Hey all, I’m going to try something a little different. Here’s a piece of the essay I wrote for the video I just released on the Iran War. Hope you find it illuminating.
You can also listen to a podcast version here (or wherever you get your podcasts!)
(For sources and citations, check out the video and show notes— for some reason, footnotes can’t copy into Substack)
The missiles struck on February 28, 2026. Then came the war.
Israel and the U.S. unleashed a brutal and, despite official claims to the contrary, indiscriminate air assault on the people of Iran over the next few months. The first day set the tone: a missile strikes the all-girls primary school in southern Iran, killing 168 people.
Bombs fall, thousands die. Sadly, this violent incursion isn’t an isolated event. Just a month before this war began, the Trump regime invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president in the dark of night. This is imperialism. But in the age of Trump, in the age of fossil fascism, are these violent escapades just the opening salvo? The Iran war might just be the beginning, because as long as the United States perceives itself as the global hegemon, and as long as fossil fuels remain the primary lubricant for the engines of capitalism and military power, the U.S. will continue to burn and plunder.
The Spiral of Contradictions
The Iran war didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. It is also not just the result of Trump’s idiocy or rogue whims, although those certainly do factor into the timing. This new violent conflagration in West Asia has deep roots in the past. Indeed, the history of Iran is one of spiralling contradictions and escalating tensions. A history wrapped up in play and counterplay between Iran and the imperialist reach of the United States. Indeed, from the 1950s onward, the development of Iran cannot be understood without the U.S.
The history that brings us to where we are today starts long before 1953, but 1953 gives us enough context to understand the current situation.
And it starts with a coup.
On August 19th, 1953, ex-Iranian general Fazlollah Zahedi, with the aid of the CIA and MI6, ripped the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh from power.
By 1953, Mosaddegh had gotten unruly. With the parliament’s support, he took back and nationalized British-controlled oil reserves in 1951, and for British and U.S. oil corporations, that could not stand. So, the two clandestine wings of the British and American empire took down Mosaddegh and installed their own puppet dictator more amenable to the multinational corporations from the Imperial core siphoning oil from their soil. That dictator’s name was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. For 26 years, the Shah ruled under the auspices of the United States, essentially acting as a puppet dictator for the Western superpower in the area.
Importantly, in 1954, the Shah signed a consortium agreement with the United States and England, allowing 5 U.S. oil companies a 40% share in oil, while Royal Dutch Shell and BP would take 20%, leaving just 40% to Iran. A deal that would last until 1979, and would allow Western oil multinationals to get rich off Iranian oil. But as the years dragged into 1978, the people of Iran grew restless and angry. The imperialist meddling could not stand.
In 1978, over ten thousand seminary students and residents marched en masse to the homes of religious leaders, urging them to join the fight against the Shah, who they saw as an unjust, imperialist puppet regime. But the firm hand of the Shah couldn’t countenance this dissent. The government deployed armed forces and shot live rounds into the crowd, killing many. Estimates put the death toll that day anywhere from 5 to 300. Regardless of the exact number of deaths, this was a spark that would ignite an inferno. By 1979, 10% of Iran flocked towards an uprising against the Shah that coalesced around Islamic cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
With this new, and decidedly anti-American, Islamic Republic in power, a new era of tension would stretch on in the Middle East. One that saw the U.S. and Israel, which Nixon’s secretary of state called “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk,” work to contain and pry open this new threat to the stability of markets. Specifically, oil markets. This took the form of Reagan sending arms to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, the heightening of sanctions under the Bushes, Clinton, Obama, and Trump administrations, border skirmishes, and military exploits like the 12-day war in 2025 and the assassination of Iranian Major General Soleimanii. Finally, the pressure from these contradictions grew too intense, and the gasket blew on February 28, 2026.
Peak Oil?
But of course, this brief history of spiralling contradictions that have now led to outright war, isn’t floating in a void. The Iran war is materially grounded in resources, in finance, in profit, in labor, in the logic of capitalism. And in the 21st century, nothing is more materially important to the smooth flow of capital accumulation, to the undying acquisition of profits, to financial markets, than oil. Iran, Venezuela, and so many of the United States’ other imperialist exploits are grounded in the fundamental nature of our fossil capitalist economy: oil is king. Oil, and more broadly, fossil fuels, are what make our capitalist economy tick. Fossil fuels allow capitalists to bring production to where the work is cheapest and enable them to exploit their labor as long as needed. In short, as Andreas Malm describes in Fossil Capital, fossil fuels give the owners of production flexibility in time and space to maximally exploit workers and ultimately achieve maximal profits. Not only that, but oil is crucial for military superiority. All the war machines that the U.S. spends billions on each year are useless without a steady flow of oil to turn them on and keep them running, and all that fossil fuel use means that if the U.S. military were a country, it would rank 47th in terms of emissions. Ahead of countries like Sweden.
In our current global order, the core hub of the capitalist exploitation machine, through which the tendrils of multinationals stretch their imperialist arms across the globe, is the United States. In short, the United States’ supremacy, both economically and militarily, is reliant on a stable flow of fossil fuels, especially oil. As one professor of political science puts it:
“Oil has continued to play a role in American foreign and military policy because the United States has feared that political disruptions in the Middle East—internal instability, the threat of extremist fundamentalist Muslim control in the Middle East, if that came about—could pose a threat to American oil supplies that especially would hurt our prosperity.”
This desire for stability can be seen in this chart. When we look at this graph, the United States by no means holds the majority of oil reserves. Indeed, the countries on this chart are overwhelming ones that the U.S. deems “enemies of the state.” And part of that has to do with the slow decline of easily available oil in the United States. Starting in the 1960s, as the United States leaned more heavily on fossil fuels for every aspect of our economy, oil production increased, but as more and more oil flowed out of U.S. soil, fossil fuel companies had to dig deeper and use technologies like advanced oil recovery to get more product. Essentially, the days of oil gushing up from wells were over in the United States, and it became more costly to wring oil out of the likes of shale fields and deepwater rigs. It seems as if the U.S. has reached the moment of peak “easy oil,” and now we’re scraping at domestic wells with techniques like advanced oil recovery, which uses carbon dioxide pumped into wells to eke out the last drops of oil. And the U.S. has gotten very good at wringing out those last drops. Over the last two decades, it increased its oil exports substantially to the point where the U.S. was exporting more oil than it imported in 2020. The first time it had done that since 1949. But again, this wasn’t an easy process, and the eyes of multinationals like Exxon wandered outward across the Atlantic, because out there, there was oil. And not just any oil. Easy to pump oil.
From Nigeria to Iraq, U.S. multinationals have pried open foreign markets to siphon the lush reserves into their coffers. Iran contains more than 11% of the world’s proven oil reserves. Venezuela, notably, is home to the largest proven oil reserves in the world. This is telling. But as we will soon see, “it’s oil” is a vague oversimplification of the imperialist dynamics playing out in West Asia right now.
Regardless of whether peak oil or peak “easy” oil has or will happen, those inside the U.S. government feel it is happening. Back in 2007, “a seventy-five-page report…argued that almost all studies had shown that a world oil peak would occur sometime before 2040.” And it’s clear that Trump’s interest in both of the U.S.’s most recent violent attacks is to pry open resources for American markets…
Watch the video version of this essay to hear the rest!
You can support Our Changing Climate directly through Patreon: www.patreon.com/OurChangingClimate
Hope you have a great day,
In solidarity,
Charlie
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