with the brief period, historically speaking, of the US as the world’s hyperpower, that began in the 1990s after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War.
The transition underway from US hegemony to a new era of an increasingly multi-polar world will also occur not in one big bang, but through a series of convulsive leaps and bounds as the shifting geopolitics of a crisis-ridden global capitalist economic and political system work their way through. The devastating Israeli-US aerial blitzkrieg on Iran is another such turning point.
The first decisive breach of the US-fashioned post-Stalinist ‘New World Order’ occurred in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2003 US-led war on Iraq, following 9/11. The decaying dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was easily deposed militarily but the US invasion, with the subsequent draining years-long occupation it began, was still a critical act of imperial overreach, creating new contradictions in its wake.
First, there was the brazen dismissal by the US under president George W Bush of the constraints of multilateral institutions, treaties and protocols, which led France and Russia to oppose the war in the UN security council. Consequently, unlike the 1991 first Gulf war of the post-Stalinist era, the 2003 version was conducted outside the UN’s orbit by a US-assembled ‘coalition of the willing’, including the UK under the New Labour government of Tony Blair. This was a key moment in the evolution of the then still newly consolidating Russian capitalist state into a disruptor of a ‘rules-based order’ that was so obviously a cover for untrammelled US dominance, with all its consequences to this day.
And then there was the invasion’s impact on the regional balance of power in the Middle East, with the relative strengthening of the position of Iran.
The fall of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni Muslim-dominated Iraq regime, which in 1980, after the overthrow of the Shah, had launched a devastating eight-year war on Iran with over a million casualties, “effectively handed Iraq to Iran on a silver platter” in the words of Saud al Faisal, the Saudi Arabia foreign minister from 1975 to 2015. Far from Bush’s infamous ‘Mission Accomplished’ boast of ‘bringing order’ to the region, how to contain a ‘Shia Crescent’ led by Iran sitting atop the majority of Middle East oil and gas reserves became a major strategical concern, of both US imperialism and the Sunni Arab regimes in fear of their Shia Muslim populations, and the Israeli ruling class. The prospect of the Islamic Republic expanding its nuclear programme, which had begun under the Shah, to develop nuclear weapons to underwrite its strategic position, was a particular preoccupation.
In the immediate short-term then the post-Iraq regional power relations have seemingly been decisively redressed by Israel’s military campaigns since October 2023. Hamas in Gaza has been pulverised as the genocidal slaughter of the Palestinians continues. The Shia Hezbollah militia has been severely weakened in Lebanon, even if not terminally defeated. The Syrian regime of Bashar Assad dominated by the minority Alawites, a Shia sect of Islam, which relied on Hezbollah fighters for its survival, is no more. And, within just days of Israel’s shock-and-awe assault on Iran itself, over a third of the Iranian air defence systems and two-thirds of its missile launchers were destroyed, numerous military leaders and nuclear scientists killed by air strikes, and state infrastructure and economic targets blasted.
The US then intervened against Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz, Isfahan, and at the Fordow site buried in a mountainside, deploying 75 precision-guided weapons including 14 GBU-57 ‘Massive Ordnance Penetrators’, the largest ever non-nuclear bomb. The damage to Iran’s nuclear programme is disputed, although before the bombing the US Defense Department’s assessment was that they could set back Iran’s ability to obtain weapons-grade uranium perhaps for some years.
But this dramatic escalation is still a reckless gamble even from the standpoint of the interests of imperialism. The last thing it has guaranteed is ‘peace’, ‘order’ or ‘stability’ in the region and beyond.
War and revolution
Iran’s regime has undoubtedly been humiliated in this asymmetrical conflict, down to Trump’s condescending ‘thank you’ for it only making a “very weak response”. Its past appeals to the masses for ‘sacrifice’ to pay for its prestige nuclear project and other weapons spending to ‘defend the nation’ proved hollow as Tehran in particular has been attacked at will, without any dedicated bomb shelters prepared for the population. If not immediately, particularly in conditions of continued siege, but in time, its shattered authority is preparing the way for its overthrow.
All scenarios are possible, including the Balkanisation of a country with substantial minority ethnic populations as different capitalist elements within and outside Iran struggle for control. But Iran is also a country with a numerically powerful working class, the world’s 23rd largest economy (at purchasing power parity rates) – with over a million auto-manufacturing workers for example producing more cars than Britain – a young, urban-based population with a higher than average regional literacy rate, and a tradition of mass movements.
And revolution. The mass uprising of workers and youth that overthrew the Shah’s dictatorship ended, after intensive struggles throughout 1979 and 1980, with a counter-revolution led by reactionary clerics who suppressed democratic rights and freedoms, and independent workers’ organisations, under the cover of ‘defending the revolution’. They were aided by the false policies of many on the left, including the significantly sized Tudeh Party (a pro-Russian Stalinist ‘Communist’ Party), which allied uncritically with the emerging Islamic regime leaders like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as ‘anti-imperialists’ until they, in turn, were suppressed. These are lessons that will have to be returned to in the events ahead. Because many times in history military setbacks have been the midwife of revolution.
All analogies can only approximate to living reality with its complexities and concrete conditions. But the 1905 Russian revolution (celebrated in Clare Doyle’s review on page 28) is pertinent here. Triggered as the military humiliations endured by the Tsarist regime in the Russo-Japanese war exposed its rottenness before the masses, it was led by a working class that comprised just ten percent of the population of an overwhelming agrarian country and whose organisations had been outlawed and brutally repressed.
The revolution also electrified the workers’ struggle internationally, with the lessons hotly debated in the German Social Democratic party for example, and spurring on the development of independent working-class political representation in Britain, where mass meetings were organised in support.
And that will be the other unintended consequence of the Israeli-US assault, as it was of the invasion of Iraq. The global movement of opposition then, which at its height saw possibly 30 million demonstrating in over 600 cities in February 2003, was a turning point in the development of mass consciousness in the post-Stalinist era. Still with resonance today, ‘Iraq’ became a shorthand term for an underlying broad discontent with the results of the US-led new world order: economically, with soaring inequality; socially, with growing mistrust of the institutions underpinning capitalist society; and with a developing fear of the growing climate crisis.
The 2007-08 financial crash was a further decisive turning point in shifting consciousness, increasing the questioning of the capitalists’ control of society. It was responsible for the first revival in the post-Stalinist era of basic socialist ideas – as shown in the Corbyn waves in Britain, the support for the Bernie Sanders’ US presidential campaigns particularly in 2016, the initial Syriza victory in Greece in 2015, the rise in just a matter of years of Podemos in Spain, and so on.
Crucially however, while the working class participated in these movements, it did not lead the struggle through its own organisations, including its own mass parties.
However events might develop as the consequences of the Israel-US blitzkrieg unfold, building such parties with a programme for the socialist transformation of society is the key task to end the horror of capitalism and its endless wars.