Stephen Zunes Podcast

Truthout has just posted my latest article about how, despite growing dissatisfaction among Democratic voters with the war on Iran and with ongoing military support for Israel and Arab dictatorships, the House Democratic leadership has picked two prominent hawks to join the House Foreign Affairs Committee while also promoting an even worse militarist to become a the ranking member (and likely next chair) of the Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee.

You can find links to both the article as well as an audio version below..........

Exactly one year ago, I wrote an article on a similar theme regarding the Democratic National Committee’s decision to block resolutions calling on the Democratic Party to oppose any additional offensive military aid to Israel and to join the vast majority of the world’s nations in recognizing the State of Palestine. This left the party on record supporting the position stated in its 2024 platform that maintaining high levels of military aid was “ironclad” and that the U.S. would only support Palestinian statehood on terms agreed to by Israel through direct bilateral negotiations, despite the fact that Israel opposes any Palestinian statehood and there haven’t been negotiations for more than a decade. https://inthesetimes.com/article/dnc-israel-gaza-palestine-democrats-ceasefire-genocide

I ended the article on a hopeful note, pointing out how the DNC chair had promised to form a committee to re-evaluate the party’s position on Israel/Palestine. That committee was never formed, however.

The good news is that at their meeting a few weeks ago, the DNC adopted a resolution calling for the consistent enforcement of the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S. arms transfers to governments engaged in war crimes. Unfortunately, given that the last Democratic administration denied Israel was engaged in war crimes, it’s unclear as to whether this will make a difference.

Here’s the article.

Democratic Voters Say They Want Change, But the Party Just Elevated More Hawks

Party leaders are ignoring the three-quarters of registered Democrats who oppose providing military aid to Israel.

By Stephen Zunes

First published in Truthout, September 3, 2026.

Despite growing dissatisfaction among Democratic voters with the U.S.’s ongoing military support for Israel, the House Democratic leadership has picked two foreign policy hawks — Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida) and Wesley Bell (D-Missouri) — to join the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC), while also promoting an even worse hawk, Jared Moskowitz (D-Florida), to become a ranking member of the Middle East and North Africa subcommittee.

Moskowitz is among the most right-wing Democrats in the House regarding Israel. He opposes any conditions on U.S. military aid to the Netanyahu government and was one of only a dozen Democrats who voted for a 2023 Republican supplemental aid package to Israel during the height of the Gaza genocide. He has conflated criticism of Israeli war crimes with antisemitism and he authored an amendment to ban the use of State Department funds to cite official Gaza casualty figures. He opposes Palestinian statehood except on terms agreed to by Israel, despite the fact that Israel’s current government opposes any kind of Palestinian state. And he was among the small minority of Democrats to vote against the War Powers Resolution targeting U.S. support for Israel’s war on Lebanon and supported sanctioning members of the International Criminal Court for investigating war crimes by Israel or any other U.S. ally.

The HFAC’s ranking member and likely next chair Greg Meeks (D-NY) — similarly a hardline supporter of Israel and of autocratic U.S. allies — unsurprisingly praised the new likeminded appointees and expressed positivity about how they will soon “guide the committee as it addresses urgent challenges in national security and diplomacy.”

Moskowitz’s appointment in particular should be of concern to supporters of human rights and international law: It puts him in the position to chair the subcommittee in the likely event that Democrats gain a majority in the House of Representatives after the November elections.

As chair, Moskowitz would have significant influence over the Middle East policy promoted by the Democratic Party, becoming the party’s de facto spokesperson on the House side and allowing him to shape legislation and oversight involving Israel and the Middle East as a whole. Committee and subcommittee chairs have considerable power in determining who gets to testify, thereby enabling Moskowitz to refuse a fair hearing to human rights advocates and others opposed to U.S. support for the Israeli government and Arab dictatorships.

Upon his appointment, Moskowitz — as a sign of his backing of the Trump administration’s support for the Israeli government and autocratic Arab regimes — pledged to use his position “to strengthen America’s relationships with Israel and our Gulf allies.” And he acknowledged the power that he will have, telling Axios, “If Democrats take control of the House, I’ll be in a position to help steer U.S. policy on Israel and the Middle East.”

Moskowitz, Wasserman Schultz, and Meeks are grossly out of step with Democratic public opinion. Nearly three-quarters of registered Democrats oppose providing additional military or economic aid to Israel. Indeed, eight out of 10 Democrats and Democratic-leading independents view Israel unfavorably and barely 16 percent think favorably of the U.S.-backed Israeli government. Sixty-five percent of Democrats now sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis, as compared with 17 percent who side with Israel.

Indeed, there is probably no issue where the policies pursued by the Democratic leadership are so out of step with the views of the rank-and-file.

Israel is not the only occupying power supported by Moskowitz. The Florida Congressman is a strong backer of Morocco’s illegal and repressive occupation of the nation of Western Sahara, a full member state of the African Union that the kingdom invaded in 1975 in defiance of a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions and a landmark ruling of the International Court of Justice. He is one of only a handful of Democrats to support a bill to designate the Polisario Front — the secular, democratic, and moderately leftist movement which governs Western Sahara — as a foreign terrorist organization, despite the fact that that they have never engaged in terrorism or have ties with any terrorist groups.

Moskowitz has pushed to fast-track arms transfers to Morocco to support its increasingly brutal occupation, ostensibly to counter Iran and Iran-backed groups, even though that northwestern African nation is thousands of miles from Iran or any pro-Iranian militia, and none of them has weapons capable of reaching it. This bill also supported expediting arms to Bahrain, which has brutally suppressed the pro-democracy movement in that island nation, as well as to the United Arab Emirates, which has been supporting the genocidal Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.

In addition, Moskowitz serves as co-chair of the Congressional Friends of Egypt Caucus, which promotes closer ties and billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to the brutal dictatorship of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Indeed, authoritarians throughout the region know they now have a powerful and influential friend in the Democratic leadership.

Meanwhile Moskowitz is also one of Congress’s leading Iran hawks. During sensitive negotiations prior to the war, Moskowitz declared that “now is not the time to appease” Iran, insisting that the Trump administration adopt a tougher stance — even acknowledging that he was to the right of Vice-President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff and was more closely aligned with far right senators Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and the late Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). Last year, he was one of only two Democrats to oppose an effort to block an incipient war on Iran through enacting the War Powers Resolution, calling it the “Ayatollah Protection Act.”

Perhaps not coincidentally, Moskowitz has bought stock in Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest military contractor, on four occasions since joining the Foreign Relations Committee.

In short, the Democratic leadership has chosen an ally of a right-wing Republican administration as the Democratic party’s chief representative of a key subcommittee, despite his views on the Middle East conflicting with those of an overwhelming majority of Democrats. The appointment of Moskowitz in 2026 is essentially the equivalent of the Democratic leadership having in the 1980s appointed a supporter of the Salvadoran death squads, the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, and the genocidal junta in Guatemala to the leadership of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee.

Not surprisingly, right-wing news outlets such as the National Review, Algemeiner, Washington Examiner, and Newsmaxhave defended the selection of Moskowitz and the other hardliners while dismissing concerns from Democratic human rights activists.

Democrats and other liberal and progressive critics are pushing back, however.

Dylan Williams, vice president for governmental affairs at the Center for International Policy, noted how “Moskowitz is deeply out of touch with Democratic voters on the very issues the party’s House leadership just entrusted to him.”

The Institute for Middle East Understanding sent out a statement saying:

Just as the Democratic Party is asking its voters to donate and volunteer for the midterms, party leadership in Congress elevated one of its most out-of-step members to block the changes most Democratic voters are demanding. This encapsulates so much about what’s wrong with today’s Democratic Party leadership.

Carrie Kharrazian, a senior policy adviser for Demand Progress, said:

By making a hard-line Israel supporter their point person on Middle East policy, House Democratic leaders are doubling down on a failed approach to Israel that shows contempt for the clear and growing majority of Democratic voters who want to stop cutting blank checks for the Israeli government. Donald Trump’s ongoing wars in the Middle East and his commitment to keeping the US joined at the hip to Israel are wildly unpopular and have been a disaster for the nation. Elevating someone who consistently sides with Trump in support of Israel, and who has a long record as an Iran hawk, represents clear political malpractice on behalf of House Democratic leaders.

Erik Sperling, executive director at Just Foreign Policy, called the decision to appoint Moskowitz “shocking,” noting that “Meeks and [House Democratic leader Hakeem] Jeffries are apparently intending to signal that the anti-war and pro-Palestinian movements are unwelcome in the [Democratic] Party.”

Ben Rhodes, who served as Deputy National Security Advisor during the Obama administration, wrote that the Democratic leadership was “showing zero regard for the vast majority of their own voters,” adding that their “disregard for war crimes and voter concerns could not be clearer.” He spoke for many by observing that it was “a giant ‘f**k you’ from Democratic leadership to Democratic voters.” He continued, “Dems are counting on people not noticing how they approach governing. Appointments on HFAC are a signal of what the party cares about and the disregard for war crimes and voter concerns could not be clearer.” And he predicted that the House leadership’s choices would leave Democratic voters feeling like their concerns were being “completely ignored.”

Congressional Democrats have been speaking out as well. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), argued that, “By elevating a genocide denier who has said he is ‘to the right’ of JD Vance on the war on Iran, Democratic leadership is once again ignoring the base of our party who want the funding of the genocide to end.” And Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) shared a social media post saying, “Don’t put Israel hawks out of touch with our voters in charge of our Middle East policy.”

