This time, it seems truly won. It certainly won’t be a lasting peace. It will perhaps only be a prolonged truce to begin negotiations, which will nevertheless proceed on a razor’s edge, given the parties’ divergent interests (*) and the active sabotage of the Zionist regime, which—both through Netanyahu and his opponents—has no intention of acknowledging defeat and leaving Lebanon; quite the opposite.
Aside from Trump’s declamations, the verdict is unanimous: the United States has once again emerged defeated from a war it waged with the foolish certainty of winning quickly and at little cost. And with the demented pretense of bringing about regime change from the outside by installing in Tehran a highly discredited figure from the Pahlavi dynasty with zero support in the country—a repeat of the 1953 coup against Mossadeq. Of the great masses celebrating the US-Zionist bombings and calling, on Washington’s orders, for the return of the monarchy, not a single snapshot, not even a fake, was seen. Nor did the Kurdish legion, supposedly ready to intervene in the service of the Western imperialists, materialize.
The (temporary) military and, above all, political-diplomatic victory smiles upon Tehran. It smiles upon an Iran that increasingly has at its core a solid, well-prepared, and efficient military-industrial complex. So strong is it that it now places itself on equal terms with the Shiite hierarchy, addressing its leader on a first-name basis, no longer bowing to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
This victory is not surprising. Many bourgeois observers had mistaken Iran for a destitute colony, which the Washington-Tel Aviv axis would have easily brought to its knees. Correspondingly, embracing a similar vision, many comrades had mistaken Iran for a sort of Cuba of the Persian Gulf and Ali Khamenei for a new Che Guevara—perhaps (for the most intelligent) malgré lui.
None of the above.
As Khamenei Jr. proudly stated, Iran “is a power.” A regional capitalist power. With a population of over 90 million inhabitants, immense energy resources, an advanced level of technology in the military field, a strong national feeling (also linked to the long imperial tradition, and to an even more ancient civilisation), Iran has been and is able to operate – enriched uranium or not – the lever of an economic atomic bomb on a global scale: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz both to ships and to submarine cables through which financial transactions amounting to 10,000 pass every day billions of dollars. A fatal closure, especially for many allies of the United States. No other Gulf country has a capitalist power comparable to that of Iran. Full of American military bases for their “protection”, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the Emirates have now experienced that US military and economic protection is only, or predominantly, a cause of damage for them. It is no coincidence that Saudi Crown Prince Bin Salman was among the most determined to oppose the re-ignition of the war, and during the truce he went so far as to propose to Iran and the other Gulf countries a “non-aggression pact” on the model of the Helsinki Treaty – a way, in fact, to escape this protection.
In a New York Times editorial written by Robert Pape, who is not a fool, today’s Iran is described as “the fourth global power“, after the United States, China and Russia.
Nor is that all. As has long been evident, Iran is far from alone. China and Russia are behind Iran, much more than Beijing and Moscow are willing to openly admit. The Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin wrote with admirable clarity: the war between Iran and the United States-Israel axis is an anticipation and, at the same time, a revelation of the “essence of the third world war“. A concept confirmed by the assessments of Thierry Breton, a former EU commissioner with a brain (unlike a Kallas), who defined this war as not local, but global.
For Aleksandr Dugin “Russia and Iran are fighting on the same side and against the same enemy. Any superficial action does not change the essence of the Third World War. The fog of war. The negotiations. The distractions. Smoke and mirrors. The main thing now is not to let the enemy – the collective West, the Epstein civilization – defeat us one by one. We must go to war as soon as possible and as drastically as possible. Support friends and allies, convince the undecided and bring society into a state of emergency.” Much depends on China, he notes; and he sees encouraging signs coming from there because finally “Chinese strategic thinking” seems oriented towards abandoning the soft “win win” or “panda” strategies to speed up the attack on Taiwan, with the opening of a third front for which the West is not prepared. One of the high-level advisors of the Russian oligarchies, Bezrukov, argued something similar at the recent St. Petersburg Forum, according to which the time has come for Russia to abandon all caution and move on to a more decisive attack on the European countries that are already at war with Russia. A thesis supported by other Kremlin advisors (at a distance) such as Karaganov and Panina. But, to avoid any misunderstanding, it must be said that Russia is far from preparing an attack on Europe, as demonstrated by the significant difficulties it is encountering in its advance into Ukraine, difficulties recently admitted by Putin himself.
