AGAINST overwhelming odds, Iran has won a defining battle in what is a long, historical war. Even if Israel’s unrelenting bombing of Lebanon scuppers the fragile ceasefire and talks scheduled in Islamabad between US and Iranian delegations break down, Tehran has, at great cost, stared down the biggest military power the world has ever known.

Some are linking the current moment to the heyday of anti-colonial Third World internationalism marked by the Bandung conference, and even the Congress of the Peoples of the East hosted by Lenin in Baku shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. A new anti-imperialist dawn, then? Upheaval of the post-Cold War order is certainly intensifying. Beijing’s role as Tehran’s guarantor to the ceasefire confirms that an imperialist war which, beyond the Zionist fantasy of regime change in Iran, was also supposed to reinforce Washington’s encirclement of China, backfired spectacularly.

I offer here a few tentative theses on how to interpret what has just transpired and what we might expect next.

The US empire, and its Zionist outpost, will continue to deploy violence when and where possible. Washington’s relative economic decline, including........

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