Israel’s pre-dawn barrage—over two hundred precision-guided airstrikes on nuclear facilities and Revolutionary Guard command centres—was, according to U.S. officials, “a necessary response to an imminent threat.” The threat, of course, was Iran’s potential acquisition of a nuclear weapon, a threshold it has not yet crossed. The reality, however, is that this war, like so many before it, is not about defence, but dominance. And for those of us looking at the world through a Marxist lens, it is impossible to see it as anything other than a continuation of imperialist logic by other means.
The Israeli state, armed with an undisclosed but widely acknowledged nuclear arsenal, attacks a non-nuclear regional rival to prevent the latter from even attaining nuclear parity. This is not strategy. It is structural. It is the asymmetry of global power written in missiles and bunker-busters. In the imperialist world-system, as defined by Lenin and later theorists such as Samir Amin and Giovanni Arrighi, peripheral states are not permitted autonomy, certainly not military autonomy. Especially if it contradicts the interests of the dominant bloc. Iran’s sin is not simply uranium enrichment. It is its refusal to submit.
Capitalist Crisis and the Permanent War Economy
Underneath the moral spectacle of “pre-emption” lies a deeper, systemic necessity. Capitalism, in its current stage of crisis, increasingly relies on what William I. Robinson calls militarised accumulation. The global economy no longer generates sufficient productive profits. Instead, surplus capital flows into speculative finance, privatised infrastructure, and the war machine. What is war in this context if not stimulus? Each missile dropped over Isfahan is also a dividend to Raytheon, a contract extension for Lockheed Martin, and another year of budget increases for Shin Bet and Mossad.
“Each missile dropped over Isfahan is also a dividend to Raytheon.”
In the United States, where Donald Trump presides over his second term with a Cabinet indistinguishable from a weapons lobby boardroom, this war is already being woven into the fabric of domestic repression. The ICE raids, the military presence in Los Angeles, the clampdowns on protest—all are part of a broader strategy of control. War abroad, war at home. This is not hyperbole; it is dialectic.
Imperialism and the Spectre of Nuclear Apartheid
A Marxist analysis also demands we interrogate the ideology of nuclear apartheid. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, all nuclear states, have long dictated who may and may not possess “the bomb.” Israel, uniquely, is allowed to maintain nuclear opacity under the so-called “policy of ambiguity.” Iran, by contrast, is sanctioned, isolated, and now bombed for possibly seeking what Israel definitely has.
This is not simply about military balance. It is about geopolitical subordination. Israel functions as what Marxists might call a comprador militarist regime: a state embedded in the imperial architecture of global capital, performing the functions that Washington—or in earlier periods, London—prefers to outsource. It can act with impunity because it acts in service of the system.
“Israel functions as a comprador militarist regime: a subcontractor of empire.”
That system is imperialism: not just war for conquest, but the enforcement of uneven development. Iran is not allowed nuclear sovereignty because it threatens to disrupt the existing hierarchy of regional dependency. Were it to succeed, it might embolden others: not only state actors, but resistance movements, popular fronts, and class-based challenges to the petrodollar order.
Nationalism as Class Discipline
Within Israel, the attack also serves another purpose. Netanyahu’s domestic position is precarious. His coalition teeters under the weight of the brutal war in Gaza, of failing to free the hostages, corruption trials, settler violence, and economic protest. A war against the old enemy provides both distraction and cohesion. National unity becomes the temporary substitute for political legitimacy. This is the age-old bourgeois trick: when class contradictions threaten to break the façade of social harmony, invent an external enemy.
The same can be said of the Iranian regime, which will now respond with rhetorical fury, perhaps with missiles (it has already responded with 100+ drones) maybe via Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen, but always with an eye to internal consolidation. The real tragedy is that neither population wants war. The working classes of Tel Aviv and Tehran have more in common with each other than with their respective ruling elites. But those common interests are buried beneath rubble and rhetoric.
“The working classes of Tel Aviv and Tehran have more in common with each other than with their respective ruling elites.”
The Crisis of Socialism in the Periphery
It would be easy to frame this purely as an anti-imperialist story, and it mostly is. But Marxists must also resist the temptation to romanticise Iran’s leadership. The Islamic Republic, though a target of imperial aggression, is no friend of socialism: it represses trade unions, jails those on the left, and executes protesters—men and women alike. Its resistance to American hegemony is real, but it is not revolutionary. It offers a form of bourgeois anti-imperialism, nationalist rather than internationalist, clerical rather than emancipatory.
What is needed, and sorely lacking, is a socialist alternative that can link anti-imperialism with class struggle, that can oppose both Western militarism and domestic authoritarianism. Until such a force emerges, the people of the region are caught between the Scylla of empire and the Charybdis of reaction.
The Fire Next Time
The Israeli attack on Iran marks a new chapter in the long war for the Middle East, but it is not new in kind. It is a reiteration of imperialist logic in an era of capitalist decay. It reaffirms the global class hierarchy, maintains the illusion of security through perpetual war, and reproduces the very conditions that drive nuclear proliferation.
From a Marxist perspective, the only path forward is not more sanctions, not more airstrikes, not more diplomatic gamesmanship—but rupture. A rupture with the global system that makes these wars not just possible, but profitable. A rupture that demands solidarity from below: between dockers in Haifa and oil workers in Khuzestan, between protesters in D.C. and students in Shiraz. Anything less is complicity in a game whose end is always the same: death for the many, dividends for the few.
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