All those taken by surprise at the rapidity of the June 2025 combined West-Israeli bombardment of the already besieged Iran, regretted not factoring in the wheeler-dealer American President’s well-known habitual lying. This time round, no one should be surprised.
After all, the reasons for a second US-Israeli bombarding of Iran in less than year are many and most of them are not directly arising from immediate causal factors on the ground in Iran itself. In fact, many would argue that there is no immediate rationale for anyone to wage war against what has long been one of the most stable, strongest, civilisations in the world. Certainly not for the love of the Iranian people. As with any regime throughout human history, the motives for an external aggression are both domestic as well as foreign. In modern times, the evidence of such motivation was seen in classic tactics of whipping up domestic nationalism to ensure local support for the regime, especially when that regime needs popular voter support. Ensuring the “security of the nation” has been such a tactic. Distracting domestic animosity toward the regime is another motive.
Iran has now a record of sustained electoral governance even if the politico-cultural ethos is not a copy of European-style liberal, multi-party, competitive politics. Very much in the Islamic political tradition of spiritual-ideological cohesion, the Iranian nation takes pride in its record of successive general elections and continuity of elected regimes that reflected popular aspirations.
Destabilisation
The popular aspiration to economic prosperity on the basis of its mineral and agricultural wealth has been, however, blocked by Western destabilising moves. This includes expanding economic sanctions, ever since the overthrow of the highly undemocratic Shah monarchy which was an enthusiastic Western client regime.
Iran’s nuclear power program has been persistently used by the West also as an additional motive for its hostile actions against that country. Modern Iran had primarily focused on the peaceful use of nuclear power for energy purposes, but the sustained hostile pressures by the West and its proxy Israel (which Tehran refused to recognise as a corollary of its anti-colonial foreign policy) very soon drove Iran to seek nuclear military power.
Tehran was motivated to develop its nuclear military capability as the logical counter to Israel’s already known nuclear military capability. Equivalent “deterrent” is the standard military posture of all powerful states that are locked into geopolitical rivalry as with Iran and other similar states.
In a world in which the world’s biggest and most aggressive power, the USA, and its allies, possess the biggest nuclear armaments, it is very reasonable that other states, especially those that are subject to Western hostility or potential hostility, also build up a countervailing nuclear capability.
This geopolitical rationale is legitimised by the continued record of the former colonial powers to push their world pre-eminence using force (economic, politico-military) far more than they do diplomatically. Otherwise, why should the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation be sustained and even be expanded after the end of the Cold War which was the original reason for its creation?
Virtually all the large scale and devastating military ventures by NATO and its lead power, the USA, in the half-century since the end of the Cold War, are so obviously to do with the Western power bloc’s goal to extend its world dominance. It then becomes the responsibility of any government compelled to deal with such dominance projection to ensure the maximum deterrent. Nuclear arms are the most reasonable such maximum deterrent.
Any regime responsible for national security, especially in the face of direct pressures by hostile, aggressive and more powerful states, would, reasonably, be expected (by its citizens) to develop all possible countervailing capability.
Iran’s nuclear program became precisely that. This rationale of countervailing force or ‘deterrent’ is the standard logic of all states that have developed nuclear armaments. Ironically, the only state that did not have that excuse of an ‘enemy’ nuclear power was the United States of America, the first state to develop the atomic bomb.
The motive of Washington in developing the bomb was not to match an equivalent power but to build military superiority over all other states – global eminence. Today, Washington still strives for that eminence, but now it is to sustain a prevailing eminence and, to do so by deploying all of its superior power wherever and whenever – even in distant West Asia or Venezuela or Greenland.
Geopolitical designs
Washington’s current government has announced to the world its readiness to enforce its geopolitical designs quite irrespective of any international legalities, alliance obligations or even human decencies. The US has earlier bombed Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos without provocation and more recently, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Iran.
The US has earlier invaded Vietnam without any threat and, recently, did the same in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and, Venezuela. And, Washington has gone further in grotesque geopolitics reminiscent of ancient, barbaric, times: in kidnaping and holding hostage the heads of other countries, earlier Panama’s Noriega, recently, Venezuela’s Maduro.
No “international rules-based order” has ever stopped the US from perpetrating such actions for more than a century – since Washington began intervening in Central America in the early 20th Century. Indeed, the vast majority of Central American and Caribbean countries have been victim to US interventions and some remain subject to continuing manipulations till today.
It is no wonder then that Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, was, on Friday, in a state visit to Beijing, able to praise China (increasingly demonised by the West) as being a most “predictable” country and easy for Canada to deal with. Carney did not expressly point to his good neighbour, the USA, as being the most unpredictable, although much of the world would have agreed with him.
Carny has just successfully re-set Canada-China economic ties after the recent trade chaos created by Washington (last year) to force all US trade partners to distance themselves from America’s perceived economic rivals, especially China.
Thus, even if Donald Trump has softened his totally undiplomatic invective against Tehran, all indications remain in favour of an imminent Western attack on Iran. As pointed out above, there are many motives for this and most of it little do with the interests of the Iranian nation. Indeed, it has all to do with aggressively hostile geopolitical interests of the West.
Sanctions
First, the huge economic suffering that prompted last week’s sudden mass protests in many large Iranian cities is entirely caused by the decades of economic and diplomatic sanctions imposed by the Western power bloc led by the US.
Paradoxically, the Western power bloc does not have the capacity to fully subjugate Iran and replace the current legitimate government with a subservient puppet regime. Rather, the West is satisfied with maintaining Iran in its current state of poverty and political instability. Just as the same West now similarly maintains Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan and many other countries (Chad? Central African Republic? Congo? Mali?).
And, most immediately, the US President has his own personal domestic motive for this external mayhem: evading public scrutiny for his personal suspect criminality and his authoritarian governance of US states currently controlled by the opposition Democratic Party.
That the US (and likely Israel) will indeed soon strike Iran is evidenced by last week’s preparatory military move of withdrawing US personnel from American military bases in Iran’s neighbourhood, especially in Qatar.
But what is also likely is that this second assault on Iran is, again, technically, a feint. It is designed merely to add to existing human and infrastructural damage but not to “obliterate” Iran as one-time US (Democratic) Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, once threatened during an interview on national TV.
What the West wants is primarily to be permitted to proceed with its ongoing, genocidal and colonial plunder of West Asia, pillaging its oil and gas resources while retaining geopolitical control (through proxy Israel) of this region which immediately adjoins homeland Europe.
Ironically, even this next phase of military destruction, along with the economic crippling, will still only weaken and not subdue Iranian defiance of the West. Tehran’s resistance to the West’s depredations in West Asia has continued all these decades notwithstanding many such geopolitical pressures. If Vietnam was not subdued, nor Cuba, nor many other nations, can Iran be that easily?
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