AISC Red Paper #2: The Multiple Fronts of Iranian Anti-Imperialism

Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective

26 Aug 2026

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The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective (AISC) offers an analysis of the Ramadan War and the multiple fronts of Iranian anti- imperialism. It uses anti-imperialist methodology, grounded in dialectical and historical materialism. This is part one (1) of two (2) parts.

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The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective’s Red Paper Series takes on the pressing issues of our time with urgency and principled clarity. We are at the frontlines of the battle of ideas and we use anti- imperialist methodology to clarify the stakes, intensify the contradictions, challenge the propaganda, and defend the Resistance.

We, the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective (AISC), condemn in the strongest terms possible the U.S. imperialist attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The U.S. launched the Ramadan War on February 28, 2026, assassinating Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and killing hundreds of Iranians on that day, including over 160 children and staff at the elementary school Shajareh Tayebeh in Minab, Iran. After 39 days of direct combat, Iran dealt a strategic defeat to the imperialist-zionist forces, leading to a fragile ‘ceasefire’ that has involved, to date, a U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and ongoing air raids of Lebanon and Palestine. We stand firmly with the Iranian people, their revolutionary state, and the forces of the Axis of Resistance as they defend their sovereign right to self- determination in the ongoing battle for national and regional liberation from zionist imperialism. As an organization committed to challenging U.S.-led imperialism and supporting the sovereignty and national liberation of the Global Majority, AISC calls on all anti-imperialist forces across the world to continue to unite in defense of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the people of West Asia.

The Multiple Fronts of Iranian Anti-Imperialism

At the regional scale, the Ramadan war comes on the heels of Operation Al Aqsa Flood, which commenced on October 7, 2023, in response to over 100 years of imperialist-backed settler colonial genocide, ethnic cleansing, and land dispossession of the Palestinian people; the ongoing regional resistance against the genocidal zionist entity since that date; the Mossad-orchestrated urban war against Iran in January 2026; and the U.S.-zionist 12-Day War that Iran defeated in June 2025. The Axis of Resistance’s historic struggle against U.S. imperialism spans decades and stands on the shoulders of previous wars of national liberation against Western imperialism in Viet Nam, Korea, South Africa, Algeria, Cuba, and Haiti, among others.

In Red Paper #2, we offer an analysis of the Ramadan War and the multiple fronts of Iranian anti- imperialism through AISC’s anti-imperialist methodology, grounded in dialectical and historical materialism. Our analysis proceeds in five parts. First, “Iranian Anti-Imperialism: The Military Front,” examines how Iran and the Axis of Resistance have delivered a blow to the U.S.-Zionist war machine through asymmetric attrition, coordinated multi-front warfare, and the strategic attacks on U.S. military assets across West Asia. Second, “A Resistance Economy: The Political Economy of Iranian Sovereignty,” analyzes how Iran built a nationalist-developmentalist economy under siege, defying neoliberal and comprador models through delinking, state-directed development, and the strategic assertion of sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Third, “A People's War: The Social Basis of Iranian National Resistance,” explores how the Iranian masses, rooted in a century of anti-imperialist struggle and Shi'i liberation theology, have defended their sovereignty, transforming the war into a popular uprising against U.S. imperialism. Fourth, “Multipolarity as Anti-Imperialist Delinking,” examines how Iran's strategic alignment with China, Russia, and the broader Global South has contributed to breaking down the petrodollar's stranglehold and accelerating the path towards an anti-imperialist multipolar world order. Fifth, “The Diplomatic Front: Anti-Imperialist Foreign Policy,” analyzes how Iran has waged diplomatic struggle alongside military resistance, navigating decades of U.S. treachery from the “nuclear deal” to the present, demonstrating that diplomacy is inextricably connected to armed struggle and is an indispensable front in the war against imperialism.[1]

I. Iranian Anti-Imperialism: The Military Front

The multi-front logic of Iranian anti-imperialism finds its most concrete expression on the battlefield. The military dimension of Iran's anti-imperialist strategy, our first analytical front, demonstrates how coordinated resistance can turn asymmetric force into strategic defeat. When U.S.-zionist forces began their assault on February 28, 2026, launching the 40 days of the Ramadan War, Iran and the Axis of Resistance immediately mobilized and systematically retaliated with defensive attacks on U.S.-zionist military installations and economic interests across West Asia. Despite inflicting another unprovoked attack on Iran amid ongoing negotiations in late February, the U.S. and its allies were dealt a strategic defeat that was demonstrated by their desperate need for a “ceasefire,” commenced on April 7. Iran has since been able to rebuild schools, bridges, and other infrastructure damaged during the War. However, the ceasefire has not translated into an end of U.S. and zionist attacks. As of this writing, the U.S. has imposed a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, essentially strangling the global economy, in an act of war that violates the ceasefire. In parallel, the U.S. and the zionist entity continue their genocidal violence against the Palestinian people, spreading to Lebanon, committing further violations of two ceasefire agreements.

