06.08.2026
%20(1)_art_full.jpg)
World order in disorder
Has Iran won its war with America? Has China’s century arrived? What about Russia and the war in Ukraine? Yassamine Mather interviewed Mike Macnair for the leftwing Iranian online channel, Jonbesh TV
YM: At the beginning of the war, many analysts, including some western strategists, did not expect Iran’s military to show such resilience. How do you assess the confrontation and its outcome on the ground? More broadly, did the war mark a real shift in the balance of power, or did it mainly confirm your earlier view that direct military intervention pushes the American hegemon deeper into an irrational, attritional quagmire?
I’m going to add one minor point here. Can you talk about those who argue that Iran has won this war, both amongst the international left, but also amongst commentators, academics and so on.
MM: The short answer is that it’s still very much too soon to tell. The idea that bombing was just going to straightforwardly knock down the Iranian armed forces was never a terribly plausible story. It reflects lobbying from Israel on the basis of their narrative of the extreme fragility of the Islamic Republic, which was supposed to be capable of being knocked down by small-scale interventions; and also ‘airforce lobbying’ of a kind which has recurred episodically since the 1920s - the belief that air power is sufficient to win wars.
That said, the other side of it is the Ukraine war, which is inextricably interlinked with the current war against Iran. In Ukraine, the US has been pursuing a policy of prolonged attritional warfare. And it’s not a ‘quagmire’ for the US to pursue such a policy, because the underlying situation of the US is radical dominance of global arms production. Which means that usually, at the end of the day, the US is going to be able to carry on bombing, carry on blockading and carry on with sanctions until the point when it finally exhausts its opponents.
The consequence is that assessment. We’ve had a series of ‘Iran has won’ stories: the war is over and Iran has won; the US has had to give up. The Memorandum of Understanding was the clearest one. But, at the same time, actually, it’s quite clear that the war is ongoing, that major strikes have carried on. Netanyahu was reported in The Times, before his meeting with Trump, saying he was going to urge that there should be no end to the war until there was regime change in Iran.
So it’s a bit like judging World War I at the end of 1914, and concluding that Germany is winning. So I’m not going to say Iran absolutely isn’t winning, but I think that, for Iran to actually win, we’d need to be talking about sinking the US fleet, rather than merely surviving under attack.
In one sense, survival is ‘winning’, but in another sense, it’s not, because it’s still the case that the world hegemon has the power to make life intolerable for you, has the power to inflict total destruction of infrastructure, has the power, eventually, to ‘Somalianise’, ‘Libyanise’ or ‘Syrianise’ its target states. It will take longer to do that, when it comes to the Islamic Republic, but at the end of the day the US can do it (that is, unless the US is actually militarily defeated).
I said, by sinking the US fleet. But it could equally be the case that, if the whole of the region goes up in flames, if the Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi regimes fall, then the US would be induced to back off - as Britain backed off on the question of Jewish settlements in the 1930s, when the whole of the Arab area (not just Palestine) went up in flames.
So, as I began by saying, ‘don’t know’ is the right answer to this question.
Multipolar
YM: You have argued against those sections of the left who are optimistic about a multipolar world order. You said that global capitalism still requires a hegemonic power, that multipolarity is a shortcut to world war. With the genocide in Gaza, devastation in southern Lebanon, tensions in the Red Sea, the war against Iran and the widening regional spillover of these conflicts, do you think we are entering the practical phase of that crisis? Have we moved to a situation where we can say there is multipolar anarchy, but not multipolar order?
MM: Well, it’s certainly the case that we haven’t moved into multipolar order, because multipolar order would imply the US backing down and accepting spheres of influence for the other major powers, and creating something like the 1815 Congress of Vienna agreement, or that of the 1884-85 Berlin Conference.