On the opposed front, for Thierry Breton, the lesson to be learned from the war against Iran is this: the United States and the EU are stuck, stuck in a (losing) “short, high-intensity war” mentality typical of completely asymmetric wars. Iran, on the other hand, has prepared for the conflict with “an industrial base designed to last,” and is cashing in on the victory thanks to its missiles and drones. Despite the severe blows it has suffered, these weapons are the “keystone” of its resilience in the face of the much more powerful and expensive Western military systems. The aggressor axis of the United States and Israel, on the other hand, has discovered its own shortage of interceptors, their exorbitant cost, the difficulty of replenishing arsenals at the same rate as “smart munitions” are being consumed, with the corollary of having to choose where to allocate military aid, which theaters to prioritize and which to neglect. This war has revealed the “strategic vulnerability” of the United States-Israel duo to the effectiveness of the Iranian strategy, “which seeks to saturate defenses over the long term, consume enemy supplies, and keep the cost of the conflict beyond what Western public opinion and industries can absorb.” Breton’s analysis also points to Beijing, the leader of “an expanded strategic architecture in which China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea (…) form a hard core around which Pakistan, India, Iraq, Syria, and, ambivalently, Turkey gravitate.” Therefore, the war in Iran must be considered “the first full-scale stress test of a world in which the Sino-American confrontation will unfold both in proxy wars of attrition and in direct clashes.” Given the inevitable military conflict between US and China, the implicit advice to Western powers is: be careful! We must radically and quickly change our military strategy and industrial structures, or we face defeat. As has just happened in Iran.
Put into perspective—after the war between NATO and Russia in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the Netanyahu government’s “seven-front” war—the imperialist aggression against Iran is precisely this: another step toward an apocalyptic Third World War that would plunge the world’s exploited and oppressed masses, and with them Mother Nature, into the abyss.
This is why we have been for the defeat of the gangster aggressors from the very beginning, but we cannot consider the temporary victory of the Iran-China-Russia camp our victory, a victory for the proletarian front. Anyone who acts otherwise, consciously or unconsciously, is effectively rooting for a global war between the great powers of capital. Unless we want to take seriously the nonsense multilateral “peaceful coexistence,” turning a blind eye to the frenetic arms race raging across the globe—from the Trump-Musk United States to the Japan of the obsessed Sanae Takaichi, via the revanchist Germany of Merz, Pistorius, and von der Leyen, and the China of the calm planner Xi, who has just dismissed the Chinese military leadership for their excessive familiarity with the Yankees. A race that is also raging in Italy, with record profits and orders from Leonardo and Fincantieri, despite the Meloni government’s objective difficulties in raising the funds needed to increase military spending from 2% to 5% of GDP.
The Iranian regime emerges from the war undoubtedly strengthened, and seems to be preparing to celebrate the truce agreement with a burial ceremony for Ali Khamenei, from July 4th onwards, of such majesty as to “amaze the world”. It has suffered severe blows to its military and production infrastructures, it has seen its navy and air force destroyed, but it has been able to use, and has brutally used, the propaganda weapon of national solidarity in the face of the aggressor to tighten the police grip on the vast proletarian and popular opposition crushed in blood on 8-9 January, and to start another flurry of executions of political prisoners detained for the street protests of the last decade.
Of course, in Tehran the top circle will have to deal with the combative opposition to the agreement declared by the Paydari Party which is demonstrating in the streets against the agreement judged to be a “catastrophic capitulation”. This group, led by the rich magnate and Pasdaran exponent Sadegh Mahsouli, and considered close to Mojtaba Khamenei, professes to be hostile in principle to any agreement with Western countries on the treatment of uranium and to diplomatic relations with them. He attacks Ghalibaf and Araghchi for the unconditional reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which it says would also be opened to Israeli merchant ships, and for the paltry reparations provided for in the agreement (in the face of hundreds of billions of dollars in damages). We will see if it is a real opposition, or a game of roles to preemptively occupy the space for criticism of the regime’s leaders by focusing it on national pride rather than on mass social needs. In any case, the rulers of Tehran will have to deal with the worsening of the social and class contradictions that the war has brought with it, and with the “risk” of a return to the field of proletarian and popular protest.
As the independent workers and proletarian organizations existing in Iran (semi-clandestine) unanimously denounced, the first victims of this war were the working masses and the dispossessed. For the thousands of dead and injured, civilians and troops, for the direct or indirect loss of millions of jobs, for the explosion in the prices of basic necessities and the consequent expansion of poverty. An ultra-Kampist like Pino Arlacchi, unsuspecting of denigrating intent, has highlighted the “paradox” of Western sanctions and their tightening as a result of the war:
“the mechanism is simple, but devastating for Iranian citizens: the sanctions create scarcity of consumer and industrial goods, the scarcity generates inflated prices and those who control the illegal import channels reap enormous profits. (…) Anyone who visits Iran is struck by the abundance of Western products that the sanctions should make difficult to find. This is not a question of the inefficiency of the sanctioning system, but of its logical consequence: the products arrive, but through channels controlled by the regime’s elite which collects the difference between the international market price and the inflated one of the black market”.