A. The Ramadan War

The Ramadan War was launched with U.S.-zionist air raids across Iran. As part of their opening salvo, the aggressors struck the Shajareh Tayebeh Elementary School, killing over 160 children and adult staff. The U.S. also targeted a sports hall in Lamerd, martyring at least 21 people, including members of a teenage volleyball team (Jaafari 2026). U.S. forces likely used a new weapon, the Precision Strike Missile, in the latter attack (Thomas 2026). On the same morning, the U.S. and zionist entity struck the home and office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with a massive attack, assassinating him along with his daughter, granddaughter, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and several colleagues and staff. Other key leaders in Iran, including Ali Shamkhani, Ali Larijani, Abdolrahim Mousavi, and Alireza Tangsiri have since been brazenly assassinated as well.

The civilian toll of the war on Iran has been significant. The death toll stands at 3,375 civilians in Iran only (WANA 2026). The imperialist-zionist forces struck approximately 1,300 schools, 24 bridges and intersections, and 240 medical facilities, damaging at least 50 hospitals and 50 emergency centers (PressTV April 27, 2026). They also bombed over 100 museums and cultural heritage sites across Iran, including UNESCO-listed monuments and museums, and the 12,000-seat stadium located at Tehran’s Azadi Sports Complex. Despite this targeting, the Iranian State was prepared, providing free medical treatment to the injured, treating 40,000 people since the war began. Moreover, 775 of the damaged schools have already been repaired.

These brutal and often indiscriminate attacks are consistent with official U.S. statements that they will show “no quarter” and have “no mercy.” The U.S. empire has made clear its intentions to commit war crimes against the Islamic Republic of Iran (PressTV April 7, 2026), including carrying out President Donald Trump’s threat to “destroy [Iranian] civilization.”

Iran immediately defended itself under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which recognizes the right of individual or collective self-defense in response to an armed attack against a U.N. member.[1] Operation True Promise IV, which began within an hour of the initial U.S.-zionist attacks, involved strikes against U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula. These bases are hosted by family dictatorships in Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan against the will of their citizens. The bases were rendered inoperable by Iranian missile and drone strikes working with other members of the Axis of Resistance, which ultimately forced U.S. troops and intelligence personnel to evacuate military bases and embassies in the region (Nereim 2026).

At the beginning of Operation True Promise IV, Iran targeted U.S. radar installations and interceptor batteries in order to blind the imperialist-zionist forces. After Iran destroyed five U.S.

THAAD radars— four in Saudi Arabia and a $300 million AN/TPY-2 in Jordan—the United States was forced to reroute replacement radar assets and interceptors from its vassal state South Korea’s THAAD systems to the Middle East, as the Ramadan War had heavily depleted and damaged existing regional air defenses. This redeployment reveals the direct link between U.S. wars in West Asia and its strategic posture toward East Asia. Having achieved this qualitative success against enemy air defenses, the Islamic Republic turned to U.S. aircraft that perpetrated the war on Iran, including refueling planes and early warning aircraft. Iran and the Axis of Resistance (AoR) have achieved documented successes in damaging or outright destroying numerous enemy forces aircrafts. Iran consistently targeted intelligence facilities linked to weapons manufacturers and industrial sites in the zionist entity as well.

While severe censorship limits the U.S. public’s knowledge of these operations and their success, the material costs (discussed more below) tell only part of the story. Equally significant is the increasing flight of zionist settlers from the region—returning to their original homes in the West—a sign that the material and psychological costs of the war have contributed to breaking the zionist will. The United States and its proxies in West Asia have tried hard to manufacture regional support for their imperialist effort to no avail.

In what appears to be a resurgence of Arab nationalism inspired by Al Aqsa Flood and intensified by the Ramadan War, Arabs across the region – including in Gulf states – have demonstrated ardent support of Iran's efforts despite collaboration by their comprador ruling classes with imperialist- zionist forces. Such a resurgence is deeply organic and expresses the religious, ethnic, and ideological breadth of the region in a manner that unifies rather than fragments it along sectarian lines. Thus, the Ramadan War has deepened ties among Iranians, Arabs, and the other peoples of the region, challenging the divide and rule sectarian logic that has long been the tool of imperialists and colonizers. While the comprador family dictatorships in the Persian Gulf and Jordan have responded with severe repression, the peoples of the region remain steadfast in their commitment to anti- imperialist resistance.

B. The Axis of Resistance and the Unity of Fields

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not facing the imperialist-zionists alone. The Ramadan War was waged through the Unity of the Fields in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine, and Syria. Together, the resistance forces in these states comprise the Axis of Resistance.

This coalition connects Iran with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and the Palestinian resistance forces, expanded to now include new Syrian resistance groups such as the Al-Karrar Brigade in the Levant, which has declared jihad against Israeli occupation forces in southern Syria (MintPress News 2026). The organizing principle of the Axis of Resistance is known as “Unity of Fields”, perhaps more accurately described today as “Unity of Fronts” This framework connects resistance forces across “national” lines in a larger regional battlefield against the common enemy, U.S. imperialism-zionism. When the zionist entity bombs Gaza, Hezbollah strikes northern occupied Palestine and forces settlers to flee. When the U.S. attacks Iran, Iraqi militias hit U.S. bases in Syria and Jordan. And when the zionist entity tightens its genocidal blockade on Gaza, Yemen imposes a blockade against "Israel" in the Red Sea.

