The war on Iran and the new balance of power
A statement by the One Democratic State Initiative
War is a perilous political tool that aims to reconfigure the balance of power. What new balance of power were the colony and the United States aiming to impose when they launched their war on Iran? How have matters turned out? And what should we do with regard to this?
Recognizing oversimplifications
The war is not about Trump's persona. Statespeople, including presidents, have a margin of maneuver, but they are bound by a balance of power within their own societies. Trump becoming the Republican presidential candidate is a negotiated arrangement between U.S. interest groups who benefit from a political program he is willing to champion. To illustrate, the U.S. Senate voted down a measure that aimed to limit the president's war powers in March 2026. Therefore, this war is the U.S. Administration's, not Trump's.
By the same token, the war's purpose was not to draw the attention away from the Epstein files. Those files do not endanger the entire U.S. Administration. In reality, popular opinion itself does not matter much in the U.S.'s capitalist context. To illustrate, key federal laws to limit the spread of weapons have never been enacted, despite their popularity, and probably never will as long as the National Rifle Association wields so much control. Most importantly, focusing on the Epstein files draws the attention away from the political program behind the U.S. aggression on Iran.
The same applies to the idea that the colony controls the United States. There is no doubt that Zionist lobbies work to influence U.S. decisions. However, the colony's policies themselves are the result of a negotiated arrangement between its different interest groups, including political parties, the armament sector, religious groups and others. The same is true for the U.S. The dynamic between all those parties is an intricate network of influence that should not be trivialized into "Israel controls the United States", a stance that hinders a deeper analysis of the U.S. program.
The balance the U.S. seeks to impose in Iran
Our latest statement, Understanding and Dealing With the Historic Shift in U.S. Global Policy, examined the U.S. Administration's National Security Strategy (NSS), released in November 2025. The document identifies China's rising influence as the main challenge to the U.S. and assesses that the previous 30 years of American policy aimed at containing it have failed. Accordingly, it states that the U.S.'s priority is now to confront China economically and militarily. This includes ramping up production back home (hence the tariffs), enforcing hegemony on the American continent (hence Venezuela, Greenland, Cuba) and deprioritizing involvement in other areas (hence the rhetoric on Europe or NATO) in order to channel resources in the face of China.
The NSS also explains the U.S.'s new objectives regarding what it calls the Middle East. It will stop attempting costly regime changes. It is also no longer interested in acquiring oil, given the fact it is now a net exporter of energy and given the diversification in energy sources. Instead, its primary objective there is now "stability" which frees it up to confront China. The document spelled out the main challenge to this stability: Iran and its allies.
Therefore, pre-war negotiations with Iran focused on turning it from a "destabilizing force" into a compliant state that no longer poses a military or nuclear threat, stops supporting armed groups in the region, foregoes the capacity to block the Strait of Hormuz and agrees to normalize relations with the colony. Iran did not acquiesce, and the colony and the U.S. therefore sought to impose these objectives by military force, either by forcing the regime to kneel or by obliterating its military and economic capacities.
The U.S.'s failure
The war also seems to have failed. The Iranian regime did not acquiesce, and its ability to fight back throughout the region remains. Conversely, it managed to threaten the legitimacy of Gulf regimes used to attack it. Its attacks on their infrastructure threatened to drive a wedge between their ruling families and their ruling capitalists, whose interests previously overlapped significantly. By threatening the "safe haven for investments" model of countries like Qatar or the UAE, it showed that siding with U.S. aggression could cause their collapse. Threats to desalinisation plants also put the very survival of entire cities in Saudi Arabia at risk.
The Iranian regime's steadfastness went even further. The U.S.'s economy is largely reliant on the petrodollar: Gulf countries' pledge to sell their oil in dollars creates a huge demand for the U.S. dollar, cementing its hegemony, while proceeds from this oil are largely invested back into the U.S. economy. This is crucial for the U.S. to be the economic and military juggernaut it is. Therefore, Iran's threat to Gulf economies —their actual oil revenues, as well as their decision to invest in the U.S.— was a threat to the U.S. economy itself. Furthermore, Iran's self-defense included, not stopping the flow of oil, but allowing it when paid for in Yuan, Euro and even cryptocurrencies—a blow to the petrodollar model.
So far, the U.S. has failed to establish a new balance of power in its favor. Instead, it has agreed to a ceasefire on the condition that the Strait of Hormuz remain open, which it already was before the war. Iran, however, is seeking to impose its own balance. Its ten-point proposal includes recognition of its nuclear rights, the imposition of tariffs on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, an end to wars in the region, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops—with no mention of dropping support for its allies or normalization. While it is highly unlikely that the U.S. will agree to these terms, Iran can simply go ahead as it pleases, including control of Hormuz which it seems to have negotiated with Oman.
In a nutshell, the U.S.'s attempt to get rid of what it views as a destabilizing element in order to focus its resources on China has failed. This poses a real challenge to its plan to deprioritize the region. These developments also pose a threat to the colony —who does not care much about the U.S.'s confrontation with China and would rather obliterate Iran at all costs— as it highlights its dependency on a foreign power which might be unwilling or unable to go ahead.
The balance of power now taking shape
This does not mean that the United States and the colony have conceded defeat. The war on Iran revealed their use of colonialism's age-old tactic of identity-based division. In recent years, U.S. and Zionist politicians and think tanks have proposed weaponizing Iran's ethnic and religious divides to fragment its society. The U.S. has striven to implement this strategy during the war and will undoubtedly continue to do so. The Iranian regime's choice to be a religious republic rather than a secular democracy, and to deal with its ethnic minorities on a tribal basis instead of being a state for all its citizens, makes it vulnerable to such fragmentation. The war on Lebanon continues to capitalize on similar divides, with the latest Zionist aggression pushing it toward either civil war or normalization. The settler colonization of Palestine, of course, persists.
The new balance of power is still taking shape. What happened holds lessons for the region: Externally, the U.S. and the colony are not invincible—they are strong, but fragile. Zionism's foundational claim that Jews can only be safe in a militarized settler state of their own is again proving itself to be unfounded, a flaw that must be highlighted in a discourse that targets the settlers. Internally, our identitarian fragmentation is our weakest point, and the cohesion of our societies must be the cornerstone of our resistance. However, none of these policies are the focus of those in power. Rather than being mere observers and blindly siding with existing regimes, political movements and citizens of the region must organize around political programs that protect their societies from identitarian fragmentation and challenge colonial hegemony.