Congressional committee assignments are not usually the top thing on voters’ minds come Election Day. However, this blatant disregard for the views of the Democratic rank-and-file will only reinforce a growing sense that the Democratic Party leadership simply doesn’t care what their constituents believe. Despite establishment Democratic leaders’ dismissal of peace and human rights advocates’ anger at their support for dictatorship, repression, occupation, apartheid, genocide, colonization, and terror as “single-issue” politics, for many Democratic-leaning voters these are fundamental moral issues that go well beyond the Middle East.

As we approach what may be the most critical midterm election in our nation’s history and with so much at stake, the appointments of Moskowitz, Wasserman Schultz, and Bell will only add to the bitterness and cynicism of progressive Democrats.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephenzunes962006.substack.com/subscribe

By Stephen Zunes , first published in Truthout, August 7, 2026. Read by Greg Bates.

The United States has launched an all-out assault on the International Criminal Court (ICC). In the past few weeks alone, the Trump administration has vowed to eradicate the top court, pressured countries to withdraw from it, and has attacked progressive political leaders like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani who seek to carry out its mandates.

These attacks are jarring, but they are not new, are not only about Israel, and are not just coming from Republicans.

The renewed chorus of attacks began on July 13, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio renewed a U.S. attack on the court by announcing a plan to “dismantle” the ICC “brick by brick, if necessary.” Rubio claimed that, without such action, U.S. police officers or border patrol agents “could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America.”

This claim is utter nonsense. The ICC has no jurisdiction over crimes committed by law enforcement officers in the United States. And while Rubio claims that the U.S. has not consented to the international humanitarian law that the ICC seeks to uphold, such law is actually drawn directly from binding treaties — including the Genocide Convention as well as the Geneva Conventions and related protocols, which the U.S. government has signed, ratified, and in many cases, incorporated into its own military manuals.More revealing is Rubio’s complaint that the United States can’t “control” international law. No country can do that, nor should they be able to. The law is the law. As Kenneth Roth, the former longtime director of Human Rights Watch, put it: “Law is meant to bind people, not be controlled by them.”

In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal accompanying his official announcement from the State Department, Rubio claimed that the court is “run” by “hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.” This is also untrue. Virtually every European government is a member of the ICC. None of its 18 justices are from countries with hostile state relations with the U.S., and all but three of those countries are inarguably democracies. Of the 73 people indicted by the ICC, none of them have been Americans and only six of them have been associated with governments allied with the United States.

Rubio’s attack was followed by continued attention on the court, this time from Mamdani, who called on federal authorities to act on an ICC warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and arrest him during a planned trip to New York later this year. In response, Mamdani was falsely accused of unfairly singling out Israel, even though he explicitly stated that his position would apply to “any other war criminals.” His focus on Netanyahu was simply because no other indicted war criminal was scheduled to visit his city.

Only two Israelis have ever been indicted by the ICC. This hasn’t stopped prominent U.S. politicians like Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) to insist that the court has an “anti-Israel bias.” Similarly, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-New Jersey) has accused the ICC of a “continued, longstanding bias against the Jewish state,” and former Rep. Kathy Manning (D-North Carolina) has criticized what she referred to as its “efforts to single out and undermine Israel.”

What actually appears to bother these lawmakers is not the baseless claim that the ICC has an anti-Israel, anti-American, or anti-Western bias, but that it refuses to make exceptions for the United States and its allies. These demonstrably false statements from lawmakers reveal a disingenuous bipartisan effort to discredit the ICC and, by extension, international humanitarian law as a whole, in the eyes of the American public.

If the court has displayed any bias, it would be against Africa. Of the 75 people indicted by the ICC, 59 have been from African nations. Indeed, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso jointly announced their withdrawals from the court last year, claiming the ICC is an “instrument of neocolonial repression in the hands of imperialism.”

It is important to note that none of these anti-ICC U.S. politicians have complained about indictments and investigations against African leaders or militants, leaders of Hamas or the Taliban, or Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials. Their attacks on the ICC are because the court seems unwilling to arbitrarily exempt U.S. allies from their investigations.

The true nature of these denouncements was made quite explicit in a bipartisan bill called the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act” that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 2024. That bill would have imposed draconian sanctions on non-Americans who directly or indirectly participated in ICC prosecutions of people who are lawful citizens or residents of the U.S. or its allies, so long as their own nation did not consent to ICC jurisdiction.

The bill was both particularly broad — it threatened anyone who was involved in arresting or detaining or even simply investigating U.S. allies — and harsh, in that it would sanction the family members of the people it targeted as well. The lawmakers’ argument was essentially that ICC investigations should be based not on the available evidence, the severity of the crimes, or the basis of international law, but on the geopolitical orientation of the government of those accused. The bill passed the House with significant Democratic support, but failed to reach the floor of the Senate.

It should be noted that the bipartisan attacks against the ICC are not new. In 2002, a bill drafted by right-wing Sen. Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) prohibited the United States from cooperating in any way with the International Criminal Court. The bill was supported by then-New York Sen. (and future Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats, and was signed into law by President George W. Bush.

This vindictive legislation also restricted U.S. foreign aid to countries that support the ICC. It also authorized the president of the United States “to use all means necessary and appropriate to free members of the United States military and certain other allied persons if they are detained or imprisoned by an international criminal court,” including military force, which led to its nickname: the “Hague Invasion Act.”

This law also initially constrained the Biden administration from providing intelligence it had gathered to the ICC regarding Russian atrocities in Ukraine until Congress passed an amendment which opened up some legal space by repealing restrictions on using U.S. funds and other cooperation in order to support the ICC’s investigations targeting Russian war crimes.

In 2024, Joe Biden became the first president to openly side with alleged war criminals against the ICC when he denounced as “outrageous” a report to the ICC recommending the indictment of Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (along with three Hamas leaders) for war crimes. “We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security,” Biden underscored, despite the fact that the report never questioned Israel’s right to self-defense. Similarly, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken called it “shameful” and “a profoundly wrong-headed” decision, which the United States “fundamentally rejects.”

A major argument in Washington against the ICC prosecution of Israeli officials was that Israel was not a signatory to the Rome Statute. The state of Palestine is, however, so attacks on and from Palestinian territory would unquestionably qualify. In any case, neither Russia nor Ukraine are parties to the statute, but that didn’t prevent the indictment of Russian officials and U.S. support for those indictments.

The attacks on the ICC have reached a new level since Trump returned to office. Executive Order 14203 has given the administration the unprecedented authority to impose sanctions on any foreigner who supports the ICC’s investigations of U.S. or Israeli citizens. This has been used to sanction the ICC’s chief prosecutor and 10 of its judges with financial restrictions and travel bans, leading to them not being able to use credit cards or have Google accounts and mandating prison sentences for any American providing them with services. It has also been used to sanction UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and three Palestinian human rights organizations as well. As a result, Georgetown University has removed Albanese, a distinguished Italian jurist, as an affiliate scholar, while the University of Southern Maine banned a conference she was set to virtually address which was scheduled to take place on campus.

Meanwhile, the respected human rights group Al-Haq can no longer fund its operations because its bank accounts have been closed. YouTube has removed hundreds of Al-Haq’s videos documenting Israeli forces’ human rights abuses. In addition, U.S.-based human rights groups with which Al-Haq had long collaborated are no longer able to provide financial support, and in many cases, have severed communications altogether due to threats of being targeted by the U.S. government or losing funding.

Ironically, the targeting of the ICC may actually get members of the administration or congressional allies in the war on the court in trouble. Article 70 of the Rome Statute criminalizes impeding, intimidating, or corruptly influencing any ICC official as part of an effort to prevent them from performing their duties or retaliate against them for having done so, a provision that even applies to non-signatories.

In his op-ed last month, Rubio claimed the ICC “threatens every aspect of our political and legal system.” He insisted that the ICC and its supporters are “waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called international law.” To address this alleged threat, he announced a new diplomatic campaign that will not only increase the administration’s pressure against the ICC, but will also withdraw foreign aid and impose other penalties on countries that continue to cooperate with it.

While the United States is among the minority of the world’s countries to have never joined the ICC, it has been pressuring member countries to pull out. The Trump administration during its first term successfully pressured the Philippines to withdraw in 2019. The U.S. pressured Hungary to announce its withdrawal last year, and Venezuela and Chad to announce their withdrawals last month, after Rubio announced his campaign against the court. Like Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, both Venezuela and Chad mentioned allegations of “bias” against the court, but Chad specifically referenced a request from the U.S. to review its membership.

The European Union has denounced U.S. “attacks or threats against the court, elected officials, personnel or those cooperating with the court” as “simply not acceptable.” In response to such objections by U.S. allies, American legal scholars, and others, Rubio has utilized the popular antisemitic dog whistle by claiming the ICC is backed and run by “smug globalists.”

Despite right-wing claims that the ICC could prosecute U.S. servicemembers for war crimes, the court can only prosecute those from countries that are unable or unwilling to prosecute themselves. While unevenly applied, the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice has generally been seen as adequate to forestall the risk of the ICC ever prosecuting American soldiers.

However, now that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has dismantled Pentagon offices designed to enforce the laws of war and criticized what he calls “stupid rules of engagement” and “burdensome rules” on U.S. troops, which he implied could include the Fourth Geneva Convention, such protection from international prosecution might soon be threatened. In any case, the ICC has generally not targeted individual soldiers for atrocities, but those who commanded them.

There is some serious speculation that the administration’s assault on the ICC may be based in part of fear that U.S. officials could be targeted as well.

