US IMPERIALISM AND IRAN: AN HISTORICAL SUMMARY AND KILLING TODAY

Harry Targ

As many as153 schoolgirls died in bombing attacks by Israel as the war on Iran started.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/least-24-girls-killed-us-strike-elementary-school-southern-iran

“The leadership of the Democratic Party fails to fully object to Trump's bloody war on Iran. Dissident voices, such as Congresswomen AOC, Tlaib, Senator Sanders and few more, are the exceptions. What is notable is the silence at local levels, local Democratic Party organizations and groups like Indivisible. Local activists need to recognize the connection between economic and political issues at home and the support of the people election day and the great war/peace issues of our day.” (Harry Targ, posted on Facebook, March 1, 2026)

“Along with the structural reasons determining US imperial policy, our rulers are insane. This means our work necessitates challenging the US permanent war economy and removing from office this coterie of insane, inhumane leaders who control the vast US war machine. We must apologize to Iranians, Gazans, Venezuelans, Cubans, Nigerians and others for allowing US leaders to kill and starve their populations._ (Harry Targ posted on Facebook, February 28, 2026)

U.S. Imperialism in the Beginning

Modern imperialism is intimately connected to the globalization of capitalism, the quest for enhanced military capabilities, geopolitical thinking, and ideologies of national and racial superiority. The rise of the United States empire occurred as the industrial revolution spread to North America after the civil war. Farmers began to produce agricultural surpluses requiring overseas customers, factories were built to produce iron, steel, textiles, and food products, railroads were constructed to traverse the North American continent, and financiers created large banks, trusts, and holding companies to parley agricultural and manufacturing profits into huge concentrations of cash.

Perhaps the benchmark of the U.S. emergence as an imperial power was the Spanish/Cuban/American war. The U.S. established its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, replacing the Spanish and challenging the British, and became an Asian power, crushing rebellion and planting its military in the Philippines. The empire has grown, despite resistance, to this day.

While U.S. expansion occurs wherever a vacuum of power exists, and an opportunity to formally or informally control a regime and/or territory, particular countries have had enduring salience for the U.S. Iran is such a country.

Scale of Significance for U.S. Imperialism

To help understand the attention U.S. policy-makers give some countries, it is possible to reflect on what is called here the Scale of Significance for U.S. Imperialism (SSUSI). The SSUSI has three interconnected dimensions that relate to the relative importance policymakers give to some countries compared to others.

First, as an original motivation for expansion, economic interests are primary. Historically, United States policy has been driven by the need to secure customers for U.S. products, outlets for manufacturing investment opportunities, opportunities for financial speculation, and vital natural resources.

Second, geopolitics and military hegemony matter. Empires require ready access to regions and trouble spots all around the world. When Teddy Roosevelt, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Vice President, and President of the United States, articulated the first warning of the need for global power he spoke of the development of a “two-ocean” navy. The U.S., he said, must become an Atlantic and a Pacific power; thus prioritizing the projection of military power in the Western Hemisphere and Asia. If the achievement of global power was dependent upon resources drawn from everywhere, military and political hegemony in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and parts of Africa also required attention.

Third, as the imperial project grows, certain political regimes and cultures take on particular importance for policymakers and the American people. Foreign policy elites claim that the U.S. has a special responsibility for them. If these roles are rejected by the targeted country, the experience burns itself into the consciousness of the people. For example, Cuba was seen by U.S. rulers as far back as Thomas Jefferson as soon to be part of the United States. Cuba’s rejection of this presumption of U.S. tutelage has been a scar on the U.S. sense of itself ever since the spread of revolutionary ferment on the island.

Sixty Years of Blowback: Iran

Chalmers Johnson wrote in 2001 about “blowback” that it “is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people. The CIA's fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded.…. This misguided ‘covert operation’ of the US government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy.” (The Nation, October 15, 2001).

The CIA initiated overthrow of the regime of Mohammed Mossadegh sixty years ago on August 19, 1953, was precipitated by what Melvin Gurtov called “the politics of oil and cold war together.” Because it was the leading oil producer in the Middle East and the fourth largest in the world and it was geographically close to the former Soviet Union, President Eisenhower was prevailed upon to launch the CIA covert war on Iran long encouraged by Great Britain.

The immediate background for the ouster of Mossadegh was Iran’s nationalization of its oil production. Most Iranians were living in poverty in the 1940s as the Iranian government received only ten percent of the royalties on its oil sales on the world market. The discrepancy between Iran’s large production of oil and the limited return it received led Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a liberal nationalist, to call for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. Despite opposition from Iran’s small ruling class, the parliament and masses of the Iranian people endorsed the plan to seize control of its oil. Mossadegh became the symbol of Iranian sovereignty.

Ironically, Mossadegh assumed the United States would support Iran’s move toward economic autonomy. But, in Washington, the Iranian leader was viewed as a demagogue, his emerging rival the Shah of Iran (the sitting monarch of Iran) as “more moderate.”

After the nationalization, the British, supported by the United States, boycotted oil produced by the Iranian Oil Company. The British lobbied Washington to launch a military intervention but the Truman Administration feared such an action would work to the advantage of the Iranian Communists, the Tudeh Party. 

The boycott led to economic strains in Iran, and Mossadegh compensated for the loss of revenue by increasing taxes on the rich. This generated growing opposition from the tiny ruling class, and they encouraged political instability. In 1953, to rally his people, Mossadegh carried out a plebiscite, a vote on his policies. The Iranian people overwhelmingly endorsed the nationalization of Iranian oil. In addition, Mossadegh initiated efforts to mend political fences with the former Soviet Union and the Tudeh Party.

As a result of the plebiscite, and Mossadegh’s openings to the Left, the United States came around to the British view; Mossadegh had to go. As one U.S. defense department official put it:

“When the crisis came on and the thing was about to collapse, we violated our normal criteria and among other things we did, we provided the army immediately on an emergency basis….The guns that they had in their hands, the trucks that they rode in, the armored cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications that permitted their control, were all furnished through the military defense assistance program…. Had it not been for this program, a government unfriendly to the United States probably would now be in power.” (Richard Barnet, Intervention and Revolution, 1972).