Hence, the Axis of Resistance has not only thwarted attempts by imperialist forces to fragment the region, it has transformed the tactics of regional resistance forces into a coordinated, multi-front war through a dialectical historical process precipitated by Al Aqsa Flood. The zionist genocidal response to Al Aqsa Flood quickly led to Hezbollah’s entry into the battle under AoR commander and martyr Seyed Hassan Nasrallah, followed by Ansar Allah’s crucial participation in the Red Sea (Ghasemi Tari 2025). The ongoing zionist-imperialist genocidal aggression against Palestine and the region, and its direct targeting of Iran in June 2025, culminated in an anti-imperialist war that continues to unfold, transforming the regional and global geopolitical map and creating new political possibilities, including decolonization. As the martyred Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei promised, any attack on Iran would lead to a broader anti-imperialist war in the region. Given the centrality of the region to the world economy, that anti-imperialist war has undoubtedly gone global.

Over the course of the Ramadan War, the Axis of Resistance has operationally perfected a strategy of asymmetric attrition, leveraging a staggering cost disparity to bleed its adversaries. In the first month of the war, Iran launched 5,471 missiles and drone attacks targeting U.S. bases and critical sites across seven countries. The backbone of this strategy is Iran’s Shahed-series drone, a product of reverse engineering and endogenous development that emerged in response to decades of Western sanctions. Each Shahed drone unit costs between US$ 20,000 and US$ 50,000 (Arranz et. al. 2026). The U.S. has been forced to intercept them using Patriot air-defense missiles that cost around US$ 4 million per interceptor, a cost ratio of up to 228:1 in detriment of the empire (White 2026). This economic imbalance has turned the conflict into a war of attrition where the outcome depends less on who has the most advanced technology and more on whose weapons deplete first.

The numbers bear this out. In the War’s first four weeks, the U.S. had already fired more than 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles, yet only a few hundred are manufactured annually, raising concerns inside the Pentagon about dwindling stockpiles. As a Pentagon official admitted, U.S. military stocks in the Middle East are “alarmingly low” and nearing “Winchester”—a military slang for running out of ammunition (Palestine Chronicle Staff 2026). The U.S. is also running low on standoff munitions launched from fighter jets and bombers outside of Iranian airspace. U.S. forces have only 425 remaining AGM-158B Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, commonly known as the JASSM-ER (Honrada 2026). These missiles allow for the bombing of Iranian sites without entering the country’s airspace and risking interception by air defenses. Once depleted, U.S. and Israeli aircraft will have to make riskier missions into Iran in order to strike targets.

This depletion is not confined to West Asia, as the loss of five THAAD radars has forced the U.S. to cannibalize its global air defense network. The U.S. has diverted stockpiles from other theaters— notably the Pacific and the Caribbean—to sustain its campaign against Iran, revealing a global military stretched thin (The Washington Post Editorial Board 2026). The material toll on imperialist- zionist forces has been staggering. In addition to the depletions outlined above, U.S. air assets have suffered historic losses. Three F-15 Strike Eagles were shot down by friendly fire in response to Iranian incursions above U.S. bases, and a fourth was downed by Iran; an F-35A was clipped for the first time in combat; an F-18 was nearly downed by a shoulder-fired missile; multiple KC-135 Stratotankers were destroyed; and twenty-four MQ-9 Reaper drones were shot down (with Iranian estimates as high as 100) (NDTV World Staff 2026). In total, the U.S. lost close to $2.6 billion from 42 aircraft losses alone (Nigerian Journal of Sustainability Research 2026).

The empire’s ill-fated Isfahan operation, a sequence of confusing U.S. military activity in Iran between April 2 and April 5, 2026, was justified as a pilot rescue operation but was more likely a larger operation to pilfer Iran’s highly enriched uranium. The operation led to further aircraft losses – including two MC-130J transport planes, an A-10C Warthog, and four MH-6M Little Bird helicopters (Sofuoglu 2026). Two HH-60W Black Hawk helicopters were also damaged in the failed operation (Ellis-Jones 2026). The Iranian air force inflicted its own damage as well. An Iranian F-5 fighter jet struck the U.S. Camp Buehring base in Kuwait during the war’s opening salvos (D’Urso 2026). Most critically, the IRGC destroyed an E-3 AWACS airborne early warning aircraft around March 30th— cutting the plane in half on the runway of the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia—and damaging a second aircraft. The U.S. has 16 of these E-3 AWACS aircrafts in total, of which only eight are operational at any given time.

