Guest Op-ed from Socialist Writer, Egor Kotkin

Support Egor’s work on Substack and Patreon. Follow him on Twitter and YouTube.

When Trump gave the order to kill Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020, Iran’s measured response, which, with advance warning to the Americans, launched a salvo of missiles at two American bases in Iraq, which were evacuated in time, was a relief to many. Including, it seems, Trump, who immediately tweeted about the missile attack on American bases “All is well!”

Iran’s response was essentially symbolic, designed to project in the media a picture of strength and will to fight back against the Americans, but to be weaker in terms of the actual damage inflicted: Iran lost an important military and political leader, the US did not lose a single serviceman. Iran deliberately skipped its turn on the escalation ladder so as not to give the US a reason to escalate even further.

When Israel attacked the Iranian embassy in Syria and directly into Iranian territory in 2024, Iran’s measured response with a barrage of missiles and drones sent to be destroyed by Iron Dome and the American Air Force was no longer a surprise: Iran deliberately skipped yet another step up the escalation ladder so as not to give Israel a reason to escalate even further.

Escalation was again avoided and peace was preserved. Iran’s approach was apparently working, confirming Iran’s willingness to take on increased responsibility for maintaining peace in the Middle East, regulating the strength of its responses to provocations by the Americans and Israelis, who, on the contrary, did not restrain themselves either in force or in the choice of targets for strikes.

Now, in 2025, when the US attacked strategic nuclear facilities in Iran, Trump almost immediately sent a public signal to Iran: that’s it, it was one and done, we are not looking for further escalation – showing that the Iranian standard symbolic, measured response, aimed at the most effective media image, but harmless compared to the damage suffered, was already expected and was taken into account when weighing the decision to attack.

Iran’s measured approach has turned into a trap for them – and another response, equal in strength to the media image but not in real damage, will slam it shut.

Iran’s strategy makes sense, provided that on the side of the potential aggressor, in addition to the hawks who are behind the provocation, there are doves who can be armed with examples of Iran’s rationality and peacefulness. But the effectiveness of this method is entirely based on the presence of a “partner for peace” on the American side, i.e. it requires an understanding of the internal balance of power in the enemy’s military-political leadership. Otherwise, wise tactics turn into “appeasement” as in the infamous Munich scenario, when Hitler was simply given Czechoslovakia with its entire arsenal: mutual concessions work when the unwillingness to war prevails on both sides. However, for the aggressor, i.e. the side that is in any case set for war, concessions achieved by the threat of war alone mean that they have even less reason to stop.

Figuring out which type you are dealing with in your potential opponent is crucial. And Iran appears to have miscalculated badly. Neither the US nor Israel appreciated Iran’s restraint and responsibility, each time attacking Iran more aggressively and trying to bite off an ever larger piece of Iran’s security infrastructure. Moreover, this time Trump launched his attack on Iran with the already-built-in calculation that Iran would once again ensure that he would not have to pay too high a domestic political price for attacking it. And Iran seems to have obliged Trump once again, producing an even more impressive viral spectacle of its counterattack, backed up on social media by cynical use of the Gaza genocide to heighten public resonance, while generally bowing to Trump’s demand to play along with him in turning this into a “12-day war” and without inflicting damage on either Israel or the US anywhere near the depth of the wound of the US-Israeli attack on Iranian scientists, civilians, military-political leadership, strategic facilities and the capital.

Only now, instead of the Iranian leadership’s strategic wisdom, it demonstrates their profound inability – or fear – to understand what exactly is unfolding: Iran’s relentless initiative and willingness to turn the tension of another escalation into a diplomatic process in search of a firm peace are wasted on Americans, because, as the 12-day war showed, there is no party in America for peace with Iran.

Understanding the Blob

US foreign policy is run by the Washington Blob – a symbiosis of the media, big business, the military-bureaucratic apparatus and US client regimes, the totality of whose interests shapes the course and sets the American empire in motion. The close connection and co-ordination of their interests allows American foreign policy to operate on autopilot. The downside of this symbiosis is that no one of its constituent parts has control over all the others, making it virtually impossible to switch to manual piloting. Even the US president has only partial control: he can give orders to the army and dictate his will to allies, but not to American businesses, which own the media and finance both political parties.

The latest attempt to take US foreign policy under conscious control was made by Biden, who tested the limits of his capabilities in this system when he ordered the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan: the army carried out the order, but media sabotage, attacks from the Republican Party, and a lack of support within his own party destroyed the initially positive rating of his presidency, which has never recovered.

