“Iran’s problem with America is not new. It did not start with the so-called Syrian revolution… Iran’s problem with America started in 1953 when America led a coup d’etat against the government of Mohammed Mosaddeq and against the will of the Iranian people who kicked out the Shah”
The history of the Islamic Republic of Iran cannot be separated from anti-imperialist struggle. Despite never having been colonised and being relatively well-developed (compared to pre-revolutionary Russia and China), pre-revolutionary Iran could be described as a ‘dependent country’, with its governance and stability being heavily subordinate to outside powers, namely the British Empire. 50 years before the 1979 revolution overthrew the ruling Pahlavi shahdom, Iran would experience two British and US-orchestrated coups in 1921 and 1953, and a joint-allied invasion during World War II. As such, the pre-revolutionary era saw Iran wage an intense struggle for control over its politics and its natural resources against the interests of foreign powers.
This struggle would also extend to Iran’s social life and cultural identity: between the shah-led ‘westernisation’ efforts at creating an artificial ‘Aryan’ national identity, separating Persian Iranians from Arabs, Islam, and the ‘Orient’; against both religious and secular thinkers who argued against an inauthentic identity, which would leave Iran more vulnerable to penetration by the West.
“Iran’s vengeance started a long time ago; but it is a nation with dignity and honour, and knows that the American presence is the problem. That the Israeli presence is the problem”
In this time, a revolutionary intellectual tradition would rise within Iran, which emphasised independence, sovereignty, and self-determination in politics, economics, and culture. The dominant revolutionary faction that would emerge from this would be led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who promoted an anti-imperialist revolutionary struggle through action-oriented Shia Islam.The Islamic revolution carried a theme of self-redefinition and third world empowerment, and was expressed not only as a struggle against the shahdom but as a war against imperialist aggression.
Since the revolution, the Islamic Republic has maintained a set of principles, which emphasise full economic and political independence, as well as third world empowerment and Islamic communitarianism. These principles are consistently upheld and balanced with any actions that Iran might take towards its own self-preservation. On its ascension, the Islamic Republic immediately cut ties with the Western-aligned Central Treaty Organisation, and became a major advocate for the Non-Aligned Movement, which continues in its advocacy for a multipolar world order today. The Iranian foreign policy outlook has generally been guided by a push to secure its own environment, which it does by balancing a diplomatic approach with a capacity for deterrence against outside aggression. On the one hand, Iran can have good transactional relations with the US, as was seen with the Iran-Contra affair and JCPOA, but it also has close relations with like-minded states such as Communist Cuba, Bolivarian Venezuela, and Sandinista-led Nicaragua. Domestically, Iran’s ruthless purges of political dissidents who it perceives as foreign backed show that it is ready to respond in the strongest way to all perceived threats to itself.
“They say that Iran exploits the Palestinian cause to spread Shiism. If so, why would it bother with 42 years of sanctions? Several hundred millions of dollars confiscated, and yet it still takes from its people’s food to support and sustain Palestinian resistance”
The shahdom was a beneficiary of the Western-aligned status quo, and as such, played an active part in countering liberation and revolutionary movements across the region. Most notably, the shahdom was also one of Israel’s closest regional partners, not only collaborating in military and intelligence, but also providing Israel with most of its oil imports.This was why, during the revolution, the US actively tried to preserve Iran’s institutions, especially its military apparatus, even after it had given up on the shah himself.
The loss of a ‘key link’ in the imperialist regional security apparatus was compounded by the revolution’s revival of political Islam as a revolutionary force, and its export beyond Iran’s own borders. The most famous example of this is the Iran-inspired Hezbollah movement in southern Lebanon, which was established thanks to centuries-old cultural and political ties between the two countries’ Shia communities. Hezbollah is now one of the most powerful regional actors in its own right, and their close ties with Iran would ultimately lay the foundations for what would become the Axis of Resistance today.
Unsurprisingly, the US and its partners, especially Israel, have tirelessly worked to undermine, contain, and at times, directly confront Iran: be it through sanctions, assassinations, propaganda campaigns, espionage, legitimising political dissidents, or backing foreign invaders. Evidently, western powers see Iran as a major threat to their interests, which has only reinforced Iran’s own fears of foreign aggression.