The Iraqi resistance, operating under the Islamic Resistance in Iraq umbrella, has executed hundreds of strikes on U.S. targets in Iraq and the region since the start of the War. Hezbollah has carried out more than two thousand operations in South Lebanon and northern occupied Palestine (at its peak reaching 87 operations in a single day, breaking its own record) as of April 16, 2026 (News Desk 2026). Yemen entered the war with ballistic missiles and long-range drones targeting the zionist entity, while demonstrating before the Ramadan War that it can close the Bab al-Mandeb and effectively dissect the Suez Canal.

The most dramatic consequence of this unified resistance has been the material decolonization of West Asia, especially through the expulsion or weakening of U.S. military forces from a region it has dominated for decades. At the start of the Ramadan War, nearly 40,000 U.S. troops were stationed across two dozen bases surrounding Iran. After five weeks of sustained AoR strikes, at least 13 U.S. military bases were rendered “all but uninhabitable” (Gibbons-Neff 2026). U.S. troops have scattered across hotels and office spaces in the region, hiding in civilian buildings in further violation of international law. Even bourgeois media propaganda outlets like the New York Times had no choice but to report that “much of the [U.S.] land-based military is, in essence, fighting the war while working remotely” (Cooper and Schmitt 2026). The Pentagon has been forced to withdraw many forces to Europe, using Ramstein Air Base in Germany as the new nerve center for the war. Yet while U.S. forces retreat, Trump peddles fantasy. Despite his fallacious claims that Iran's military has been "shattered," classified U.S. intelligence assessments report that Iran retains approximately 70 percent of its pre-war missile stockpile and mobile launchers, has regained operational access to 30 of 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, and has restored nearly 90 percent of its underground missile facilities to partially or fully operational status following the February 28–April 7 Ramadan War (Press TV 2026).

Sustaining this military capacity requires a political economy built for resistance—one that rejects comprador dependency. This is the topic to which we now turn.

II. A Resistance Economy: The Political Economy of Iranian Sovereignty

Iran's political economy is best understood as a resistance economy — a nationalist-developmentalist formation that is state-driven, resource-anchored, and organized around the strategic priority of sovereignty under conditions of protracted imperialist assault. The resistance economy is a defensive doctrine born of necessity: facing continuous imperialist economic warfare since 1979, Iran has built domestic productive capacity in strategic sectors, including food, medicine, energy, and defense, in order to reduce vulnerability to sanctions and force the enemy into retreat. This dynamic is not unique to Iran. As Setareh Sadeqi Mohammadi and Christopher Weaver argue, sanctions often backfire by empowering targeted states to "transform external pressure into opportunities for growth and autonomy" (Sadeqi Mohammadi & Weaver, 2025). Iran, like Cuba, exemplifies this process, as sanctions have inadvertently "produced resistance economies by strengthening domestic potentials, inspiring national unity and resistance, and driving diplomatic realignment" (Sadeqi Mohammadi & Weaver, 2025).

This section grounds the concept of the resistance economy in material reality, analyzing Iran's financial, oil and gas, agricultural, and defense sectors, and concluding with the Strait of Hormuz as the strategic node where economic sovereignty is enforced.

A. Delinking: The Financial Basis of the Resistance Economy

In February 2014, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei formally codified the “Resistance Economy” (eghtesad-e moqavemati) as a set of general policies for the country (Ali Khamenei 2014). The doctrine rests on three pillars: self-sufficiency in strategic goods such as food, medicine, energy, and defense equipment; economic independence to reduce vulnerability to sanctions by building domestic alternatives; and indigenous industrial capacity to produce what cannot be imported. This is a defensive doctrine: Iran has faced continuous imperialist economic warfare since 1979. The signing of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, briefly eased conditions, but the U.S. withdrawal in May 2018 and reimposition of “maximum pressure” sanctions—including blocking Iran from using the international SWIFT banking system— reinforced the IRGC’s insistence on self-reliance. As Supreme Leader Khamenei explained, the framework of the “resistance economy” aims to “increase the power of resistance and reduc[e] the vulnerability of the country’s economy” by developing strategic regional ties and utilizing economic diplomacy (Ibid.). If Iran followed this doctrine, he stated, “not only will it overcome all economic problems and force the enemy into retreat and defeat; but it will also manage to achieve an economy based on science, technology and justice” (Ibid.).

Both neoconservative and Western Marxist analysts have converged in their mischaracterization of Iran's economy, routinely dismissing it as either neoliberal or a dysfunctional hybrid of rentier capitalism. This convergence in analysis is suspicious, and reflects a theoretically underdeveloped and empirically unsustainable approach that obscures the role of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps in making the resistance economy. Yet it has gained traction among those who mistake the presence of market mechanisms, which exist in all contemporary economies, for the structural subordination of social reproduction to financialized global capital. This is the defining feature of contemporary neoliberalism, not the mere presence of market mechanisms. Even some Western Marxists, trained to see any deviation from an idealized model of revolutionary rupture as capitulation, have reproduced this misreading.

