The US’s strategic goal in the Middle East for decades has always been dominance for US economic interests. In line with this long-term strategy, the present US/Israel war against Iran is fundamentally about three interrelated things: oil, China, and nuclear weapons. 

But first, we must recognize what this war is NOT about. Despite what the corporate-backed politicians and billionaire-owned media suggest, the war is NOT mainly about the obvious personality defects of US and/or Israeli leaders, nor irrationalities of Islamic or Zionist actions based on historical theologies, nor a deliberate distraction from the Epstein files, nor the influence (and money) of the “Israeli lobby” that buys American politicians through AIPAC and others. All of these factors exist but they are NOT the root causes.  The US is NOT being jerked around by Israel (the “tail wagging the dog’ theory); clearly the US can cut Israel off and collapse its military and economy anytime it wants. But it chooses not to do so.

Iran NEVER posed an immediate direct military threat to the US². Unlike Israel, Iran does not (yet) have nuclear weapons, and (unlike Israel) has verifiably obeyed all international agreements concerning nuclear nonproliferation, and was open to inspection. Unlike the US and Israel, Iran has never initiated a full-scale war against another country in modern history and follows a “no first use” nuclear doctrine. US/Israel arguments about Iran being a threat are entirely fraudulent, much like the Gulf of Tonkin lie or the “domino theory” of Chinese expansionism that were the first excuses deployed against the public for the US invasion of Vietnam, or the “weapons of mass destruction” fabrication that hoaxed the American public into initially supporting the invasion of Iraq.

Oil

The current attack against Iran is not in response to anything specific that Iran has done recently. Rather, the US currently is trying to reverse Iran’s long-term recurrent tendency to defy rather than buckle under US demands for control of Iranian oil. The history “goes way back” as they say. In 1951, a progressive nationalist secular government was democratically elected by the Iranian people, headed by Mohammed Mosaddegh. His administration instituted social security, land reforms, and women’s rights. His government’s most significant policy was the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. The US CIA thereby was engaged in 1953 to overthrow the progressive Mosaddegh government and institute a harsh, basically fascist dictatorship under a previous royal family member (the Shah Pahlavi). For the next two decades, the Shah then allowed foreign companies to control 80% of Iranian oil production, thereby pleasing private Western oil interests. Illegal detentions and torture of domestic protestors of both the religious right and the intellectual left became common in the Shah’s regime.

The Shah’s monarchist rule engendered deep opposition among the people of Iran, and he was overthrown in 1979. It is this event that the US has been trying to reverse ever since. Ever since 1979, the US has tried to overthrow the Iranian government and seize back control of Iranian oil, with tactics including CIA subversion, kidnappings, killings, and attempted invasions through proxy armies. 

One proxy army was that of neighboring Iraq under Saddam Hussein, who the US supported at the time although he was known as a dictator.  In 1982, the US (and Germany) supplied Iraq with arms, money, and materials to make chemical weapons with which to attack Iran in the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran War. The direct US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 to 2021 had direct motivations (in part, control of Iraq’s oil and control of Afghanistan’s rich lodes of lithium and rare earth minerals). Neither nation was defeated. But if they had been defeated, that would have enabled the US to militarily surround Iran, with Iraq on the long western border and Afghanistan on the long eastern border. The US also imposed a long series of severe economic and banking sanctions on Iran ever since 1979, in an effort to foment a counter-revolution. The present attack on Iran is clearly not new: it is a continuation of the policy of the last 47 years.

Control of Middle East oil is the real reason that the US supports Israel as a military arm. That support has little to do with moral sympathy for the descendants of the surviving victims of the World War II Holocaust. Prior to 1979, Israel was friendly with the dictatorial Shah regime in Iran. But since then, Israel (like the US), has carried out multiple covert assassinations and bombing operations on Iranian soil. Back in 1986, then Senator Joseph Biden announced how Israel provided the US with an essential military foothold in the Middle East. He said that supporting Israel “is the best three billion dollar investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her (US) interests in the region.” The US and Israel share an extensive and deep overlap in military, intelligence, military secrets, surveillance, and high tech weaponry industries. So Israel is not jerking around the US; both nations have common interests, with the US the dominant partner because it is much larger and supplies all the money.

