More than rhetorical, this is the lived, material reality imposed on Iranians since 1953 for the crime of claiming their own resources. While by no means the first colonial intervention, Operation Ajax introduced a new paradigm of the postwar colonial West: a more efficient method of controlling resources without the costly business of physical occupation.
The national flag is raised, the government adopts a native name, but the nation’s independence is subdued through financial coercion, coups, proxy wars and sanctions. The methods changed, the $10 trillion per year extraction from the Global South did not. Fast-forward through more than 80 Western interventions around the globe, and we find ourselves back in Iran where the first casualty of the neocolonial order has returned to haunt its architects.
Punishment as policy
Any challenge to Western hegemony must be punished, lest the dominoes begin to fall. Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, and the Philippines before them, were all made examples of. Sure enough, when Iran finally disposed of the Pahlavi puppet regime in 1979, Washington and Europe did not waste time on diplomacy. Instead, they unleashed their neighborhood proxy, Saddam Hussein, armed with European chemical weapons and US intelligence. The resulting massacre lasted for 8 years, killed hundreds of thousands and devastated Iran’s economic and demographic foundations.
Facing an existential invasion, the new Islamic government consolidated power and cracked down on the progressive movements that had helped bring it to power -a predictable outcome that the architects in Washington and Europe welcomed under their emerging “Green Belt” strategy. They knew well that democracy and prosperity do not survive wars.1A fact too familiar to the military-age men held hostage in Ukraine since day one of the NATO-Russian war.
When the bombs ran out, the war machine put on a new suit: sanctions, stolen assets, assassinations and sabotage. Why allow a decolonial movement to benefit its people when you can force it into reactionary militarism? The results are well documented. Western sanctions alone have caused a 17% shrinking of Iran’s middle class every year since 2012; tens of millions of people stripped of comfortable lives in an internationally applauded collective punishment.
Globally, unilateral EU and US sanctions have caused an estimated 38 million excess deaths, half of them children. No media headlines. No memorials. Just a silent bureaucratic genocide.
The Neocolonial circus
Today, the neocolonial playbook is so well rehearsed it looks effortless. Starve a country, isolate it and attack it until the population suffers and many are forced to flee. On cue, a theater of outraged politicians and human rights experts spring to life with condemnations and performative concern. The media joins the stage to manufacture a selective start date for history that conveniently omits the West’s role in creating the crisis.2When General Wesley Clark leaked the Pentagon’s 2001 plan to take down seven countries in five years, he didn’t bother with pretexts. He knew the loyal western media would manufacture them on the fly, regardless of which oligarch is currently for sale at the White House.
Venezuela achieved the greatest global improvement in Human Development Index under Chavez, yet after 20 years of US coup attempts and sanctions, its suffering is blamed on Caracas. Cuba, choked by the world’s most suffocating embargo and blocked from buying fuel, is lectured on economic mismanagement and the path is cleared for another colonial intervention. To no surprise, when Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso expelled French forces in 2022, Europe and their African neocolonies immediately responded with a campaign of destabilization, sanctions and coup attempts that continues to this day.
Colonial powers also have a convenient habit of creating the enemies they later use to justify their lucrative perpetual wars.
The US cultivated Islamic State in Syria as a counter to Russian and Iranian influence until they became redundant. It funded the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the progenitors of the Taliban, before turning them into the justification for a new war. Israel nurtured Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO, and now uses them to justify the Gaza extermination. Today, Washington backs terrorist groups like HTS in Syria; tomorrow, they may become another pretext.3The only difference today is the refreshing honesty with which Washington now justifies its kleptocratic campaigns.
Iran’s anti-Western flame, its CIA trained security-apparatus, its militarism, even the Shia resistance lore that sustains it, are not innate features of Iranian society. They were forged in the 1953 coup and hardened through 73 years of neocolonial warfare and strangulation.
Love it or hate it, the Islamic Republic is an enemy of the West’s own making.
The colonized
In Western capitals, cinemas, lunch rooms and in academic halls Iranians are applauded for parroting the colonial script.
This pathology is well diagnosed: the colonized individual is constantly aware of themselves through the stereotypes projected onto them. To assert an identity outside of these confines is to always seek approval from the imperial society. This ‘colonial dependency’ means taking any opportunity to defend the war crimes of the master and downplay the empire’s role in destroying their own culture.
The exiled MAGA Iranians have a lot in common with the American original: they have reason to be angry and disenfranchised, but lack the context to identify the root cause of their misery. Throw in a romanticized vision of a fictitious “glory days” and a not so subtle dash of racism and Islamophobia, and you’ve got the perfect imperial cheerleader, complete with Israeli flags and pom-poms.
Meanwhile, the historically educated leftists, usually unforgiving in their opposition to the Islamic Republic, aren’t taking the bait. They recognize this war for what it is, and whatever grievances they have with the government will not be settled by the US and their NATO allies murdering civilians and fueling the very hardliners they oppose.
Similarly, the ethnic minorities, while having clashed with the government for decades, are well familiar with outside interference. Despite tremendous pressure and promises from the West, most Kurdish groups have heeded the warnings from their comrades in Syria and Türkiye, and refused to become proxies of the foreign powers.
Then there are the European vassals, clinging to the embarrassing fragments of empire. Not out of obligation, but out of a deep, unspoken fear that they might one day suffer a fraction of the violence they have inflicted on the global south.
In the morning they are cuddling Al-Qaeda leaders like al-Julani in their Parisian palaces, by the afternoon they are criminalizing Muslims at home for their dress code. They may chant ‘human rights’ when it is convenient and censor journalists when it is not. Not even an insincere threat of suspending strategic partnership with Israel, the last stronghold of European settler-colonialism, the liberal pretense long since abandoned and European racial hierarchy laid bare once more.
Now, their mass media will work overtime to maintain a shred of dignity in the face of total capitulation to the American empire. Europe will cower behind its fortress borders4Borders which claim the lives of 8 000 migrants every year. as it slowly fades into global irrelevance.
A new West Asia
Operation Epic Fury was dead on arrival. Washington built its technofeudal echo chambers so tight they started believing their own press releases.
The empire’s own analysts explicitly warned them: the leader of the Pahlavi cult had little grassroots support in Iran. The war and a campaign of assassinations would do nothing but unify the country against a foreign aggressor. But the echo chamber is fueled by hubris and shareholder profits, not rationality.
The truth is, America lost this war on day one.
They lost the moral war when they bombed a girls’ school and sports complex in the first hour of the campaign.
They lost the spiritual war the second they made a martyr of a leading Shia cleric.
They lost the attrition war by funneling massive military contracts to expensive, over-engineered systems produced by the for-profit military industry.
And they lost the strategic war when they ignored their own military analysts in favor of the delusions of think-tank yes-men.
The Islamic Republic is now more assertive in the region, more hard-line domestically and, to some, even vindicated in their spending on military and regional proxies.
So what’s left for the empire? The tantrum phase.
The colonial West will fall back to its old systems to keep the global south from developing, sabotage the economy, incite riots, seize assets, bully allies, anything to make sure Operation Epic Fury doesn’t look like an Iranian victory. Meanwhile the region is already moving on from under an eroding Western hegemony toward new locally managed security arrangements.
The dark poetry is that the post-colonial order in West Asia might end where it began: in 1953, with the overthrow of Iranian democracy.
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