The post-World War II international legal system upon which the International Criminal Court is based was crafted by Western nations, particularly the idealists of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. While there are some reasonable critiques of the limitations of this “rules-based international order,” it at least sent a message — however unevenly these principles may have been enforced — that the killing of civilians, torture, territorial conquest, maltreatment of prisoners of war, apartheid, and genocide are illegal, and that perpetrators of these crimes should be held accountable.

This is what Trump administration officials, members of Congress, and critics of Mamdani’s statement oppose. They are essentially rejecting the liberal international order in favor of a new system in which governments — at least the United States and its allies — are no longer bound by such principles.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephenzunes962006.substack.com/subscribe

First published in The Progressive, July 29, 2026. Read by Greg Bates

Michigan Democrats face a critical choice next Tuesday in what polls show is a tight primary race for the U.S. Senate. It pits Representative Haley Stevens, one of the more hawkish and pro-corporate Democratic members in the U.S. House of Representatives, against public health official Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a prominent progressive advocating Medicare for all, progressive taxation, and getting corporate money out of politics.

Much attention has been given to the Stevens campaign’s dependence on contributions from corporate donors and conservative political action committees (PACs), including those affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Various PACs supportive of Israel’s far-right government have donated up to $30 million to her campaign in appreciation of her strident opposition to conditioning military aid to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid ongoing occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide.

Stevens has supported Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, voted to defund U.N. agencies helping Palestinian refugees, denounced Amnesty International and other human rights groups for documenting Israeli war crimes, and attacked the International Court of Justice for investigating Israeli violations of international law.

El-Sayed, on the other hand, opposes Israel’s actions in Gaza and the U.S.’s provision of military aid. He has underscored the importance of conditional military aid in adherence to internationally-recognized human rights standards to all nations and supports international legal institutions that consistently advocate for universal standards. He has stressed the differences between criticizing a government and attacking the religion or ethnicity of a nation’s population. For example, he also opposes U.S. military aid to Egypt, an Arab Muslim country from which his parents came.

But Stevens’s dismissal of international humanitarian law goes well beyond Israel. She opposes any accountability for war crimes by any U.S. ally.

Stevens was one of only a handful of Democratic members of the House to support a 2024 Republican-sponsored bill designed to punish anyone who directly or indirectly participates in the investigation or prosecution of those suspected of war crimes if they are part of a government allied with the United States.

The bill, which passed the House that June but never made it to the floor of the Senate, was rooted in the belief that the prosecution of suspected war criminals by the International Criminal Court (ICC) should be based not on the available evidence, the severity of the crimes, or what the law says, but on the geopolitical orientation of the government of those accused. While Stevens has no objections to prosecuting war criminals belonging to organizations or governments that the U.S. government opposes, her backing of this bill would seem to indicate that she believes those supported by Washington should somehow be held unaccountable.

It’s not as if the ICC has an anti-Western bias. Since its founding in 2002, the ICC has indicted seventy-three people, including African warlords, Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials, and Hamas terrorist leaders. Only two of those seventy-three indicted have been affiliated with U.S.-allied governments. However, it would appear that even that is too many for Stevens.

Indeed, Stevens’s list of those impacted by the sanctions she supported would have included some of the world’s most prominent human rights lawyers and international jurists, along with their immediate family members. Their property and other assets held in the United States would have been subjected to seizure and they would have been banned from entering the country.

Almost all of these targeted individuals have been involved in other war crimes prosecutions, including those stemming from atrocities in Rwanda, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Myanmar, Liberia, and elsewhere. None of them have ever shown any ideological bias against Israel or any other U.S. ally. They simply believe that international humanitarian law should be defended regardless of political considerations—which is exactly what seems to upset Stevens.

Among those targeted by these sanctions would have been Theodor Meron—a Holocaust survivor, former Israeli Ambassador to Canada, and president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia—because he was one of the experts consulted by the ICC regarding suspected war crimes committed by Israeli leaders.

Another target would have been the prominent British human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who has been involved in human rights cases in dozens of countries. She would be subjected to sanctions for her participation in an ICC Panel of Experts in International Law which, in addition to recommending the prosecution of three Hamas terrorist leaders, also supported the prosecution of two Israeli leaders. She is married to American actor George Clooney, a major Democratic Party fundraiser, and would have been banned from ever again living with or even visiting her husband in California.

The Biden Administration, despite its own criticisms of the ICC and support for Israel in the face of large scale war crimes in Gaza and elsewhere, issued a statement in June 2024 saying that it “strongly” opposed the bill because it “could require sanctions against court staff, judges, witnesses, and U.S. allies and partners who provide even limited, targeted support to the court in a range of aspects of its work.”

Stevens, however, sided with Trump and her Republican House colleagues against the Democratic administration.

Indeed, the Trump Administration imposed its own sanctions on the ICC in February 2025, although they were not quite as severe or comprehensive as those supported by Stevens. She could potentially use her position in the Senate, if elected, to support the Trump Administration’s efforts to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court.

Stevens’s hostility to the ICC is not popular. Polls show that Americans have been broadly supportive of the ICC, with only a small minority supporting sanctions. And a poll released July 23 showed that Americans, by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, support arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was indicted by the ICC in 2024 (along with a Hamas leader) for multiple war crimes, including crimes against humanity.

This could be a big political mistake. If Michigan Democrats nominate someone so out of touch with her constituents and so supportive of Trump’s opposition to international law and human rights, many thousands of Michiganders will likely vote third party or stay at home in November, thereby risking handing this critical Senate seat to a rightwing Republican.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephenzunes962006.substack.com/subscribe

First published in The Progressive, June 23, 2026. Read by Greg Bates

Many of the criticisms being leveled against the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran—namely, that it is not that great a deal—are accurate and worthy of attention. But under the disastrous set of circumstances resulting from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, it is probably the best deal that can be realistically hoped for, given that Iran clearly has the upper hand. Unfortunately, that has not stopped some Washington politicians, including many prominent Democrats, from attempting to undermine it.

Iran has suffered enormously in terms of damage to its military and civilian infrastructure and the killing of many in its clerical, political, and military leadership, among many other thousands of deaths. In response, the regime has demonstrated an effective new form of asymmetrical warfare, in which relatively cheap drones can continue to inflict an enormous amount of damage on U.S. assets in the region, as well as on the military and civilian infrastructure of U.S. allies, even when more than 90 percent of such projectiles are successfully intercepted via more costly technologies.

The United States cannot win this war against Iran.

The deal outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding is decidedly of greater benefit to Iran than the terms agreed upon in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—an agreement primarily negotiated by the Obama Administration and signed by six other nations with the support of the United Nations and the European Union. That deal was unilaterally broken off by President Donald Trump during his first term.

Trump’s new Memorandum of Understanding with Iran calls for Iran’s enriched uranium to be blended down inside the country rather than removed to another location. In addition, as much as $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets will be released, although Trump has repeatedly criticized the JCPOA for unfreezing billions in Iranian assets. And, unlike the JCPOA, this deal lifts sanctions prior to Iran’s implementing the nuclear provisions.

The Trump Administration emphasizes that its agreement forces Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and commits Iran to not developing a nuclear weapon. However, both of these were already the case prior to Trump’s launch of the war four months ago on February 28.

For Republicans who attacked President Barack Obama for the JCPOA to now defend Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding is beyond hypocrisy. But many Congressional Democrats are demonstrating their own hypocrisy in claiming that they oppose the war while actively undermining efforts to end it.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, referred to the agreement as “the art of surrender.” Senator John Hickenlooper, Democrat of Colorado, deemed it “despicable.” Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, said it was a deal in which Iran gets all the benefits. Former Clinton Administration National Security Advisor Susan Rice dubbed it a “jaw-dropping, horrific surrender.” Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, said it was “a thorough capitulation.” Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, similarly claimed it was “basically a surrender document.” And Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, also called the agreement as an “unconditional surrender” by the United States, insisting it would be “dead on arrival in the Senate”—even though, since it is not a formal treaty, it does not require ratification or any other action on Capitol Hill.

Under international law, countries that engage in aggressive war are generally held liable for the damages inflicted upon the country they attack. The costs to Iranian society of the U.S.-Israeli bombing has been estimated to be nearly $300 billion. The Memorandum of Understanding does not call for reparations, but it does make reference to a reconstruction fund in that amount, apparently led by Arab Gulf states; payments will likely be in the form of loans with a decent return on investment for those Gulf states. It is not U.S. tax dollars that are being spent. It is not money that Trump is giving to Iran.

This has not stopped some Democratic leaders in Congress from claiming this is somehow a taxpayer-funded cash grant to the Iranian regime. Schumer insists the agreement would force the United States to “send Iran $300 billion when economic needs are severe here at home.” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, falsely claimed these funds could be used to “end homelessness, fund cancer research for forty years, and give every child free pre-K for over seven years. Instead, Trump is sending it to Iran.” Blumenthal even claimed that Iran would be able to spend the money on supporting Hezbollah and other extremist Iranian allies, and rebuild its nuclear program. However, the investments would more likely actually be directed towards specific civilian infrastructure development projects under the supervision of the donor countries and private investors.

Misrepresenting arms control agreements is a time-honored tactic used by militarists. During the Cold War, these agreements frequently prompted rightwing claims that arms control locked in Soviet nuclear superiority. Trump himself insisted that the JCPOA, rather than make it physically impossible for Iran to develop a weapon, would have enabled them to do the opposite and destroy Israel and attack the United States.

By falsely claiming that the United States would pay Iran $300 billion, Schumer (who also opposed the JCPOA) and other Democrats are essentially trying to mobilize popular opposition to the ending of the conflict.

The big question: What is the alternative?

