Is the Iran War Just the Beginning?

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In this Our Changing Climate climate change video essay, I examine why the Iran War might just be the beginning of Trump's warmongering. Specifically, I look at how American imperialism (and even more specifically, oil imperialism) and fossil fascism are driving the United States war machine into dangerous territory. But of course, Iran and its control of the Strait of Hormuz mean that a war with Iran has global ramifications--for oil, for helium, for fertilizer, and so much more.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

The missiles struck on February 28th, 2026. Then came the war.

SPEAKER_03 0:05

The US and Israel have launched an unprovoked attack on Iran. Unprecedented joint attack on Iran. A massive and ongoing combat operation.

SPEAKER_04 0:15

Israel and the U.S. unleash a brutal and despite official claims to the contrary, indiscriminate air assault on the people of Iran over the next few years. The first day set the tone. A missile strikes an all-girls' primary school in southern Iran, killing 168 people.

SPEAKER_03 0:34

One of the first strikes of the US-Israeli attack on Iran hit a girls' school in Minab, in southern Iran.

SPEAKER_04 0:45

Sadly, this violent incursion isn't an isolated event. Just a month before this war began, the Trump regime invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president in the dark of night. This is imperialism. But in the age of Trump, in the age of fossil fascism, are these violent escapades just the opening salvo? The Iran war might just be the beginning. Because as long as the United States perceives itself as the global hegemon, and as long as fossil fuels remain the primary lubricant for the engines of capitalism and military power, the U.S. will continue to burn and plunder. The Iran War didn't just emerge out of nowhere. It is also not just the result of Trump's idiocy or rogue whims. Although those certainly do factor into the timing. This new violent conflagration in West Asia has deep roots in the past. Indeed, the history of Iran is one of spiraling contradictions and escalating tensions. A history wrapped up in play and counterplay between Iran and the imperialist breach of the United States. Indeed, from the 1950s onwards, the development of Iran cannot be understood without the US. The history that brings us to where we are today starts long before 1953. But 1953 gives us enough context to understand the current situation. It starts with a coup. On August 19, 1953, ex-Iranian general Fazula Sahedi, with the aid of the CIA and MI6, ripped the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeh from power.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Shortly after his election, the CIA began to plan his overthrow, teaming up with Britain's MI-6.

SPEAKER_04 2:35

By 1953, the democratically elected Mossadegh had gotten unruly in the eyes of the West. With the parliament's support, he took back and nationalized British-controlled oil reserves in 1951, and for British and U.S. oil corporations, that could not stand. So the two clandestine wings of the British and American Empire took down Mossadegh and installed their own puppet dictator, more amenable to the multinational corporations from the Imperial Corps, siphoning oil from their soil. That dictator's name was Mohammed Reza Balabi, the Shah of Iran. For 26 years, the Shah ruled under the auspices of the United States, essentially acting as a puppet dictator for the Western superpower in the area. Importantly, in 1954, the Shah signed a consortium agreement with the United States and Britain, allowing five U.S. oil companies a 40% share in Iranian oil, while the Royal Dutch Shell and BP would take 20%, leaving Iran just 40% of its own resources. A deal that would last until 1979 and would allow Western oil multinationals to get rich off of Iranian oil. But as the years dragged on into 1978, the people of Iran grew restless and angry. The imperialist meddling could not stand. In 1978, over 10,000 seminary students and residents marched en masse to the homes of religious leaders and clerics, urging them to join the fight against the Shah, who they saw as an unjust imperialist puppet regime. But the firm hand of the Shah couldn't countenance this dissent. The government deployed armed forces and shot live rounds into the crowd, killing many. Estimates put the death toll that day anywhere from 5 to 300. This was the spark that would ignite an inferno. By 1979, 10% of the people of Iran flocked towards an uprising against the Shah that coalesced around the Islamic cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. With this new and decidedly anti-American Islamic Republic in power, a new era of tension would stretch on in the Middle East. One that saw the U.S. and its settler colonial ally, Israel, which Nixon's Secretary of State at the time called it the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, worked to contain and prior open this new threat to the stability of markets, specifically oil markets. This took the form of Reagan sending arms to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, the heightening of sanctions under the Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and Trump administrations, border skirmishes and military exploits like the 12-day war in 2025, and the assassination of Iranian Major General Soleimani. Finally, the pressure from these contradictions grew too intense, and the gasket blew on February 28th, 2026. But of course, this brief history of spiraling contradictions that have now led to outright war isn't floating in a void. The Iran war is materially grounded in resources, in finance, in profit, in labor, in the logic of capitalism. And in the 21st century, nothing is more materially important to the smooth flow of capital accumulation, to the undying acquisition of profits to financial markets than oil. Iran, Venezuela, and so many of the United States' other imperialist exploits are grounded in the fundamental nature of our fossil capitalist economy. Oil is king. Oil, and more broadly, fossil fuels, are what make our capitalist economy tick. Fossil fuels allow capitalists to bring production to where the work is cheapest and enables them to exploit their labor as long as needed. In short, as Andreas Mom describes in his book Fossil Capital, fossil fuels give the owners of production flexibility in time and space to maximally exploit workers and ultimately achieve maximal profits. Not only that, but oil is crucial for military superiority. All the war machines that the US spends billions on each year are useless without a steady flow of oil to turn them on and keep them running. And to make matters worse, all that fossil fuel use means that if the US military were a country, it would rank 47th in terms of emissions output, ahead of countries like Sweden or Portugal. In our current global order, the core hub of the capitalist exploitation machine through which the tendrils of multinationals stretch their imperialist arms across the globe is the United States. In short, the United States' supremacy, both economically and militarily, is reliant on a stable flow of fossil fuels, especially oil.