The Shah, who had fled Iran after the plebiscite, returned when Mossadegh was ousted. A new prime minister was appointed by him who committed Iran to the defense of the “free” world. U.S. military and economic aid was resumed, and Iran joined the CENTO alliance (an alliance of pro-West regional states).

In August, 1954, a new oil consortium was established. Five U.S. oil companies gained control of forty percent of Iranian oil, equal to that of returning British firms. Iran compensated the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for its losses by paying $70 million, which Iran received as aid from the United States. The Iranian ruling class was accorded fifty percent of profits from future oil sales. President Eisenhower declared that the events of 1953 and 1954 were ushering in a new era of “economic progress and stability” in Iran and that it was now to be an independent country in “the family of free nations.”

In brief, the United States overthrew a popularly elected and overwhelmingly endorsed regime in Iran. The payoff the United States received, with British acquiescence, was a dramatic increase in access by U.S. oil companies to Iranian oil at the expense of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The overthrow of Mossadegh and the backing of the return of the Shah to full control of the regime led to U.S. support for one of the world’s most repressive and militarized regimes. By the 1970s, 70,000 of the Shah’s opponents were in political prisons. Workers and religious activists rose up against the Shah in 1979, leading to the rapid revolutionary overthrow of his military state.

As Chalmers Johnson suggested many years later, the United States role in the world is still plagued by “blowback.” Masses of people all across the globe, particularly in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and East Asia, regard the United States as the major threat to their economic and political independence. And the covert operation against Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran is one place where such global mistrust began.

Hybrid Wars Against Iran

from https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2020/01/hybrid-warswhat-is-new-and-what-is-not.html

Iran has been a country of particular concern of the United States at least since the end of World War II. As suggested above, the US propped up the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) at the outset of the war to protect US bases which were used to transfer war materials to the former Soviet Union. After Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, elected in 1951, nationalized Iran’s valuable oil resource, Great Britain, whose Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had “owned “ the oil, began to urge the US to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister, instill full power in the monarch, the Shah, and reprivatize Iranian oil. In 1953 the US Central Intelligence Agency launched a coup to overthrow the Prime Minister and to establish the Shah as Iran’s all-powerful dictator. His brutality and repression lasted for years until a mass-based worker and religious-led movement ousted him from power in 1979. In the aftermath of the ouster of the Shah, religious leaders consolidated their control of the state, the Shah fled to the United States for medical treatment, the new regime demanded his return to stand trial for his crimes, and Iranian students took 52 US embassy personnel hostage for 444 days.

The United States responses to the transformation of the Iranian regime included President Carter’s declaration of his “doctrine,” which proclaimed that instabilities in the Persian Gulf region were vital to US national security. The US began to fund Iraq in its eight-year bloody war against Iran, which led to 500,000 Iranians killed. The United States urged Israel to invade Lebanon, escalate attacks on Palestine, and in general tilted in opposition to Iran and its allies in the region. The US also increased the sale of technologically sophisticated arms to Saudi Arabia. 

Therefore in the 1980s, US policy in the Persian Gulf and Middle East regions was driven by the growing hostility of Iran to the United States (once a pillar of US support in the Persian Gulf), the continued need of Europe and Japan for Iranian oil, and Iran’s vital geographic location, particularly in terms of its potential control of the  flow of oil to Europe and Japan.  But, in addition, the Iranian people had violated a cardinal rule of US global hegemony. They had risen up against rule by an American puppet. Much like Cuba in the Western Hemisphere, Iranians declared that they no longer would abide by a leader chosen by the United States and not them. (In fact, in the Nixon Administration, the Shah’s regime was identified as the key “gendarme” state in the Persian Gulf, the local US police enforcer).

Ever since the hostage crisis of 1979, the United States has imposed economic sanctions of one sort or another on Iran. After the long years of damage to the Iranian economy and the people at large, the Nuclear Treaty of 2015 (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), was negotiated by Iran, the United States, member countries of the European Union, and Security Council members, Russia and China.  Along with Iran’s promise to stop the production of potential nuclear material, signatories agreed to end the freezing of Iranian assets deposited in US and European banks, to eliminate various prohibitions on Western investment in the Iranian economy, and to remove trade restrictions.

Almost immediately after the sanctions were lifted in the aftermath of the Nuclear Treaty, the Iranian economy grew: a 12 percent growth in GDP in 2016 and an additional but modest 3.7 percent in 2017. However, in 2018 President Trump withdrew from the Nuclear Treaty and re-imposed crippling sanctions. As a result, the Iranian economy contracted by 4.8 percent in 2018 and in a BBC report projected a further decline of 9.5 percent in 2019.

Iran’s oil exports and hence production was hit particularly hard. The value of Iranian currency declined dramatically and inflation in the country rose, particularly for the price of food. (BBC News. “Six Charts That Show How Hard US Sanctions Have Hit Iran,” December 2, 2019). Sanctions reduced purchasing power, increased the cost of living for food and transportation, reduced access of Iranian students studying abroad to financial resources, and led to the reduction of public services. 

This is the story of hybrid war against Iran: along with military threats and attempts to isolate Iran diplomatically, make the people suffer and cause increased outrage at the material conditions of life. The hope is that the people will rise up and overthrow the regime in power (and, of course, instances of corruption and repression will magnify protest responses). The scenario has been repeated over and over: Guatemala and Iran in the early 1950s, Cuba since 1960, and now Venezuela and Iran again. And make no mistake about it: economic sanctions are targeted against civilian populations and constitute a strategy of war against the people, motivating them to rise up against their governments.

Returning to SSUSI and Iranian Relations

As an emerging global power, United States needs for natural resources, customers for consumer and military products, investment opportunities, and outlets for energy companies grew throughout the twentieth century. One of the significant historical junctures in the transfer of economic and geopolitical power in the world from the declining British empire and the rising U.S. empire was the agreement to redistribute control of Iranian oil in 1954. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was obliged to share Iranian oil with the then five U.S. oil giants.