A return to a war on Iran that brings retaliatory attacks on a half-dozen Middle Eastern nations? The continued devastating Israeli bombardment of Lebanon? The indefinite closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its disastrous global economic impact, particularly on families worldwide living under the poverty line?

Some Democrats recognize this reality. “There is no good way out of a bad war,” noted Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland. “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.” Similarly, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, observed, “It’s a disaster, but it’s probably a necessary disaster.”

But the Democratic politicians who are joining rightwing Republicans in claims of “surrender” are assisting in the creation of a climate that might indeed lead the hawkish Trump Administration to break off the current agreement and return to war.

In many respects, this is nothing new. Democrats played an important role in working to undermine Obama’s efforts to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran, in discouraging President Joe Biden from returning to the deal, and in promoting a war in Iran that Trump finally brought to fruition in recent months.

Those of us interested in peace and security, however, should not encourage these actions. It is easy to criticize the agreement as a means of underscoring the tragedy of this reckless and illegal war, and to further discredit Trump as we approach the midterm elections. We must resist the understandable temptation to forward the memes, cartoons, and late-night jokes critical of the deal on our personal listservs and social media.

Doing so simply reinforces the efforts by Republican hawks, rightwing Zionists, and others who seek perpetual war. The unfortunate reality is that the implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding is probably the best hope at this point to end—or at least suspend—this tragic conflict.

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First published in Truthout, May 5, 2026

U.S. efforts to force an end to the stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz by attempting to escort a few U.S.-flagged ships through the Iranian closure will not only fail to relieve the worsening global fuel crisis and disruption of supply chains, it risks a resumption of full-scale war. The Trump administration has rejected Iran’s suggestion for negotiating an end to the blockade followed by a resumption of talks on other outstanding issues, insisting that Iran first agree to eliminate its nuclear program.

In February 2019, I sat in the Iranian Foreign Ministry, along with a small delegation of American peace activists, with Javad Zarif, the U.S.-educated foreign minister. He described how the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was a result of many months of intense direct negotiations, during which he met with then-Secretary of State John Kerry no less than 50 times, going over the agreement line by line.

Indeed, the talks took nearly two years, and involved five other nations (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China) as well as the support of the European Union and the United Nations, before finally reaching the agreement formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Those negotiations took the best efforts of scores of veteran diplomats, skilled mediators, and technical experts. The result was a deal which, in return for the lifting of sanctions, made it physically impossible for Iran to build even a single nuclear weapon and included a rigorous inspections regime to ensure Iran’s compliance.

During his first administration, Donald Trump famously tossed that deal, insisting he could negotiate a better one. And now, instead of mobilizing the human and material resources to negotiate a political agreement with staying power to end the war, Trump is insisting that his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his real estate buddy Steve Witkoff, and his novice vice president JD Vance — none of whom have significant diplomatic experience or technical expertise regarding nuclear issues — could simply fly into Pakistan and, after no more than a few days, force Iran to capitulate.

Indeed, it was Kushner and Witkoff’s lack of understanding of how nuclear enrichment and related issues work that prevented them from appreciating Iran’s major concessions in talks early this year. Such ignorance likely contributed to Witkoff’s misleading assessments regarding the progress in negotiations which may have prompted Trump’s decision to go to war.

Trump has continued claiming the JCPOA was a one-sided deal favoring Iran, when in fact it was just the opposite. Iran had agreed to strictly limit its nuclear program without any reciprocity from nuclear-armed states nearby — Israel, Pakistan, and India — even though all three have also been in violation of UN Security Council resolutions regarding their nuclear programs which, unlike Iran, have actually produced nuclear weapons. And none of the other nuclear powers, including the United States, were required to reduce their arsenals, either.

Despite this, Trump abrogated the agreement, stating it did not go far enough to force Iran to stop supporting its regional allies, eliminate its missiles, and make internal political reforms. This has always been a pipe dream, however. It is hard to imagine any country not defeated in war making such concessions unilaterally. Indeed, Witkoff made a whole series of absurd demands, including that Iran unilaterally give up its navy.

During the Cold War, in nuclear arms talks with the Soviet Union, despite the plethora of geopolitical issues dividing Washington and Moscow, even the extreme anti-communist Nixon and Reagan administrations recognized that nuclear arms needed to be addressed separately, both as a result of their singular importance and the fact that bringing up other issues would needlessly prolong the talks and likely make any agreement impossible.

In my 2019 meeting with Zarif in Tehran, he noted how he had to fight elements within the Iranian government who opposed the treaty. The JCPOA required Iran to destroy billions of dollars’ worth of nuclear facilities and material in return for the lifting of debilitating sanctions. These political factions argued that the United States could renege on the agreement and reimpose sanctions at any time. Zarif and other political reformists expended enormous political capital by insisting that Washington could be trusted.

Trump proved Zarif and his fellow reformers wrong.

The reimposition of sanctions was not just in regard to Iran’s own direct trade with the United States. The Trump administration insisted on imposing secondary sanctions on companies in any country that continued economic relations with Iran, forcing many to comply against their wishes. For example, the French conglomerate TotalEnergies decided to pull out of a major project in Iran rather than lose its larger investments in the United States.

In part as a reaction to the reimposition of sanctions and the seeming vindication of hardliners, Iranians elected conservative Ebrahim Raisi president in the lowest turnout since 1979, and the clerical military leadership hardened their own political positions against further diplomacy with the U.S. Up until that point, Iran had been strictly following the JCPOA limits on its nuclear program, despite the U.S. abrogation and the imposition of new sanctions. But with the international community no longer willing to honor its end of the deal with sanctions relief, Iran determined that it was no longer bound by restrictions to its nuclear program and began enriching uranium well beyond the 3.67 percent allowed by the agreement. It is believed that Iran is now up to 60 percent enrichment capability, far closer to the 90 percent necessary to build a nuclear weapon.

This further enrichment then led, with the support of European nations, to a resumption last year of the more comprehensive UN sanctions that had been lifted in 2015, worsening the economic situation still further. Those sanctions exacerbated the problems inherent in the Iranian state’s crony capitalism, corruption, and economic mismanagement to further strangle the Iranian economy.

While Trump certainly deserves most of the blame, the failure of European countries to more forcefully challenge U.S. duplicity or even ensure desperately needed humanitarian aid makes it into Iran has further weakened Iranian officials seeking greater openness to the West and increased the power of political factions that insist on turning inward and imposing their will on a restless population.

In periods when the West appeared more willing to engage in serious diplomacy and economic relations, more political space has opened within Iran for both reformers within the system and pro-democracy activists seeking to change the system. By contrast, punitive sanctions, war, and the threat of war have helped elevate more reactionary clerical leadership as well as enrich elites and bolster the control of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has in many respects already turned Iran from simply a conservative theocracy into a brutal military dictatorship.

Trump does not appreciate the importance of real diplomacy, however. He is used to getting his way by making demands, issuing threats, and using whatever means of force are at his disposal, whether it be with business associates, regulators, women, or nations. He is under the false impression that Iran will blink first — that by denying Iran critically important revenue from its oil exports, it would effectively surrender. More likely, the Islamic Republic, which has dealt with major economic sanctions for much of its existence, is quite willing to let its economy suffer rather than submit in a war over its own existence. And the Iranian people are less likely to push for more democratic space in the domestic political sphere while they are struggling to survive day to day, and their nation is under constant threat of war.

While negotiating an interim agreement which would allow for at least a partial reopening the Strait of Hormuz and postponing nuclear talks until later seems like the logical course of action, Trump may see such a compromise as making him appear to be a loser since, despite all the human and financial costs of his war on Iran, it would at best be a return to the status quo ante. His dramatic reaction to comments by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz — traditionally one of the more hawkish European leaders in regard to Iran, publicly recognizing Washington’s lack of an exit strategy — illustrates how he has backed himself into a corner, and much of the world with him.

If the domestic and international pressure for a reopening of the strait gets to be too much, Trump might borrow from Henry Kissinger’s response to another negotiation impasse in December 1972: Despite progress in peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam, the U.S. launched a devastating 11-day bombing campaign over Christmas, dropping 20,000 tons of ordnance on North Vietnamese cities and killing more than 1,600 civilians. Four weeks later, a peace agreement was signed on essentially the same terms North Vietnam had offered before. The Nixon administration, however, contended that it was the bombing that led the North Vietnamese to agree to U.S. terms.

The Trump administration may use the escalating conflict over the strait as an excuse to launch a similar short-term intensive bombing campaign on Iran and, regardless of whether it leads to further Iranian concessions, essentially declare victory if the Strait of Hormuz reopens, even with tolls.

Whatever the outcome, the same kind of hubris out of Washington that led to the tragic wars in Vietnam and Iraq is manifesting itself with Iran today. This time, however, it is impacting the entire world.

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First published in Truthout, April 17, 2026. Read by Greg Bates

Unlike the invasion of Iraq, which received the support of a sizable minority of congressional Democrats, Donald Trump’s war on Iran has received near-universal criticism. Still, the party has focused primarily on process-style critiques — such as the legality of declaring the war under the Constitution and the war’s economic impact — rather than the humanitarian consequences and flagrant violations of international law.

That should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the U.S. bipartisan consensus on Iran: For over 20 years, a number of prominent Democratic leaders — and in some cases, large majorities of congressional Democrats overall — have helped paved the groundwork for Trump’s war by issuing exaggerated and alarmist statements about Iran’s supposed danger to the region, threatening the use of military force, and undermining diplomatic initiatives, sometimes even criticizing Republicans from the right.