Thus, the Blob functions as a collective primitive brain without (or minimally developed) central executive function: it responds to stimuli and threats (hunger sets it in motion, fear stops it), but is not capable of complex thinking, which makes its course practically uncontrollable, but highly predictable. And in some areas, the Blob’s political course is more predictable than in others – especially in the Middle East, especially on Israel and Iran, and following the simple sum of interests that form the Blob, in the present the shape of the future begins to emerge. What will be is already present.

For example, I will show how this works using the example of the recent, already somewhat forgotten show with the sudden announcement of a three-stage ceasefire with Israel in Gaza right before Trump’s inauguration. As sudden as it was, it looked serious, confirmed by the Biden administration, which even tried to claim some credit. Yet in my January 18 Telegram-post I called bullshit:

there are no grounds for a long-term change of course: neither the composition of the forces whose struggle determines the results on the news agenda, nor their interests, nor their ratio have changed:

• The pro-Israel monopoly in the American establishment does not depend on a change in the ruling party.

• Trump remains consistently predictable: he is driven by vanity and always takes the side of money. And money was brought to him during the election campaign for approving the annexation of the West Bank.

• Israel’s plans for at least Northern Gaza are already known and have not changed either.

The whole thing looked faked, entirely staged with the sole purpose to create triumphant headlines as a gift to Trump for his Inauguration Day. Everything about this was theatrically exaggerated, especially the rumors about Trump’s ambassador Witkoff, who allegedly forced Netanyahu to go to work on Shabbat. I am pretty sure that Netanyahu himself was the one spreading rumors of how badly he was defeated and humiliated by the emissary of the all-powerful Trump.

The conclusion that there will be no three-stage ceasefire, that sadly is exactly what happened, followed from the fact that the entire ceasefire was a ruse. This was not a prediction of the future as such, I simply described the shape of the future from what existed in the present, and this is the shape it took: soon after the inauguration, the “ceasefire” was forgotten, Trump thanked Netanyahu for rushing him to the inauguration with public support for the end of ethnic cleansing and the appropriation of Gaza territory, and Israel continued the genocide with redoubled zeal and cruelty.

The same logic can be applied to analyze the current moment with regard to the US and Iran.

With each aggressive contact with the US in 2020 and Israel in 2024, Iran’s response transmitted the threat of “do not confuse our restraint with weakness”, but the Blob, being an unconscious sum of individual conscious interests, is not capable of perceiving a message like this as a whole. And it terms of the specific interest groups, some of them registered gains as pieces were torn out of Iran, and no interests registered a threat to themselves, because that is what Iran was avoiding. Thus no one was incentivised to be against the war. In total, Blob only registered gains without downsides: because each time Iran was losing enough to keep the Blob hungry, exacting no actual price in retaliation, that would hurt someone else’s interests enough to make the Blob fear.

Trump’s “12-day war” with Iran made clear as much:

1. The exponential increase in the depth and scale of attacks on Iran shows no trace of the presence of doves in the US military-political leadership who oppose the hawks;
2. the uniform bipartisan approval and support of both the pro-democracy and pro-democracy media for the “12-day war” with Iran shows the lack of interest among all those who could make Trump pay a political price to do so.

A forceful regime change in Iran is in the interests of practically all the forces that together form US foreign policy: the military-industrial complex, interested in a new hot and, preferably, endless war; the oil business, interested in controlling Iranian oil; anti-Chinese hawks, interested in completing the semicircle of China’s encirclement and gaining the ability to completely cut off China from Middle Eastern oil in an instant; Israel, interested in expansion and the creation of a Greater Israel in the Middle East, etc.

At the same time, there is not a single force or institution that has influence on US foreign policy whose interests would be contrary to a regime change in Iran — the Sunday raid on June 22 in this sense, it turned out to be very indicative: in corporate media from Fox to CNN and MSNBC, in Trump’s own Republican Party and the “opposition” Democratic Party, there was only varying degrees of support – and not a shadow of opposition.

As a result, the mathematics of the latest escalation with Iran shows pure domestic political profit with zero costs.

This puts the Blob on a trajectory for war with Iran, regardless of what the individual interest groups that make it up think or say.

Another “another unthinkable war.”

To use the quote from Stephen Platt’s book “Imperial Twilight” on the Opium Wars against China, cited in Jeff Rich’s “Burning Archive“:

nearly all parties concerned, including even the government ministers who launched it, the war was all but unthinkable until it actually began.” And war with Iran right now has all the makings of another “another unthinkable war.”

But who is war with Iran unthinkable to? Not to the people who actually have the influence over the American use violence — the blob. “It’s a big club and you ain’t it.” It might be unthinkable even to the individual people within the blob: Trump may claim that the military conflict with Iran has been resolved by a “12-day war,” not out of malice but because he could actually be deluded enough to believe that he can attack Iran, get what he wanted, and then quickly call for peace, pinky promising that this was all he wanted and it was the last time. “I guess that’s that.” And he might actually believe it.

