Updates on the Iran-Israel War
Conversations with leading analysts
By Daniel Falcone
[Note: first published in Counterpunch, July 1 2025.]
Part 1
In this latest and extensive discussion on U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, CounterPunch features international relations scholar Stephen Zunes, Middle East historian Lawrence Davidson, and legal expert and former UN rapporteur Richard Falk, to explain the dynamics of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East with a focus on the Trump administration.
This conversation addresses several themes: the continuity of US imperialism, the strategic use of Israel as a proxy, the decline of democratic accountability and erosion of international law, the challenges facing civil society, and the need to construct more ethical frameworks for evaluating foreign policy. Lastly, we focus on the most recent US/Israel/Iran strikes, and their individual and collective goals.
Part 1: US Policy Toward Iran & the Middle East
Daniel Falcone: Can you explain the ways that Trump and American foreign policy toward the Middle East and Iran has continued its colonial path in distributing hard and soft power to the region? What might escalation look like?
Lawrence Davidson: Despite the isolationist mood of a segment of Trump’s supporters, the assumption among most of the “ruling economic class” is still that the U.S. must assert control over markets and resources. Thus, there is no reason to expect a significant diminishment in overseas adventures (though as explained below, how these are prioritized in the U.S. is a function of lobby power).
Indeed, Trump’s rather disgusting mimicking of Mussolini and Hitler by asserting unilateral claims to the Panama Canal, Greenland and even Canada is just a modern twist, albeit an embarrassing one, on U.S. colonialism.
Trump, of course, has a unique approach to this issue. He wants to assert control, and he will try to do so with a lot of bluster. His recent lecturing of Iran and Israel is a good example. Trump’s problem is he has trouble staying consistent. His attention span is short, and he is susceptible to consistent lobby pressure.
Stephen Zunes: The bombing of Iran is the logical extension of the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy which essentially made the case that the United States would not tolerate regional powers challenging its hegemony in important regions like the oil-rich Middle East. After the overthrow of Saddam in Iraq in the 2003 U.S. invasion and the ouster of Assad in Syria by his own people last year, Iran is the only recognized state to resist effective U.S. control of the entire region.
When we think of the obsession U.S. policy makers have had with Cuba for the past 65 years and with Nicaragua and Chile in previous decades due to their resistance to U.S. domination, it’s not surprising that a large, relatively powerful, and resource-rich country like Iran would become such a focus. And, given the reactionary and authoritarian nature of the regime, its isolation in the region, and its unpopularity among its own people, it has become a perfect foil.
Let’s remember that Trump was never antiwar; he just opposed other people’s wars. He has always believed in war making to advance U.S. hegemony. His claims of being antiwar were as disingenuous as his claims he would stand up against Wall Street— he recognized that it was the best way to win over white working-class voters who had seen how Democratic hawks like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden supported sending their kids to die in Middle Eastern conflicts.
Israel and its supporters are useful allies in implementing this policy, but they are not the source of it. Given the Iraq debacle, Israel has been utilized as a surrogate in a similar manner, like when the U.S. tried to use the Shah in the 1970s, advancing U.S. interests through wars without sacrificing American lives. Israel’s attacks on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran make it so the United States only needs to intervene directly in extraordinary circumstances, such as in delivering 30,000-pound bombs safely from a high altitude.
As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz put it, “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”—a disturbing description in that it conjures up how, during the Middle Ages and other times in European history, the ruling class used some Jews to do the “dirty work” (i.e., money-lenders, tax collectors) so they could later be scapegoated rather than allow the masses to go after those who really had the power. Using Israel to attack the West’s enemies in the Middle East follows this pattern. Already, we are hearing some war critics insist that “the Zionists” are somehow forcing an otherwise reluctant United States and Europe to support wars of aggression rather than recognizing Israel’s role as that of a proxy for Western imperialism, a chorus which will likely increase should the United States be dragged down in an ongoing military conflict with Iran.