In 2024, the Democratic Party platform criticized “Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency” by not responding militarily to attacks by Iran and groups in Iraq and elsewhere that share Iran’s strategic objectives. The platform cited four separate incidents that took place under his first administration, failing to acknowledge that each was a direct result of Trump’s aggressive policies against Iran, including the assassination of Qassim Suleimani, a top Iranian general.

By contrast, the party’s platform praised President Joe Biden for having “authorized precision airstrikes on key Iranian-linked targets,” which it claimed would “deter further aggression by Iran.” It praised “America’s ironclad commitment to the security of Israel and our unrivaled ability to leverage growing regional integration among U.S. partners to counter Iranian aggression.” Though eager to stress military means to counter Iran, the platform failed to directly call for a return to the Iran nuclear deal under the Obama administration, which considerably reduced regional tensions — a deal that Biden campaigned on reinstating but failed to do.

The month after the release of the party platform, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris attacked Trump in a presidential debate, declaring that her administration “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”

In an interview with CBS, when she was asked who she considered to be the greatest enemy of the United States, Harris said it was “obvious” that Iran — not nuclear-armed states such as Russia, China, or North Korea — was the “greatest adversary.” She explicitly said that she would not rule out going to war against that country.

This framing from the right continued into Trump’s presidency, even as the president began pushing more toward sustained military conflict. During Israel’s unprovoked bombing of Iran in June 2025, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer insisted that “Israel has a right to defend itself,” despite the fact that Israel had started the war. Just over a week before, he criticized Trump for even engaging in negotiations with Iran — negotiations that provided cover for the U.S.’s own bombing of multiple Iranian nuclear sites. Just prior to the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites during Israel’s war, Schumer posted a video to social media accusing Trump of “folding on Iran” by attempting to negotiate a deal, bemoaning about how “Trump always chickens out” regarding the use of military force.

Similarly, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries refused to criticize the Israeli attack or call for a return to the Iran nuclear deal. Although Iran has no capability of striking anywhere outside of the Middle East, Jeffries claimed “the Iranian regime poses a grave threat to the entire free world.”

Such hyperbole is not new. As far back as 20 years ago, Democratic leaders like then-Sen. Evan Bayh were claiming that Iran “may be only months away from having the capacity to build a nuclear bomb” and insisting military options should be considered. Similarly, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton argued during the Bush years that his administration was not taking the threat of a nuclear Iran seriously enough, criticizing it for allowing European nations to take the lead in pursuing a diplomatic solution, and insisting that the administration should make it clear that military options were being actively considered. These proclamations came even as the U.S. was struggling to maintain control of Iraq at the height of its occupation.

During the 2008 Democratic primaries, Clinton accused Barack Obama of being “naive” and “irresponsible” for wanting to diplomatically engage with Iran and other nations that U.S. policy has often antagonized. Despite these accusations, Obama selected her as his secretary of state, through which, according to a story in Time magazine, Obama administration officials noted she was “skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, and firmly opposed to talk of a ‘containment’ policy that would be an alternative to military action should negotiations with Tehran fail.”

Clinton was far from the only Democrat pushing back against the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts. In 2011, in an effort to sabotage any potential diplomatic contact with Iran, an overwhelming majority of House Democrats voted for a Republican bill declaring “No person employed with the United States Government may contact in an official or unofficial capacity any person that … is an agent, instrumentality, or official of, is affiliated with, or is serving as a representative of the Government of Iran.” Administration pressure and constitutional questions prevented the bill from passing the Senate, but it underscored that over 90 percent of House Democrats were intent on undermining Obama’s efforts for a non-military resolution to the conflict with Iran.The following year, a similarly large majority of House Democrats voted for a resolution urging the president to oppose any policy toward Iran “that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.” While Obama had already stated a willingness to consider taking military action against Iran if the regime procured nuclear weapons, this resolution significantly lowered the bar for war by declaring it unacceptable for Iran simply to have “nuclear weapons capability” — not necessarily any actual weapons or an active nuclear weapons program.

In 2013, after Clinton was replaced by the more liberal John Kerry as secretary of state and Iranians elected the reformist President Hassan Rouhani, yet another overwhelming majority of House Democrats joined Republicans in voting, over the objections of the White House, to impose punitive new sanctions on Iran. It was widely interpreted as a bipartisan rejection of the new Iranian president’s offer to enhance nuclear transparency and pursue “peace and reconciliation” with the West.

Additionally, in an apparent effort to poison the atmosphere on the eve of Rouhani’s inauguration, over two dozen Democratic senators signed a letter to President Obama demanding a “toughening of sanctions” and “a convincing threat of the use of force.”

In May of that year, every Democratic senator joined their Republican colleagues in supporting a resolution which “urges that, if the Government of Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defense, the United States Government should stand with Israel and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel.” The wording is significant in that it put Senate Democrats on record that the United States should support an Israeli war on Iran not only if Israel was attacked, but even if Israel attacked first. By giving Benjamin Netanyahu the authority to determine what might “compel” Israel to act in “self-defense,” this near-unanimous decision helped pave the way for Israel to make such claims in its U.S.-backed war in June 2025 and the joint U.S.-Israeli war this year.

Fortunately, by 2015, the Obama administration — along with Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China, and with the backing of the European Union and the United Nations — was able to negotiate an agreement whereby, in return for sanctions relief, Iran drastically curtailed its nuclear program to the degree that it was physically impossible to build a nuclear weapon, while also agreeing to strict monitoring to ensure compliance. It took perhaps the most intense lobbying efforts of the Obama presidency to get congressional Democrats on board. In the end, only two Democratic senators, Robert Menendez and Chuck Schumer, opposed the agreement, but their colleagues nevertheless elected them to senior positions — Menendez as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and Schumer as their Senate leader.

The 2016 Democratic platform endorsed the nuclear deal — but declared that, if Iran violated the agreement, rather than allow for the automatic reimposition of strict international sanctions to pressure Iran to come back into compliance as the deal outlined, a Democratic president “will not hesitate to take military action.” Since it would take Iranians at least a few years to rebuild their dramatically circumscribed nuclear program to the point where they could develop even a single nuclear weapon, there would be plenty of time, as well as serious punitive economic mechanisms, to push Iran to resume its compliance. Immediately launching a war, as the platform called for, would therefore not only be a direct violation of the United Nations Charter, it would be completely unnecessary.

This is only a partial list of ways in which Democrats have pushed for a military confrontation with Iran over the past couple of decades. Even today, the fact that Democratic leaders still support unconditional military aid to Israel and Netanyahu, Trump’s partner in the illegal attacks on Iran, raises questions about their sincerity in opposing the war.

It is highly unlikely the United States would have launched a full-scale war under a Democratic administration as it has under Trump. However hawkish many in the Democratic leadership have proven to be, they would have been far more likely to listen to allied governments, as well as the broad consensus of strategic analysts, intelligence officials, and military leaders that make up the foreign policy elite, many of whom have long warned of the serious consequences of going to war.

At the same time, it is important to recognize how Democrats share responsibility with Republicans for creating the climate that made such a war possible.

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First published in The Progressive, April 10, 2026. Read by Greg Bates.

t is difficult, as of this writing, to speculate as to whether a genuine ceasefire in the war with Iran will take hold, even temporarily. Under previous U.S. presidential administrations, it was easier to make predictions, even when foreign policy decisions were based on faulty assumptions, since there was at least some sense that decision making would be based on strategic thinking.

Not so under President Donald Trump, who has consistently sidelined or overruled knowledgeable advisors, including those in top military and intelligence positions, in order to pursue policies that appear to be motivated more by emotion than rational thinking.

Indeed, even if the two-week ceasefire holds, the United States may simply use it to rearm and resupply its depleted stocks in order to resume its war on Iran.

If the ceasefire does mean the end of hostilities for the foreseeable future, it will be hard for the Trump Administration to portray it as any sort of victory. Despite killing prominent Iranian leaders and inflicting enormous damage on Iran’s military and civilian infrastructure, the U.S. and Israeli bombardment of Iran appears to have left the critical components of its nuclear facilities and its supply of partially enriched uranium intact. Iran is still able to launch drones and missiles, and the regime’s grip on power is as strong as ever, and all of Trump’s stated goals for the war remain unfulfilled.

Indeed, with the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and ascension of his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as Iran’s new Supreme Leader, the Iranian people and the entire region are now dealing with a regime which Ravi Agrawal, editor of Foreign Policy, correctly observes is “emboldened, vengeful, more militaristic, and more hardline.”

And, if Iran allows ships to resume transiting the Strait of Hormuz, it will have unprecedented control over shipping, including the ability to charge fees to help rebuild the country’s damaged infrastructure. With the Strait acting as a chokehold for the transit of 20 percent of the world’s oil supply—as well as a great deal of the world’s fertilizer, liquid helium, and other important commodities—this control is a valuable asset for Iran, and one they did not possess before the current war began.

More critically, as Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft notes, “The United States is no longer in a position to dictate terms; any agreement will have to rest on genuine compromise. That, in turn, demands real diplomacy—patience, discipline, and a tolerance for ambiguity—qualities not typically associated with Trump.”

At the same time, the United States may not have much of a choice. Trump’s genocidal threats about destroying Iranian civilization on April 7—an act that in itself can be considered a war crime—may have come from the knowledge that a ceasefire was imminent so he could pretend that it was he that forced the Iranians to give in, not the other way around.

In spite of the apparent willingness of the Trump Administration to accept the enormous financial costs of the war, the physical damage inflicted on U.S. assets in the region and allied Middle Eastern states, the harm done to America’s international standing, and the impact on the global economy, it became apparent that the war had simply become unwinnable. Trump has found himself under enormous pressure, not just from the American public and U.S. allies (which he appears quite willing to ignore), but international business and finance, which are reeling from the economic consequences of the war and fearful of far greater damage to come if the war resumes.

