"Anyone thinking seriously about globalization, particularly those hoping to organize political resistance to it, cannot afford to elide the question of black liberation without missing something essential about its unfolding." 

Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes

"In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich." 

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

For decades, we have been told that the global economic order exists to prevent conflicts like this war on Iran; that the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) are stabilizing forces wherein global trade binds nations together so tightly that war becomes irrational. The illusion being bought and sold under neoliberalism's "Washington Consensus" ruling doctrine was that markets create peace. But the U.S. and Israeli bombs falling across Iran and several other countries in the Arab World make clear that this is fiction. 

It reveals for some—and highlights for others—the core of the capitalist structure under which we live: a global police force that functions with the purpose of ensuring the flow of wealth from the Global South to the imperial core. The U.S. military bases in and around West Asian countries; the unceasing sanctions imposed on Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and several other countries; and the cyclical debt agreements function as assertions of power—they operate with the intent to whip. And when the diplomatic whip fails, bombs and other weapons of unending destruction enforce empire's will.

Manufacturing War: Empire, Propaganda, and Regime Change

The first battlefield of any war, especially one of the West, is narrative. In Western media coverage, Iran's military response has been repeatedly described as irrational escalation. On March 2, just days after the initial strikes on Iran, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show gave a "sharp, satirical analysis" of the developing war wherein he asked: "So let me get this straight: America and Israel attack Iran, and Iran's answer is to just f*cking attack everybody?!" He continued, "You know, having been in a bar fight or two in my life, I'm pretty sure the worst thing you can do during a two-on-one beatdown is slap everyone else." 

In a written commentary for National Review, neoconservative political commentator Noah Rothman wrote that Iran's strikes were "an early miscalculation," lauding Trump's attempt at regime change in the region because "…it's hard to see how […] anything could be worse than the aggressively anti-American, terrorist regime in place in Tehran for nearly the last 50 years." Avowed Zionist Seth Mandel published an essay titled "Iran's Irrational Self-Destruction" wherein he likens Iran's actions to those of Nazis, claiming that, like the Nazis, "…the [A]yatollahs in Iran were similarly beset with, and blinded by, a self-defeating obsession with the Jews."

David Brooks of The Atlantic appeared as a guest on PBS News Hour to provide his own commentary. He stated, "I share everybody's fears. It's also true that the 1979 Iranian Revolution was one of the worst events of the 20th century, and it began 47 years of terrorism, extremism, [and] theocratic fascism."

The aforementioned examples are a mix of commentators across the political spectrum who all frame the U.S. and Israel's strikes as tactical, while Iran's counterattacks are positioned as illogical and erratic. Within this Orientalist framing, Iran's defense is positioned as futile, disconcerted, and downright foolish. This framing operates not simply through interpretation, but through the very words used to describe it. Terms like "theocratic fascism" have been routinely leveraged against Muslim-majority nations like Iran, completely flattening complex social and political realities into caricatures of religious extremism. Yet, these same commentators rarely, if ever, apply parallel language to the Christo-fascist and Judeo-fascist logics underwriting the actions of the U.S. and Israel—nations that explicitly utilize religious identity and divine mandate to justify the use of military force and occupation in their quest to conquer the lands of Turtle Island and the "Greater Israel" promised land.

This asymmetry in language is not employed by happenstance; it is a deliberate and core function of propaganda. By reserving labels like "theocratic fascism" for Muslim nations—especially amid the resignation of key White House personnel, who noted that Iran "was not an imminent threat" to the U.S.—Western media constructs a moral binary in which violence deployed by the U.S. and its allies is secular, strategic, and therefore intelligible, while violence enacted by its enemies is fanatical and therefore illegitimate. By doing this, it veils the extent to which U.S. and Israeli state violence is itself animated by deeply entrenched religious-nationalist ideologies.

This framing is indivisible from the post-9/11 construction of the so-called "War on Terror," which has, for decades, functioned as justification and cover for U.S./Western expansion across the Arab and broader Muslim World. Entire nations being designated as incubators of "terror" and "extremism" isn't a neutral assessment of the political conditions, but a racialized classification that relies on the colonial formation of the "savage," marking racialized populations as preemptively violent and therefore legitimate targets of surveillance and war.

In this paradigm, "terror" is not a stable category—it's an ambiguous symbol attached to states and movements that resist being incorporated into the Western geopolitical and economic order.

There is a reason why Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, and black subjects globally have been tethered to this label; it's constitutive of an imperial logic that requires permanent enemies to sustain permanent war. Collapsing anti-imperialist resistance into "terrorism" allows Western powers to foreclose any possibility of legitimacy for those resisting, casting struggles for "sovereignty" and "self-determination" as threats to global security. 