Washington has long acknowledged Israel’s role of a surrogate. President Biden has stated that “If it weren’t for Israel, we’d have to invent them.” Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig referred to Israel as our “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”
If the goal was simply to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, which was the focus of the Obama administration, Trump would not have abrogated the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA, or “the Iran nuclear deal.”) By pulling out and reimposing sanctions, Trump effectively provoked Iran into enriching uranium to a degree that could someday potentially lead to weaponization and thereby provide a pretext for war. The actual goal, therefore, has been to weaken Iran as much as possible, and Israel was quite willing for its own reasons to play along as well. Indeed, Israeli air strikes went well beyond targets related to its nuclear program and Washington supported them in doing so.
I met with then-Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Tehran in 2019. He explained how it took nearly a decade of posturing and two years of intense negotiations to create the JCPOA, signed by seven governments and endorsed by the United Nations. He noted how he met with then-Secretary of State John Kerry no less than 50 times to go over the draft line by line. The idea that Trump could impose an even more restrictive agreement simply by demanding it was at best naïve and more likely just an excuse to go to war. Indeed, nuclear talks had resumed and were ongoing when the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Iran began. Neither the United States nor Israel wanted them to succeed.
The U.S. bombing of Iran, therefore, was not ultimately about nuclear policy or about Israel. It’s about hegemony. That Iran decided to launch only a limited response is a great relief. Though Israel had damaged Iran’s offensive capabilities, they still had enough weapons to do a lot of damage to U.S. assets. The United States has 40,000 troops within a couple hundred miles of Iran, easily within range of not just Iranian missiles, but drones and other weaponry. Iranian proxy militia in Iran could target U.S. bases.
The U.S. Navy is just off the Iranian coast, which could have also been targeted, and the Iranians could have attempted to close the Strait of Hormuz, crippling the world oil supply and threatening the global economy. Trump, meanwhile, explicitly threatened to unleash “a tragedy for Iran far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days” if Iran retaliated.
Richard Falk: To gain perspective on the present alarming situation, I begin my response by taking note of the U.S. foreign policy response to the Suez Operation of Israel, UK, and France during the Eisenhower presidency in 1956. This was both the first, last, and only occasion on which the U.S. Government adopted a position that distanced itself from a colonialist initiative in the Middle East or anywhere. It was represented the only foreign policy challenge in which the U.S. gave priority to its legal commitment to uphold the UN Charter even when its constraints were inconsistent with its geopolitical alignments both with its NATO partners and Israel since the end of World War II and remains so fifty years later. It was particularly impressive at the time because Nasser’s Egypt was hostile to the West and a harsh critic of Israel statehood at the expense of Palestine, and beyond all this was on friendly terms with the Soviet Union at a time of rising Cold War tensions.
In a superficial sense, the U.S. response to the Suez Operation demanding withdrawal from Egyptian territory was consistent with its leadership in the UN after North Korea attacked South Korea or at least seemed so at the outset of the Korean War as the defense of South Korea was given legal authorization by the UN, including the Security Council. This was only possible because the Soviet Union was boycotting the UN at the time because of its refusal to seat China’s Peoples Republic as representing China and could not cast its veto to block UN support for South Korea. The Soviet Union learned its lesson, returned to the Security Council, and never again boycotted the Organization.
Yet the Korean precedent is quite different as the U.S. tends to resort to a legalistic approach whenever its adversaries violate Charter norms on the use of international force, and no time else. North Korea as a hard-core Communist country was an adversary and for this reason appeals to the UN appeals by the West, like the U.S. immediate reaction to the 2022 Russian attack on Ukraine. Both in the Korean and Ukrainian wars recourse to force was provoked by the West-oriented governments, especially the U.S., but covered up by influential international media platforms.
It is notable that the deep state, and its visible manifestations in the Council on Foreign Relations and the Washington think tanks, faulted this U.S. response in 1956 because it mistakenly adhered to international law at the cost of weakening its alliance relations, which was interpreted to mean weakening strategic national interests that were associated with the central issue of unconditionally opposing the Soviet Union and all direct and indirect extensions of its influence beyond its geopolitical borders.
This post-mortem critique of U.S. statecraft prevailed, and the U.S. Government never again sacrificed its strategic interests out of deference to international law or the UN in the Middle East, or elsewhere. In the early stages of Israel’s existence it meant balancing relations with Israel as a settler colonial exception to decolonizing historical worldwide trends against the pragmatic priority of securing for the West assured access to Gulf oil at stable prices, which meant a maximum effort to minimize Soviet influence even at the risk of major warfare and also a maximum effort to avoid antagonizing the anti-Israeli stance of Arab governments during the remainder of the 20th century.