“Iran is the only country in the world that has a permanent clause in its budget, from the budget of Iranian people’s bread, that pledges support to the Palestinian revolution, regardless of its orientation: whether it was Fatah, the PFLP, the communists, anyone! It never intervened in our ideological conceptions of resistance”
The shahdom’s counterrevolutionary actions in the region would bring it into direct confrontations with Palestinian resistance factions, such as the Marxist PFLP, who themselves voiced strong support for the Iranian revolution. Conversely, the bonds of mutual support between Iranian and Palestinian revolutionaries can be traced back as far as the 1940s, and would become a major theme of the revolution:
After the revolution, one of the first actions of the Islamic Republic was to shut the Israeli embassy in Tehran and establish an office of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in its place. Fatah leader, Yasser Arafat, would then become the first major foreign leader to visit the country that same year. Subsequently, Iranian support for Palestine would diversify in a number of ways:
“First we destroy our relationship with Syria, then Iran, and then we go like ‘well we cannot defeat Israel through war, war is futile and destructive, and no one supports us”
Iran views Israel as a force of western imperialism who is in large part responsible for Iran’s own subjugation under the shah. The Palestinian struggle is therefore shared with Iranians, and drives Iran’s efforts to ensure, not only the survival, but the military capacity of the Palestinian resistance, thereby openly contradicting Israeli and Western efforts to isolate it. This has at times worked to the detriment of Iran’s own global position. For one, although Iran is not averse to some rapprochement with the US, its support for resistance movements across the region mean that it is still viewed as a threat to the status quo and therefore cannot gain more benefits from improving relations between the two countries. Naturally, this also extends to its relations with neighbouring Arab comprador regimes.
“These are a people who think, and know how to plan, and know exactly when to execute the deadly blow. Iran has been successful in its battles and has been working - principally for 42 years - to expel the American and the Israeli from this region. Not for the purpose of taking their place, but to deter their evil”
Israel’s reckless attack on an Iranian consulate in Syria, and assassination of several key figures in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, was reportedly months in the planning and aimed to deter if not outright provoke a response from Iran, who Israel clearly sees as the ‘central hub’ of regional resistance. Regardless, Iran, like any state, could not allow for such a blatant attack on its sovereignty to go unanswered, especially when a key component of Iran’s foreign policy strategy is to maintain its deterrence. After Israel refused to accept a ceasefire in Gaza in exchange for mitigating the response, Iran’s spectacular strike on April 14 was four-fold:
“Together, we fight for the emancipation of the land and the human. But to achieve that, the Arab nation has to be cleansed from the class of compradors, who’ve been taking over a large space in society, the compradors of idiocy, the compradors of NGOs, the compradors of sectarian strife, and the compradors of defeatist thought”
The most we can take away from moments like this is to test theories against practice, when ‘push comes to shove’ so to speak. Iran and the axis demonstrated their independence, their commitment, and the lengths to which they are willing to go should Israel and the West try to humiliate or intimidate them. In contrast, the US preventing Israel from launching a sufficient retaliation and thereby deliberately blunting its deterrence capacity to prevent more escalation, only confirms that Israel is incapable of taking major action without the consent of its patron.
April 14 did not result in a major confrontation between Iran and Israel but it did expose a serious shift in the status quo, as Israel and its Western backers will have to act much more carefully and less confidently in how they assert themselves in the region from now on. By extension, the lines between those local actors aligned with the united resistance front and those aligned with Western Imperialism have been clearly drawn and will likely become more visible in the confrontations to come.
But with US discourse still pressing for Israeli-Arab normalisation and for the neutralising of Iran and its so-called ‘proxies’, it would seem that the securitisation of Western regional interests by outsourcing to a coalition of local Western partners is still a top priority. The US does not want to keep allocating resources to protect its interests in the Middle East but it also needs to secure its exit before it pulls out completely. It still remains to be seen whether the approach of Western-aligned forces will be more aggressive or diplomatic in confronting resistance in future, but in any case, April 14 has brought the imperial/anti-imperial struggle in the Middle East to a new stage of development with significantly raised stakes.
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