Equally, we haven’t moved into multipolar anarchy of the sort which one can argue existed between 1918 and 1939-40. The reason for that is the fact that we only entered into multipolar anarchy when it became clear that the UK was not capable of winning the 1914-18 war against Germany without US assistance; and then the consequence at Versailles, that the unwillingness of the US to let Britain and France off their debt obligations to the US in connection with the purchase of armaments in 1914-18 meant that Britain and France had to demand reparations from Germany and Austria, which produced ongoing instability. This condition of multipolar anarchy is caused by the fact that the war of 1914-18 did not yet knock over British world dominance. In 1940, the fall of France, Scandinavia and the Low Countries in spring 1940 knocked over the structural basis of British world hegemony and made the British actually dependent on the US. However, 1914-18 did create a condition of anarchy, which persisted until the conflict was resolved in 1939-45 - so we aren’t into that yet.
I want to be a bit cautious about this. I don’t think we are on the verge of a new 1914 (in which China, aggressively encircled by the USA and its vassals, would play the role of the Kaiser-Reich, aggressively encircled by the UK and its vassals in the early 1900s). But there’s a sense in which we may be near a new 1914. And in that case, we should analyse this chaos in the Middle East as being analogous to the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. These were the precursors to 1914, but not yet the outbreak of a world war.
YM: That’s very useful. Some argue that Russia and China are using Iran and other regional actors as a kind of geopolitical buffer: a kind of shield to absorb pressure that is coming from the west. I think you argued previously that China is currently not in a position to become the alternative hegemon. How do you read the current strategy pursued by Xi Jinping? Is China trying to build a new order, or simply securing a larger share of the existing disorder?
MM: I think we need to treat Russia and China separately. Apart from possessing nuclear weapons, Russia is very much a second-rank power. It is, in fact, not even properly characterised as sub-imperialist, I think. If Russia wins the war in Ukraine, and the US is unambiguously defeated, then Russia could become an imperialist power, but at the moment it definitely isn’t winning, and what seems to be on the agenda is actually the colonisation of Russia. We need to think of Putin from this point of view as analogous to Tipu Sultan, who was allegedly, in the British press, the great aggressor against the East India Company in the 1790s.
The US is seeking, and indeed actually succeeding, to drive Russia’s naval assets out of the Black Sea. It is seeking to get control of the Donbass, the Caucasus, and so on, and thereby the Caspian Sea. It is seeking also to trigger regime change in Moscow (the creation of a ‘new Yeltsin’) and, as a result of that, a break-up of the Russian Federation and the creation of a series of small states, which the US will be able to control directly - thereby enabling US control of what Halford Mackinder called the heartland (which means, essentially, the Caucasus, the Caspian, central Asia. The Putin administration is pursuing a defensive struggle against this existential threat from the US.
China is in a very different situation. China has been becoming more and more capitalist. I don’t think I’m going to say it’s completely capitalist, because it’s a complicated story, and it’s still got large state-controlled corporations, and a government that is more autonomous from capital than either ‘western’ or ‘southern’ states. China is unlike Russia, in the sense that, all the way through being a ‘communist regime’, there was an external financial capitalist class operating in Hong Kong and in Singapore, which, since the 1980s, has been, to a greater or lesser extent, reintegrated into Chinese capitalism. It was always a country with a much higher level of the forces of production than Russia.
Hence, in essence, in becoming more and more capitalist, China is driven towards imperialist operations, in the same way that the German Kaiserreich in the late 19th century was driven towards imperialism by virtue of capitalist industrialisation, and, in particular, the heavy industry sector became major lobbyists for German overseas investments and so on. China is driven towards overseas investments. It’s also driven towards competition with the United States at the highest of high-tech levels (again, just like the Kaiserreich was driven towards technical competition with the UK in the late 19th century).
It still remains the case that the US is absolutely dominant. It’s more dominant in the world than the UK was in the later 19th century. So I don’t think that Beijing is at present in a position to become an alternative hegemon. I do think Beijing could become, like the Kaiserreich, the battering ram which breaks down US hegemony, and forces the US into a more equal relationship with the European capitalist powers. But, at the moment, we’re nowhere near that sort of situation. And it’s clear, equally, that talk of India becoming a potential hegemon power is just not plausible.