Given the history, it is no surprise that Iran feels threatened by both the US and Israel and especially by the combination of the two. The present unprovoked attack by the US and Israel proves Iran was right feeling that threat. As a defense, Iran has established close ties with foreign political parties and resident armed militant groups in the Middle East including Hezbollah (in Lebanon), Houthis (in Yemen) and Hamas (in Palestine).

But what does the phrase “control of oil” mean? The US itself already has a lot of oil because of environmentally destructive fracking in our heartland. But the ability to control the international supply provides the controller, at will, the power to turn on or off the spigot and affect prices to both “adversaries” and competitors.  A prominent example of this kind of “control” is Venezuela’s forced cut-off of oil exports to China right after the Jan 2026 US kidnapping of the Venezuelan president. The US did not have a dire need for Venezuelan oil but wanted to be sure that China would get little of it.

China

Ever since WWII, the US has been the dominant economic power in the world. More precisely, US-based corporations have been the dominant power. But corporate power is an ever-shifting shapeless monster, as corporations buy and sell and merge and align and compete with each other, even (or especially) across legacy national boundaries, always in the interest of the bottom line, always seeking markets, lower wages, fewer live human employees, fewer environmental safety restrictions, etc. But since about 2010, the shifting has developed a new reality: the rise of China. China, partly capitalist and partly socialist, has become the world’s second largest economy and is headed toward becoming the largest. The US is predicted to lose its absolute economic dominance in international manufacturing (it already has) and in finance (coming soon but not quite yet). This pending loss stimulates a kind of desperation among sections of the US corporate elite, a need to secure its hegemonic control over uncontested areas of the world and to gird for war over contested regions.

Some “globalist” US corporations – some of the largest – have deep investments in China and want continued cooperation there. But others – mainly more US national-based ones – find China to be a dire threat, as China produces more and better products, and sells them more cheaply around the world. Any corporate-bought US politician (i.e., most of them) will find themselves pushed and pulled by this tension among the lobbyists representing the divergent interests of capitalists. 

The US corporate elite class may be unified internally in their opposition to sharing its wealth with working people (who are the real enemy from their perspective), but it still does have a range of views, depending on where its investments reside. Some in that class want the US policy to “pivot to Asia” (meaning East Asia), directly competing with China over land, resources and military power. Others want to place a hegemonic economic and military clamp upon the Western Hemisphere (South and North America, including Greenland). But the Middle East remains a consensus zone of interest and contention, both for its oil and its strategic location near shipping lanes around the Red Sea and Persian Gulf.

This context explains why the US urgently wants to take back Iran after the debacle of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and why it uses Israel to achieve that goal. The goal is NOT to “protect Israel”. In fact, the US policy greatly endangers the people of Israel, as they currently experience heavy retaliatory bombing after foolishly poking a hornet’s nest. 

Likewise, the US policy is NOT molded just by the “Israel Lobby”, a circle of super-rich donors in the US consisting of Bible-thumping Zionist Jews and Christians who boast of their ethnic or moral superiority, allegedly granted to them thousands of years ago by a supernatural being. As usual in history, organized religion is used as a tool of the dominant economic class to secure property and recruit fanatics. It is true: the Israel Lobby buys US politicians and staffs executive offices and mainstream media outlets, while smearing, denouncing, and harassing (and sometimes getting the government to beat and deport) many people, including many US Jews who do not support Zionism. 

But the real engine driving this war is the pressing need felt by the US capitalist class to slow its decline relative to China, in part by securing control of oil in the Middle East. Securing that control, with all its world-wide geopolitical benefits may well involve nuclear weapons. Introducing nuclear weapons into a conventional conflict is a well-established part of US nuclear strategy.