In contrast to the “hollow and highly erratic growth” that Ali Kadri identifies in neoliberalized, comprador economies, where structural adjustment, trade and capital account liberalization, and dependency on foreign finance have undermined sovereignty, the Islamic Republic of Iran, like China, has built a political economy that prioritizes national autonomy over integration into global markets. Iran directs resources through state institutions, anchors development in domestic capacities, and organizes production around the imperative of social reproduction under relentless imperialist assault. It is an economy that effectively “lock[s] in resources and re-circulate[s] the social surplus nationally” (Ibid. 21). That is, capital accumulation in the Islamic Republic occurs primarily through state-directed allocation and institutions, not globally integrated financial markets. This is what Kadri identifies as the core of any genuine developmentalist project, not a neoliberal one.

Similar to the impact of sanctions on the Russia economy, the sanctions regime imposed on Iran accelerated the state’s delinking. Samir Amin defines delinking as the process through which countries in the Global South subordinate “outside relations to the logic of internal development,” rather than organizing their economies around the needs of imperial capital. Amin insisted that delinking involves breaking from the mechanisms of imperialist domination that sustain the global hierarchy of capitalism, not retreating “to the moon” (Amin 2014, 40). Central to this process was overcoming what Amin called the imperial core’s “five monopolies” over finance, technology, natural resources, communications, and military power–thereby allowing peripheral states to pursue “autocentric” and sovereign development rather than “disarticulated” accumulation subordinated to foreign capital (Amin 1990, 62-67).Amin maintained that the struggle for a “polycentric world” was inseparable from anti-imperialist resistance, warning that Washington viewed “even the slightest desire to open up some margin of autonomy in the system” as “anathema” (Amin 2006, 48). For Amin, delinking was ultimately a class project rooted in popular struggles against comprador elites and monopoly capital, and aimed at retaining surplus value within the Global South while redirecting production toward domestic social needs as part of a broader transition toward socialism.

Iran possesses all the components of a sovereign, nationalist-developmentalist state: near food sovereignty achieved through adapted arid-climate farming systems; a diversified domestic industrial base anchored by state-directed oil revenues and parastatal enterprises like Khatam al-Anbiya; a protected internal market sustained by capital account restrictions and state-owned banking; and a fully indigenous military-industrial complex capable of producing over 90 percent of its defense equipment domestically. The Islamic Republic’s political economy is structured around the strategic priority of national sovereignty under imperialist assault—a project that cannot be understood, let alone dismissed, through the label of “neoliberalism.”

The Western left’s eagerness to label Iran “neoliberal” reflects a deeper theoretical problem: the conflation of any market activity or private sector presence with neoliberalism proper. What distinguishes actually existing neoliberalism is not the presence of markets but the subordination and integration of the state to western-dominated finance capital, the opening of the capital account to speculative flows, and the retreat of the state from productive investments in favor of austerity.

On each of these measures, Iran’s trajectory has been the opposite. Its capital account remains restricted given sanctions placed on it by the western states that dominate the global financial architecture. Its most productive sectors, including oil, gas, defense, minerals, and major infrastructure, remain under direct state or parastatal control. According to the International Monetary Fund, state-owned banks dominate Iran’s financial sector, holding approximately 80 percent of the country’s total wealth deposits as of 2011 (International Monetary Fund 2007). While private banks have been permitted to operate since 2001, the state still controls major commercial and specialized banks, with 100 percent state ownership of the Central Bank of Iran. State-owned commercial and specialized banks dominate the banking system, holding about 98 percent of deposits. In sum, neither the actions of Iranian leaders nor the structure of the Iranian economy reflect a comprador ruling class that capitulates to imperialist domination.

By contrast, the neighboring Gulf sheikhdoms exemplify the classic comprador model. The comprador class "chokes the developing state and its assets become the liquidated national wealth stock lodged abroad in dollar form" (Kadri 2021). Examining the role of Western vassals in the Persian Gulf, particularly the colonial-era sheikhdoms, reveals how British colonial heritage created a comprador class whose economic and political dependence on Western nations has persisted from the 1980–1988 war to the current U.S. imperialist war on Iran (Ghasemian 2021). The sheikhdoms' dependence on Western powers has conditioned them to align with U.S. imperialism in the ongoing war, just as it caused them, with the direct and indirect support of Saddam Hussein, to actively expand conflict and insecurity in the Persian Gulf decades ago. The Islamic Republic of Iran, in stark contrast, is carrying out a world historical war against imperialism, using its sovereign economy as a critical weapon. A sovereign economy is a prerequisite for sovereign military and technology sectors. A subordinate monetary and economic system cannot block the drain of surplus value nor invest that surplus in indigenous military and technology productive capacity. Without control over one's own currency, finance, and industrial base, the military ultimately remains dependent on foreign powers for self-defense. This is precisely why Iran's push to de-dollarize, and its development of domestic manufacturing of everything from turbines to oil tankers, is central to its resistance economy and anti-imperialist strategy.

As Iranian parliamentarian Ebrahim Azizi stated in a phone conversation on May 7th with his South Korean counterpart Kim Soo Kyu, “Reliance on rented security from foreign powers is nothing more than a mirage. The future belongs to those who, by relying on their nation's will, separate their path from the unilateralism of the domination system... Strategic independence is the only way to guarantee national interests in Asia” (Ebrahim Azizi 2026). Notably, South Korea does not have a sovereign military, as a 4-star U.S. General ultimately commands the South Korean military during wartime. Economic sovereignty and military sovereignty are not separate struggles but two sides of the same coin.

