08.10.2026
Realities of siege warfare
Internationalists oppose US imperialism and simultaneously maintain complete political independence from the Islamic Republic. The struggles of the working class and the poor are central, declares Yassamine Mather
There is a tendency, particularly in sections of the international left, to look at the continuing confrontation between Iran and the United States and conclude that, because Washington has failed to impose a decisive military settlement, Iran must therefore be winning. That is far too simple. Survival is not the same thing as victory, and at this stage the US remains militarily dominant in the region. What is required is a sober assessment of what is actually happening: with the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s economy and, increasingly, the American military being used to prosecute the war indirectly.
Iran’s threat over the Strait of Hormuz was straightforward enough: if the Islamic Republic could not export its oil, neither would its Arab neighbours. For a period, this appeared capable of inflicting enormous damage on the world economy. Now, however, the picture is considerably more complicated.
Shipping through the Strait has resumed to a significant degree, although claims that traffic is back to anything approaching normal have to be treated carefully. Lloyd’s List Intelligence recorded 117 non-Iranian-linked transits between September 14 and 20, compared with 106 the previous week - a figure initially reported as 97 before unrecorded transits were verified.1
That revision is itself revealing. Many tankers travel with their transponders switched off and are identified only later. This explains why real-time websites can produce apparently catastrophic figures for Hormuz, while retrospective industry data show considerably more traffic. How ships are getting through is contested. Some reports suggest that fees are being paid to Iran in exchange for safe passage, while more recently there are indications that US naval escorts for tankers are moving up and down the narrow waterway.
More important still is what has happened to oil volumes. It is estimated that at least 16.5 million barrels of crude a day left the Gulf region in September - roughly the pre-war level … if Iran itself is excluded. Yet around 40% of regional crude now bypasses Hormuz altogether, compared with about 17% before the war.
In other words, the oil industry has built an expensive and dangerous wartime workaround of pipelines, shuttle tankers, ship-to-ship transfers and military protection. This is not a return to normal commercial shipping. Refined petroleum products, liquefied natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas and petrochemical exports remain much more severely disrupted.
Nevertheless, the system is functioning well enough to undermine Iran’s original strategy. Tehran has not been able to win acceptance to the notion that, if Iranian oil cannot leave the Gulf, nobody else’s can either. Iran itself is now in a much weaker position: its own crude exports have been reduced to negligible levels by the American naval blockade.
But the ability of the US to impose enormous economic costs on Iran should not be confused with an ability to impose a straightforward military or political settlement.
Asymmetry
In another sign of an asymmetric confrontation, on October 4 the US withdrew all its bombers from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. Throughout the war, Fairford had been a key operating location for American strategic bombers, B-1s and B-52s, flying combat missions against Iran. Donald Trump linked the withdrawal to a specific threat against the base, while vice-president JD Vance said the aircraft had been moved “out of an abundance of caution”. Either way, it is a striking indication of the vulnerability of US forces.
On September 27, five men were arrested near Fairford after reports of three suspicious vehicles heading towards the base. They were initially held under the Explosives Act and subsequently on suspicion of ‘preparing a terrorist act’. No explosives were found, although a quantity of petrol was recovered. The five were released on bail and remain under investigation.
The episode inevitably raised the question of Iranian involvement, and that possibility cannot simply be dismissed. Tehran has repeatedly warned that bases used to launch attacks on Iranian territory could be regarded as legitimate targets. ‘Counter-terrorism’ investigators are reportedly also examining possible links to Russia or non-state groups. What deserves considerable scepticism is Trump’s much more definite account. He suggested that the plot had been uncovered through joint American and British intelligence work and that the suspects were “looking to do big damage”. The public account is rather different. The BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner, pointed to “a clear inconsistency” between Trump’s version and what appears to have happened.
Washington nevertheless clearly took the threat to Fairford seriously. The precise relationship between the arrests, Iran and the withdrawal of the bombers has not been publicly established. This brings us to the more interesting aspect of Fairford: the extraordinary economics of modern warfare.
A B-1 has an official US air force unit cost of approximately $317 million. The nature of the threat to Fairford has not been disclosed, but the weapons that can threaten such an aircraft, whether a drone or a crude improvised device, cost a minute fraction of that. They do not even have to destroy a bomber to achieve a significant result. If the possibility of an attack is credible enough to force the US withdrawal of 12 extremely expensive aircraft from a forward operating base, then a comparatively cheap threat has already imposed substantial costs on a vastly wealthier military power.
This is one of the central asymmetries of contemporary warfare. Washington has overwhelming superiority in conventional firepower, but it also has costly, concentrated assets that must be protected against cheap almost throwaway weapons. Iran does not need to reproduce US military capabilities in order to threaten them.
Removing the bombers from Fairford does not, of course, remove America’s ability to attack Iran: they can fly from the continental USA with aerial refuelling. Moreover Washington retains formidable naval and air assets in the region.
Internal effects
For ordinary Iranians, the question is not whether Washington or Tehran is ahead on some geopolitical scorecard. It is what this prolonged war of attrition is doing to them. Siege warfare - blockade, sanctions and secondary sanctions - is combining with an already profound domestic economic crisis.