SPEAKER_05 7:15

As one professor of political science puts it, oil has continued to play a role in American foreign and military policy because the United States has feared that political disruptions in the Middle East, internal instability, the threat of extremist, fundamentalist Muslim control in the Middle East, if that came about, could pose a threat to American oil supplies that especially would hurt our prosperity.

SPEAKER_04 7:41

This desire for stability can be seen within this chart. When we look at this graph, the United States is not home to the majority of proven oil reserves. Indeed, the countries on this chart are overwhelmingly ones that the US deems enemies of the state. And part of that has to do with the slow decline of easily available oil in the United States. Beginning in the mid-1960s, as the United States leaned more heavily on fossil fuels for every aspect of our economy, oil production increased. But as more and more oil flowed out of the US soil, fossil fuel companies had to dig deeper and use technologies like advanced oil recovery to get more product. Essentially, the days of oil gushing up from wells were over in the United States, and it became more costly to wring oil out of the likes of shale fields and deep water rigs. These days, it seems as if the US has reached the moment of peak easy oil, and we are now scraping at domestic wells with techniques like advanced oil recovery, which uses carbon dioxide pumped into wells to eke out the last drops of that black gold. And don't get me wrong, the US has gotten very good at wringing out those last drops. Over the last two decades, it has increased its oil exports substantially to the point where the US is exporting more oil than it imported in 2020, the first time it had done so since 1949. But again, this isn't an easy process, and the eyes of multinationals like Exxon are constantly wandering outward across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Because out there there's oil, and not just any oil. Easy-to-pump oil. From Nigeria to Iraq, US multinationals have pried open foreign markets to siphon the lush reserves into their coffers. Iran, for example, contains 11% of the world's proven oil reserves, and Venezuela, notably, is home to the largest proven oil reserves in the world. This is telling. But as we'll soon see, its oil is a vague oversimplification of the imperialist dynamics playing out in West Asia right now. Regardless of whether peak oil or peak easy oil has happened in the United States or will happen, those in the US government feel like it is happening. Because back in 2007, a 75-page government report argued that almost all studies had shown that a world oil peak would occur sometime before 2040. And it's very clear that Trump's interest in the US's most recent violent attacks is to pry open resources for American markets. For Venezuela, he said this. And for Iran, he said this 10 years ago. I would bomb the sht out of them.

