Iran war and geopolitics
24th March 2026
There can be little objective truth when thinking, talking or writing about war. It is the 25th day of the war launched by the USA and Israel against Iran. I have not watched the news but have preferred to listen to what I believe to be informed commentators: Alistair Crooke, Jeffrey Sachs, Daniel Davis, John Mearsheimer, the Duran, The Young Turks, Dialogue Works, Danny Haiphong, Sayyed Marandi, Drop Site News. All of these are telling a quite different story from the mainstream media. I prefer these people’s views because they are critical of the US and Israel.
The war is like an animal inside me. It burrows away turning and gyrating. It needs feeding with news of the war. I want to know more and more. I want to spend every minute ingesting words and images and opinions about the war. I can never know enough. Knowing everything would involve me being in it. But there will always be a deficit of knowledge because in a war all actions are unpredictable. No matter how algorithmic and game theoretically worked out everything is, the comp[lex interactions are incapable of being summarised. Things happen so fast. Both sides are controlling information outputs. This involves secrecy. Not even the commanders know what is happening or what is going to happen. We hear what we want to hear. We project our desires on to the complex of events and see what we want to see. I want Iran to win but I can hardly admit this. I dont believe war is a good thing. We should abolish war. We should create the social conditions that make it anachronistic. How can I want this victory? I want it from the same core inside myself as where the inner animal of the war moves. That is the place from which for the first time in my long life I witnessed events, the perpetrators of which I knew I could never forgive, the genocidal political elites of the West. It was like a taste in my mouth, a feeling behind my eyes. I’d never experienced this certainty before. I know damnation.
I look forward to the success of the Iranian government’s aim of making the USA and its allies withdraw from West Asia. Collateral with this will be the dismantling of the zionist state. Iran’s clear need is to ensure that the attacks they are suffering can never happen again. This involves a new security architecture for the region which unsurprisingly will be compatible with security architecture that Russia has been fighting for in its battle against the USA, NATO, and the Zelensky government in Ukraine. It is also compatible with the assurances that the People’s Republic of China require in relation to the attempts by the USA to weaken it by embattling Taiwan. These emerging frameworks are compatible with the USA’s adoption of the Western Hemisphere as its principal sphere of influence. This was outlined in their 2026 US National Defense Strategy and their 2025 US National Security Strategy.
Decline and withdrawal is a good thing for the USA only if the ruling group there are persuaded to accept this as a natural process. We know that this acceptance is unlikely because of residual cultural and institutional habits and material interests involved. It will be painful and difficult. But it must divest itself of the mantle of empire, the lure of absolute power in order to become a nation amongst others, looking after the well-being of its people.
This is clear from the UK’s problematic imperial decline. It has clung on to imperial functions in becoming a vassal state of the USA, and is vicariously living in a twilight zone of quasi-imperialist existence. In doing so it offers harbour for US arms and military bases, financial laundering services, so-called intelligence and special operations services. And the toxic legacies of racism and delusional ethnic supremacism that eat at its core persist. It lives the life of a half-dead nation, a ghoulish weird entity, shrouding the real history of its people in a damp fog, lauding the media-fed delusions of chosenism and exceptionalism. The post imperial numb-skulled elites suck the toxic elixir of a power that it subliminally and delusionally imagines it is the father of and is still honoured by.
Notwithstanding the craven statement by the G7 blaming Iran for reckless unjustifiable attacks, presumably with the expectation that they should expect to be attacked and accept the bombs without reproach or response, the UK and other European states turned down the opportunity to join the US efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This may be the first fissure that is a harbinger of the future withdrawal of the US from Europe. May this day come soon.
This would obviously be such a good thing for Europe because it would lay the basis for a reconnection to its bioregional roots. This is, of course, compatible with the system of security guarantees described above. The reintegration of Europe with the Eurasian continent would be a tectonic-like shift that would reverse a profound historical tendency that has its origins in the break up of the Roman Empire. It would entail turning away from the West and looking with realism and promise at the continent of which it is situated. To assess the magnitude of the events we are witnessing we have dig deep into the history of our island and the Eurasia..
From what perspective am I talking? In 1968 a photograph was taken of the Earth from the moon. This became an icon because it offered a visual register of a planetary consciousness. This has been called latterly ‘overview’ consciousness. It has had a profound impact on our ecological understanding but also, perhaps even more specifically, on our consciousness of ourselves as a species. This consciousness of our species being is an attribute of our sentience and knowing and is tied to, and refined by, the contemporary situation where our ‘global’ sense has been sharpened by complex economic interactions, particularly in energy, fertiliser and food markets but also in electronic technological tools and products.
Well before the ‘earthrise’ photograph was taken many human beings were aware of the earth’s geography. This knowledge, its relevance and prevalence shouldn’t be exaggerated. After all, it was the conquerors who produced the maps. However it is beyond reasonable question that the Earth has two main contiguous land masses: the Western Hemisphere and the Eurasian/African/Australasian super-continent. It was the English geographer McKinder who pointed out that whatever political power had dominance over the central area of the largest land mass, the Eurasian continent, would hold sway and influence over the human world. This was before the discovery of and dependence on oil and gas as a major source of human energy needs. His ‘heartland’ theory that asserted that the east of Europe, ie Ukraine/Russia and the area extending east towards Afghanistan was pivotal to the disposition of global political power. Iran is at the centre of this continental land mass.