So, are the Chinese trying to secure a larger share of the existing disorder? That, I think, attributes too much aggressive quality to what they’re doing. If we think about the Chinese navy, it’s been extended and pursued basing rights, because China has been drawn into overseas investments. But also, actually, because the US has pulled back from policing piracy - so that other states with large trade investments and large shipping industries have to pursue their own anti-piracy measures. Again, very similar to the dynamics of the later 19th century, in which the British navy, because of the enormous cost of Britain maintaining a navy bigger than the next two navies together, etc, began to pull back on ‘anti-piracy’ work, which depended on smaller ships, and more of them, and so on; and then other powers - France, the USA, Germany, etc - were driven to expand their own naval power to protect their own shipping.
The formulation of the question is, then, unhelpful.
Anti-imperialist
YM: Obviously, now we have the Houthis, who have declared a naval blockade against Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea. They are considering a system of tolls on commercial shipping. You have argued that US military doctrine depends on control, and this control includes strategic energy and trade routes. At a time when competition over transit corridors has become a burning issue, these asymmetric forces have managed to challenge America’s control over the flow of goods and energy. What is the class character of the forces in Yemen and Iraq? Would you consider them anti-imperialist, or militia-based actors seeking a share of regional trade routes?
MM: The first point is: is this a challenge to the US? My view of what the US needs is veto control. That is, not the ability to turn on the taps, but the ability to turn them off. And Iran (or for that matter the Houthis) turning off the taps themselves is not a challenge to the United States’ geostrategic control.
The US is self-sufficient in petrochemicals. Okay, it’s a bit more complicated, but it’s certainly not the case that the US itself needs oil to flow from the Gulf. Turning off the oil taps damages the Europeans, it damages China, it damages Japan, it damages the far-eastern countries more generally, but it doesn’t directly damage the US - unless its vassal states are so pissed off with its failure to turn the oil taps on that they rebel, which they aren’t doing at the moment.
If we were expecting to see a European or Japanese rebellion against the USA, we would expect to see a totally different sort of nationalism, as opposed to Alternative für Deutschland, Meloni, etc. These guys are Atlanticists. They may want to shift the balance a little bit, but they’re basically acting in the interests of the US, not against its interests.
The idea that this challenges the US is part of the left’s belief that Iran is defeating the US. It’s a misconception of what the US interest is in this stuff. The US interest is in holding its rivals in the ‘advanced capitalist’ countries in subordination. And that is achieved by closing off their access to oil. And here, in particular, we’re concerned with closing off Chinese access to oil. It doesn’t matter, from the point of view of the US, whether it’s the US which closes off the access, or whether it’s Iran and its allies in attempting to coerce the US.
Second question: an anti-imperialist movement, or simply militia-based actors seeking a share of regional trade routes? I think that’s a false counterposition. There is a sense in which nothing can be anti-imperialist which is not posing some positive alternative to the global regime of imperialism, and, in that sense, when the Islamic Republic says it is not anti-imperialist, that is perfectly accurate. The Islamic Republic is seeking a higher position in the global hierarchy, not to get rid of that global hierarchy altogether. By contrast, communists historically - and, in fact, including the ‘official communists’ in the period before 1991 - seek to get rid of global hierarchy altogether. So, in that sense, these are not anti-imperialist movements.
In another sense, however, when we think of Comintern and what was called the ‘anti-imperialist united front’, these movements are to be understood as anti-imperialist, even if they do not claim the name. The early Comintern idea of the anti-imperialist united front was an extension onto the global scale of the worker-peasant alliance that took power in Russia in 1917. The idea was that the working class, as an international class, and the Soviet Union, ally with nationalists against imperialism (principally British imperialism). Hence the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East, and at that event Zinoviev presenting what the Comintern was doing as a kind of jihad.
The underlying idea was not just Zinoviev’s. It was the line agreed at the second, third and fourth congresses of Comintern on the national and colonial question. It was a geostrategic orientation, which sought an alliance between the Soviet republic, the workers’ movement, and the nationalist movements in the colonial and semi-colonial countries.