Usually this childish behavior is not something that works with adults, but to be fair, the Iranian regime itself, fearful of war with the United States, provided Trump enough leeway to sustain this delusion while the Blob creeps much closer, thus making war with the United States all but inevitable.

For Iran this turns the logic of the situation 180⁰: strategic foresight turns out to be strategic cowardice, and a balanced approach is the very same “appeasement of the aggressor” according to the Czechoslovak scenario, which every Western liberal insists cannot be repeated.

Ironically, while wasting warnings against appeasing an aggressor on propaganda for every war with yet another country led by the US, a “new Hitler,” from Iraq to Russia, Western liberals have never addressed the fact that the original Hitler was not an external enemy threatening the West – he was a threat to peace created in the West, at what was then the center of Western civilization. Fascism is a malignant form of European imperialism, a cancer that has become a threat to its host. That is why European countries concluded non-aggression agreements with Hitler from the very beginning, turned a blind eye to all transgressions and territorial ambitions, and, under British leadership, forced Czechoslovakia to surrender to the Nazis in 1938 until Hitler himself attacked them – because they believed until the last moment that Nazism was on their side, the weapons were in their interests. (Kit Klarenberg: “The Anglo-Nazi Global Empire That Almost Was”)

And just as in 2025 the West as a whole (except Norway, Ireland and Spain) refuses to notice a new Holocaust, openly perpetrated by another model representative of Western civilization – Israel; so for more than 30 years they have been in denial about the growing scale of crimes of the new world aggressor, which they again see as a weapon in their interests, again considering themselves protected from it by the NATO non-aggression pact: the USA. Just like in the 1930s, today’s West will remain bewitched by their own illusions to the very end: after all, the beacon of freedom, the very heart of Western civilization, cannot be that… Moreover, even the countries designated by the US as its enemies are to some extent under this spell – including Russia, and including Iran, which continues to act as if it hopes that somewhere ahead the heat will subside, and everything will be fine.

The logic of peace does not work for Iran anymore, but the mathematics of war works: war is a competition in damage enduring, a fundamentally self-harming activity: in a fight, damage is inflicted not only by the opponent, but also by participation in the fight itself – punches hurt the fists too. The goal is to make each exchange of blows cost less damage than the damage inflicted on the opponent.

The symbolic, deliberately minimized harm of Iran’s strikes in response to the exponentially growing material and political damage from US-Israeli attacks allows them to gradually destroy Iran for next to nothing.

This is the error of “appeasing” the aggressor – the aggressor is ready for violence, which means it is ready to withstand some losses to win. If the aggressor is willing to risk at least a dollar in a fight to achieve his goal, and the enemy, in order to avoid a fight, buys off the aggressor with a dollar, then the aggressor now has aggression and already has two dollars to try his luck in a fight without risking anything more than the original dollar. After the second concession, only one thing will change: the weight of the threat of attack will increase to 4 dollars, and so on until the readiness or ability to buy off is exhausted.

The US does not need to conquer anything from Iran in the literal sense to increase the strength of aggression; the resource that Trump wins from Iran is domestic: permission to use more force. Otherwise, the dynamics are the same:

1. In 2020, Trump took a dollar from Iran by killing their key military and political figure of General Soleimani, which hurt them politically and strategically in the Middle East, without paying a penny of the political price that the deaths of American soldiers would have cost him.
2. Damage to Iran without American casualties in 2020 and the sharp escalation of Israel against Iran in 2024, that caused even more significant damage—again without American casualties, provided Trump with blank check for another military escalation against Iran without any political cost to the attack itself. But not free from consequences: the total political cost would depend on the Iranian response—which is why Trump was so eager to repeat with them «All is well!» from 2020.
3. In 2025, Trump cashed the check, and the US military took 10 dollars from Iran in the lives of high-ranking officials and damage to strategic facilities. If Iran again takes care not to do anything in response that could pose political risks for Trump – whether it be a direct military strike on American forces in the region or an economic blow to oil prices – then for Trump, strikes on Iran become a game of winning political points by using military force, and the more force is used, the greater the political gain.

…which is seemingly exactly what happened.

This result makes Trump personally interested in a war with Iran. If before it was clear that Trump was simply following the anti-Iranian trend common to all the influence groups around him, now he himself has felt how the launch of the American military machine delights his supporters, pacifies the liberal opposition – and no one calls him TACO anymore. It’s a surefire lottery, the winnings of which depend only on the size of the bet – and in the context of growing political problems at home and the falling popularity of the Republicans ahead of the midterms in November 2026, the “easy money” from winning a small victorious war for Trump is not just tempting, but the only opportunity to cover the failures on other political fronts – from the war on migrants to the trade war.