SPEAKER_09 10:29

And that's right, I'd blow up the pipes, I'd blow up the refinery, I'd blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left. And you know what? You'll get Exxon to come in there in two months. You ever see these guys how good they are, the great oil companies?

SPEAKER_04 10:42

Thus, we see the many conditions that have led to this point, with oil imperialism at its fore, a confluence of tensions that have built up over the last 70 years. Iran is the way it is because it's grown in opposition to the Israeli land grabbing and US oil militarism in West Asia. But there's also another factor that often gets overshadowed in the face of this history. Fascism needs war. As a remarkably Prussian Marxist writer Henri Barbuse explained in 1935, way before Hitler invaded Poland, fascism is not and never will be anything but a veneer. And the only really imaginative or original things that fascists have ever done have been to decide upon the color of their shirts and to persuade the people that one can live on smoke. What can be the outcome of it all? Only war. And once more we shall have snout-like gas masks, trainloads of soldiers, hearses full of living men, masses of people rushing headlong to get themselves killed. The reality is that Trump, a fossil fascist, has no great economic plan to help everyday working people. He has no plan to make America great again. And because Trump is unable to field any economic plan, he instead turns towards military conquest and the scapegoating of the racialized outsider. A tried and true fascist tactic of pointing towards the enemy at the gates as an imminent threat to make people ignore the destruction happening from within. So the only way fascists can produce the outcomes that they want is to go to war. That's what happened with Hitler's invasion of Poland, Mussolini's attack on Ethiopia, and Japan's capture of Manchuria. And Trump confirmed this bloody economic strategy in an Easter luncheon not too long ago.

SPEAKER_07 12:45

It's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.

SPEAKER_04 12:57

He then proposed a 44% increase in the military budget to $1.5 trillion built on the back of cutting education, health, and housing programs by $73 billion. Trump, who is soaked in the dollars of multinational oil companies, is a fossil fascist warhawk. And there has been no larger target for him than Iran.

SPEAKER_08 13:19

If I had my choice, what would I like to do? Take the oil. Because it's there for the taking. There's not a thing they can do about it. Unfortunately, the American people would like to see us come home. If it were up to me, I'd take the oil, I'd keep the oil, and would make plenty of money.

SPEAKER_04 13:34

A country whose control would not just mean a significant amount of rich oil reserves for the axons of the world, but quote unquote stabilization of the region and importantly, for Israel's settler colonial expansion desires. Even as far back as a 1988 interview with The Guardian, Trump claimed that if he ever became president, he would be harsh on Iran, explaining that he would go after Iran's biggest oil depots on Karg Island, claiming that he'd do a number on Karg Island, I'd go in and take it, and it'd be good for the whole world to take them on. And yet, this war seems to be a new frontier for the United States. It's revealing cracks in the foundation of a country that has seen itself at the center of the Imperial core since World War II. As European countries shy away from supporting the US, and as China aids countries that are suffering the ramifications of this war, the US loses its credibility as a global hegemon, as an economic power, and as a moral arbiter. But this doesn't necessarily mean that the US will quietly fall out of power. In fact, it could mean the exact opposite. As the US war with Iran drags on, it reveals the power and necessity of Iran and the crucial trade corridor that is the Strait of Hormuz. Because Iran and more broadly West Asia over the recent years isn't just a country of oil. It's diversified its export portfolio to encompass a host of oil-derived chemicals like fertilizer and helium that are now foundational to global supply chain, stretching from food production to semiconductor factories.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

The Gulf Oil companies have really uh diversified down the value chain. They're no longer simply exporters of crude oil, they are manufacturers of basic chemicals, they are manufacturers of basic uh uh fertilizers. Uh and uh this is this is really a a crucial shift in in the nature of these states and their integration into the into the global economy. Uh about a third of the world's uh fertilizer exports come from uh the Gulf.

SPEAKER_04 15:44

Additionally, a lot of the oil coming out of Iran is not flowing to the United States, it's going to Asia, specifically China.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Instead of going westward, the oil exports and gas exports uh from the region now uh flow overwhelmingly eastward, in particular to China. China uh takes around one quarter of the world's oil imports. One in four barrels of oil go to China.