B. Sovereignty at the Sectoral Scale

Oil revenues play an important role in the political economy of Iran. On average, 60 percent of Iranian government revenues and 90 percent of export revenues originate from oil and gas resources (Farzanegan 2011). Iran’s constitution explicitly prohibits private ownership of natural resources. Its Principles 43 and 45 dictate that all natural resources, including oil and gas, are considered public wealth or Anfal, and controlled solely by the State on behalf of the nation (Ibid.). The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), which was under the control of Western corporations until the 1979 Revolution, remains a fully State-owned enterprise with a public monopoly over oil production, sales, and exports.

Western unilateral sanctions have reinforced this condition by restricting Iran’s integration into global financial circuits, thereby reducing exposure to volatile cross-border capital flows and the disciplinary mechanisms of international finance. Citing Enfu and Xiaoqin (2017), Kadri notes that “regulated financial flows are the safety latch” of sovereign development” (Kadri 2020). Iran’s relative insulation has enabled the government to preserve a degree of policy autonomy and shield the economy from the destabilizing effects of financialization: debt-driven growth, asset bubbles, and dependence on the imperialist financial system. In this sense, Iran's limited financialization is not a sign of backwardness but reflects a form of peripheral resistance to the subordination of the economy to finance capital—a contradiction borne by imperialist siege against Iran itself!

Beyond oil, Iran’s economy is structured around a relatively diversified set of sectors. Agriculture accounts for roughly 13 percent of GDP (Clark 2026) and employs around 15 percent of the labor force, reflecting its social significance beyond its output share (FAO 2026). Industry, including construction, gas, and manufacturing, comprises about 36 percent of GDP, a comparatively large share for a developing economy and one that reflects the centrality of

hydrocarbons alongside state- supported manufacturing (The Global Economy 2024). Between 70 and 85 percent of Iran's oil and petrochemical equipment, including turbines, pumps, catalysts, refineries, drilling rigs, and offshore platforms, is produced domestically, with 95 percent localization achieved at South Pars refineries and in fixed petrochemical equipment (Abbaszadeh 2025; Heidari 2025; Saqafi 2025). Services make up approximately 50 percent of output but are less financialized and more domestically oriented than in many comparable economies (Statistical Center of Iran 2025).

Taken together, this structure reflects a mixed political economy in which productive sectors, particularly industry and resource extraction, retain a central role rather than being subordinated to finance. Employment also remains anchored in productive activity. The service sector, though dominant in GDP terms, does not exhibit the speculative characteristics of financialized service economies. Iran’s agricultural sector has similarly benefited from imperial-core delinking, with the state investing in farming systems uniquely adapted to its arid climate, achieving remarkable self- sufficiency as part of its resistance economy. The country now produces approximately 85 percent of its agricultural products and basic goods domestically (Vanguard Staff 2026).

Iran is the world’s dominant producer of saffron, contributing the highest share of global output. The global saffron market is projected to reach close to $ 800 million by 2032 (MMR Statistic Research Team 2026). Premium Grade I saffron, which meets high ISO quality standards, accounted for over 52 percent of total revenue in 2025. Iran is also a global powerhouse in pistachio production, serving as the biggest rival to California almonds on the world market. Between March and December 2025, Iran exported approximately 100,000 tons of pistachio products to 67 countries, generating revenues of around $ 730 million (Tehran Times 2026). Major importers included India, Russia, Kazakhstan, and China. In all of 2024, Iran exported over 175,000 tons valued at $ 1.7 billion. The specimen star of this industry is the Akbari variety, an exceptionally long pistachio with a distinctive pink-purple shell, widely grown in Kerman province even on harsh saline soils. Iranian farmers continue to favor traditional harvesting methods, handpicking nuts or gently striking branches with wooden sticks to protect the trees for the next season (Taher 2026).

Iran also produces more than one million tons of dates annually, roughly 15 percent of global supply, and ranks fourth globally with a sheep population of approximately 53.8 million head (Tehran Times 2025, TV Brics 2025). This livestock sector supports the multi-billion dollar Persian carpet industry through ancient nomadic herding traditions, which were the basis for Persian integration into medieval silk trade routes. The sheep are raised on drought-resistant plants and wild herbs across the Zagros mountains, producing lean, flavorful meat and the high-protein, high-fat milk used for traditional Leghvan cheese. The wool is harvested using hand-forged steel shears to produce ultra- fine kurk fiber, the essential material behind Persian carpets that can sell for tens of thousands of dollars in luxury markets (Business Insider 2022).Iran’s agrarian economy directly counters neoliberal logic, preserving rural livelihoods and national food security as components of a broader project of sovereign development.

