Notes from the Editors (of Monthly Review)

The roots of the current US and Israeli War on Iran go back 73 years to the CIA coup that overthrew the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 following the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Washington reinstalled the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had earlier fled the country, affirming his role as an absolute monarch. Under the Shah’s brutal dictatorship, Iran operated as a subimperial power in West Asia, constituting a crucial part of the US empire. During these years, Washington supported an ambitious nuclear programme in Iran. In late 1978, massive protests against the Shah’s regime began, culminating in the 1979 Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, overthrowing the Shah and freeing the country from US domination. During the revolt, students broke into the US embassy, taking over fifty US hostages. This led in turn to a failed US military intervention to free the hostages, who were later released by Iran. In 1984, the Reagan administration declared that Iran was a “state sponsor of terror” and introduced economic sanctions. Washington backed Saddam Hussein in the Iraq-Iran War (1980-1988), while secretly supplying Iran with weapons part way through the war in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra Scandal.
Following the 1990-1991 Gulf War with Iraq and the decline at the time of Soviet power, soon to be followed by the demise of the USSR itself, Washington experienced a “unipolar moment” in which it sought to dominate the entire world. Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Paul Wolfowitz told General Wesley Clark at that time that Washington had a decade to carry out regime change in West Asia and elsewhere, following the vacuum left by the absence of the Soviet Union on the world stage, before new global powers arose. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Clark was informed by a general at the Pentagon that the US had decided to “take out seven nations in five years starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, and finishing off [with] Iran.” In 2002, George W Bush declared that Iran was part of the “Axis of Evil” along with Iraq and North Korea.
Although Iran was a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Washington classified its nuclear industry, inherited from the Shah, as a potential nuclear weapons threat, and as a justification for coercive actions against it. From 2013 to 2015, Washington, under Barack Obama, conducted extensive high-level talks with Tehran, in which all five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany took part, arriving at an agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, limiting Iran’s nuclear development in exchange for the easing of economic sanctions. The deal capped Iran’s enrichment at 3.67 percent for 15 years, far below the level of enrichment needed for nuclear weapons. In 2018, the US under Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the agreement and imposed sanctions once again on Iran. In 2020, the US assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, head of the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In 2023, the Joe Biden administration agreed to release $6 billion of the $100 billion in Iranian assets frozen globally by the US since 2018, in return for the freeing of five US citizens held by Iran (while Washington was to release five Iranians that it had imprisoned). The prisoner exchange occurred. However, Washington reneged on its side of the bargain, refusing to release the funds.
At the beginning of the second Trump administration, a controversy arose in the US Senate confirmation hearings for Elbridge A Colby, Trump’s Under Secretary of Defence for Policy. Neoconservative senators tied to Israel challenged Colby’s less than hawkish position on Iran and his emphasis instead on a direct confrontation with China in line with the New Cold War on China. Trump’s tariff war targeted China especially, with tariffs aimed at Beijing in 2025 raised at one point to 145 percent. However, Washington was forced to back down in November 2025, when Beijing retaliated with stringent export controls on rare earth minerals threatening the viability of the entire high-tech sector in the US. Washington therefore shifted its immediate strategic emphasis from the Indo-Pacific to West Asia and Latin America, seeing this as part of its overall New Cold War on China. This included not only support for Israel’s genocidal occupation in Palestine, its wars on Syria and Lebanon, and its war aims against Iran, but also Washington’s direct military incursions in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the January 3, 2026, military abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Already in June 2025, in the midst of negotiations with Tehran, the US and Israel had launched a twelve-day war on Iran, including US missile attacks on three key nuclear facilities. In February 2026, the US and Iran entered nuclear talks in Geneva, mediated by Oman. On February 27, Oman’s foreign minister announced that as a result of the talks Iran had agreed to degrade its stocks of nuclear material to “the lowest possible level” consistent with a commercial nuclear energy industry, while both Washington and Tehran exhibited optimism about the talks. A day later, the US and Israel launched surprise AI-facilitated attacks on Iran that Trump later compared to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, assassinating the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and hitting a thousand targets in 24 hours, including the killing of at least 150 schoolgirls in the strike on the Minab school in Iran.
