Understanding the Iran war in the context of U.S. imperialism
Axis of Empire: A History of Iran–US Relations, a new book by Afshin Matin-Asgari, covers two centuries of interactions between the two countries and provides crucial context for understanding Trump’s current military campaign.
Matin-Asgari, who is a Professor of Middle East History at California State University, Los Angeles, had a front row seat for many of the developments he covers. He was born in Iran, but studied in the United States, where he was active in the anti-Shah student opposition, before returning to the country during the Islamic Revolution.
Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke to Matin-Asgari about his book and the current U.S.-Israel war on Iran. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mondoweiss: There are many recent books on Iran and the United States. What compelled you to write this history, and what did you feel was missing from existing histories on the relationship between the two countries?
As you mentioned, in the past two or three years, four or five books on U.S.-Iran relations have been published and most of them are very good. This book took me seven or eight years, and it’s a long-term history of U.S.-Iran relations going back to the early 19th century.
The main actors, especially in the 19th century, are American missionary Presbyterians who go to Iran to evangelize. They’re not very successful at evangelizing, but they open schools and health clinics. They do this not really in big cities but in the countryside. Their numbers are small, but they create a measure of goodwill towards Americans. They can only preach to non-Muslims, to the very tiny Jewish and Christian population of Iran. Those groups aren’t really interested in conversion either, but the services these missionaries provide build goodwill toward Americans.
In the scholarship, there’s usually a narrative that says US-Iran relations started with auspicious beginnings, but Iranians really welcomed Americans. We have to remember that these missionaries were acting on their own. They were not representing a state.
Once we get into the 20th century, the prominent foreign powers in Iran are Russia, then later the Soviet Union, and the British Empire.
The British side controls Iranian oil, a highly valuable asset. The U.S., when it comes to state-to-state relations with Iran in the early 20th century, is also interested in oil. But the problem is the British have a monopoly on Iranian oil, and they don’t want to relent on their concession.
Everything changes when we get to the Second World War. The Soviets and the British have already occupied Iran. Iran is very important for obtaining war materiel from the British and, later, from the Americans, via Iran’s transcontinental railway to the Soviet Union. The Red Army is fighting the Nazis on Soviet soil, and Iran is a vital point in that linkage of eventual allied victory.
So, you have about 30,000 American military and other personnel in Iran, and that is the beginning of an intense relationship. When the U.S. becomes the major driver of this relationship, they are already a global power. You are in the middle of the Second World War, and the entire global geopolitical and political economy of the world is going to be transformed in the post-war reconstruction, and the U.S. is acting as a global hegemon. It reconstructs Europe and Japan and puts NATO in place, and puts military bases all over the world.
The main argument of my book is that, at this point, it’s the American empire and its relationship with Iran must be understood in that imperialist context. This is not the perspective of really any of the other studies that have come out
In your book, you refer to Ayatollah Khomeini backing the students who took over the American embassy as a “second revolution.” Can you explain what you mean by that and why that moment ends up being so important?
Let me just give a brief background as to what I mean by the American hostage crisis being a second Iranian revolution. That’s the term that Ayatollah Khomeini, in fact, used for it.
My point there is that, during the 50 years before the Iranian revolution, if we look at U.S.-Iran relations, obviously, one side has this imperial presence that’s much stronger. The U.S. has the upper hand, and there’s a famous, or infamous, episode of the 1953 CIA coup, and the Shah gradually becomes a significant player.
It’s an asymmetrical relationship, but the Shah is not merely an American puppet; he has some agency, and he can act within certain limits, but when we get to the revolution, U.S.-Iran relations are going to take an entirely different track.
The significant thing to remember in the immediate background to the hostage taking is that, in November 1979, the monarchist state with which the U.S. had a very tight relationship had totally collapsed. The monarchy, the bureaucratic structure, and its military structure have collapsed, and a new state, the Islamic Republic, has to be built from the ground up, and no one knows what it might look like. Even Ayatollah Khomeini, who proposed the idea of an Islamic Republic, never explained it, and I don’t think he had a clear idea of what it might be.
So, 1979 is really the second phase of the Iranian Revolution. The first part was to bring down one existing political order, the monarchy, and the second, and the more important part, is to replace it with an entirely different state structure.
As in all revolutions, there’s a fierce struggle within the revolutionary coalition that brought down the old regime. Everyone united for the objective of bringing down the monarchy, but once that was accomplished, that coalition fell apart, and power was dispersed in different parts of Iran.
Another complication is that, with the collapse of the armed forces, hundreds of thousands of small arms are now in the hands of ordinary people. So you have an effective civil war going on in parts of Iran where the population is armed, and they control their own regions. There are other ethnic-national uprisings in different parts of the country. The Kurdish rebellion is the most significant. Everywhere you look, power has fallen to the ground. In factories, it’s worker control. In government offices, the employees are in charge. So the new state has to establish itself by taking this dispersed power back and centralizing it, and that becomes the project of the Islamic Republic.
There’s a proposal for a new constitution. It’s debated but, after about six months, there’s a very strong push by a group of clerics, mostly around Khomeini, to make this effectively a constitutional dictatorship where an unelected official, Khomeini himself, who was enormously charismatic and popular, has the office of the supreme religious leader with absolutely unchecked powers and then there would also be unelected institutions, again, occupied mostly by clerics, and that would be superimposed on top of a republican political regime.