This was a plausible orientation, and indeed continued to be a plausible orientation right down to the 1970s. The Soviet Union post-1945 added to ‘actually existing socialism’ eastern Europe and North Korea. Revolutions under the Soviet aegis added Yugoslavia, Albania, China, North Vietnam, and later Cuba and South Yemen. And beyond these, there was a large range of more or less leftwing nationalist governments of one form or another. So this looked like a plausible strategy. But then the US found the way to take it down in the 1970s - taking it apart through offering bank-syndicated lending as a road to development, as an alternative to import substitution under import controls, and bilateral trade and aid relations.
At the same time, the Soviet Union’s economy and state budget were falling apart, due to the combination of the internal planning irrationalities, based on the complete dominance of lies, and the external pressure of the costs of military competition with the US and its vassal states. This created conditions in which extending the ‘socialist bloc’ and the ‘anti-imperialist front’ ceased to be a serious practical option. This was already visible in the effective unwillingness of the USSR to go beyond ideological support in the ‘anti-imperialist front’ in relation to the Nicaraguan and Iranian revolutions; which in Iran meant ideological support for the repression of local communists and the workers’ movement. The strategic option of extending the ‘socialist bloc’ and ‘anti-imperialist front’ ceased completely to be a serious practical option with the collapse of the USSR and eastern European Soviet-style regimes, of course.
What I have just said about China implies that attempting to place it in the role of the USSR is therefore wildly unrealistic.
The early Comintern talked about the Indonesian Islamist movement as anti-imperialist, though it would never have called itself anti-imperialist. The same is true of Enver Pasha and his pan-Turkism, where the alliance went to the extent of Enver participating in the Congress of the Peoples of the East. These Islamist and nationalist movements were not seeking an end to global hierarchy, but merely to raise the positions of their own country in the global hierarchy. This was, of course, also true of the peasants in Russia or in China: they weren’t actually seeking an abolition of social hierarchy, which was inconsistent with the character of peasant proprietors as patriarchal exploiters of family labour and as employers. They were seeking to improve their own position in the social hierarchy. That, however, wanders a long way from the question.
YM: One problem is that because they don’t challenge the world order, they often end up either compromising, as in the case of many of the Arab nationalists of 1960s and so on; or else they might go along a suicidal route - of taking on enemies they are not in a position to defeat - and therefore creating a worse situation in failing to have the support of the masses to take on the imperialist powers.
MM: Yes, that’s a good point, and I would add, in a sense, Vietnam is also a counter-example. The US was defeated in Vietnam not just by the military action of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, and not just by the fact that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were backed by the Soviet Union (which is too often forgotten); but also by the fact that the Vietnamese perspective, as internationally understood, was a communist and universalistic one, which could animate an anti-war movement in the US itself, reaching all the way into its armed forces. In this way, the US could be driven to back off because of the threat of its armed forces falling apart.
Sub-imperialism
YM: Another concept that is put forward internationally and by sections of the left in Iran is the concept of ‘sub-imperialism’. This often includes those who criticise ‘campism’. It also is used to describe the regional behaviour of Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia ... These countries, according to this definition, are dominated at the global level. However, they still act hegemonically and exploitatively. And as a result, therefore, are sub-imperialist.
First of all, does this concept have any meaning in Marxist political economy? Is it a useful framework? Does it help to call the Islamic Republic of Iran ‘sub-imperialist’? Does it make us understand better its contradictions with the west and its bid for a share of the Middle East market? Or does it flatten the complexity of capital accumulation geopolitical systems with simplistic labels?
MM: I’m not going to rule out the use of the category, ‘sub-imperialist’, and I think there are two good examples. One is the tsarist regime in the late 19th century and down to 1917. This was characterised by the fact that its economy was dominated by foreign direct investment, meaning substantial financial dependence on the major, core imperialist powers - Britain, France, Germany, etc. But at the same time, tsarist Russia had its own financial structure and banking system. And it exploited as colonial possessions what’s now the central Asian republics, but also Siberia, and so on and so forth. Boris Kagarlitsky’s Empire of the periphery is helpful. So, in that sense, Russia was colonised as far as its core economy was concerned, but its core economy also colonised the subordinate territories!
