I want to begin with Vijay Prashad’s Thought for today (January 18 2026) – In the Global South, no left government or even government that is not left but seeks national sovereignty is a government without contradictions. Those contradictions are not only within the ranks of the governments themselves, but they mirror the contradictions in the world. Those who critique these governments from a standpoint of purity simply want to wash their hands off of the contradictions of the world, the muck of human history. That is a position of great privilege. If you are inside the historical process, trying to drive it forward, you understand the nature of contradictions and you understand the place of imperialism in trying to suffocate these governments. Mao, in On Contradiction (1937), figured this out clearly.
Vijay basically sums up my thinking on the current situation in Iran, which I briefly mentioned last week when discussing how Venezuela is resisting US imperial aggression. The mainstream western media has been going full throttle for the past two weeks covering the protests in Iran, drumming up support for American military intervention and even predicting the return of the deposed Iranian monarchy and the restoration of friendly diplomatic ties between Iran and Apartheid Israel. Regardless of events on the ground, their agenda could not be more clear. They want the destruction of Iran as an anti-imperialist force in the region and in particular its solidarity with Palestine as the bombing of Gaza continues daily.
It’s important to recognize that these protests in Iran were kicked off by a tightening of US-led economic sanctions which led to serious repercussions for small businesses in particular. Yet western governments are calling for more sanctions, more economic strangulation of the country, more ordinary Iranians dead from lack of vital medicines, supposedly out of “solidarity” with the protesters. This is absolutely criminal. Any solidarity with the Iranian people that does not begin with the immediate removal of sanctions is completely fake – a mask for empire and war. And, however many people died and however brutal the Iranian government’s crackdown might have been, it’s a fact that the forces of empire, both the Israeli Mossad and the CIA, were on the ground in the country creating carnage. They’ve openly admitted as much.
Currently the situation in Iran has calmed down. Donald Trump has been forced to tone down his aggressive rhetoric about regime change given that Iranian missiles have the ability to pulverize just about every American base in West Asia, including Israel itself. Just like in Venezuela, regime change has failed in Iran.
And I know some comrades out there aren’t exactly happy about this. They want a socialist Iran. They want an end to theocracy and religious rule. They want rights for women and workers. And I want to stress that none of these things are going to be possible without a serious weakening of US empire and that empire’s ability to intervene in countries worldwide. Because if the Islamic Republic of Iran had fallen in the last few weeks, you wouldn’t get a socialist Iran. You would get a new shah. You would get a puppet government dominated by proxies of the United States and Israel. You would see the loss of Palestine’s biggest ally in the region and an utter disaster for the Palestinian resistance as a whole. And the workers and women of Iran would face greater repression, not less. That’s because imperialism’s grip remains strong in West Asia.
This is what needs to change.
Sources:
Ben Norton, Geopolitical Economy Report, "US & Israel support protests in Iran: Trump calls for regime change"