Thus, all the available factors today are for a violent regime change in Iran, and many of those factors point towards a very narrow time corridor for action between the Israeli “right now” and September 2026, when the voting at the midterms begins.

In other words, everything in the current balance of power at the helm of the American empire sets the course for the recolonization of Iran by military force, a “special military operation” to change the regime in Tehran this year or the first half of next year. At the same time, today there is not a single force either inside the US or in the entire “collective West” that can prevent this.

Only external forces have such an opportunity – China, Russia and Iran itself. Neither the Russian Federation nor China are in a military alliance with Iran, so by default Iran has no reason to count on their protection, which leaves Iran alone with the American imperialist machine that has set a course for regime change. In this situation, Iran has only two choices:

1. Do nothing/do the same as before – i.e. a restrained response without crossing the line of escalation, the bar of which Iran itself put extremely low, limiting its own options, leaving the United States with complete freedom of initiative and choice as to when, where and how to strike next time, while hoping that this time was the last time, and the US would finally—after Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Gaza—learn their lesson.

This is an open invitation for the Blob to take another step on escalation ladder, a smaller one, counting on Iranian restraint in response one more time, or a bigger one, aimed to topple the regime itself. Which, following the logic of the previous escalations, might happen as an extension of one air raid on Iran into an air war with the goal of destroying the Iranian regime with missile strikes and aerial bombardment, without boots on the ground, like it was done in Libya, rather than a ground invasion like Iraq.

2. Escalation: a response that would cause Trump political damage that would outweigh any political points he earned from the Iran strike, like shutting down the Persian Gulf, attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, hitting American military bases. Obviously it would be used by the West to “reset” everything that happened before that in order to call Iran an aggressor that started the violence out of the blue in the quiet and peaceful before region, and it will give the US all the excuses they need to start a full-on regime change war.

But also it might give the US a pause that might be desperately needed. Appeasement of the Blob keeps the balance of stimuli set straight on “war,” guaranteeing it climbing the ladder of escalation up until the inevitable regime-change war. While escalation, that targets the interests of the parts of the Blob that are not anti-Iran warmongers, might give them enough energy to create an anti-war faction, slowing down or stopping the Blob in its tracks. Also, Trump has shown he is willing to attack Iran when he believes he can call “one and done” and expect them to stand back and stand by, but in the face of a full-scale war in response to Iranian escalation, Trump may find de-escalation preferable.

In the world where the belligerent empire has already taken course to your destruction, where restraint and level-headedness only pushed you closer to the brink of existential war, the only chance you’ve got is a fighting chance. Iran could use the math of war to its own benefit, and show to the US, the Blob and Trump that it might be smaller, poorer and worse equipped than the US, but it is willing to sell its life dearly, and for every political point won against Iran, America will pay Iran a price high enough so that a war with Iran will no longer seem to them like a “small, victorious war.”

The irony is that it is in the interests of the US as much as Iran that Iran pulls this off and scares the Blob away from a full-scale war before it enters one. The Washington Blob ≠ the US, and the closer the Blob gets to dragging the US into another big war, the clearer it is that it is as much an enemy to the Americans as it is to the Iranians. The blob is on one side, all the people of the world are on the other.

But each passing day after the “12-day war” it becomes clearer which of these options is emerging in the picture of the present.

But Iran being in a position of today’s 1938 Czechoslovakia goes beyond just a history lesson for the Ayatollahs to learn yesterday: war with Iran is just a stop on the trajectory to war with China. If the US wins the war and recolonizes Iran (which is not a given at all, but a possibility), there will likely be no other power left, domestically or internationally, to stop them from war with China.

The failures of 1938-1939 were the reason why World War II, the Holocaust and the nuclear bombing of Japan happened. And in today’s world with many more nukes, where the second Holocaust is unfolding right now, there’s no doubt that humanity could end up repeating all the worst things that happened the last time, and then much more. But also, why the future is not yet set, chances are that at some point humanity will reassert itself and the better angels will fight our worst demons. But we can neither hope nor wait for this – we must do everything to make it happen sooner rather than later, and destroy the mechanisms for the self-destruction of civilization before they destroy us.

Support Egor’s work on Substack and Patreon. Follow him on Twitter and YouTube.

Recommend Krystal Kyle & Friends to your readers

Krystal Ball and Kyle Kulinski dive into politics, philosophy and random BS with people they like. Krystal is co-host of Breaking Points. Kyle is host of Secular Talk on YouTube.