As a result, Trump’s new priority became to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which had been operating normally until the United States and Israel launched their war on February 28.

However, as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed, the war could resume at any moment. And it is unlikely to re-open as long as Israel continues its horrific assault on Lebanon.

Despite U.S. and Israeli claims to the contrary, Pakistani mediators and others have confirmed that the agreement for a two-week halt to the fighting and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz was contingent on a ceasefire in Lebanon. European leaders and other U.S. allies have underscored the importance of the ceasefire applying to Lebanon as well.

In actuality, Israel’s U.S.-backed air strikes in Lebanon have gone well beyond Hezbollah military targets to include the heavy bombing of crowded urban neighborhoods. Israeli bombing on April 9, the day following the cessation of hostilities in the Gulf, killed more than 300 people, the vast majority of them civilians. This comes on top of Israel’s occupation and ethnic cleansing of a large swath of southern Lebanon and the systematic destruction of entire villages.

The United States is therefore faced with a decision to either force Israel to cease its attacks on Lebanon or to accept the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the likelihood of the resumption of the war.

Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in Congress are being forced to explain how they can both oppose a resumption of the Iran war while refusing to call for an end to offensive U.S. military aid to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Israeli leaders continue to sabotage the prospects of maintaining a ceasefire. At the Democratic National Committee’s annual meeting this past week, party leadership blocked a resolution calling for conditioning future military aid to Israel on that government’s compliance with international law in relation to the U.S.-Israel war on Iran.

Even in a best-case scenario in which the worst of the killing and destruction is over, some semblance of normal commerce can resume, and the reconstruction of war-damaged homes and infrastructure can begin, the main challenge for those of us in the United States is to create measures to ensure that never again can a single man unleash such chaos and destruction.

To do so will require a long-overdue assertion of Congressional authority, including a willingness by Congressional Democrats to block funding for Netanyahu’s war machine and Trump’s Pentagon until they come into compliance with international law and categorically renounce wars of aggression.

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First published in The Progressive Magazine, April 3, 2026. Written by Stephen Zunes, Read by Greg Bates.

Iran certainly cannot win a war in the face of the massive U.S. and Israeli onslaught. As recent weeks have shown, however, it can still prevent the United States from winning.

In a new form of asymmetrical warfare, Iran has proven itself capable of wreaking havoc on the global economy to punish the United States and Israel for its aggression.

President Donald Trump is a bully. Whether with women or with nations, he is willing to cross any moral or legal boundaries in order to dominate and control. He thinks he has the right to impose his will, whatever the consequences and however unpopular it may be with the international community and the American public. His insistence that he should have had a say in picking Iran’s leadership underscores that this war is ultimately about control.

This is not something the Iranian regime will accept, however much destruction will be rained down upon the country. The Tehran regime appears uninterested in a ceasefire. According to Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, there is a sense that the decision to accept a ceasefire in the twelve-day war last June “only enabled the United States and Israel to restock and remobilize to launch war again. If they agree to a ceasefire now, they will only be attacked again in a few months.”

There appears to have been a mistaken belief in Washington, D.C., that the regime would implode upon the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other leaders, failing to recognize that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a complex network of overlapping interests with a stake in the status quo, not a regime that can be toppled by killing a few leaders. That failure has resulted in increasingly heavy bombardment of an ever-widening range of targets, along with the possibility of arming Kurdish rebels and other restive minorities and introducing U.S. ground troops.

The Trump Administration has been unwilling to recognize that the Iranian regime could endure a long, incredibly one-sided, and utterly devastating war in the face of massive casualties. However, with Trump calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” it has become an existential war for the Iranian regime. Given how the Islamic Republic was willing to slaughter thousands of Iranians during the pro-democracy protests before the war, it is not likely to have much compunction about many thousands more being killed at the hands of foreign powers, particularly since many in leadership see their mandate as coming from God.

Few authoritarian regimes in the post-World War II era have been toppled through foreign military intervention, and none through bombing alone. Hardly any have turned into stable democracies as a result. Indeed, Trump has said he does not care if Iran does not become a democracy as long as it is compliant with American interests.

In the face of the horrific massacres of demonstrators earlier this year, there was some hope that the regular Iranian army might move in to depose the clerics and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the two foundations of the regime’s power. While less politically and economically influential than the IRGC, the regular army is much larger and is composed largely of conscripts not necessarily allied with the regime. With them now under constant barrage and fighting to defend themselves from foreign attackers, however, this scenario seems far less likely.

The most common and successful method of toppling autocrats has been through unarmed civil resistance, of which Iran has a rich history. Despite Trump’s call on the Iranian people to rise up, most Iranians at this point are just desperately trying to survive. It was not surprising, then, that the initial celebrations over the killing of the hated “Supreme Leader,” and others in his circle, failed to turn into a movement. And no popular struggle is helped by vocal support from a nation’s sworn enemies, particularly if they are currently killing thousands of your people.

People tend to rally around the flag if their country is being bombed, particularly as civilian casualties grow. During my time in Iran in 2019, while the popular anger and frustration at the regime was palpable, and there was a clear desire to bring it down, I found no one advocating for war.

Comments by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller that the United States is no longer bound by international humanitarian law and other rules of engagement have already led U.S. and Israeli forces to target schools, hospitals, city parks, and cultural sites along with military and governmental facilities. This will likely lead to only greater resistance.

The big mistake the United States made in Vietnam was seeing the struggle as one of fighting communism which, as an expansionist totalitarian ideology, it felt, had to be confronted with massive military force as was done against the fascists in Germany, Italy, and Japan during World War II. It failed to recognize that the National Liberation Front (the NLF or “Viet Cong”), while communist-led, was first and foremost a nationalist movement. So policymakers didn’t understand why the more troops they sent and the more they bombed, the stronger the resistance became.

Similarly, in Iran, the regime is seen in Washington, D.C., through its Islamist identity and its efforts to spread a reactionary version of Shia Islam in the region. What the U.S. government fails to understand is that the regime’s hold on power comes in large part from taking advantage of its people’s strong embrace of nationalism and anti-imperialism. (During my time in Iran, I noticed that nationalist symbols were far more common in government propaganda than Islamist ones.) As a result, the terror bombing and calls to surrender to U.S. and Israeli demands is breeding its own resistance.

Iran is an industrialized nation of more than ninety million people that has been a major regional power for much of the past 2,500 years and will not easily yield to foreign aggression.

So, if the regime cannot be replaced, the ultimate goal may become to subject the country to such massive destruction it can no longer serve as a deterrent to U.S. hegemony in this important oil-rich region, and to send a message to any governments that dare to defy U.S. objectives that they either do what the U.S. President says or suffer utterly devastating consequences.

Even some of the current Iranian government’s harshest opponents fear “regime collapse.” They have seen the aftermath of foreign intervention in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Despite promises of freedom, each of these countries descended into chaos and civil war and/or were forced to endure a foreign occupation. As British Pakistani journalist Saima Mohsin noted, “We know how imperial powers treat ‘liberated’ nations in the Middle East.”

With the unlikelihood of an effective Iranian surrender, the only realistic way to end the carnage is to get the United States to end the war.

The war is already unpopular with the American public. Even controversial wars like the invasion of Iraq had majority popular support once they were underway due to initial successes and a perceived obligation to back the government in wartime and to “support our troops” who were in harm’s way. Though initial support for the war with Iran nearly doubled from pre-war polls, this is still the first American war to have only minority support at its outset.

There are growing concerns among American military and intelligence officials that they will not be able to bring down the regime through air power alone. There are also limits to U.S. weapons stockpiles, raising questions as to how long the war can be sustained. The best hope in ending the carnage may be some kind of hurting stalemate resulting in a ceasefire where both sides could claim victory—the U.S. government claiming it has sufficiently damaged Iran’s military capabilities and the Iranian government noting that it survived.

This is not likely to happen, however, until the physical destruction in Iran and, to a much lesser but not insignificant extent, other countries mounts. And, as evidenced by the current so-called ceasefire in Gaza, a humanitarian crisis and intermittent bombing will likely continue amid the rubble and the conflict will remain unresolved.

Editor’s note: This article was written for the magazine on the eighth day of an ongoing war on the nation of Iran. It has been updated slightly to reflect events as they continue to unfold. At least fourteen countries have so far been drawn into the conflict, and in early March, the estimated cost to the U.S. taxpayer was estimated to be about $1 billion per day. Since its founding in 1909, The Progressive has always opposed the use of military force to resolve conflicts.

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First published in Truthout, March 4, 2026.

The ramifications of the escalating U.S.-Israeli war on Iran remain to be seen, but they will not be good. Indeed, as with the U.S.-led war on Iraq, the war on Iran could prove disastrous. It is important to understand, therefore, what would motivate the United States to launch such a reckless, illegal, and destructive action.

Not surprisingly, most of President Donald Trump’s justifications for the war are demonstrably false:

First of all, there is no evidence that Iran was planning a pre-emptive attack or constituted an imminent threat, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others have claimed. Secondly, given that Iran’s missiles have a maximum range of 1800 miles, and that Iran is estimated to be a decade away from developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching North America, Trump’s claim that Iran was on the verge of being able to attack the United States is absurd.