Long before the Suez Crisis the colonialist penetration of the region was introduced in a somewhat disguised Orientalist form by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which the British Foreign Secretary pledged support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine without even a pretense of consultation with the resident Arab population of post-Ottoman Palestine. The Balfour Declaration represented an expression of overt colonialist arrogance to solve European problems associated with antisemitism at the sacrifice of Palestinian rights of self-determination undertaken without any show of concerns about the impassioned grander ambitions of the Zionist Movement that went far beyond establishing a non-governing homeland in a foreign sovereign state even at this early stage.
British motivations included a typical application of the divide and rule tactics of colonial governance through encouraging Jewish immigration as a check on rising Palestinian nationalism. It backfired as anti-colonial nationalism flourished, the Zionist Movement shifted its focus from gratitude to Balfour to the adoption of armed struggle against the British colonial administration in Palestine. The legacy of these several varieties of colonialism policy was to inflict on post-1945 Middle East life a continuous series of wars, prolonged tensions that solidified Israeli autocratic rule dependent on the U.S., and worst of all, the embodiment of the Zionist domination of the Israeli state which entailed systemic human rights violations, ethnic cleansing, culminating in apartheid and genocide, and the establishment of a sophisticated and ruthless settler colonial state that made Palestinians persecuted strangers in their own homeland, victimized by a lethal fusion of apartheid and genocide.
This balancing of strategic interests was tested, and reaffirmed in the context of the 1967 War in which Israel lost its identity as a strategic burden worth protecting for a variety of political reasons to become a highly valued partner in ensuring Western control of the region despite the formal independence achieved by Arab national movements in the MENA region that included the North African states. From this time forward to the present the U.S. never challenged Israel’s use of force in the region, including its flagrant violations of the Geneva Conventions in its administration of the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza occupied by force during the 1967 War.
There was a naive attempt to find a solution to the Israel/Palestinian conflict by way of the framework set forth in Security Council Resolution 242 adopted shortly after the war end, which wrongly anticipated Isreal’s early withdrawal from these Palestinian territories after minor border adjustments. As we now know more than half a century later this withdrawal never happened and was probably never contemplated by the Zionist leadership that held sway in Tel Aviv. Given this unfinished nature of the expansionist Israeli agenda as marching in lockstep with the imperial nature of the U.S. approach to the Middle East.
The result was a gradual normalization of these realities that achieved a bipartisan consensus second in solidity only to the anti-Communism of the Cold War. In effect, the U.S. became the replacement for the UK and France colonial management of Western political and economic interest in the Middle East, whose policies were increasingly at odds with support for international law, UN majority sentiments, and the essential decolonizing ethos of national self-determination. The growing dependence of Gulf Arab governments on stabilizing relations with the U.S. became evident in the aftermath of the 1973 War in which the temporary prohibition of oil sales to the West gave rise to long lines at U.S. gas stations and reactive scenarios of U.S. intervention dramatized on the cover of a leading national magazine with an image of American commandos parachuting in Gulf airspace to take over the production and distribution of oil and natural gas to the West.
Subsequently, the leading Arab governments and the U.S., and even Israel, informally made a mutual accommodation, acknowledging a Palestinian right to statehood, but turning a blind eye to Israel occupation settlement policies designed to make the establishment of a viable Palestinian state impossible, dismissed by Palestinian liberation politics as ‘breadcrumb diplomacy’ or a new version of South African Bantustans.
Next time: Part 2: Civil Society Watches Another War
Daniel Falcone is a historian specializing in the revolutions of 1848 and the political refugees who sought asylum in New York City. His academic work focuses on Giuseppe Garibaldi’s influence on New York’s local history and the politics of memory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Aside from his research, he is a teacher and journalist whose work has appeared in additional publications such as The Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World, The Nation, Jacobin, and Truthout. His journalistic pieces, Q&As with public intellectuals, intersect history with modern-day geopolitical issues.