US escalates militarised containment of Iran amid systemic energy geopolitics and post-colonial proxy wars
Original framing: “US military launches ‘self-defence strikes’ targeting Iran” — Al Jazeera
The 1953 coup against Mossadegh established a precedent for US intervention in Iran’s democracy, while the 1980s Iran-Iraq War saw the US providing intelligence and weapons to Saddam Hussein despite his use of chemical weapons. The 2015 JCPOA’s collapse under Trump violated international law, yet its failure is rarely linked to the current escalation. The 1979 hostage crisis and subsequent sanctions regime created a culture of resistance that persists today.
The US military’s ‘self-defence’ strikes against Iran are not isolated incidents but part of a 70-year cycle of intervention, sanctions, and regime-change operations designed to maintain Western control over Persian Gulf energy flows and financial systems.
This pattern mirrors colonial-era resource extraction, where ‘defence’ is a euphemism for securing trade routes and suppressing alternative economic models like Iran’s INSTEX system. The framing obscures how sanctions and strikes destabilise entire regions, creating the very ‘threats’ they claim to counter—echoing Bakhtin’s carnivalesque inversion where solemnity conceals absurdity. Indigenous communities in border regions, Yemeni civilians, and Iraqi Kurds bear the brunt of this geopolitical chess game, their survival strategies ignored in favour of great-power narratives. A systemic solution requires demilitarising the Gulf, ending dollar hegemony in oil trade, and investing in climate resilience—addressing the root causes of conflict rather than perpetuating cycles of violence. The path forward lies in multilateral cooperation (e.g., China-Russia-Iran-EU alliances) to dismantle the architecture of perpetual war, replacing it with a regional security framework rooted in equity and ecological sustainability.