As U.S. oil needs and those of its friends in Europe increased, control of the Persian Gulf region and access to its oil became more vital. Furthermore, since a hostile Iran could control the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian revolution of 1979 posed an increasing geopolitical problem for American dominance.

The impulse in 1979 to send U.S. troops to save the Shah’s regime was driven by both economics and geopolitics. It was only because other Carter advisers disagreed with the National Security Advisor on the possibility of saving the Shah that a U.S. intervention stalled in 1979. But in 1980 an Iraq/Iran war provided an opportunity, it was hoped, to weaken Iran’s potential control of the region.

Finally, the U.S. decision-makers since 1953 saw a special relationship between this country and Iran. The U.S. put the Shah in power, plied him with enormous military power, encouraged and facilitated significant cultural exchanges, and defined his regime as a junior partner in policing the region.

The rapidity of the Shah’s overthrow and the anger expressed by the Iranian people about its historic relationship to the American people communicated to the world declining U.S. power. Consequently, U.S. hostility to Iran in subsequent decades using a variety of issues including processing uranium is not surprising.

The US Pursuit of Empire

Taking “the long view” of United States foreign policy, it is clear that from NSC-68; to the response to the Soviet challenges in space such as during the Sputnik era; to global wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq; to covert interventions in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States has pursued global hegemony. And foreign policy influentials, such as a recent Council on Foreign Relations position paper suggests, regard the maintenance of global power the main priority of foreign policy in the years ahead. It is also clear that the pursuit of empire has, of necessity, involved the creation of a permanent war economy, an economy that overcomes economic stagnation by the infusion of enormous military expenditures.

It is also clear that justification for empire and military spending has necessitated the construction of an enemy, first the Soviet Union and international communism; then terrorism; and now China and most recently Iran. The obverse of a demonic enemy requires a conception of self to justify the imperial project. That self historically has been various iterations of American exceptionalism, the indispensable nation, US humanitarianism, and implicitly or explicitly the superiority of the white race and western civilization.

In this light, while specific policies vary, the trajectory of US foreign policy in the twenty-first century is a continuation of the policies and programs that were institutionalized in the twentieth century. Three seem primary. First, military spending, particularly in new technologies, continues unabated. And a significant Council on Foreign Relations report raises the danger of the United States “falling behind,” the same metaphor that was used by the writers of the NSC-68 document, or the Gaither and Rockefeller Reports composed in the late 1950s to challenge

President Eisenhower’s worry about a military/industrial complex, the response to Sputnik, Secretary of Defense McNamara’s transformation of the Pentagon to scientific management in the 1960s, or President Reagan’s huge increase of armaments in the 1980s to overcome the “window of vulnerability.”

Second, the United States continues to engage in policies recently referred to as “hybrid wars.” The concept of hybrid wars suggests that while traditional warfare between nations has declined, warfare within countries has increased. Internal wars, the hybrid wars theorists suggest, are encouraged and supported by covert interventions, employing private armies, spies, and other operatives financed by outside nations like the United States. Also the hybrid wars concept also refers to the use of economic warfare, embargoes and blockades, to bring down adversarial states and movements. The blockades of Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran are examples. So, the hybrid war concept suggests that wars are carried out by other, less visible, means.

Third, much of the discourse on the US role in the world replicates the bipolar, superpower narrative of the Cold War. Only now the enemy is China. As Alfred McCoy has pointed out (In the Shadows of the American Empire, 2017), the United States in the twenty first century sees its economic hegemony being undermined by Chinese economic development and global reach. To challenge this, McCoy argues, the United States has taken on a project to recreate its military hegemony: AI, a space force, biometrics, new high tech aircraft etc. If the US cannot maintain its hegemony economically, it will have to do so militarily. This position is the centerpiece of the recent CFR Task Force Report.

Finally, during the last decade there has emerged rising resistance to US/European global hegemony, such that some theorists (and US foreign policy elites) believe that today a global transformation of power is occurring, a centerpiece of which is the rise of the Global South. In the spirit of the 1950s Non-aligned Movement countries such as China, Russia, India, Brazil, and South Africa (the BRICS) have begun to talk about increased cooperation around  the transformation of currencies and commerce, foreign assistance, and technological cooperation. The Trump Administration’s kidnapping of the president of Venezuela, threats against Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and others, and now a war on Iran are designed to forestall the rise of the Global South.

Imperial Policies in Trump's First Term

Recognizing these continuities in United States foreign policy, commentators appropriately recognized the idiosyncrasies of foreign policy in the first Trump administration. He reached out to North Korea and Russia (which had the potential of reducing tensions in Asia and Central Europe). He rhetorically claimed that the United States should withdraw military forces from trouble spots around the world, including the Middle East. He declared that the United States could not be “the policeman of the world,” a declaration made by former President Nixon as he escalated bombing of Vietnam and initiated plans to overthrow the Allende regime in Chile. Some of these measures which seemed to contradict the Cold War policy agenda Trump was inappropriately criticized by Democrats and others. Tension-reduction on the Korean Peninsula, for example, should have been encouraged.

However, while Trump moved in one direction, he almost immediately undermined the policies he had ordered. His announced withdrawal from Syria, while in the abstract a sign of a more realistic assessment of US military presence in the Middle East was coupled with a direct or implied invitation to the Turkish military to invade Northeast Syria to defeat the Kurds. Also, at the same time he was withdrawing troops from Syria, the Defense Department announced the United States was sending support troops to Saudi Arabia. He withdrew from the accord with Iran on nuclear weapons and the Paris Climate Change agreement. Time after time, one foreign policy decision was contradicted by another. These contradictions occurred over and over with allies as well as traditional adversaries. Sometimes policies seemed to be made with little historical awareness and without sufficient consultation with professional diplomats. 

Imperial Policies in the Second Trump Term

Candidate Trump ran for reelection in 2024 claiming that the US role in the world (at least outside the Western Hemisphere) should be reduced. His would adopt an "America First" strategy. 

