Bikrum Gill
The war of aggression waged against the Islamic Republic of Iran constitutes a further expansion of the “regional dimensions” of the genocide conducted by the Zionist entity and its Western backers in Gaza over the past 20 months. In turn, the war of aggression has been resisted by what has been termed the “Second Sacred Defence” of the Islamic Republic. This widening of the war arises out of a key motivating aim of the genocide itself – the imperative of Zionism and imperialism to maintain the overwhelming deterrence power that is necessary for the reproduction of both Zionist settler colonialism and US imperialism in West Asia. Just as the Zionist army has rained genocidal terror down upon Palestinians in Gaza, in an ultimately futile attempt to disarm Palestinian resistance, so has it brought war to the members of the “axis of resistance” who have taken up arms in defence of Palestine. The escalation of the Zionist-imperialist war towards more direct aggression against the Islamic Republic aims to target the destruction of the state structure that stands as a bulwark of strategic depth for the entire axis of resistance.
The escalation of war against the Islamic Republic of Iran has generated a broad spectrum of “anti-war” opposition. However, the premise and terms of this opposition have often risked reproducing the very ideological logic and basis of the regime change objective pursued by the Zionist-imperialist war. In particular, a significant section of the “critical” Western intellectual class has advanced a form of opposition to the war on Iran that aims to distinguish between the Islamic Republic and a generic category of the Iranian “people.” This bloc seeks to defend “the Iranian people” while joining the imperialists in denigrating the Islamic Republic as an authoritarian state that a so-called authentic popular will must overthrow. There can be no practical anti-war politics that takes as its premise the very distinction between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian People that ideologically authorizes the war itself.
To separate the Iranian people from the Islamic Republic at this moment is to reproduce the very logic that has underpinned decades of sanctions, destabilization, and war. It mirrors the rhetorical sleight of hand used to destroy Iraq (“We’re only after Saddam, not Iraqis”), to bomb Libya (“We’re saving civilians, not attacking the country”), and to support regime change efforts in Syria (“We stand with the people, not the regime”). The same logic is now being mobilized again—this time to justify war on Iran, in the name of its people.
But, if we can see through the ideological smoke of imperialism, what is clear is that this is a war on a revolutionary state that has been central to the most enduring resistance to U.S. imperialism and Zionist colonialism in West Asia.
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Revolution against Imperialism
The Islamic Republic was born of the 1979 Islamic Revolution—an event that overthrew the Western-backed Shah of Iran, dismantled one of the most brutal U.S. client regimes in the world, and gave birth to a state whose political and military doctrine was explicitly opposed to both U.S. imperialism and Zionist settler colonialism.
The revolution, which remains in motion–—despite 46 years of relentless hybrid warfare aimed at overthrowing it: from an eight-year military Iraqi invasion backed by Western powers, to covert and overt operations, assassinations, crippling sanctions, and now once again, open military aggression— is premised upon overturning the material and ideological basis of imperialism and Zionism in West Asia. For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic has refused to normalize relations with Israel. It has refused to accept U.S. military dominance over the region. And it has refused to abandon Palestine. These refusals—rooted in both Islamic principles and a sober reading of imperial power — are understood as fundamental conditions for the West Asian region to achieve substantive sovereignty. That the Islamic Republic has been uncompromising on these questions is what has made it the primary regional target of the U.S.-Israeli war machine for the past 45 years.
The war on Iran is not about upholding a universal law on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. It is about destroying a state structure that has helped build and sustain the material basis of anti-imperialist resistance in West Asia.
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The Historical Context: Refusing Defeat at the End of History
To understand the historical depth of the challenge posed by the Islamic Republic, we must return to the closing decades of the twentieth century —what Western ideologues dubbed the “end of history.” This was the moment when the U.S. declared victory over Soviet Communism, when socialist and third-worldist movements were defeated or dismantled, and when global South states were forced into structural adjustment by international financial institutions. The “end of history” was a profound setback for the sovereignty of the Global South and non-Western world.
In West Asia, this period marked the systematic defeat and co-optation of formerly resistant states. Egypt had long normalized relations with Israel. Iraq, weakened by the Gulf War and sanctions, was on the verge of collapse. The PLO was pressured into the Oslo Accords, disarmed, and turned into a subcontractor of the occupation. Arab regimes, once rhetorically opposed to Zionism, became strategic partners with it.
Amid this era of defeat, the Islamic Revolution in Iran would come to constitute one of the principal challenges (the other being the rise of China) to this “end of history” order. While Western liberalism declared the death of ideology, Iran advanced a revolutionary Islamic politics that stood apart from both liberal capitalism and Soviet communism. Having emerged in response to US imperialism’s imposition of the pro-Western Shah on Iran for a quarter century, the revolution understood that it could never safeguard its sovereignty without contesting imperialism on both regional and international scales. And so the revolution refused the end of history.
While Arab states normalized, Iran deepened its support for resistance. While Palestine was being disarmed, Iran provided the strategic depth and material backing for its rearmament.