A well-oiled mechanism that leads Arlacchi to portray this elite as an institutional “predatory machine,” a “colossal kleptocracy,” centered on the powerful Setad Ejraiye Farman Emam organization, with a turnover of $95 billion. Dubai, with 8,200 Iranian companies operating there, serves as a legal transit point for rivers of goods that “with clean documentation, are relabeled and shipped by sea or land to Iran through networks controlled by the Pasdaran.” The tightening of sanctions in the final months of the war has further exacerbated poverty in a context of militarism and repression that has made any form of protest impossible. Even more serious than the thousands of deaths and the sacrifices necessary for survival, as the Tehran bus drivers’ union argued, was the disintegration of proletarian and popular resistance networks to the regime caused by arrests, executions, and the three-month shutdown of the internet.
In proportion, of course, the proletarian masses in the United States fared no better, with the significant rise in gasoline and diesel prices, general inflation, and the enormous costs of the brief (for now) war. With wars underway and in preparation on land, at sea, in the skies, and in the solar system, while Musk ascends to the throne of the first trillionaire in the history of capitalism, millions of proletarian families in the United States are burdened with further debt, junk food, and disease, plunging into overwork and desperation—so much so that precisely during this war, the popularity of the superboss, strong “at the top,” is plummeting “at the bottom.” Where ICE continues to repress and sow hatred against immigrants—the internal side of the external war.
The proletarian movement in Iran, the United States, and the world has gained nothing from this war. Indeed, it has been and remains the target of this war, both in Iran and the United States. Nor has it anything to gain from the growing prestige of the Iranian Islamic-military regime: due to its class-based nature, its plans of action, and its alliances.
Some comrades argue: Iran’s resistance has nevertheless boosted the morale of the Arab masses, frustrated by their failure to prevent the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and further Zionist expansionism in the West Bank and Lebanon. Even if this is true, it’s a breath of polluted air, harmful because it reinforces the belief that the only way to strike and possibly destroy the state of Israel is through a general inter-capitalist war that would inevitably spill over into the Middle East, given that Israel is the long arm of terrorism in the region of the United States and the European Union. It reinforces the passive belief that the exploited and oppressed classes are powerless in the face of imperialism; only states are powerful. And never mind if these are states that oppress the working classes (or is there anyone so shameless, especially among former comrades, as to consider today’s Iran anything other than a top-to-toe capitalist regime?).
Should the struggle to free ourselves from imperialism therefore be delegated to the states belonging to the anti-Western capitalist-imperialist bloc, and therefore to a reactionary war between capitalist states, rather than a revolutionary war of the exploited and oppressed? This would be a guilty repetition of the catastrophic self-deception of the war against Nazism: long live the “liberators,” the Anglo-American democratic “allies” who are helping us free ourselves from Nazi-fascism… we’ve seen how!
Should they rely on an alliance between Iran, China, and Russia to free themselves from Yankee imperialism and Zionism?
That would be a very misplaced hope. The tragic events in Gaza are irrefutable proof of this. October 7, 2023, was a pivotal moment in the centuries-old national-revolutionary liberation struggle of the Palestinian people. Faced with the ferocious Zionist reaction to this uprising, the Iranian regime has not drawn any “red lines”—neither for Gaza nor for the West Bank. For its part, China, the capitalist superpower leading the bloc to which Iran belongs, has continued to supply Israel with oceans of goods necessary for its economy and daily life, heedless of the mountains of corpses of Palestinian fighters, women, and children. Russia, Brazil, India, and other BRICS countries have also continued to send the IDF the fuel it needs to endlessly reiterate its bombings and massacres, including those that occurred after the “truce” or that have been unfolding for months in Lebanon. China and Russia could have at least made the scenic move of vetoing the Trump-Netanyahu plan for Gaza, the quintessence of colonial fascism. Nothing, not even that. They preferred to abstain, showing their goodwill toward the willing executioners of the Palestinians.
For all these states, without exception, the Palestinian cause, as a national-revolutionary liberation struggle, is merely a card to be played in the manipulation of international public opinion and at the secret tables of diplomacy and the exchange of favors between assassins. It is not the liberation of the Palestinian people, much less the liberation of the exploited and oppressed Arab and Islamic people that they care about; it is only the assertion of their own interests of domination over the greatest possible number of oppressed and exploited in the Middle East and beyond.