The second example is Portugal, which is a very different case, because the symbiosis of the Portuguese late feudal state with Genoese financial capital, between roughly the 1420s and into the 1600s, was one of the pioneers of European imperialism. I say ‘symbiosis’, because you can’t talk about the Portuguese state as being a capitalist state at this date, but at the same time, the relationship with the Genoese republic, which undoubtedly was a capitalist state, and Genoese finance capital and shipping industry, created an entity which was a sort of very early form of imperialism.
In 1580 Portugal had a succession crisis and was folded into the Spanish empire. But then, in 1640-60, the Portuguese broke free of Spain - in the last stages essentially under the aegis of the British. The restored royal government in Britain got rid of its inconvenient Cromwellian soldiers in the former New Model Army by sending large numbers of them to Portugal to fight the Spanish in the final stage of the Portuguese war of independence with Spain. The upshot of this is that, although Portugal was no longer a front-rank power, and its metropolitan domestic economy became increasingly colonised by British capital, nonetheless it was also a colonial power, which controlled Brazil until 1822, and Mozambique, Angola and various other colonies until the 1974 revolution.
So we can talk of Portugal right down to the 20th century as a sub-imperialist power, because its economy is colonised at the centre, but it has colonial possessions as a whole of its own, which it exploits in the usual way imperialists do - by exporting capital and getting a return, by financial dependence and by imposing requirements on exports from the colonies for the benefit of the centre, and so on.
However, in the cold war period, there was a very strong tendency for any state which somehow benefited by or was promoted by the central imperialist regimes, and therefore was stronger than other states in the region, to be characterised as ‘sub-imperialist’. And this characterisation was exceedingly misleading. I think, if you call Iran ‘sub-imperialist’, it’s sort of prima facie evidence that you’re arguing in the interests of the US. That confuses two different things: holding other countries in economic subordination for the benefit of the metropolitan economy (which is the essence of capitalist imperialism); and merely having stronger political power and intervening in the affairs of neighbouring countries. You might as well call, say, Tipu Sultan of Mysore a ‘sub-imperialist’ in the 18th century. This is not serious analysis.
Boundaries
YM: In terms of the current war, we are seeing geographic boundaries collapse. We had Ukraine’s entry into confrontation with Iran. There are reports of attacks on Iranian ships in the Caspian Sea. So you could say there is a widening overlap between the eastern European war and west Asian security. At the same time, the Iranian government and its foreign minister appear to be pursuing a contradictory line: they stress defence, and they are trying to avoid regional escalation, while they’re becoming more and more dependent on Russia and China. Can we say that Iran is now trapped in a geopolitical situation that forces it to coordinate, even when that coordination brings it into confrontation with the west beyond the Middle East?
MM: I don’t think ‘the west’ is a useful category. It’s basically a self-image of the US and its vassal states, derived, ultimately, from Oswald Spengler and his Decline of the west. What you’re talking about is actually being brought into sharper confrontation with the US and its vassal states. It’s important to recognise that, precisely because before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and before the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance redefinition of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, the European powers - particularly France and Germany, and to a lesser extent the UK - pursued independent diplomatic and trade relations with Iran and with the Arab states.
That could happen again. It’s just that, in order for it to happen again, there needs to be a political overthrow in Europe of the political institutions by which the US controls the domestic politics of the European countries, around insistence on backing the US settler-colony, Israel.
Talk of a Russia-China axis is problematic. I’ve already discussed the fact Russia and China are in different situations. Russia is engaged in a war of defence against an existential threat from the US. What China seems to be doing is hoping to survive the adverse effects of the oil embargo, but also to actually outbuild the US in high tech. And there does seem to be some serious perspective of China potentially doing that. At the same time, China is seeking to radically reduce its dependence on petrochemicals, through increased emphasis on renewable energy of one sort or another. Although that doesn’t mean that China is actually reducing carbon emissions radically, it does mean that the strategic need for oil is pushed into motor transport and aircraft, rather than applying across the whole economy.