Nuclear weapons

Many nuclear weapons experts in the US now agree that the world is closer to nuclear war than ever before. The most-likely immediate finger on the trigger is that of Israel, which currently is subject to an ongoing beating from Iran’s (non-nuclear) missiles and drones. The beating from Iran is universally recognized as retaliatory self-defense, launched only after the unprovoked joint US/Israel bombing beginning on Feb. 28 against Iranian civilian and military facilities, schools (including elementary schools), hospitals, and water supply infrastructure; creating toxic air-pollution; and including targeted assassinations of officials. If Israel gets to the point where it feels it cannot take any more punishment from the Iranian retaliation, it will likely order nuclear bombing of Iran. Then the “gloves are off”, and Iran (or more likely its allies Russia and China) may respond with nuclear weapons, even after weeks or months. Fallout in radioactive clouds will be world-wide, with few areas exempt. So it is important, even essential, for Americans to be completely clear about what is going on, in a confrontation that, at first, seems so far away, but may well become world-wide as long-lasting cancer-producing toxins appear in our air and water and food.

The present attack on the Iranian homeland may well convince the Iranians (and many other nations) that, going forward, it is a good idea to possess a small stock of nuclear weapons to deter a future attack on their territory.

US nuclear threat-making that involves Iran is not new: it has been going on for eighty years, because of issues around the control of oil. Back in 1946, Iran was a major target of world powers as the US and the Soviet Union made competing oil concession claims. The Soviets tried to enforce, with tanks, a WWII agreement between the US, Britain, and the USSR to split Iran’s oil. Betraying the prior agreement, the US delivered an ultimatum in March, 1946: either remove your Soviet troops from northern Iran in 48 hours or “we” (the US) will nuke “you” (the USSR). The USSR withdrew in 24 hours. 

Nuclear threats in the Middle East have not always been about Iran, but also about other places in the Middle East as well. According to President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s own statements, nuclear threats directed against the Soviet Union have been invoked in the course of numerous Middle Eastern crises (for example: the 1956 Suez crisis; the 1970 propping up the King of Jordan; and the 1973 Arab attempt to retake lands stolen by Israel in 1967) to maintain US dominance in the Middle East, bolster Israel, and keep the USSR out.

The Future

Essentially, the war’s three participants – Iran, Israel, and the US – are all fighting a war against the future. The governing theocracy in Iran did not start this war. At least that fact is to their credit. But the Iranian theocracy has been fighting for decades against the best of modern humanitarian ideas, like women’s rights, freedom from religious oppression, and real secular democracy. Israel has been fighting (even with genocide) the modern idea that all people everywhere have equal value and none have been especially selected for favors by a supernatural being. And the US has been fighting against the modern ideas that oil as a fuel is fast becoming dangerous to the environment and thereby obsolete, and that the military and nuclear bullying required to seize and control it is exceedingly dangerous. It is ironic that the US corporate ruling class (now called the “Epstein class”³) considers China to be a threat. China, despite all the defects in their own system, at least follows a fossil fuel-free path to the future with regard to pioneering solar power and batteries. Hopefully, our future will include the development of a mass movement of ordinary Americans that forces the ruling elites to move away from war.

Footnotes

1. Daniel Axelrod is a Professor Emeritus of Physics from the University of Michigan. He is a co-author (with physicist Dr. Michio Kaku) of the book “To Win a Nuclear War”, South End Press, 1987. He has taught a full semester full credit course at the University of Michigan entitled “Science and Strategy in the Nuclear Arms Race”. Currently a resident in Siskiyou County in far northern California, he has worked with several groups including Siskiyou Progressive Alliance, We Advocate Thorough Environmental Review (W.A.T.E.R.), and the Siskiyou Community Alliance.

2. Iran had absolutely NOTHING to do with 9/11. That act was done by the nongovernmental group Al Qaeda. Iran has always consistently opposed Al Qaeda. But in a stunning reversal, the US government now supports Al Qaeda in its takeover of the government in Syria.

3. The Epstein files confirm the existence and functioning of a large international circle of billionaires, corporations, and financial institutions, involved in money laundering, arms sales, blackmail, bribery of government officials and royalty, financial price manipulation, and contract awarding. Much of that is illegal, both nationally and internationally, and includes, but goes far beyond, the crimes of human trafficking and sexual exploitation of minors that are the focus of the corporate media.