C. Self-Defense as Sovereignty

This same logic of self-reliance and material delinking extends beyond agriculture to defense, where the Islamic Republic has built an indigenous military industry rooted in the revolutionary institutions forged during the Iran-Iraq War. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was born from the 1979 Iranian revolution. When the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown, Iran's new leaders did not fully trust the existing military. The regular army, known as the Artesh, had served the monarchy and its officers had trained with Western allies. In a fragile moment, loyalty mattered more than tradition. Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies wanted a force committed not just to defending borders, but to defending the revolution itself. So the IRGC was formed on May 5, 1979, by direct decree of Khomeini. At first, it was a small ideological guard. Then came the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s. The war consolidated the organization, expanded its ranks, and turned it into a central pillar of the new Islamic Republic (Chakrabarty 2026). Khomeini also recalled the 1953 CIA-MI6 coup that overthrew democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry. A military whose officers had ties to the West was a perpetual counter-revolutionary threat. To protect and consolidate the revolution, the state was compelled to develop alternative military institutions, including the IRGC and the Basij. The latter was a volunteer force established by Khomeini in November 1979.

Iran’s defense capacity developed under difficult conditions. The Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from September 1980 to August 1988, was an existential conflict for the Islamic Revolution. The war produced three enduring institutional features: engineering and logistics expertise developed under fire, organizational autonomy from the regular military chain of command, and the doctrine of self- reliance (khodkafa'i). The latter is a strategic commitment to indigenous production that has shaped Iranian defense policy for decades (Farnia 2025). At this time, Iran received military assistance from Syria, Libya, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Iran’s stockpile never exceeded more than seven or eight missiles. Yet rather than deploying all the missiles received from other countries, Iran set aside a few for research and reverse engineering. This practice became the basis for Iran’s now-robust ballistic missile program (Hajizadeh 2025).

The Iran-Iraq War also transformed the IRGC into a conventional fighting force, even while it maintained its asymmetric strategic trajectory. By 1985, the IRGC had established its own navy and air force, independent of the regular military. Artesh also became fully subordinated under the revolutionary state. The formative experience of the war also forged a deep ideological commitment to national unity. The IRGC has consistently emphasized that synergy between the Iranian government, nation, and Armed Forces is the key to building a strong and advanced country, a principle cemented during the sacred national defense against the Iraqi invasion (Sayyari 2025).

Imperialist sanctions pushed Iran toward industrial self-sufficiency, pursued within an asymmetric warfare doctrine, achieving remarkable military self-sufficiency both under, and given, the severe consequences of imperialist sanctions. Iran has maintained a steadfast commitment to self-reliance even when opportunities arise to acquire weapons. Over 90 percent of the equipment and systems used by the Armed Forces have been completely designed and manufactured by industrial enterprises under the Defense Ministry and the Armed Force’s collaborating networks. Naval systems have achieved over 90 percent domestic manufacturing of submarine parts as of December 2025. This very success, the transformation of Iranian scientists and engineers into the architects of an autonomous, indigenous military-industrial base, has made them primary targets of imperialist- zionist assassination campaigns, which have killed over a dozen senior nuclear and defense scientists since 2010 (Iran Press 2026; Xinhua 2024).

Asymmetric capabilities constitute a hallmark of Iranian defense doctrine. Iran's leadership recognized the futility of pursuing conventional weapons, including fighter jets and tanks, soon after the Revolution, deciding decades ago that it would not attempt to match its adversaries tank-for-tank or plane-for-plane, but would instead build an asymmetric deterrent from scratch (The Cradle 2025, PressTV 2026). Had Iran pursued a conventional defensive development path, it would have remained generations behind its imperialist adversaries. Instead, Iran focused on ballistic missile technology and other non-conventional programs. This would come to include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Iran's vaunted UAV program is now emulated by allies and adversaries alike.

The IRGC has broadly prioritized the preservation and enhancement of its defensive and security capabilities, playing an active role in Iran’s resistance economy. As a result of this commitment, Iran’s military industry has achieved levels of indigenous production that few, if any, peer nations can match. These achievements were forged through praxis, learned from the Iran-Iraq War years, which “remain embedded in doctrine: survival depends not on a single battle but on a combination of resilience, redundancy, and the capacity to absorb pressure while preserving command structures” (Tehran Times 2026).

The Islamic Republic of Iran has built a political economy that defies neoliberal and comprador bourgeois logic: state-anchored banking, domestic industrial development, agricultural sovereignty, and endogenous scientific and defense development. Its political economy illustrates a concrete process of asserting sovereignty over strategic sectors that include finance, energy, defense production, and technological development under conditions of sanctions, siege warfare, and financial isolation. Practically speaking, Iran’s political economy cannot be undermined by neoliberal financial warfare given its exclusion from the western-dominated global financial system and architecture; and it cannot be claimed that Iran is ruled or managed by comprador elites who, based on their collaborationist function within the imperialist system, do not and cannot build resistance economies based on self-reliance and sufficiency.