It was during this same period that Hezbollah emerged in Lebanon—not just as a militia, but as a political force that would expel Israel from South Lebanon in 2000 and again repel invasion in 2006. None of this would have been possible without the material, logistical, and ideological support of the Islamic Republic.
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A material anti-imperialist challenge
Across the Arab-Iranian region, the re-emergence of organized armed resistance would fundamentally challenge the material basis through which the zionist-imperialist order denied sovereignty. Sovereignty, in the first and last instance, is premised upon the capability to demonstrate the most significant force projection over a territory. Imperialism will do whatever is necessary to maintain its required equation of force. The targeting of the Islamic Republic has been informed by a desire to destroy the strategic depth backing the rise and reproduction of armed resistance movements in the region. It is precisely this support that U.S. policymakers cited in the 1990s when they imposed sweeping sanctions on Iran. The 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (under Bill Clinton) made clear that Iran’s real “crime” was opposing Israeli hegemony and supporting armed resistance.
Later, the discourse would shift to Iran’s nuclear program, but the core concern remained the same: a sovereign state that refused to submit. A state that understood, clearly, that its independence was inseparable from the regional struggle against imperialism.
This understanding has guided Iranian policy for decades. And it has had a cost. Sanctions have devastated the economy. Assassinations and sabotage have targeted scientists and infrastructure. Regime change operations—often coordinated through Gulf states and exiled opposition groups—have attempted to destabilize the state from within.
But despite these pressures, Iran has refused to abandon its position. It has chosen resistance over relief. It has chosen Palestine over profit. It has chosen regional sovereignty over imperial appeasement.
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Contradictions of Resistant Sovereign Development
It is worth asking: what would Iran look like today if it had abandoned the Palestinian cause? If it had normalized with the U.S. and Israel? If it had disarmed Hezbollah and cut off Hamas? The answer is simple: Iran could rapidly become one of the 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 “moderate” state and not a ‘regime’. It would enjoy trade deals, foreign investment, and the full benefits of integration into the global economy.
But it would also be complicit in the dispossession of Palestine. It would be a silent partner in the siege on Gaza. It would be another client state in a region already saturated with them. The Islamic Republic has refused this path—not out of stubbornness, but out of principle and political clarity rooted in its revolution.
The sanctions regime has, however, failed in its objectives. The convergence between China’s economic challenge to the “end of history” paradigm, and Iran’s military challenge, has provisioned Iran access to an alternative global economic architecture through which it has been able to withstand sanctions. The access to markets and capital via an emergent multipolar economic architecture led by China has enabled Iran to safeguard its sovereignty while continuing to support the resistance and achieving a significant degree of national development even while under sanctions.
It is the failure of the sanctions regime that explains why the West has returned to a military approach to regime change. The zionist proxy of Western imperialism had achieved some success militarily in Lebanon and Syria which led it to believe it could now strike Iran with impunity. Here, however, it failed to realize that Iran had its own strategic calculus, wherein it had surmised that its enemies had overstretched themselves and experienced attrition to an extent that striking back now made more sense than in response to previous aggressions last year. Iran has now demonstrated it has the capability and alternative “international context” with which to withstand not only economic warfare in the form of sanctions but also military aggression. Here, the military depth Iran can draw from, for example, North Korea, has proven essential to its ability to resist the recent military aggression by the US and Israel.
The stakes are thus clear: the Islamic Republic of Iran has been fighting to defend a state structure that has been essential to the challenge to the genocidal profit-oriented system the West seeks to impose on the peripheries of its capitalist world system. At this moment, we see clearly that the victory of the Islamic Republic is essential to overturning the genocidal world order the West seeks to renew in Gaza.
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The Danger of False Distinctions
At this moment, when Israel is bombing Gaza with genocidal ferocity, when the U.S. continues to back the war with weapons and vetoes, and when Iran is facing open military threats, there can be no ambiguity. To oppose war on Iran while disavowing the Islamic Republic is to speak the language of imperialism.
It is to accept the logic that some states have no right to exist if they resist the imperial order. It is to divide the Iranian people from the very political project through which they have asserted national sovereignty. It is to echo the framing used to strip Palestinians of their resistance: “We support the people, not Hamas.”
This is not a war on an abstract Iranian “people.” If Iran were governed by the Shah or any other form of government that did not materially challenge the basis of Zionism and US imperialism, its people would simply not be subject to sanction and war. To separate the Iranian “people” from the Islamic Republic at this point is to reinforce the language of the imperialist, and reproduce the logic of the war on Iran.
People do not exist in the abstract. The Iranian people, like all people, live within structures of power. And the Islamic Republic—whatever its internal contradictions—is fundamental to the structural challenge to US imperialism and Zionism.
The war on Iran is about destroying a resistant anti-imperialist state so that the region can be remade in the interests of the settler and imperialist.
At this moment, the task is not to offer comfortable liberal distinctions, but to stand clearly: against war, against sanctions, and against the imperialist project that demands submission or annihilation.
To disown the Islamic Republic while claiming to defend Iran is to disarm the very resistance that has held the line when others surrendered.
Bikrum Gill is a scholar of international political economy and author of the book “Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism: Race, Nature and Accumulation.“