The 2026 war on Iran is being waged by the US with an official military budget of around $1 trillion a year, and by Israel with a military budget of $48 billion a year, against a country with a military budget of $7 billion a year. US and Israeli strategy anticipated a quick victory and regime change through the decapitation of Iranian political and military leaders. However, Washington underestimated the coherence of the Iranian state and society, with a new Supreme Leader being quickly chosen ensuring political continuity, and new military leaders taking the place of those assassinated. Moreover, Iran’s military structure was a decentralised one with a strategy of defence worked out well in advance. Iran’s conventional military assets were hard hit in the US and Israeli attacks. Consequently, the weight of the war on its side is being carried out to a large extent by the IRGC, specialising in asymmetric warfare and trained specifically to defend the country against the US. Iran from the start carried out massive attacks on the radars of Terminal High Altitude Area Defence systems in US bases throughout the region, thus severely compromising the missile defence systems on which the US forces and the Israeli military relied, with the result that the Iranian missile attacks were far more effective than anticipated by the aggressor nations. Iran was also able to degrade US military bases and force the retreat of US aircraft carriers.
During the Iraq-Iran War, Iran acquired a few Scud missiles from Libya and North Korea, which it proceeded to re-engineer. It now has a variety of missiles of different ranges stored in underground tunnels. They are fired from mobile missile launchers. In addition, Iran relies heavily on inexpensive drones. Its low-cost Shahed drones can be launched off the back of a commercial-grade truck. The US military, meanwhile, in seeking to shoot down these drones, utilises munitions that may cost as much as a million dollars per shot. Although the US and Israel have air superiority, 39 advanced US military aircraft were brought down in the first 40 days of the war. The main Iranian navy has been destroyed. However, the IRGC operates a ‘mosquito fleet’, consisting of hundreds of armed speedboats that are highly flexible and hard to track down and that can operate in swarms against larger vessels. It also has dozens of midget submarines. All this means that the key Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian control.
Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which over 20 percent of world oil trade passes, along with about a third of the world’s nitrogen fertiliser, has been its most potent weapon in the war, threatening the US and world economy, as oil supplies are reduced and prices rise. Iran allowed its own oil tankers and those of a few other countries not allied with the West to pass through the strait during the war, and it continued its trade with China. In order to pressure Iran, therefore, the US, even in the midst of a ceasefire in which Iran opened the strait, erected a naval blockade on Iranian ports designed to prevent Iran from selling its oil, leading Iran to close the strait again in response. Attempts by the US to force an opening of the Strait of Hormuz have all failed. Negotiations have been blocked by continuing hostilities on the part of the US and Israel, the ending of which is Iran’s first condition for going forward.
The US, lured by Israel, has entrapped itself in an imperialist war that it cannot win. Around two-thirds of the US population opposes the war, which is hitting consumers hard in the form of increased oil prices. Outside of defence contractors and oil companies, most US business is also non-supportive, at most adopting a wait-and-see attitude. There is no doubt that Iran has handed the US and Israel a strategic defeat on the world stage, offering a powerful deterrence in defence of its sovereignty. A continuation of the war will have devastating economic consequences not only for the US, Israel, and Iran, but also for the entire world, and could potentially induce a wider world war. Nevertheless, there is every sign that the US is engaged in a “forever war,” even if direct hostilities were to cease for a time. An international movement for peace, encompassing a global struggle against imperialism, is therefore more essential than ever.
The above is a slightly revised version of an article originally written in April by MR Editor John Bellamy Foster for the German Quarterly, entitled “The U.S. Forever War on Iran.”
Courtesy Monthly Review July-August 2026 (Volume 78, Number 3)