During his first year he engaged in tariff wars, supported dramatic increases in military expenditures, and under the guise of pursuing peace gave support to Israel in its genocidal war against the Palestinian people and continued both to support the Ukrainian military effort and negotiations with the Russians as brutal war in Ukraine continued. During his first year in office the United States bombed eight countries. And after the administration issued its National Security Strategy Document in November 2025, largely endorsed the drive for remaining the hegemonic power in the Western Hemisphere (the Monroe Doctrine 2 or the "Donroe Doctrine") while calling for arming the world to challenge growing Chinese power. 

And while the world continued to process Trump's blustery statements, contradictory calls to action, seemingly words and acts to insult the traditional allies, a veritable "mad man" approach to US foreign policy, he made war on Venezuela and carried out the kidnapping of Venezuela's President and wife.

Subsequently, he has alluded to taking out regimes in Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico, running the Venezuelan government-particularly its oil sector, and seizing Greenland from NATO ally, Denmark.  And it cannot be forgotten that the Trump Administration and its sallies in Congress authorized a trillion-dollar military budget for 2026.

 Processing the Trump foreign policies one is reminded of the old Nixon idea, the so-called “madman theory.” "Trump thinks that he can frighten and thus deter opponents by appearing unhinged—an idea that political scientists call the madman theory. As Trump once boasted, Chinese President Xi Jinping would never risk a blockade of Taiwan while he is president because Xi “knows I’m fucking crazy," (Keren Yarhi-Milo, "How Trump's Foreign Policy is Ruining American Credibility," Foreign Affairs, October 2, 2025)

(Nixon allegedly wanted to appear mad so that adversaries would be deterred from acting in ways contrary to US interests out of fear of random responses. For a useful discussion of the "madman theory" see below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory#:~:text=International%20relations%20scholars%20have%20been,failed%20to%20win%20coercive%20disputes.)

Working for Peace in the 21st Century

The contradictory character of Trump foreign policy has left the peace movement befuddled. How does it respond to Trump’s occasional acts that go against the traditional imperial grain while he acts impetuously increasing the dangers of war? How does the peace movement participate in the construction of a progressive majority that justifiably seeks to overturn the Trump era and all that it stands for: climate disaster, growing economic inequality, racism, sexism, homophobia, and hybrid war? Perhaps the task for the peace movement is to include, in the project of building a progressive majority, ideas about challenging the US as an imperial power, proclaiming that a progressive agenda requires the dismantling of the permanent war economy.

Without illusions, the peace movement must participate in politics: which includes the electoral arena and lobbying for policy changes including rekindling the War Powers Act and cutting the trillion dollar military budget.. Articulating a peace agenda, demanding that politicians running for office at all levels embrace it, and convincingly demonstrating that politicians who do not embrace it will be held accountable. Meanwhile, by articulating a peace platform, activists will be participating in a broad educational effort to construct a majority “people for peace.”

Finally, peace and social justice movements must articulate and embrace truly global policies of solidarity in the spirit of the Non-aligned Movement, the Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, commitments to human rights, environmental protections, and support for those movements in the Global South that are pursuing the rights of sovereignty and social and economic development. While flawed the United Nations system, with its multiplicity of political, social, economic, and legal organizations provide the skeletal form of a New World Order.

These are truly troubled times, with to a substantial degree the survival of humanity and nature at stake. The war system is a significant part of what the struggle is about and every avenue must be used to challenge it. Whether it is the mad men theory or traditional imperialism that drives US pursuit of global hegemony or both, it must be stopped.

Now the priority is to stop the killings in Iran.

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THE US/IRANIAN STORY: FROM OVERTHROWING ITS LEADER TO HYBRID WAR TO BOMBING THE POPULATION

Harry Targ 

Iran has been a country of particular concern of the United States at least since the end of World War II. The US propped up the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) at the outset of the war to protect US bases which were used to transfer war materials to the former Soviet Union. After Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, elected in 1951, nationalized Iran’s valuable oil resource, Great Britain, whose Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had “owned “the oil, began to urge the US to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister, instill full power in the monarch, the Shah, and reprivatize Iranian oil. In 1953 the US Central Intelligence Agency launched a coup to overthrow the Prime Minister and to establish the Shah as Iran’s all-powerful dictator. His brutality and repression lasted for years until a mass-based worker and religious-led movement ousted him from power in 1979. In the aftermath of the ouster of the Shah, religious leaders consolidated their control of the state, the Shah fled to the United States for medical treatment, the new regime demanded his return to stand trial for his crimes, and Iranian students took 52 US embassy personnel hostage for 444 days.

The United States responses to the transformation of the Iranian regime included President Carter’s declaration of his “doctrine,” which proclaimed that instabilities in the Persian Gulf region were vital to US national security. The US began to fund Iraq in its eight-year bloody war against Iran, which led to 500,000 Iranians killed. The United States urged Israel to invade Lebanon, escalate attacks on Palestine, and in general tilted in opposition to Iran and its allies in the region. The US also increased the sale of technologically sophisticated arms to Saudi Arabia. 

Therefore in the 1980s, US policy in the Persian Gulf and Middle East regions was driven by the growing hostility of Iran to the United States (once a pillar of US support in the Persian Gulf), the continued need of Europe and Japan for Iranian oil, and Iran’s vital geographic location, particularly in terms of its potential control of the  flow of oil to Europe and Japan.  

But, in addition, the Iranian people had violated a cardinal rule of US global hegemony. They had risen up against rule by an American puppet. Much like Cuba in the Western Hemisphere, Iranians declared that they no longer would abide by a leader chosen by the United States and not them. (In fact, in the Nixon Administration, the Shah’s regime was identified as the key “gendarme” state in the Persian Gulf, the local US police enforcer).

Ever since the hostage crisis of 1979, the United States has imposed economic sanctions of one sort or another on Iran. After the long years of damage to the Iranian economy and the people at large, the  Nuclear Treaty of 2015 (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), was negotiated by Iran, the United States, member countries of the European Union, and Security Council members, Russia and China.  Along with Iran’s promise to stop the production of potential nuclear material, signatories agreed to end the freezing of Iranian assets deposited in US and European banks, to eliminate various prohibitions on Western investment in the Iranian economy, and to remove trade restrictions.