SPEAKER_04 16:10

As a result, instead of stability, a war with Iran creates the opposite: massive global instability, exemplified in the closing of the Street of Hormuz. A bottleneck that provides passage to nearly 34% of global crude oil trade, as well as a third of all fertilizer and helium trade, a choke point that Iran can easily monitor and control with just a few gunboats. Like the sword of Democles over the world's head, Iran's power doesn't just stem from oil. It comes from the fact that it can hold hostage one of the most important passages of world trade. And the consequences of Iran refusing to back down in the face of American imperial pressure, and also the US's refusal to end their imperialist gambits look like a full-blown crisis for countries worlds away, like the Philippines, where gas and fertilizer prices have skyrocketed, leaving many farmers unable to harvest and transport their crops to market without taking a loss. Or closer to Iran, aid failing to reach Gaza. But as countries like the Philippines dive into crisis, it's not the US they are turning to. Especially after programs like USAID were so readily ripped from the global economic scaffolding when Trump and Elon Musk came to power. They are instead turning to China. The Strait of Hormuz reveals the vulnerability and honestly idiocy of the US's war. This is a war that hasn't been prepped with the manufactured consent of previous oil wars. There is no pretense of spreading democracy, no facade of policing the world or finding weapons of mass destruction. The American ruling class has been very clear about its intentions. The truth is laid bare for all to see. In America's working class, even those deeply embedded in the MAGA fascist thought, are recognizing the folly of this imperialist war. But more broadly, we're seeing the erosion of American unilateral global power in real time. As Bret O'Shea from the Red Menace podcast puts it, Under the banner of renewal, aka Make America great again, they have done nothing but accelerate the decline. The crumbling of American global hegemony is coming slowly, with small cracks in the foundation, like a handful of European countries that refused US bombers from entering their airspace to do war with Iran. Unfortunately, as this vision of the American superpower declines, and as the US's European allies turn their backs on the US, the fear of a retaliation within those countries has meant calls for increased militarization, which can only lead to terrible and violent consequences for the European working class. Meanwhile, China has built up a massive petroleum reserve, estimated to be roughly 1.4 billion barrels, to weather this exact situation. And it is faring much better than the US, especially because it has also rapidly built a renewable grid that can provide some amount of baseline capacity to the country. China's petroleum reserves and rapidly diversifying energy portfolio means that it's buffered a bit from this conflict. It becomes a bastion of stability, especially for countries in desperate need of oil and fossil fuel commodities. This in turn tightens ties that further destabilize the US's hold on the global economy. Meanwhile, the Trump regime's spurning of renewable resources further exacerbates and puts into sharp relief this failing fossil fascist war. Instead of moving away from fossil fuels, the US and its multinational oil giants are doubling down because it's profitable to do so. Ultimately, all of this fallout shatters the moral and economic superiority of a country that has so long declared itself the protector of the free world. I hope perhaps in this war there are the conditions or at least the beginnings for the toppling of American imperialism. But also within the uncertainty of the future lies further, more dangerous explosions of violence led on by the logics of fossil fascism and oil imperialism. There can be no question that we must end the war with Iran now. But for the sake of this planet, for the sake of all working people everywhere, we must lay new anti-capitalist foundations. Ones without the deep cracks of fossil-fueled capitalism that led to the flood of fossil fascist war. Instead, we need international solidarity. We need a system built on the rational planning of the economy that prioritizes people and the planet, not violent resource grabs and the racialized scapegoating of the other. We need eco-socialism. But of course, the construction of eco-socialism won't spring up out of nowhere. Although this moment of intense contradiction could be fertile ground for rapid transformational global change. So now, more than ever, we need to build power, seizing this moment to lay bare that this war is the inevitable consequence of capitalism, of imperialism, and revealing the incompetence of liberal capitalism to prevent it. This means joining up with socialist vanguard parties in your area or leftist anti war organizations. But most importantly, it means joining up with people out there in the real world and lending your skills to toppling capitalism and building international eco socialism in its stead.