This project is not going down very well. Throughout the summer of 1979, Iran is in upheaval. There are clashes between different forces, and the left plays an important role. It’s a minority, but we have to remember we have a religious left and we have a secular left. Half of them support the Islamic Republic project. This left is led by a pro-Soviet faction who are hoping the new Islamic Republic will be in alignment with the Soviet Union, and stand up against the U.S. The non-Soviet left is opposed to this, and by the fall, there are clashes all over the country.
It’s in that context that the U.S. embassy is seized. One more thing in this background is that the diplomatic relations between Iran and the U.S. are not broken. The U.S. embassy in Tehran is still functioning. The last ambassador is removed. There’s no ambassador there, but American diplomats are meeting openly and sometimes in secret with members of the provisional government.
However, the takeover of the embassy by a group of students who call themselves followers of Khomeini’s line then changes everything. It’s not a conspiracy or a plan hatched by Khomeini himself. In fact, when it happens, he’s not even sure who they are and wants to evict them. But I think he quickly realizes that this could be a winning card that can be used to raise the banner of anti-imperialism, which is a very strong component of the revolution. There’s a very strong anti-American, anti-imperial sentiment.
So he made the decision to hold the embassy. He calls it, rightly so, a “second revolution” because it really defines the character of the new Islamic Republic.
Of course, it’s not going to militarily defeat the war’s hegemon, the combination of the U.S. and Israel. But as we see, it could inflict tremendous pain and damage and raise the cost of the war for the other side. It’s hitting U.S. clients and allies around the Gulf, and it’s impacted the global economy. Oil and gas prices are up, and markets are down in Asia and globally. The war has been very costly for the U.S. side.
How it has transformed the Islamic Republic is less clear, but it seems the Islamic Republic will survive.
The son of the Supreme Leader has officially been placed in his position, but we haven’t heard from him and don’t fully know who is in charge. It appears the system operates in a decentralized manner: even without its top echelons, it still functions effectively. This has been shown to be true to some extent, but obviously, there is a center, some kind of a central mechanism of political and military decision-making. It seems that the center of gravity has shifted very much to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, as the very existence of the regime has been under attack.
The Islamic Republic is already very much militarized and securitized, and has had a history of repression towards its own population. The question that remains unclear is what happens when the war ends. What kind of character will the regime that survives and comes out of it have? There are predictions that it might become even more repressive. It might decide to finally pursue the building of a nuclear bomb. But none of these things are clear because, for one, it’s unclear what the regime will have the capacity to do. The country is facing extreme devastation. The bombing and the military attacks are now aiming at the country’s infrastructure, not just military targets, but they’re destroying factories, roads, bridges, homes, and the population is suffering. So even if the Islamic Republic emerges out of this war, surviving, its capabilities are vastly diminished, and it needs to maintain some kind of social base. Obviously not the majority of the population, but it seems to have enough support to sustain itself, at least in the short run.
I think that is as much as we can say on that question at this point. The fact that the regime has survived and has been able to hit back at the U.S. and Israel with this level of effectiveness and turn this war into a global crisis is really beyond expectations of even the most informed commentators who have been warning against this war, including U.S. intelligence and military experts who warned Trump against the war. He did not listen to them. But I don’t think anybody expected this level of effectiveness from the Iranian side.
I’m not saying this in terms of approving or celebrating this; this war has been enormously costly to the people of Iran. People like me who live outside of Iran, we all have family members whose lives are in danger, and the country is paying a heavy, heavy price for this that is going to take years, if Iran is able to rebuild itself. So I don’t think there’s anything to celebrate here. I think the best outcome for everyone is for this war to stop immediately. But Trump doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing, let alone make a strategic decision about whether to end this or continue.
Finally, this book is about relationships between two countries and, by extension, the U.S. empire’s relationship to the broader region. How will this war ultimately impact the United States’ role in the Middle East, or even on the global stage more broadly?
Well, if you look at what has already happened, this was not a war that anybody wanted except Israel. None of Iran’s neighbors wanted this war. They all knew it would have bad consequences for them, and they were right.
Trump started the war without consulting his European and NATO allies, and now he is asking them to join the U.S. Some, like Spain, have just said, no, this was a bad decision. It was illegal. We want nothing to do with it. But other European countries, even friendlier ones like France, are not opening their airspace to U.S. military operations. Nobody is for this war. So the war has caused significant tension, affecting the global economy, energy markets, and oil and gas.
Trump dragged the U.S. into a war whose end he cannot control, and really nobody approves of.
The consequences are bad, and the same is true for the Gulf states. Iran is attacking them because they have allowed U.S. military attacks from their soil, and that seems to be the logical thing to do. If Gulf states allow the U.S. to invade Iran from their territory, then the Iranian side will hit their territory. So now Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and even the Saudis must reconsider their relationship with the U.S. The U.S. can’t protect them.
To say it simply, Trump took a wrecking ball to many of the U.S. longstanding relationships and brought down whatever was remaining.
He had always said he didn’t care for international conventions or the UN, and now he has demolished whatever remained of that; it’s acting as if it were the law of the jungle. This is obviously not beneficial for the U.S., and I don’t think this is beneficial even for Israel, who the whole world will blame for being behind this when the war ends.
Yes, the Iranian side and Iran’s neighbors and their people are going to suffer tremendously. They have already suffered because of this war, but the political outcome of this war is not going to be positive for the U.S. or Israel, and for U.S.-Israeli relations. It’s clear that not just the American population, but even part of the political establishment will blame Israel for dragging the U.S. into a losing war.
https://mondoweiss.net/2026/04/understanding-the-iran-war-in-the-context-of-u-s-imperialism/