Almost immediately after the sanctions were lifted in the aftermath of the Nuclear Treaty, the Iranian economy grew: a 12 percent growth in GDP in 2016 and an additional but modest 3.7 percent in 2017. However, in 2018 President Trump withdrew from the Nuclear Treaty and re-imposed crippling sanctions. As a result, the Iranian economy contracted by 4.8 percent in 2018 and in a BBC report projected a further decline of 9.5 percent in 2019.

Iran’s oil exports and hence production was hit particularly hard. The value of Iranian currency declined dramatically and inflation in the country rose, particularly for the price of food. (BBC News. “Six Charts That Show How Hard US Sanctions Have Hit Iran,” December 2, 2019). Sanctions reduced purchasing power, increased the cost of living for food and transportation, reduced access of Iranian students studying abroad to financial resources, and led to the reduction of public services. 

This is the story of hybrid war against Iran: along with military threats and attempts to isolate Iran diplomatically, make the people suffer and cause increased outrage at the material conditions of life. The hope is that the people will rise up and overthrow the regime in power (and, of course, instances of corruption and repression have magnified protest responses). The scenario has been repeated over and over: Guatemala and Iran in the early 1950s, Cuba since 1960, and now Venezuela and Iran again. And make no mistake about it: economic sanctions are targeted against civilian populations and constitute a strategy of war against the people, motivating them to rise up against their governments. And in the case of Iran, government repression against protest has magnified dramatically.

Finally, it behooves the peace movement to be cognizant of twenty-first century methods of imperialism. It must fashion strategies that clearly and compellingly identify and combat economic sanctions recognizing that they, indeed, are acts of war.

The Tudeh Party, cognizant of "blowback," recently provided an analysis of the repression of the current regime in Iran and at the same time demands that outside powers not make war on the country.

Statement of the Tudeh Party of Iran: Long live the dynamic, encompassing, and heroic uprising of the Iranian people against the dictatorship of Ali Khamenei! - Tudeh Party of Iran

                                              

Fusion Politics from the Poor People’s Campaign to the Rainbow Coalition to the New Poor People’s Campaign

Valeria Sinclair-Chapman

Department of Political Science

Purdue University

101 N. University Street

West Lafayette, IN 47907

 

Harry Targ

Department of Political Science

Purdue University

 Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the Global Studies Association, June 6-8, 2018, Howard University School of Law, Washington, D.C..

Abstract

This paper examines a model of fusion politics that connects activism to end poverty and address a constellation of social injustices across more than a half century in the United States.  We consider an articulation of fusion politics that highlights the actions of disparate groups and individuals, including youth, racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBT activists, teachers, and union members who have joined in a cooperative effort to address independent but linked concerns such as quality public schools, livable wages, affordable healthcare, environmental justice, immigrant rights, women’s reproductive rights, fair elections, and criminal justice.  Our analysis points out the historical links between the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, the Rainbow Coalition of the 1980s, and the new Poor People’s Campaign launched in 2018.  It draws heavily on the words and writings of King and the Reverend William Barber, II in understanding the organizing, objectives, and transformative potential of these movements.

 Introduction

The new Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) launched with rallies and demonstrations across the country on Mother’s Day 2018.  It is not coincidental that 2018 marks the 50^th anniversary of the original 1968 PPC organized by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  After the gains of the civil rights movement evidenced in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, King was struck by limited effect that these monumental changes to American law had on the everyday lives of black people across the U.S., and particularly in America’s urban slums.  In the period following the 1965 Watts riot, King moved with his family to a Chicago tenement to help coordinate new efforts challenging discriminatory housing and hiring practices outside the south.  

Following the long, hot summer of 1967, a period during which young people and others took to the streets in an angry response to black unemployment, racial discrimination, and police brutality in more than 150 American cities, King began to recognize the limits of a series of isolated campaigns to address a constellation of problems plaguing black Americans.  What was required was a nationally coordinated response, a national response to the conditions confronting black people whose hopes had been raised by the successes of the civil rights movement, but whose everyday circumstances had largely remained unchanged.  It is in this arena that King began to articulate a framework uncovering the mutually constitutive –isms of racism, materialism, and militarism. 

King’s assassination in April of 1968 makes it impossible to know what might have come of the PPC had its charismatic and visionary lived.  As it stands, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King’s wife Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson and others continued to organize the PPC’s March on Washington and the Resurrection City encampment on the National Mall.  As King and others pointed out, poverty knew no color, nor age, nor state or regional boundary.  Resurrection City was to remain encamped on the National Mall until the federal government redirected attention and federal resources to alleviate poverty, provide an income floor, and expand public sector employment in a jobs program.  What Barber refers to as “fusion politics” is a three-pronged notion about the connectedness of people, organizations, and issues that can drive change on a national scale in the United States. Then, as is the case now, fusion politics, or the idea that a sustained multiracial coalition of antipoverty, antiracist, and antiwar activists could help refocus American policy and redirect resources to address a concern that affected our common well-being, was a central tenet of the PPC.  Our paper aims to discuss the development of a fusion-based approach to organizing, why and how fusion is viewed by organizers as an important factor, and under what circumstances fusion is likely to contribute to the success of a movement.   

 In what follows, we describe various incarnations of fusion politics, first using King’s famous speech at Riverside Church in Harlem, NY in 1967 as a framing device.  We then apply this vision to organizing across groups, individuals, issues, and time from sanitation workers, to the Black Power Movement, to the Fight for $15.  We conclude with a discussion of the constraints and opportunities that confront the modern PPC. 

 Dr. King and the Three Evils: The Articulation of a Fusion Politics Vision

     Dr. Martin Luther King, in his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York City, spoke of the devastating consequences of the Vietnam War on the Vietnamese people and the poor and oppressed at home. To him, the carnage of war not only destroyed the targets of war (their economies, their land, their cultures) but the costs also misallocated the resources of the nation-states which initiated wars.