This narrative discipline isn't just an echo; it's being directly enforced by this administration. As Trump has moved to characterize unfavorable coverage of this war as treasonous, the imaginary boundary between the alignment of media and state coercion collapses, making it increasingly clear that deviating from state-sanctioned narrative is not simply discouraged; it's punishable.

This is how the media, as a part of the state apparatus, propagandizes the general public and prepares them for escalations, as well as false flag operations. When retaliation is positioned as instability, it allows legislators and pundits to resurrect a refrain we're all too familiar with: intervene, stabilize, and change the regime. Calls for a Western-backed (and led) coup that intends to overthrow resistant, anti-Western governments is inherently counterinsurgency against populations who refuse the terms of the global economic order.

The aforementioned Orientalist framing persists even though many of Iran's retaliatory strikes have targeted countries hosting U.S. and Israeli military bases, with the intent to cripple the logistics, oil, and surveillance capabilities of U.S. and Israeli allies in the Arab World—the very infrastructure used to project force into the region. 

But the language of irrationality is purposeful. It invokes the same associations as "madness," a word that's indivisible from an antiblack, ableist context that has long pathologized resistance. This echoes the plantation logic that produced "drapetomania"—the mental illness that eugenicist and race scientist Samuel Adolphus Cartwright coined in 1851 to describe slaves who sought freedom. This "condition" remains the blueprint for any and all association between madness and resistance, as the aforementioned plantation logic renders dissent as disorder rather than political consciousness and positions empire as the arbiter of morality and order.

Even apparent dissent from this narrative doesn't signal a break from imperial logic. Instead, it reveals how deeply embedded that logic is—reproducing itself even through those who claim to oppose the war. Disagreements along religious-political lines continue to fracture the far-right MAGA coalition, but this fragmentation is folded into the broader machinery of an indoctrinating media analytic. While many Christo-fascists continue to view the escalating war as another harbinger of end times and the rapture, others, like Tucker Carlson, cite their Christian beliefs as the foundation of their anti-war and anti-genocidal stance against "Israel's War." 

Far-right detractors like Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly join former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene in dedicating their platforms to opposing the war, deploying a mix of justifications—namely that the war breaks from Trump's election promises to his base to end the forever wars by putting "America First." It's important to note that while the far-right's most popular punditry align around an anti-war stance, their anti-Israel turn is not indicative of an anti-imperialist stance. Rather, it is a deployment of fascist protectionism politics, conspiracy theories, and antisemitism to rail against the Trump Administration's decision to support a war manufactured by Israel through presenting Iran as a threat to national security.

While these factions differ in their rhetoric, they remain united in a very critical way: None of them fundamentally challenge the longstanding role of the U.S. in orchestrating regime change to secure its geopolitical and economic authority. Whether advocating for intervention or opposing it on nationalist grounds, the underlying logic remains.

It is precisely the rise of regimes that threaten the West, and the global capitalist hegemony by extension, that constitutes empire's worst nightmare made manifest. Therefore, regime change coups in the name of "restoring stability" remain its sharpest tool wielded to maintain the world order.

The 1953 American-British coup against Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh did not target abstract "authoritarianism." Following Mossadegh's decision to nationalize Iran's oil industry, the coup was a punishment against the government for seeking to have control over its country's own resources. And that coup effectively created the conditions for the terms of this war. 

That 1953 coup mirrored, and helped set the precedent for, others across the Global South, among them Cuba (1952), Guatemala (1954), Iraq (1959, 1991), the Congo (1960-65), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973), Haiti (1991, 1994-95, 2004), and Venezuela (2002). Iran, however, has remained a thorn in the side of the Zio-Western global order since it overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the coup's puppet regime leader, in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Iran, like Cuba, is therefore a nation that exists today because its people continue to successfully defend its anti-imperial revolution, despite American attempts to "make its economy scream" under the weight of sanctions.

 Calls for a Western-backed (and led) coup that intends to overthrow resistant, anti-Western governments is inherently counterinsurgency against populations who refuse the terms of the global economic order.

Within this context, Iran's role in the region must also be interrogated more deeply. The Islamic Republic has positioned itself as a state actor willing to support movements for self-determination across Palestine, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the region—particularly in opposition to Zionist expansion and Western intervention. This posture has made it a consistent target of aggression. Even its most popular chant, "Death To America," is often stripped of its political context and accepted as irrational fanaticism. But the phrase is intended to function as a rejection of U.S. supremacy—acting as a shorthand for opposition to military occupation, genocide, sanctions, and regime change operations that have defined and overdetermined U.S. foreign policy in the Arab World. Dismissing this context indiscreetly pathologizes political resistance and reproduces the very logics that make war seem necessary.