Undoubtedly, the defeat of the United States can encourage the masses of the Arab and Islamic world (and beyond). This is precisely why it is welcome! it can be real (and not imaginary) only if the exploited and oppressed classes take action themselves, without any delegation to the bourgeois and reactionary states of the anti-Western camp. Being anti-American is one thing, being anti-imperialist is another. If you are anti-imperialist, you are anti-American, but the reverse is not true. The Iranian regime is anti-American, even though it has had at least three long-term presidents (Rafsanjani, Khatami, and Rouhani) who favored mending relations with the United States and the West, and so is Pezeshkian. But this has nothing to do with anti-imperialism. Unless, by imperialism, against all Marxist criteria (Lenin first and foremost) and the incontrovertible facts, we mean only American imperialism.
Even less does it have anything to do with the fight against the global war now underway. If what Dugin and Breton claim without hypocrisy is irrefutable, the fight against rearmament, the war economy, and the rush to inter-capitalist world war demands maximum commitment to the formation of an international and internationalist proletarian front that concedes nothing to kampism, nor to the always disastrous expectation that our enemy’s enemy will do part of the work for us, nor to the minimalist illusion that settling for the “lesser evil” protects us from the worst, rather than paving the way for it. Eighty years of bankrupt Togliattian reformism, Berlinguerian sub-reformism, and the reactionary-liberal reformism of the Democratic Party should be enough, shouldn’t they?
The misplaced expectations and illusions mentioned above have such a following today, even in movement circles, due to the absence on the national and international political scene of a proletarian movement worthy of the name. A particular responsibility lies precisely with the proletarians of the imperialist countries who, so far, with very rare exceptions, have not waged a real battle against the industrial, financial, commercial, military, and diplomatic interests of their own ruling classes and their apparatus of domination. Here in Italy, and in the United Kingdom, Greece, and France, some steps have been taken to support the resistance of the Palestinian people and against the Zionist-Western apparatus of destruction and death. But it is still too little, in quantity and determination. The heavy sacrifices demanded here too by the Iran-West war and the arms race—in terms of soaring inflation, reduced purchasing power of wages, and repressive crackdowns on workplaces and society—can create a situation more favorable to broader and more decisive mass responses.
Everything will depend on the resurgence and strength of mass self-organization and proletarian political organization, and on the ability of the sparse vanguard forces to outline a coherently internationalist perspective for anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist action, one that destroys the illusions of geopolitical blocs as factors for the liberation of the oppressed masses. The liberation of the exploited and oppressed classes can only come about through their own struggle.
The next International Conference Against Capital’s Wars in Athens in July must be a step forward in this direction, a step taken without hesitation.
June 15, 2026
Revolutionary Internationalist Tendency
(*) The divergence of these interests is also evident in the way the 14 points of the memorandum of understanding are presented, which, however, have not yet been officially released (6:00 PM on June 15). The Iranian Mehr News agency, which is close to government circles, claims that within 60 days of the next talks, Iran will regain possession of €24 billion of its frozen assets. The draft agreement would begin with a mutual commitment to a complete cessation of hostilities (including Lebanon) and a US commitment not to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs. Washington would commit to easing the naval blockade around the Strait of Hormuz by gradually withdrawing its forces over the next 30 days, thus allowing the reopening of the strait “under Iranian arrangements“—a formula that appears to be interpreted differently. Iran interprets it this way: all ships will be forced to pay a toll to Iran and Oman, which will co-manage the strait. But Trump has repeatedly stated the opposite, namely that no toll will be paid.
The content of the further negotiations planned for the next 60 days appears equally controversial: for the Iranian Mehr News, they would only concern enriched uranium, enrichment or dilution activities, sanctions relief, and economic reconstruction. Meanwhile, Tehran’s missile programs and its support for affiliated groups operating in other countries should remain untouched. Is this really the case? It’s really hard to say. Galibaf himself retorted a few hours ago to his critics from the Paydari Party (not exactly newcomers to the central government, far from it): you’re talking without knowing the latest version of the agreement. Well, if they don’t know it either…
Post-scriptum
Perhaps it’s useful to recall this position taken by Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obaida last July, which exempted only “our brothers in Yemen” from a harsh judgment on the “betrayal by the leaders of the Islamic and Arab nation” of the heroic Palestinian resistance in Gaza. This, obviously, doesn’t mean putting all these states and leaders on the same level, but it does give due weight to the claims about the “Axis of Resistance” and the role (at its head) of the Iranian state.
https://pungolorosso.com/2025/07/20/una-notevole-dichiarazione-delle-brigate-al-qassam/