 Every health and welfare provision of the government, local, state, and federal, was limited by resources allocated for the war system. Health care, education, transportation, jobs, wages, campaigns to address enduring problems of racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental revitalization, and non-war related scientific and technological research were reduced almost in direct proportion to rising military expenditures. Over half the US federal budget goes to military spending past and current.  And the irony is that the money that is extracted from the vast majority of the population of the United States goes to military budgets that enhance the profits of the less than one percent of the population who profit from the war system as it exists.

“I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.” Since 1967 when he made that speech, Dr. King would surely have added a long list of other wars to the Vietnam case: wars in Central America and South America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. and the more than 1,000 bases and outposts where US troops or hired contractors are fighting wars on behalf of capitalist expansion. Meanwhile the gaps between rich and poor people on a worldwide basis have increased dramatically with some twenty percent of the world’s population living below World Bank defined poverty lines.

Dr. King Building Fusion: A Labor/Civil Rights Alliance

     Dr. King arrived in Memphis on March 18, 1968 to support the sanitation workers of that city who had been on strike for five weeks. These workers had many grievances that forced them to protest. Garbage workers had no access to bathroom or shower facilities. They were not issued any protective clothing for their job. There were no eating areas separate from garbage. Sanitation workers had no pension or retirement program and no entitlement to workers compensation. Their wages were very low. Shortly before the strike began two workers died on the job and the families of the deceased received only $500 in compensation from the city. Finally, after Black workers were sent home for the day because of bad weather and received only two hours pay they walked off the job.

 On March 28, ten days after King arrived, violence disrupted a march led by him. He left the city but returned on April 4 to lead a second march. On that fateful April day, King told Jerry Wurf, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees or AFSCME: "What is going on here in Memphis is important to every poor working man, black or white, in the South." That evening Martin Luther King was killed by a sniper's bullet.

 It was logical for King to be in Memphis to support garbage workers. Despite a sometimes rocky relationship between the civil rights and labor movements, King knew that black and white workers' struggles for economic justice were indivisible; that civil rights could not be realized in a society where great differences in wealth and income existed, and where life expectancies, educational opportunities, and the quality of jobs varied by class, by race, and by gender. The more progressive and far-sighted leaders and rank-and-file union members in the AFL-CIO knew it too. At the time of King's death working people were coming together to struggle for positive social change around the banner of the Poor People's Campaign.

 Dr. King's thinking on the need for an alliance between the civil rights and labor movements was expressed many times. As far back as 1957 at a convention of the United Packinghouse Workers of American (UPWA) he asserted that "organized labor can be one of the most powerful instruments in putting an end to discrimination and segregation."

 During an organizing effort of the Hospital Workers Local 1199 in the fall of 1964, King was a featured speaker at a fundraising rally. He said of the 1199 struggle," Your great organizing crusade to win union and human rights for New Jersey hospital workers is part and parcel of the struggle we are conducting in the Deep South. I want to congratulate your union for charting a road for all labor to follow-dedication to the cause of the underpaid and exploited workers in our nation." Shortly after, Dr. King left a picket line of Newark hospital workers on strike to fly to Oslo, Norway to receive the Nobel Prize.

Upon his return from Norway, King returned to the picket line; this time in support of Black women workers of the Chemical Workers union at the Scripto Pen Plant in Atlanta. He said there: "Along with the struggle to desegregate, we must engage in the struggle for better jobs. The same system that exploits the Negro exploits the poor white..."

At the Negro American Labor Council convention of June, 1965 King called for a new movement to achieve "a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God's children." In February 1966, King spoke to Chicago labor leaders during his crusade for the end to racism and poverty in that city. He called on the labor movement which had provided techniques and methods, and financial support crucial to civil rights victories to join in the war on poverty and slums in Chicago. Such an effort in Chicago, he said, would show that a Black and labor alliance could be of relevance to solving nationwide problems of unemployment, poverty, and automation.

 One year before his death, King spoke at another meeting of Hospital Workers 1199. He said a closer alliance was needed between labor and civil rights activists to achieve the "more difficult" task of economic equality. The civil rights movement and its allies were moving into a new phase to achieve economic justice, he announced. This would be a more formidable struggle since it was in his words "much more difficult to eradicate a slum than it is to integrate a bus."

 In early 1968, Dr. King incorporated his opposition to the Vietnam War with his commitment to economic justice. He called for an end to the War and the utilization of societal resources to eliminate poverty. To those ends the Poor People's Campaign was launched. It demanded jobs, a guaranteed annual income for those who could not find work, the construction of 6 million new homes, support for employment in rural areas, new schools to train jobless youth for skilled work, and other measures to end poverty.

 While preparing the Poor People's Campaign, King got a call to go to Memphis. Before leaving he sent a message to be read at the seventh annual convention of the Negro American Labor Council. He wrote that the Council represented "the embodiment of two great traditions in our nation's history: the best tradition of the organized labor movement and the finest tradition of the Negro Freedom Movement." He urged a black-labor alliance to unite the Black masses and organized labor in a campaign to help solve the "deteriorating economic and social conditions of the Negro community... heavily burdened with both unemployment and underemployment, flagrant job discrimination, and the injustice of unequal education opportunity."

 Michael Honey demonstrates that Dr. King’s vision of fundamental change evolved over his long career of political activism. But Honey suggests, King always saw the struggle for desegregation and voter rights as just part of a historic battle to achieve full economic and social equality. He refers to King’s vision of building “civil rights unionism,” an alliance of Black and white workers to achieve the twin pillars of a just society: racial justice and worker rights. The SCLC had long and close ties with the sleeping car porters, packinghouse workers, public sector workers, autoworkers, and steel workers. His ties to socialist currents were strong.