Trump also repeated the long-debunked claim that thousands of Americans and millions of others were killed and wounded by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) made by Iran. Not only are these numbers gross exaggerations, but the vast majority of IEDs targeting U.S. forces were manufactured by Iraqi guerrillas (most of whom were anti-Iranian Salafists, Baathists, and others), not by Iran. And the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen’s Aden Harbor, which Trump has also mentioned, was done by Al-Qaeda, a bitter rival of Iran, not by anyone from Iran.

Iran’s brutal repression of its own people is well-documented, but U.S. support for regimes that have engaged in either severe repression against pro-democracy protesters or mass killings of civilians — including Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Turkey, Egypt, and others — belies any genuine concern about promoting human rights and democracy.

In this moment, Trump has made calls for the Iranian people to again rise up, but that cannot realistically take place while the country in being bombed. Indeed, being attacked by a foreign power generally leads people to rally around the flag. For example, while eventually successful, the Serbian democratic movement against the Milosevic regime was set back by the 1999 NATO bombing of their country.

Indeed, a truly democratic Iran would likely reflect the anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist sentiments of the majority of Iranians and have more credibility than the corrupt, reactionary government currently in power, something the United States would presumably want to avoid.

Trump falsely stated that Iran had never pledged not to build a nuclear weapon, when its leaders have in fact pledged not to repeatedly. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also tried push the contradictory claim that the United States “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program during its strikes last June, while simultaneously insisting Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial grade bomb making material.” Neither is true.

Meanwhile, there is no credible means by which the Trump administration can use Iran’s nuclear program to justify the war. The talks to revive the nuclear agreement were ongoing. On February 27, the Omani mediator said there had been significant progress in U.S.-Iranian talks and a deal was “within reach.” Furthermore, Iran’s nuclear program would not have even been an issue had Trump not unilaterally pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal, which would have put very strict limits on Iran’s nuclear capabilities which, combined with its rigorous enforcement mechanisms, would have made it physically impossible for Iran to build a bomb.

It was doubtful that Trump even wanted a nuclear agreement, however. Given the scale of the ongoing military operations, it’s clear that these attacks had been planned for some time. Indeed, Trump’s insistence that he would not lift sanctions even if Iran gave into his demands provided Iranian negotiators little incentive to compromise. Furthermore, the Trump administration’s insistence that any deal with Iran also include agreements on other issues — such as eliminating Iran’s missile program, its support for regional allies, and internal repression — likely would have doomed the negotiations to failure. Even Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, despite their extreme anti-Soviet views, recognized that their nuclear agreements with Moscow would not have been possible if they insisted on including other contentious issues between the two countries in those deals.

It is striking, though — in contrast to every other modern president who has taken the United States to war — how little effort Trump put into convincing Congress or the U.S. public that it was necessary. In 2003, George W. Bush devoted much of his State of the Union address just prior to the invasion of Iraq to making his case — albeit inaccurate and misleading — for why the U.S. should go to war. By contrast, Trump spoke about Iran for less than three minutes of his one hour-48-minute State of the Union address, underscoring how he really didn’t care that much about convincing Congress or the U.S. public of the necessity to launch a major war in the Middle East.

So, why has the United States gone to war against Iran?

Much of it has to do with what was perceived as an opportunity. The Iranian regime has never been more isolated, both internationally and domestically. Its violent repression of pro-democracy protesters in January and its status as a pariah state has resulted in a somewhat muted response in the international community to the U.S.-Israeli attacks, despite their clear illegality. Meanwhile, Syria’s Assad regime, the only state in the region that the Iranian government considered an ally, was toppled in late 2024 in a popular uprising, and its Houthi and Hezbollah allies have been dramatically weakened by devastating air strikes in recent years. Domestically, the anger at the regime has never been higher, particularly after its recent massacre of thousands of anti-government demonstrators.

However, such setbacks do not mean the regime is on the verge of collapse, even with the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei. Iran’s supreme leader was 86 years old and in declining health. His death will not likely change much except that this widely reviled cleric has now been made a martyr. More salient is the fact that Iran was already as much a militarized authoritarian state as a theocracy, with the Revolutionary Guard exerting at least as much power as the clergy. Even killing a few of their commanders as well will not weaken their control over the country. The authoritarian regime in Iran is not a typical one-man dictatorship in which the government can be toppled by a single leader’s elimination. Rather, the Iranian regime comprises a complex system of powerful overlapping institutions that have a stake in maintaining the system. As a result, the killing of leaders, while a serious setback in some cases, will not likely constitute a fatal blow.

Among those wishing to take advantage of Iran’s weakened state has been Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been pushing for a major war against Iran for decades. However, while Israel has joined the United States in its war on Iran in pursuit of their common objectives, there is little indication that the Trump administration is doing this to protect Israel. Israel has more than adequate defenses from any possible Iranian aggression, including a nuclear deterrent.

U.S. hostility toward an independent-minded Iran has been a major component of U.S. foreign policy for decades, regardless of Israel. The United States overthrew its democratically elected prime minister in 1953. The United States repeatedly attacked Iran’s navy, coastal installations, and even a civilian airliner in the so-called 1987-88 “tanker war” toward the end of the Iran-Iraq War. The United States armed Kurdish and Baluchi separatists in the 2000s. Over the decades, the United States has supported the Gulf Arab monarchies, Israel, and even Saddam’s Iraq in targeting Iran.

I’ve never seen any evidence that Israel was behind any of those policies and, despite Netanyahu’s encouragement, there is little evidence that he or the pro-Israel lobby were a decisive factor in Trump’s decision to go to war. Trump is nobody’s puppet. Failing any direct evidence that this war would not have taken place were it not for the Israeli government and its backers, there should be caution about claiming that it was — both for the sake of accuracy as well as the importance of not reinforcing old antisemitic canards about Jews manipulating non-Jewish political leaders into pursuing destructive policies they would not have otherwise taken.

Ultimately what this war is about is going after the one major power left in the region that has dared to challenge U.S. hegemony. It’s about the “full spectrum dominance” originally articulated in the 2002 National Security Strategy during the Bush administration. Since even weeks of heavy bombing are not likely to bring down the Iranian government, the goal may be to inflict as much damage as possible, making Iran an example to any other country that dares defy the United States.

What the United States and Israel want, therefore, is a weakened Iran, one with a severely damaged infrastructure that is incapable of meeting the needs of its own people, much less serving as a counterweight to U.S. hegemony. The U.S. and Israel appear to be angling to create a situation where ethnic minorities (which constitute close to half the nation’s population), leftists, monarchists, religious factions, and others will struggle against each other amid the ruins, leaving the nation weak and divided. In effect, if the United States cannot impose a government of its choosing, it is seeking to turn Iran into a failed state.

Indeed, it appears the United States and Israel are targeting not just regime leaders, but also dissident nationalists and moderate Islamists. Former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Moussavi, the central figure in the 2009 Green Movement against the regime, narrowly escaped assassination by an airstrike targeting his residential building, where he has been under house arrest. There have been a number of reports of prominent Iranian leftists being targeted as well. Perhaps the United States believes that, in targeting all of these different groups, it will make it easier, in the event of a regime collapse, to reinstate the monarchy as the United States did back in 1953.

It is very unlikely, however, that this effort will succeed. From the outset, Trump has treated Iran as if it were one of the Central American governments that the U.S. treated like vassal states in the early to mid-twentieth century, essentially dictating policies under threat of overthrowing the government. But Iran, by contrast, is an industrialized nation of over 90 million people that has been a major regional power for much of the past 2,500 years.

Washington’s big mistake in Vietnam was seeing the conflict as part of an advancing global totalitarian threat that needed to be met by massive military support. In reality, the National Liberation Front (a.k.a. the “Viet Cong”), while communist-led, was first and foremost a nationalist movement, which was why the more the U.S. bombed and the more combat troops were sent, the greater the resistance. Similarly, the United States, by focusing on the religious orientation of the Iranian regime, is grossly underestimating its staying power as a nationalist government.

As a result, this overtly imperialist effort, like most attempts of hegemonic overreach by Western powers, is almost certain to yield unexpected and devastating consequences.

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By Daniel Falcone

First published in Foreign Piolicy in Focus, January 28, 2026

In this interview, international relations scholar Stephen Zunes and Middle East historian Lawrence Davidson help to unpack the Iranian protests and explain their relevance within the context of U.S. and Israeli national interests.

Daniel Falcone: Jeffrey St. Clair of CounterPunch, recently cited filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s insistence that change in Iran must come from the will of the people, not from outside intervention. As U.S. and Israeli involvement tends to strengthen hardliners, how do you explain the balance between international solidarity and the risk of external actors undermining Iran’s sovereignty and social movement?

Lawrence Davidson: One has to ask what these terms, international solidarity, and risk from external actors, mean in today’s international environment. If international solidarity means, for instance, the solidarity of reactionary countries that have somehow made an alliance to change the internal behavior of a third nation, that is obviously problematic. In this case, international solidarity is the manifestation of just these external actors. If the United States intervenes in Iran at this time, it would not be to the benefit of the Iranian people, it would be for the suppression of anti-Zionist sentiment in the country through the introduction of the Shah’s adult son. This would probably lead to something like a civil war in Iran. If, however, international solidarity means the sentiment of people rather than governments, this has not proved very effective, as we can see in the case of Gaza.

The Arab and Muslim peoples have either chosen not to or could not in any practical way act to support the Palestinians. I’m afraid that the conclusion here is that in the present circumstances, there is no balance between international solidarity and external actors. The power of institutionalized external actors overwhelms practical terms, the power of popular solidarity.

