Epitaph for the MoA between the U.S. and Iran – and for U.S. control of West Asia

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Professor Michael Hudson

To understand the logic of Iran’s counterattacks against neighboring Arab countries supporting the U.S. attack on it, it is necessary to recognize the basic aims and strategy that has been guiding long-term U.S. imperial policy.

The guiding aim of U.S. imperial diplomacy has been to control the world’s economic chokepoints, starting with control of oil. If the United States cannot control an independent country’s oil production and marketing, the first response will be to impose trade sanctions to detach and isolate that country’s oil – and indeed its economy as a whole – from the rest of the world. This is what the United States did to Iran after it overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah’s military dictatorship in 1979. The United States repeated this policy of economic isolation against Russia after President Putin moved in February 2022 to defend Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population from ethnic genocide by the U.S-backed regime.

Today’s war by the United States with Iran is over who will control Arab OPEC countries. U.S. forces sought to use military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other oil producers to attack Iran. Iran retaliated by attacking and thoroughly destroying U.S. military bases throughout the region, driving its military out of the region.

Iran also is insisting on control of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, with the intent of using this as a pragmatic way to obtain reparations for the destruction of its own economy by U.S., Israeli and Emirate attacks. This drastic solution is necessitated by the fact that the United States has disabled the United Nations rules to impose reparations payments on it for violating international law by waging an undeclared and unprovoked war on Iran, focusing on bombing civilians, bridges and other infrastructure in its attempt to create domestic panic that U.S. strategists expected to lead to regime change (which was to have been coordinated by covert domestic destabilization and a Kurdish invasion).

Iran’s move to use its own chokepoint in controlling shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has left the reins of control to be purely economic, not military. Iran recognized this, and so has focused its military response on destroying U.S. economic linkages with the Emirates, Saudi Arabia and other neighboring OPEC countries. Iranian attacks have focused on the computer processing investments by Amazon, Google and other U.S. companies that had hoped to use energy (and even water) to power their cloud computing centers.

This has led the U.S. diplomacy to its Plan B to control the world’s choke points: If it cannot control key resources by outright control by allied governments or client oligarchies, then isolating them; and if that fails, then it is necessary to destroy them to prevent them from offering other countries an alternative source of supply outside of U.S. control – and on payment terms other than the U.S. dollar. The guiding principle is that if the United States is unable to control foreign oil production, then it is necessary to simply destroy it so as to leave the United States and its allies in total control of the entire world’s trade in critical energy and petrochemicals, so as to monopolize its economic natural-resource rents and the fictionalization of the resulting oil-trade surpluses.

The same principle applies to the dollarized international financial system. It has been weaponized so as to isolate countries and simply confiscate their monetary savings if they follow political, economic or military policies at odds with those of the United States. The prospect of such sovereign countries seeking an alternative to act in their own interest has led the United States to wage what it considers to be a civilizational war against China, Russia, Iran and other countries that may join in the new orbit being created.

A third chokepoint is U.S. control of the institutional and legal system governing the world’s foreign relations. This principle underlay U.S. strategy in guiding creation of the United Nations, the IMF and World Bank in 1945. The United States insisted on being given veto power within any organization in which it would join. It has refused to join (or permit to function) any organization not under its direct control. That is why it has not joined the International Criminal Court, or the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea. It is why U.S. diplomats have blocked the World Trade Organization from functioning by not permitting a quorum of judges.

The only alternative is for other countries to create their own counterparts to such organizations, free of U.S. control and that of its proxy satellite governments. That means a new United Nations. It also means a new kind of international monetary system with its own bank providing vehicles for the world’s Global Majority to hold their international reserves, including their claims on debtor countries – and to determine the limits and rules for international creditor and debtor relationships.

Such an organization is needed to provide an alternative to the IMF’s economically destructive anti-labor austerity plans demanding privatization to dismantle foreign government infrastructure in the hands of international (mainly U.S.) owners.

Some thoughts on the broad civilizational war that is taking shape

Zero-sum games are actually negative-sum policies because of the destruction involved. The U.S. attempt to win the war against Iran by destroying its government and re-instituting a new U.S. puppet dictator has led Iran to protect itself by raising the stakes to a fight for its survival with the entire world’s economy balance at stake.

It has stated that if other countries do not join it in opposing the U.S. strategy of “Join us or be destroyed,” than Iran itself will destroy OPEC oil production and plunge the world economy into depression.