 Memphis represented the culmination of the civil rights unionism, demands to end poverty, and the effort to fuse the interests of trade unionists, poor and marginalized men and women, and people of color in one struggle. With the weakening of the organized labor movement by 1968, the rise of racism inspired by politicians like George Wallace, a renewed and virulent anti-communism, a fusion politics was required that would organize millions of people struggling against racism, poverty, and war. As Honey described it:

     “These conditions undermined fhe unions and King’s power base, as we so well know today. That is why King moved on to the Poor People’s Campaign framework, which was to organize the unemployed poor and the working poor in a multi-racial coalition to demand the government spend money for jobs, health care, education and housing instead of spending for war and to benefit the wealthy and white.” Michael Honey interview, “MLK: To the Promised Land,” Solidarity, (http://solidarity-us.org/atc)

    Fifty years later the social and economic injustices of which Dr. King spoke continue. But so does his vision of a working class movement united in struggle to survive, a movement of Blacks, whites and Latinos, men and women, young and old, and organized and unorganized workers. The times have changed but the importance of Dr King's political vision remains.

 Another Kind of Fusion: The Black Panther Party and Rainbow Coalitions

 O, yes,

I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

(From Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” 1938)

             In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The Party inspired African American and white leftists who were beginning to see capitalist exploitation and racism as central to the American experience. The BPP saw the need for Black people to organize to defend their communities; to develop a theory that would help Black people understand their subordinate condition; to construct institutions, particularly health care, education, and food distribution, to serve the people; and to act in solidarity with liberation struggles on a worldwide basis. To articulate its goals the BPP wrote a 10-point program that would serve as a guide to programs and action for party members (collectiveliberation.org).

 The BPP program included demands for community control, access to “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace,” and an end to police violence and mass incarceration of Black people. In each issue of The Black Panther newspaper, all 537 of them, the platform was printed. The dramatic escalation of state violence against the BPP and the Black community in general by the FBI and local law enforcement agencies testified to the fact that the Panther program resonated in urban communities around the country, particularly among the young. 

 The Party encouraged grassroots activism and community control basing its appeal on the idea that it would serve the needs of the people. Establishing free breakfast programs for children, health clinics, and education, had enormous appeal. With growing violence against the community by the police the BPP advocated collective self-defense.

 After the police dispersed Resurrection City, the Poor People’s lodging on the Mall in Washington D.C. and the police riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a group of Black, Brown, and White youth organized what would become the first Rainbow Coalition. The campaign was initiated by young leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party Fred Hampton.

 Jakobi E. Williams, (“The Original Rainbow Coalition: An Example of Universal Identity Politics,” Tikkun, 2003, https://www.tikkun .org/nextgen/the-original-rainbow-coalition-an-example-of-univeersal-identity-politics) describes the coming together of Black, Brown, white youth, men and women around an anti-poverty agenda, that was avowedly anti-capitalist. He argues that the Panthers, the Young Lords, The Young Patriotism, and other groups came together maintaining their identities and at the same time recognizing what interests they had in common. While police repression defused the Original Rainbow Coalition, Williams suggests that the idea of the Rainbow was appropriated by the mayoral candidacy of Harold Washington and the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson. Williams believes that while the idea of the Rainbow resonated with politicians and constituents, its vision and ideology was not quite as radical as the original. Even so, Rev. Jackson and later Senator Bernie Sanders used the idea of the Rainbow to build large, movements for social change in the electoral area in the 1980s and beyond.

 For the purpose of suggesting continuities in the idea of fusion over time, the recognition of the Original Rainbow Coalition is important. As Williams writes:

“The original Rainbow Coalition embodied the intersectionality of the critical issues of race, class, gender, anti-war, student, labor, and sexuality. It fused these various forms of identity politics into one group with one ideal form of identity—an identity that transcends differences and focuses on commonalities. The most common unifier was poverty.”

 

The Emergence of Moral Mondays in the South

         Moral Mondays refers to a burgeoning mass movement that had its roots in efforts to defend voter rights in North Carolina. Thousands of activists have been mobilizing across the South over the last year inspired by Moral Mondays. They are fighting back against draconian efforts to destroy the right of people to vote, workers’ and women’s rights, and for progressive policies in general. Paradoxically, many progressives in the South and elsewhere have not heard of this budding movement.

         Moral Mondays began as the annual Historic Thousands on Jones Street People's Assembly (HKonJ) in 2006 to promote progressive politics in North Carolina. Originally a coalition of 16 organizations, initiated by the state’s NAACP, it has grown to include 150 organizations today promoting a multi-issue agenda. In 2006, its task was to pressure the state’s Democratic politicians to expand voting rights and support progressive legislation on a variety of fronts. 

With the election of a tea-party government in that state in 2012, the thrust of Moral Mondays shifted to challenging the draconian policies threatening to turn back gains made by people of color, workers, women, environmentalists and others. Public protests at the state house weekly in the spring of 2013 during the state legislative session led to over 1,000 arrests for civil disobedience and hundreds of thousands of hits on MM websites. Similar movements have spread throughout the South (Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida) and in some states in the Midwest and Southwest (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Missouri). 

To kick off the spring 2014 protests, MM organizers called a rally in Raleigh, North Carolina on February 8 which brought out at least 80,000 protestors. Rev. William Barber, a key organizer of the movement, has grounded this new movement in history, suggesting that the South is in the midst of the “third reconstruction.” The first reconstruction, after the Civil War, consisted of Black and white workers struggling to create a democratic South (which would have impacted on the North as well). They elected legislators who wrote new state constitutions to create democratic institutions in that region for the first time. This first reconstruction was destroyed by white racism and the establishment of Jim Crow segregation. 

 The second reconstruction occurred between Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 and President Nixon’s 1968 “Southern Strategy.” During this period formal segregation was overturned, Medicare and Medicaid were established, and Social Security was expanded. Blacks and whites benefited. Dr. King’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign envisioned a defense and expansion of the Second Reconstruction.

