Hands off Iran protest at Parliament Square, London, February 28, 2026. Photo by Steve Eason/Flickr.

The United States and Israel have launched a major military offensive against Iran, triggering retaliation across the region and pushing an already fragile geopolitical order into open war. These strikes came even as nuclear negotiations were reportedly advancing, raising urgent questions about why diplomacy was abandoned for force.

The war is already being narrated for us—as necessity, as deterrence, as moral intervention. But history teaches us to be cautious when American bombs are framed as benevolence.

The Carney government has issued a statement that, for all practical purposes, signals alignment with Washington. By framing Iran as the primary threat to regional peace—while sidestepping Israel’s central role in the escalation—Ottawa reinforces the same alliances and geopolitical logic that have shaped Western engagement in the Middle East for decades. So much for the independent “middle power” posturing at Davos.

Last year, I warned that allowing Israel to act with impunity in the region would lead to broader and more devastating consequences. That warning has now materialized. What comes next remains uncertain. What is clear, however, is that those of us on the left must resist the narrowing of our political imagination to only two possible futures.

This war is already being framed as a choice—empire or theocracy, intervention or clerical rule—but that framing is a false dichotomy. Iran’s political life is far richer and more complex than these binaries suggest. Its history contains more political possibilities than the current narrative is willing to admit.

Before the current war, Iran was already in crisis. The rial had plummeted, and inflation had surged, fuelled in part by Western sanctions. What began as demonstrations over collapsing currency values and the rising cost of living expanded into broader unrest against the political system. Shopkeepers, workers, students, and others took to the streets demanding economic justice, basic freedoms, and an end to government repression.

These protests were not orchestrated from abroad. They were born of lived experience—of repression, economic precarity, and political suffocation. But war does not liberate these movements. It suffocates them.

In 1979, a broad coalition of workers, students, feminists, socialists, and Islamists rose up to overthrow the Shah. What followed was not pluralistic democracy but the consolidation of power by one faction that criminalized dissent and eliminated its former allies, giving rise to the Islamic Republic. The Iran-Iraq war only accelerated this consolidation of power. The narrowing of the political space reshaped Iranian society and contributed to the departure of millions.

Those of us descended from the leftists the revolution imprisoned, exiled, and executed carry that history with us. We were raised on stories of a revolution whose emancipatory promise was ultimately overtaken by authoritarian consolidation. That inheritance demands vigilance.

The lesson is not that revolution is futile. It is that authoritarianism thrives in moments of violence and instability. The collapse of a regime does not automatically produce democracy. Liberation movements can be co-opted. Broad coalitions can harden into singular authority. The language of freedom can be weaponized to justify new forms of oppression. If the stated objective of this military campaign is freedom for Iranians, it misunderstands—or ignores—how authoritarianism operates.

But Western imperialism is not the only danger. The Islamic Republic has long policed women’s bodies, crushed labour organizing, silenced ethnic minorities, and imprisoned dissidents. It has conflated divine authority with political legitimacy and narrowed the pluralism that democratic life requires.

To oppose clerical rule is not to endorse foreign intervention. That false equivalence is precisely the trap we have to sidestep.

Some (well-funded) monarchists in the diaspora are now positioning dynastic restoration as democratic rescue. But the Shah’s rule was not a golden age of pluralism. It was a surveillance state sustained by repression. The revolution of 1979 happened for a reason—one the monarchists seem to forget. That it hardened into another authoritarian order does not justify romanticizing the regime it replaced.

Empire, monarchy, and theocracy differ in aesthetics. But they converge in structure. Each centralizes authority and tramples human rights in the pursuit of their ideological agendas. And perhaps most importantly, each treats dissent as destabilizing rather than constitutive of the political experience.

Those of us shaped by socialist and anti-imperialist traditions understand something that mainstream debate prefers to obscure: the reality that anti-imperialism and anti-authoritarianism are not competing commitments. They are inseparable. To condemn Western imperialism while excusing domestic repression is indefensible. And to condemn clerical repression while endorsing imperial violence is equally indefensible.

The Canadian left must hold both lines, which is admittedly hard to do. But it must be done. We must oppose this war unequivocally. We must oppose sanctions that punish civilians while entrenching ruling elites. We must resist the quiet normalization of escalation, and do so without sliding into apologetics for authoritarian rule.

We do not have to choose between two terrible options. Other possibilities exist. But they must be determined by Iranians within the country, not imposed from abroad.

What has been most radical and alive in Iran has not come from above. It has come from below—from women challenging compulsory veiling, from workers organizing under threat, from students demanding accountable governance, from ordinary people saying “enough.” Those movements do not need foreign bombs. They need political space. They need solidarity that does not come attached to missiles or sanctions or hidden agendas.

This is not an easy position to hold. In a media ecosystem structured around “with us or against us,” refusing the binary invites suspicion from every direction. But the alternative is to allow our politics to be conscripted into projects of domination we claim to oppose.

We must approach this moment with care. If it truly is another historical turning point, the international left—including here in Canada—bears the responsibility of ensuring that the mistakes of the past are not repeated under new banners.

Too many Iranians have already died under authoritarian rule—their lives must not be used to justify someone else’s self-serving agenda. A different future remains possible: plural, feminist, labour-rooted, and self-determined. It will not be delivered by empire, inherited through bloodline, or imposed by clerical rule. It must be built—contested and imperfect—by Iranians themselves.

Our role, as those outside Iran, is not to script that future but to resist narrowing it.

Jasmine Ramze Rezaee is located in Toronto where she writes about food insecurity, feminism, and emancipatory politics. Views expressed here are her own.

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