The collapse of the currency gives some indication of its scale. When the popular protests began in late December 2025, the free-market rate was around 142,000 tomans to the dollar. By late September 2026 it had passed 250,000 tomans. The distinction between rials and tomans is worth making, because international reporting frequently creates confusion: ten rials equal one toman, so a rate of 2.5 million rials to the dollar means 250,000 tomans.
The currency, however, is only part of the story. Official figures from the Statistical Centre of Iran put year-on-year inflation in September at 89.8%, with 12-month average inflation at 73.6%. Food inflation has been even more devastating: in August, food and beverage prices were 127% higher than a year earlier. This makes nominal wage increases almost meaningless: a worker receiving a 30% or even 40% pay rise is still suffering an enormous fall in real income.
Currency depreciation intensifies the process. Iran may manufacture a substantial proportion of its medicines and other goods domestically, but manufacturers depend on imported machinery, components and raw materials. A collapsing rial therefore feeds back into the price of supposedly home-produced goods. The consequences are visible in shortages, rapidly rising medicine prices and reduced everyday food consumption levels.
This creates three overlapping grievances among workers: wages and pensions that no longer cover basic living costs; wages, pensions and benefits that are not paid on time; and growing insecurity, layoffs and unemployment.
There have been repeated protests by municipal, industrial and oil and gas workers, nurses, teachers, pensioners and others. Municipal workers in some areas have reported months of unpaid wages. Factory workers have protested over both wage arrears and insecure employment. Nurses face low salaries, delayed payments and compulsory overtime. Pensioners have demonstrated repeatedly over arrears, health insurance failures and the rising cost of living. Their demands are particularly significant, because they bring together several dimensions of the crisis: incomes below subsistence level, unpaid entitlements, deteriorating healthcare and rising inflation.
This is not a unified national workers’ movement. It is better understood as a series of localised and sectoral struggles increasingly driven by the same underlying material conditions. Those conditions could bring people together with very different occupational and political histories, including sections of the lower middle class.
Of course, economic desperation does not automatically produce political generalisation, let alone socialist consciousness. Independent working class organisation remains weak and heavily repressed, and workers can respond by emigrating, taking second jobs or retreating into individual survival strategies just as readily as by organising collectively. Nevertheless, the material foundations for repeated social explosions are clearly present.
One particularly revealing expression of the crisis is the growing number of women turning to street vending. The phenomenon is not new. Women have sold cosmetics, clothes and other goods in the women-only carriages of the Tehran metro since at least the 2000s. Later, social media - above all Instagram and Telegram - created another space in which women could establish micro-businesses despite the surrounding formal economy.
War and repeated internet shutdowns have disrupted much of that informal economy. Women selling food, handicrafts, jewellery and clothes through Instagram suddenly found themselves without customers. Meanwhile, the transport and service industries were also hit by the war. The result has been a movement from the digital back on to the street. Women with university degrees can be found setting up tables on pavements and selling food, drinks or handmade goods.
This produces a revealing contradiction: more people are trying to sell because they desperately need an income, while fewer people can afford to buy. One vendor described 10 people stopping at her stall with perhaps one reluctantly buying something. Inflation also means that even successful vendors cannot necessarily replace what they sell, as today’s takings may not cover tomorrow’s wholesale prices. The street stall is therefore both a form of resistance to economic exclusion and evidence of the depth of the crisis. The spread of informal self-employment should not be romanticised as entrepreneurial dynamism. For many, it is survival in the absence of viable wages, jobs or social protection.
Real victory
A state can survive, while its population becomes dramatically poorer. For socialists, this is not a secondary consideration. We cannot measure ‘victory’ by asking whether the Islamic Republic has successfully resisted the US, while ignoring what is happening to its people.
Opposition to American imperialism does not require us to prettify the Iranian state. Equally, recognising the enormous economic damage inflicted on Iran does not mean accepting Trump’s claims that American military superiority is producing a decisive victory.
For internationalists, the task is therefore not to cheer either state from the sidelines. It is to oppose the imperialist war drive, while maintaining complete political independence from the Islamic Republic, and to place at the centre of our analysis the struggles of the working class and the rural and urban poor.
That is why we take a position of revolutionary defencism. We want to see the defeat of the US and victory - real victory - can best be achieved by empowering the Iranian masses through demands such as imposing strict rationing, confiscating corrupt wealth, the renationalisation of privatised industries, ending censorship and freedom to publish, demonstrate, organise and strike. Instead of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the hated basiji, the people have to arm themselves and be organised into a nationwide militia system. Women must have full legal equality. The morality police must go. Kurdistan and other minority nationalities should be granted the right to self-determination - that way the unity of Iran will be voluntary, not forced.
Above all, in place of the living-dead supreme leader, the council of guardians and the carefully selected majlis, there must come the constituent assembly born of a popular uprising and elected through universal suffrage. Sovereign power must be vested with the people as a whole.
A government of workers and the rural and urban poor will be a far more potent force than any number of mines, drones or ballistic missiles - reaching out with an internationalist message of peace, democracy and socialism. It will surely get a ready hearing, not only regionally, but globally - not least in the heart of the beast, the United States itself.