 Now we are in the midst of a third reconstruction, according to Barber. Political mobilizations today, like those of the first reconstruction, are based on what was called in the 1860s “fusion” politics; that is bringing all activists—Black, Brown, white, gay/straight, workers, environmentalists—together. Fusion politics assumes that only a mass movement built on everyone’s issues can challenge the billionaire economic elites such as the Koch brothers and their Wall Street collaborators with masses of people (the 99 percent). Fusion politics, he says, requires an understanding of the fact that every issue is interconnected causally with every other issue. Therefore, democracy, civil rights, labor, women’s, gay/lesbian, and environmental movements must act together (http://youtu.be/sOMn8jLjVLE).

 At the February action in Raleigh, five general demands were articulated as guides for their spring activism. While economic, political, and historical forces vary from state to state the demands can serve as a model for action elsewhere as well. The North Carolina demands are:

• Secure pro-labor, anti-poverty policies that insure economic sustainability;
• Provide well-funded, quality public education for all;
• Stand up for the health of every North Carolinian by promoting health care access and environmental justice across all the state's communities;
• Address the continuing inequalities in the criminal justice system and ensure equality under the law for every person, regardless of race, class, creed, documentation or sexual preference;
• Protect and expand voting rights for people of color, women, immigrants, the elderly and students to safeguard fair democratic representation.

The Twenty-First Century Poor People’s Campaign

        The twenty-first century Poor People’s Campaign, around which Barber and Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Center are organizing, takes the Moral Mondays campaign to another level. Moral Mondays was about state level issues. It concentrated on domestic policy. It awakened progressives to the critical idea that most of the anti-people policies of the last decade supported by reactionary billionaires like the Koch Brothers, were instituted at the state level. Therefore, Moral Mondays began, appropriately, as a series of state campaigns. Now, Barber suggests, there is a need to take the struggle to the entire nation. Local, national, and international issues are connected. Anti-racist, antisexist, anti-worker policies at the state level are connected to similar developments at the national level. AND, all these issues have global dimensions as well.

         This new necessity led naturally to reflections on the last project initiated by Dr. Martin Luther King in the spring of 1968, a Poor People’s Campaign. This was a national campaign organized by and for the poor in America, today representing about 40 percent of the population. The specific program was to organize a march/rally/occupation of Washington D.C. to demand an end to poverty in America. Dr. King, in his famous speech at Riverside Church one year earlier articulated the fundamental interconnections, the fusion, of three primary structural problems in America: poverty, racism, and militarism.

 Sixty years later, Reverend Barber is calling on progressives to join in a common struggle, led by the poor and oppressed, to challenge these three evils. Rev. Barber, therefore, has been traveling across the United States beginning a conversation about and training for a 2018 Poor People’s Campaign. He is calling upon 1,000 people from each of 25 states and the District of Columbia to commit to train for and engage in civil disobedience to bring the triad of evils to the attention of the public. And he emphasizes repeatedly that the campaign is not just about changing attitudes but changing institutions and policies.

 The optics of the rally at the Saint Gabriel’s Church of God reflected the movement Reverend Barber is building. Attendees were Black and white, young and old, women and men, and religious and secular. As to the latter point Barber cited scripture for the religious and the better parts of the US constitution for the secularists.

 Finally, Reverend Barber's speech on August 28 emphasized that there cannot be freedom without equality. There cannot be human rights without access to health care and education. And there cannot be economic justice at home while there is militarism overseas.

 The twenty-first century Poor People’s Campaign grounds today’s struggles in history; links democracy to economic change; connects social and economic justice; and connects a humane future in the United States to an end to war and the preparation for war. As Barber has written:

The fights for racial and economic equality are as inseparable today as they were half a century ago. Make no mistake about it: We face a crisis in America. The twin forces of white supremacy and unchecked corporate greed have gained newfound power and influence, both in statehouses across this nation and at the highest levels of our federal government. Sixty-four million Americans make less than a living wage, while millions of children and adults continue to live without access to healthcare, even as extremist Republicans in Congress threaten to strip access away from millions more. As our social fabric is stretched thin by widening income inequality, politicians criminalize the poor, fan the flames of racism and xenophobia to divide the poor, and steal from the poor to give tax breaks to our richest neighbors and budget increases to a bloated military. (William J. Barber II, “Rev. Barber: America Needs a New Poor People’s Campaign,” ThinkProgress, May 15, 2017.)

 

Assessing Fusion Politics and Multiracial Unity:  Critical Reflections and Hopes for the Future

 

If history is any guide, the prospects for success of a fusion politics model of organizing to end poverty, racism, and war are promising, but mixed.  America’s history of racism and racial distrust is a consistent threat to the potential of a sustained multiracial coalition.  As was the case more than 100 years ago in 1890s North Carolina, coalitions of poor whites and blacks, and now poor and marginalized people from myriad backgrounds, are at risk of coalition-raiding strategies that promise rewards to one group at the expense of others, making multiracial coalitions fragile and short-lived (Hamilton and Ture 1967). 

Scalability is another challenge confronting the new PPC.  Can 1,000 people in every state scale up into a movement of thousands or millions as would be necessary to capture the attention of the nation, particularly in Trump’s America?  The constant threat of state repression and violence that comes with the mobilization of what Jesse Jackson called the “locked-out” people during the height of the Rainbow Coalition could fracture and undermine the movement, scatter activists, and dampen momentum. The new PPC depends upon what appears to be a long-term strategy of organization building in states and across the nation.  History demonstrates that such a process could take years, decades, or even generations to build. In the absence of short-term policy or electoral wins, maintaining coalitions may very well become difficult. Finally, if governments at various levels simply ignore the actions of fusion organizers in favor of wealthy interests (see MacLean 2017), the effects of grassroots organizing may be very limited or nonexistent. 

 

That Americans seem to return to fusion organizing over and over across time signals a hopefulness about movements that extol us to “move forward together,” as did Barber’s Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina.  A mass movement built on the fusion of people from diverse backgrounds, organizations with varied missions and constituencies, and interconnected issues may be the only practical approach to counter the vast material resources of conservative wealthy elites.  The viability and sustainability of such an approach against such a well-resourced and entrenched opposition remain to be seen.

And Reverend Barber remembers Jesse Jackson.

https://www.democracynow.org/2026/2/18/jesse_jackson_william_barber_tribute_death