D. Sovereignty Over the Strait of Hormuz

Iranian self-reliance finds a powerful lever at the Strait of Hormuz, where the Islamic Republic has transformed a geographic chokepoint into a material instrument of sovereignty and surplus value accumulation in the form of reparations. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow shipping lane through which more than one-third of the world’s crude oil, one-third of the global fertilizer trade, one-fifth of liquefied natural gas, and nearly half of the world’s sulfur passes through. The Strait is between 33 to 48 kilometers wide, and the deeper channels favorable for shipping lay closer to Iran’s shorelands. On the other side of the Strait is the Musandam Peninsula, an Omani governorate. Oman maintains a permanent military presence on Musandam, while Iran controls the Strait to the north.

Iran has asserted sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, imposing a toll on all passing ships while banning vessels from aggressor states including the United States, the zionist entity, the United Kingdom, France, and Gulf Arab states—including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain—entirely. Iran’s parliament has drafted legislation making this situation permanent, in effect reversing the currency collapse the U.S. attempted to impose on it earlier this year. “The Law on Establishing Iran’s Sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz” authorizes Iran to collect tolls for passage through the Strait, among other clauses (PressTV 2026).

Iran’s newly established sovereign authority over the Strait of Hormuz has had irreversible impacts on the global economy across multiple sectors. From oil and gas to agriculture and the “FIRE” sector (finance / insurance / real estate), the effects continue to be realized. Some states (United News of India 2026) have expressed their willingness to abide by Iran’s regulations controlling Hormuz, but the U.S.’s imperialist blockade has effectively prevented the full implementation of the tolling system and blocked access to key supplies powering the global economy.

According to the International Energy Agency, the world is facing the largest energy crisis in history (Angelo 2026). In March, the International Energy Agency released 400 million barrels of emergency oil stocks (IEA 2026) and the U.S. Department of Energy released 172 million barrels (Energy.gov 2026). Inflation has already impacted working class communities although the downstream effects have been slow to hit the macroeconomy of the United States. But analysts believe the worst is yet to come (Power 2026).

Global food systems stand to be severely impacted by shortages in fertilizer, threatening global food inflation and a food crisis (Bazillian 2026). Some insurers have already begun to require ships to follow Iranian-approved routes through Hormuz in order to receive war-risk coverage, which has skyrocketed from one to five percent of hull value (Eaglesham 2026). But the U.S. blockade of Hormuz effectively prevents the removal of mines, deterring some insurers and halting traffic. Even if hostile conditions come to a decisive end–unlikely in the near future–pre-war traffic patterns could take months or years to resume, with a long-term impact on supply chains.

The Gulf dictatorships, longtime U.S. vassals hated by their own populations, now realize that the U.S. military bases used to stage and support the war of aggression against Iran made them targets rather than protectees. These vassal regimes, whose survival depended for decades on Washington’s military umbrella, now find themselves increasingly exposed and vulnerable. The Axis of Resistance has effectively scuttled any remaining prospects for Saudi-Israeli normalization and forced the Gulf monarchies into a defensive crouch, with news reports of some quietly reconsidering their longstanding strategic dependence on the United States (Reuters 2026). As the IRGC has declared, after this war the Persian Gulf will no longer serve as a platform for U.S. imperialist aggression.

The Axis of Resistance is not merely defending Iran and its crucial regional role in upholding Palestinian resistance; it is actively restructuring the regional and global balance of forces. By controlling the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of globally traded oil passed before the War—the vast majority of which was sold in dollars (along with 80 percent of all transactions in the global oil market)—Iran is now requiring ships to pay passage fees in Chinese yuan or other non- dollar currencies (Power 2026). In doing so, Tehran has forced the U.S.-led imperialist system to reckon with the material reality of supply chains, contributed to the unfolding global process of de- dollarization, is exporting oil at higher prices (World is One News Staff 2026) and has undermined the entire sanctions regime.

Through diplomatic coordination with Russia and China, Iran has integrated West Asian anti- imperialism into broader efforts of Global Majority delinking, hastening the transition from U.S. unipolarity to a de-imperialized multipolar world order. Perhaps most importantly, the Axis of Resistance has demonstrated that a network of popular militias and a revolutionary state, powered by indigenous knowledge and productive capacity, can outlast the world’s most powerful military, inflicting the kind of multi-billion-dollar losses not seen since World War II.

In effect, the Axis has provided a template for sovereignty that reaches far beyond West Asia, on the military, economic and ideological fronts alike. The Unity of Fields has proven that when the oppressed fight as one, they can do serious damage to even the most seemingly invincible empires— not in a single cataclysmic battle, but in a thousand coordinated blows across a single, indivisible front. The Strait of Hormuz is one such blow. It is a turning point in the War, and a proof of General Võ Nguyên Giáp's concept of people's war, "a war fought for the people by the people" and where the goal is "to wear out the enemy forces, gradually reverse the balance of forces, turning our weakness into strength" (Giáp, 1962/1968).

(To be continued…)

The Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective is a group of scholars committed to challenging US-led imperialism and supporting liberation movements of the Global Majority through critical knowledge production and international solidarity. https://www.anti-imperialists.com/

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