The Islamic Republic has since served as an anti-Zionist force in the region, threatening the Zio-American settler hegemony by supporting so-called "Axis of Resistance" forces in the region to defend Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine from Zionist aggression and conquest. Iran's military threat permeates the psyche of the settler war machine, fueling the Zionist alliance's long-held myth that Iran possesses nuclear weapons or the capacity to build them. This overshadows Israel's long history of secretly building a nuclear arsenal—which makes the Zionist entity, not Iran, the sole nuclear threat in the region. 

War as Economic Order: Petro-Imperialism and Global Domination

The economic impact of this war is already being felt globally, just three weeks in. Iran's control over the Strait of Hormuz—through which roughly 20 percent of the world's oil and 25 percent of global sulfur trade passes—has effectively halted an overwhelming portion of global oil traffic. Oil prices have skyrocketed to $150 per barrel, and Iran has repeatedly expressed that the world should prepare for that to rise toward $200 per barrel. Gas prices will continue to soar, and the cost of essential goods—including medicine—will increase significantly. Even a temporary continuation of this blockade could launch global supply chains into chaos, undoubtedly causing a global recession. The bombing of oil refineries and the continued shutdowns of natural gas facilities throughout the Gulf threaten the financial stability of many other parts of the world, too. Even if the war ended tomorrow, the economic aftershocks would continue for a long time to come, alongside the environmental impact and health consequences of bombing oil infrastructure.

Unlike earlier economic shocks—like Nixon's abolition of the gold standard in 1971, which destabilized the post-Bretton Woods system; or the 1995 creation of the WTO, which sought to organize nations under global trade rules—this war represents a direct attack on the foundations of global trade itself. Nixon's move to disentangle the dollar from the gold standard is especially pertinent to our present moment. The shock happened against the backdrop of the Zionist-Arab wars (1967-1974), which sparked the 1973 OPEC oil embargo against nations supporting Israeli aggression in the Yom Kippur war, plunging Western nations into an energy crisis that many Americans remember all too well. Nixon and Ford were saved by imperialist demon Henry Kissinger, who, in 1974, negotiated the Petrodollar Agreement with Saudi Arabia—promising U.S. military protection of Gulf petro resources from Israeli threats in exchange for global oil to be traded exclusively in dollars. 

Oil has been as good as gold ever since. 

The 20th-century energy crisis and its petrodollar resolution reveal that the belief in economic interdependence as a barrier to war is a fiction, and clarifies that war has always been a tool of imperialism—a method for Western powers to enforce and maintain global authority. Further, it affirms the imperial capacity to solve economic crises with fascist policymaking, warfare, and other uses of force to open new markets for capital flows. 

The 1944 Bretton Woods conference was never about fostering fair or balanced global development; it was an expansion of the global economic order designed to open the world to American capital. Institutions like the IMF and World Bank were created to stabilize markets in ways that relied on uneven global (under)development to ensure U.S. financial dominance, which is a cornerstone of imperial hegemony. But as Lenin taught, the decline of a leading imperial power is marked by a shift from economic to military coercion. When economic leverage is interrupted and "adversaries" challenge the imperial core, military force becomes the instrument to defend currency, maintain control of supply chains, and maintain the global arrangements that benefit the weakening empire.

The attacks on Iran, and the broader antagonisms on the Global South, are a direct result of this logic: a declining imperial power is desperately attempting—through war and coercion—to hold onto its slipping authority, defending the value of the dollar in a world increasingly unmoved by it.

No Economy Without The Slave: A South to South Manifesto

For black folks in the U.S. South, none of this is unfamiliar. The global order described here mirrors the sociopolitical economy of this region. The South has functioned as an internal colony; our land, labor, and resources have been actively extracted for the purpose of building a nation and an economy that is maintained through ongoing war on our flesh. From picking cotton on the plantation, to being bought and sold at ports, to the petrochemical infrastructures that poison our air, the South's economy has often been structured around the needs of external markets. 

Along the South's Gulf Coast, factories, pipelines, and large-scale storage and cooling facilities pollute our communities while generating profits that enrich the petrochemical industry at the direct expense of the Southern communities they exploit. Ports and shipping hubs funnel global trade through Southern cities, while workers remain sick and underpaid.

The same logic that organizes the extraction of the Global South organizes the domestic South. The plantation did not disappear, and the Middle Passage lives on.

The shared South to South antagonism of antiblack violence and imperial underdevelopment is especially important to understand in the face of the geopolitical moves mentioned throughout this piece. As the West—which has already been reeling from the energy constraints caused by Russian sanctions and the ongoing war in Ukraine—seeks alternative markets to fill its consumption gaps, its eyes will surely turn to the Gulf South. Following Iran's retaliatory strikes, Qatar has shut down its LNG production—a move that comes about a month after the catastrophic Delfin LNG-owned pipeline exploded near Holly Beach in Louisiana's Cameron Beach. And the explosion shortly after America's theft of Venezuelan oil to process in the Gulf South's petrocrescent corridor. 