Stephen Zunes: While the United States and Israel have tried to take advantage of the unrest, the protests this round, as well as previously, have been homegrown and not the result of imperialist machinations. Iran has had a long history of widespread civil resistance going back to the late nineteenth century with the tobacco strike against imperialist economic domination, through the Constitutional Revolution the following decade, through the revolution in the late 1970s that brought down the U.S.-backed Shah. The outspoken support for the protests by the U.S. and Israeli governments have probably been counter-productive, feeding the regime’s false narrative that they are a result of foreign backing. Israel and the United States have a lot of power in terms of blowing things up and killing people.

They do not have the power to get hundreds of thousands of angry Iranians into the streets or even to steer the direction of their protests. The people who have given their lives on the streets were fighting for their freedom, not for foreign powers. Threats of military action by the United States and Israel have also likely strengthened the regime, since people tend to rally around the flag in case of outside threats and most Iranians across the political spectrum do not trust either country.

Given the U.S. support for even more repressive regimes in the Middle East, don’t think the Trump administration cares about the Iranian people. Bombing Iran to ostensibly support the uprising would be a tragedy. People would certainly be reluctant to go out onto the streets while they are being bombed. Most of those calling for U.S. military intervention appear to have been from the Iranian diaspora, not those on the streets. Although some Iranians within the country may have been desperate enough to want to risk it as well, let’s remember that it was not the eleven weeks of NATO bombing that brought down Milosevic in Serbia. It was the massive nonviolent resistance of the Serbian people that took place more than a year later.

It is possible that the United States and Israel might prefer the current reactionary, autocratic Iranian regime to a democratic one, which would still be anti-hegemonic and anti-Zionist but have a lot more credibility. A democratic Iran would still be nationalistic and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but less likely to engage in the kinds of repression and provocative foreign policies that would give the United States and Israel an excuse for some of their militarism. Solidarity from global civil society, by contrast, is important and appropriate. Despite claims by some to the contrary, many prominent pro-Palestinian voices from Bernie Sanders to Peter Beinart to Greta Thunberg have been outspoken in their support for the Iranian popular struggle as well. People will certainly tend to protest more when their own governments are actively supporting repression and mass killing, as with Israeli violence in Gaza and the West Bank, than when their governments are opposing the repression and mass killing.

Same as during the Cold War—it is quite natural for Americans to be less involved in protesting Communist repression we could do little about than repressive rightwing governments backed by Washington, where we might have more impact. As a result, this line about “where are all the protests on U.S. campuses?” has been unfair (particularly since most were still on winter break). And although some sectarian leftists really have become apologists for the reactionary Iranian regime or have exaggerated the Israeli role in the uprising, they are fortunately a small minority.

Ultimately, international solidarity is important, but it must be from sources that genuinely support the principles for which a popular movement is struggling. The movement in Iran, as with similar movements against autocratic regimes elsewhere, is fighting for freedom, democracy, and social and economic justice. Since neither the U.S. nor the Israeli government supports those principles, the Iranian regime—quite accurately in this case—can observe that U.S. and Israeli backing of the resistance is about advancing U.S. and Israeli strategic objectives, since these right-wing governments support regimes with even worse human rights records and they themselves are undermining democratic principles in their own countries. Indeed, some statements of support have played right into the regime’s hands.

Daniel Falcone: It seems that the participation of bazaaris and the poor and working class makes these protests distinct from earlier movements dominated by students and the middle class. How does this class composition alter legitimacy and the political stakes for the regime?

Lawrence Davidson: Their participation reflects the economic circumstances now. Those circumstances are, in turn, the product of externally imposed economic sanctions and incompetent internal management. Certainly, the participation of the bazaar keepers and the poor and working class in the protests is significant. No matter who comes out on top here, you’re going to see some sort of reform take place. The probability that it is the government that comes out on top is a function of the remaining loyalty of various contingents of the military. And a lot of this has to do with the economic stake of the Revolutionary Guard Corps in the status quo. As long as the military components of the regime stay loyal, the addition of bazaar keepers and the lower classes in the demonstrations cannot change the government.

Stephen Zunes: I find it rather significant that the bazaaris, traditionally a backbone of support for the regime, have been in the leadership of the resistance, as is the fact that there has been significant poor and working-class participation in the protests, unlike some previous movements, which have been disproportionately students and those from the educated middle class. The Iranian military, like the military in Egypt and some other autocratic systems, has their fingers in all sorts of economic enterprises at the expense of the common people. As a result, their brutal response to the protests was not just ideological, but from a desire to protect their vested interests.

It is also striking how quickly the protests went beyond economic issues. Most Iranians want at minimum much greater democratization/accountability within the current system and an increasing number clearly want regime change, not just because of economic hardship, but because they are simply tired of the repression.

Daniel Falcone: Although U.S. led sanctions have crippled Iran, there are also problems of systemic corruption and mismanagement by the Iranian state. Protesters increasingly reject both. Do you see this moment as one in which economic grievances lead to demands for democratization?

Lawrence Davidson: The economic problems come from both factors you mention. The Iranian theologians did not understand the intricacies of modern economic institutions or the importance of international trade. Thus, they could not manage a national economy, particularly one under outside stress. At the same time, American sanctions were designed to destroy that economy and impoverish the Iranian people. The two factors, working simultaneously, opened the way for corruption. And then there is the Revolutionary Guard capturing control of important parts of the economy. It is a mess. Democracy? I think we are a long way from that. We are probably closer to a military coup with the mullahs kept as front men.

Stephen Zunes: U.S.-led sanctions are unjustifiable (since Iran was honoring the nuclear agreement when Trump reimposed them) and they are hurting the economy. But my sense is that both the regime and Washington, for different reasons, are exaggerating the importance of the sanctions in sparking the rebellion. It is the regime’s corruption, mismanagement, and lack of accountability that are the bigger problems. The sanctions have provided the government with an excuse to deflect attention from their lousy economic policies, but that justification is now wearing thin. The economic problems are systemic, so changes at the Central Bank and minor adjustments in fiscal policies will not satisfy most protesters. The regime’s crony capitalism is being seen increasingly as beyond repair under the current system.

Daniel Falcone: UBC Professor Jaleh Mansoor eloquently defended the circulation of protest images as a form of democratic solidarity, while also warning about reactionary diaspora fantasies that reduce Iran’s future to either the Islamic Republic or a restored monarchy. How do you see media circulation distorting an understanding of the protests?

Lawrence Davidson: I do believe that the images should be shown as widely as possible, just as should the ones from Gaza. However, the problem is that they are often shown with either few or misleading explanations. Western commentators do not understand much of the context of happenings in Iran, much less the history. This is the price of a corporate press. The ignorance and biases of editors, if not reporters, are shown over and over. In our lifetime the best example is during Vietnam.

Unless one is motivated to go to an alternate, more accurate source one will get a distorted picture. It is a curse that has always been with us. The wealthy Iranians in California can be as delusional as they wish but there will be no restored monarchy short of an American invasion and occupation of Iran. That is not going to happen. Thus, the Shah’s son will stay in LA.

Stephen Zunes: The greater the circulation of imagery of the people’s resistance and the regime’s repression the better. Care should be given as to how they are presented, however. Like protest coverage elsewhere, the media tends to disproportionately show dramatic photos of vandalism and arson even though overall the protests have been overwhelmingly nonviolent. Indeed, violence is used by the regime to increase its already horrific repression even more.

Similarly, the monarchists are certainly a small minority of the protesters, though both the regime and the Western media (for different reasons) like to highlight them. Although there is something of a nostalgia among better-off Iranians from the pre-revolutionary days—like there is by some Russians for the Soviet era—it is more of a sign of how bad things are now than how good things were then. The Shah was one of the most repressive dictators in the world, and the inequality and corruption under his rule was terrible. Despite some protesters with signs or chants calling for a return of the Shah, the reality is that most Iranians on the streets in recent weeks have been fighting for democracy. In addition to the small number of monarchists, there have also been communists, moderate Islamists, secular liberals, and lots of other folks. People are fed up. Based on my time in Iran a few years ago and my following the situation in that country for decades, I can say with confidence that most of the Iranian people are both anti-regime and anti-monarchist.

Daniel Falcone: Masoud Pezeshkian has taken a conciliatory tone. Are hardliners likely to prevail if the protests intensify? And do you see any viable path for change within the current system?

Lawrence Davidson: There is a story going around that some government people went to the University of Tehran. They asked the protesting students what they wanted. The answer was “we want you to leave.” This was a mistake on the part of the protesters. They gave those with more power than themselves, no way to retreat. I see no path to meaningful change. I do think that once the government retakes the streets, there will be minor positive alterations in their behavior.

Stephen Zunes: Pezeshkian is a relative moderate, but he is not nearly as powerful as the mullahs or the military. Iran’s authoritarian system is a series of complex overlapping loci of power which represent varying interests, unlike some authoritarian regimes centered around a single autocrat, whose social base is thinner. As a result, I am not surprised, though quite disappointed, that the regime appears to have successfully and violently suppressed another round of protests.

Another problem is that the Iranian regime is the first government to face a massive civil insurrection that initially came to power themselves through a massive civil insurrection. Just as regimes that have come to power through guerrilla warfare are better at engaging in counterinsurgency, the Islamic Republic has unfortunately developed better mechanisms than did the Shah (or Mubarak, Ben Ali, Milosevic, Marcos, Suharto, etc.) to suppress civil resistance. I do believe the regime’s days are numbered, however. I just can’t say when or predict what will replace it.

Daniel Falcone is a historian, teacher and journalist. In addition to Foreign Policy in Focus, he has written for The Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, The Nation, Jacobin, Truthout, CounterPunch, and Scalawag. He resides in New York City and is a member of The Democratic Socialists of America.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephenzunes962006.substack.com/subscribe