It is in the light of the recognition of these geopolitical factors that the withdrawal of the current world hegemon’s becomes significant. It can be seen as a significant event in the history of the human species.
Since I received a training in ecology I have deepened my sense of how species are connected and rooted in their environment by the availability of, and access to, natural resources. Every species has a carrying capacity of environmental resources on which it depends. A maximum population of any species is determined by the the bundle of resources necessary for its life and survival. It was the adaptability of the modern human species (homo sapiens sapiens), originating in Africa, that led to its dispersal throughout the earth into diverse bioregions.
It cannot escape even the casual observer’s attention that the movement of human populations across the Eurasian continent during the first half of the first century of the first millennium of our recent history was a movement from east to west. This migration was due to profound climatic changes in the Eastern part of the continent before and at that time. This movement of the human species eventually created the European states that were the foundation of the Western Empire. It was this imperial project generated by the nations of the Western seaboard of Europe (England, France, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands) that the US gained dominance over during the successive wars of the twentieth century. It is the consequences of this massive transformational movement impelled and boosted by industrial capitalism that we are now facing. We are witnessing the undoing or reverse of this movement, the war of the end of the American Empire.
The line of human development of which this colossal movement is a part is the history of patriarchy, the basic structures of which were affirmed by the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago and were coincident with the development of field crop agriculture and animal husbandry and sedentism. Capitalism, and its crucial super-development, industrial capitalism, enabled by the availability of coal deposits on the island of Britain, is best understood as a generalisation, integration and refinement of patriarchy. Industrial capitalism based on fossil fuel extraction and exploitation is the highest and most totalised and interiorised form of patriarchy. The ascendancy of the United States to the position of dominance of industrial capitalism as the universally dominant production system is the last and final stage of this social formation. This is what we loosely call the ‘West’. As this system break up we can witness the regressive, patriarchal, infantile forms of behaviour in the leadership of the West.
I am not claiming that its demise will lead to an end of patriarchy, only to this specific and historically determined form of it. However its fall is precedent to the eventual fall of this hierarchical production-oriented brutal structure of internal and external dominance. The new states that will emerge from the current conflict will still be patriarchal but with climate change and the undermining of the carrying capacity for the human species that it represents, these will be transitional forms that will be dismantled and restructured from the inside according to emerging imperatives based on recognitions and actions that men and women living in radical equality will work out and achieve.
The best move is represented by human beings re-rooting their lives in the local bio-regional circumstances that surround them. This is based on appreciating that all human groups are manifestations of the beautiful and varied interactions of people with their earth and its natural resources. This view of human life is rooted in ecology and historical materialism. I am dismissing the central core values of liberal democracy and the pretensions of the demand for human rights which stand at the centre of this system of values and hide its bias and racism. I am asserting radical equality. This must involve the right of human beings to know how their lives are organised and to permit them to make their societies according to what they learn and know from their direct control over social processes. This is participation in ‘society-making’. This requires the upholding of justice, radical equality and transparency. It means a complete re-conception and re-building of the state. From the bottom up. It is in this respect that I consider the People’s Republic, for example, as an advanced form of social organisation.
The technologies of violence are being wielded by fewer and fewer people although they exert dominance over masses of people through the media and electronic information technology, a dominance which is fed to people along with the essential commodities on which they live. This is in direct contradiction to democracy. Yet the illusion of democracy is necessary for the internalisation of the system that commodity society requires. As the moral crisis of Western values deepens this consensus will fragment and disperse.
Humanity is not an idea to which real human beings may or may not conform but the living existence, history and being of human beings making their own history and working towards the radical equality and transparency that is essential to our species ability to face the challenges produced by our productivity and its transformational impact on environmental resources.
One last thought. Tolstoy in War and Peace elaborates a theory that the motive force that led to the French invasion of Russia in the early years of the 19th century was an semi-unconscious collective urge impacting masses of people to move across the Eurasian continent. This happened either towards the east or towards the west. Many comparisons have been made between what appear to be irrational and almost suicidal military moves made by both Napoleon and by Hitler. It is as if Russia with its transcontinental geography, its Eurasian dimensions, offered a kind of talismanic lure, an irresistible influence on Western Europeans. The same kind of suicidal irrational drives might also be attributed to Israel, as the outpost of the Western Empire in West Asia, the distended mini-hegemon envenomed by racist spite enacting its sense of purpose or destiny by attempting to destroy Iran, the mythic enemy from the east. I am certainly not the first to draw out the similarity between the Napoleonic/Hitlerite missions against Russia and the US/Israeli attack – irrational, illegal and immorally destructive and maybe suicidal – against Iran.
The current war is a pretext for thinking deeply about the motive forces of human history. Let the shock of the violence not numb us but bring us to vivid understandings of our history and future and, rather than render us passive in the face of massive events, help us participate more fully in our ‘society-making’.