This week, the administration approved BP's $5 billion Kaskida deepwater drilling project. Located 250 miles off the Louisiana coast, Kaskida is BP's first new oil field constructed in the Gulf of Mexico since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. Once it begins production in 2029, BP projects the Kaskida operation to yield some 80,000 barrels of oil per day. The demand to extract, transport, liquify, and export petroleum resources ahead of the war on Iran has made expanding the U.S. Gulf petro and LNG industries—along with eliminating the few environmental protections in place to aid the greater Cancer Alley regional communities—a shared priority of the Trump and allied Southern state and local administrations. Gulf South communities and their surplus populations remain empire's worthy casualties—evidence that black(ened) geographies, no matter their material or cultural wealth, remain structurally available to spatially fix any real or imagined crises of whiteness and capital.      

The creation of the IMF and World Bank ensures that the Middle Passage exists in perpetuity. So long as black and black(ened) nations are trapped in endless cycles of debt, their land, labor, and resources remain in service to—and under the ownership of—the Western world. And that debt, while legitimized today through the institutionalizing of a global economy, is created from nothing more than the continued war on blackness. This debt guarantees that wealth flows outward, that profits accumulate elsewhere, and that the machinery of dispossession never stops turning. The global economic order, then, is not a framework for growth; it is a ledger meticulously tracking the profits of a war on the slave that never ended.

 The same logic that organizes the extraction of the Global South organizes the domestic South. The plantation did not disappear, and the Middle Passage lives on.

Even this description may still be too polite. The violence sustaining the global order is not merely economic, but an explicit consequence of The World's white over black structure. The people most often subjected to sanctions, occupation, genocide, environmental destruction, and economic dispossession are those historically deemed expendable. The il/logic of the slave trade—of blackness' reduction to labor and fungible exchange—has not been, and cannot be, undone. It functions to propel the creative force that births new carceral institutions, undergirds new markets, and builds and enforces new borders. The coterminous nature of endless war alongside rapidly expanding use of surveillance technologies, immigration enforcement, prisons, and concentration camps proves capital's global spatial fix is also indeed a prison fix. 

This is the antiblack structural relation of gratuitous violence, and is therefore not a malfunction. 

The war with Iran is not exceptional. It is revelatory. Beneath the language of diplomacy and markets lies a system maintained through force: military bases guarding trade routes, sanctions disciplining dissenting governments, debt ensuring that resources continue flowing toward the centers of power. For those in the U.S. South, the parallels are impossible to ignore. 

The same economic logic that extracts oil from The Gulf poisons communities along the Gulf South. The same structures of debt and dispossession shaping the Global South echo in the poverty and abandonment of Southern cities. Empire abroad and neglect at home are not separate phenomena. They are two sides of the same dollar that give all economies their meaning. When bombs fall in Iran, they illuminate the architecture of that arrangement more clearly than any policy document could. Iran's leadership was clear on this, too, as evidenced by its long history of solidarity with black folks under the boot of U.S. oppression. War does not interrupt the global order. War is how the global order survives.

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Da’Shaun Harrison is a trans theorist and Southern-born and bred abolitionist in Atlanta, Georgia. They are the author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, which won the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and several other media/literary honors. As an editor, movement media and narrative strategist, and storyteller, Harrison uses their extensive history as a community organizer—which began in 2014 during their first year at Morehouse College—to frame their political thought and cultural criticism. Through the lens of what Harrison calls “Black Fat Studies,” they lecture on blackness, fatness, gender, and their intersections. Harrison currently serves as Editor-at-Large at Scalawag Magazine, is a co-host of the podcast “Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back,” and one third of the video podcast “In The Middle.” Between the years 2019 and 2021, Harrison served as Associate Editor—and later as Managing Editor—of Wear Your Voice Magazine.

Tea S. Troutman (they/them) is an abolitionist, digital propagandist, editor, and critical urban theorist born in Macon, Georgia, and currently calls Atlanta home. Tea is a Ph.D. student in the Geography, Environment, and Society department at the University of Minnesota, and also holds a B.S. in Economics and a Master's of Interdisciplinary Studies in Urban Studies, both from Georgia State University. Tea's work draws heavily on their experience as a long-time community organizer in Atlanta, Georgia, and their research interests broadly consider urbanism and critical urban theory, afropessmism, black geographies, and black cultural studies. Their dissertation project is a critique of Atlanta, "New South Urbanism," Anti-Blackness and the global circulation of the idea of the Black Mecca.