So China is essentially trying to reposition itself to be less dependent on the US. But also to reposition itself in terms of independent diplomatic and trade relations with other countries; to create its own independent payment system, so that it’s less dependent on Swift; to draw down slowly, to some extent, its heavy investment in the US for foreign exchange reserves. It wants to do this without going for outright confrontation, whereas the US, on the other hand, is pushing increasingly sharply for aggressive encirclement of China.
In this context, it’s worth looking on the website, ‘Responsible Statecraft’ (a leftish, so-called realist, think tank). Volodymyr Zelensky’s big idea for Trump is that Ukraine is the Israel of Europe. The Ukrainian regime is essentially attempting to sell to the US the idea that the Ukrainian regime will become a highly militarised military-industrial complex, immediately dependent on the US, playing the same role in eastern Europe that Israel plays in the Middle East. And the Ukrainian attack on the Iranian ships in the Caspian, although it can be sold as being really an attack on Russian trade, is part of that diplomatic game.
Having said that, it is also the case that this represents the extent to which Ukrainian attacks have reached. It makes the status of Ukraine as a US client into an existential threat to the Russian Federation as a state. This in turn means that any sort of diplomatic deal, founded on freezing the front line or anything like that, no longer makes sense, any more than the two-state solution in Israel-Palestine makes sense: the US has already achieved making Ukraine an institutional base for targeting any part of the Russian Federation, driving the Russian navy out of the Black Sea, and so on.
What this shows us is that the US and its vassals are pursuing an aggressive policy. The participation of the vassals is a very curious thing, because the German state, for example, is pouring vast resources into backing Ukraine, but this is actually at the expense of Germany itself. Emmanuel Macron has been backing Israel in relation to Lebanon, but this is actually at the expense of French interests.
The Europeans are not colonies of the US. But there is US political control of the European states through the EU constitution and inter-state conflicts - in the same way as, before 1860, the UK had political control of the US through slave-owner power. And, in the same period, the UK had political control of Germany through the latter’s lack of unity.
Endless war
YM: We’ve seen significant divisions within the Iranian left, as the war has developed.
We have sections of what I would call the reformist left - some of them with Stalinist backgrounds - who have returned to their post-1979 position of unqualified or near-unqualified support for the Islamic Republic, and argue that the regime’s survival is a political achievement that we should celebrate; and that any criticism of Iran is actually a way of supporting the US.
On the other side, we have people who describe themselves as the radical left. I would, however, call them social-imperialist. They say, we can’t call this a war of aggression by an imperialist power. Because …? I assume they think if you go with that description, you inevitably have to support the Islamic Republic, so they don’t want to differentiate the attacker state from the attacked state.
Within these groups, we also hear arguments that Iran is equally as culpable about this war as the US and Israel. Why? Because it supported the Palestinians. Because it introduced the nuclear programme, forgetting that this was actually part of the shah’s programme - and was completely uncontroversial until the early 2000s, when George Bush decided Iran was part of the ‘axis of evil’. It wasn’t an issue until then.
MM: We have to break with the assumption that you have to make a choice between alliance with the democratic bourgeoisie and alliance with the national bourgeoisie. The first turns into support for so-called ‘democratic’ imperialists. Trotsky, repeatedly in the 1920s and 1930s, rightly said that the democracy of the imperialist powers is like the democracy of Athens, which ruled over disenfranchised slaves and women (but also over disenfranchised satellite states in the Aegean) in classical antiquity.
The upshot of the strategic alliance with the ‘democratic bourgeoisie’ can be seen most clearly in Libya. The Mandelite Fourth International, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and others argued that we should support British and French military action (leading to US military action) against the Gaddafi regime, for humanitarian reasons. What was the outcome? Not in any sense humanitarian, but just a failed state and endless civil war. This has been a continuous pattern since the US turn in the 1970s, after its defeat in Vietnam, from attempting to ‘impose order’ to merely inflicting destruction.
We have edited and considerably cut this interview. For the whole recording, go to: