Category: Lenin

France Had a Two-State Solution Too: It Was Called Vichy.

Communists were opposed to the two-state solution for France. It is a mistake for them to accept the two-state solution for Palestine.

9 October 2026

By Stephen Gowans

Pro-Zionist communists, such as the Communist parties of the United States, Canada, Britain, and China, support the two-state “solution,” a euphemism for the colonization of 78 percent of Palestine. Many base their support on the argument that a) communists must allow Palestinians to decide the solution to the problem of Jewish colonization of their homeland and b) that most Palestinians favor the two-state proposal. The first part of the argument is logically flawed. The second part is empirically invalid.

Let’s begin with the second part.

A little over a year ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Polls in recent years have shown that only a minority of Israelis and Palestinians support the idea” of a two-state solution. Among Palestinians, “just 28 percent of those interviewed … supported such a plan, while 64 percent opposed it.” A Gallup poll released this month showed that 58 percent of Palestinians interviewed in the West Bank and Jerusalem oppose the two-state proposal. (Palestinians in Gaza, could not, for obvious reasons, be surveyed.) As Mondoweiss, an independent, non-profit news website focused on Palestine concluded, “Most Palestinians disagree with a two-state solution.”

In 1947, when partition of Palestine was proposed by the United Nations General Assembly, Palestinians were dead set against it. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand why. Palestinians were expected to hand over 56 percent of their country to recent immigrants who made up only one-third of the population, while they would keep only 42 percent of their homeland. (Jerusalem, two percent of the territory, was to be internationalized under the UN plan.)

The partition plan sparked a civil war followed by an international war. When the dust had settled, Jewish colonizers had driven 83 percent of Palestinians who lived in what has since become 4 June 1967 (or Green Line) Israel out their homes, and refused their repatriation. At the same time, they expanded their territorial holdings from the 56 percent the UN General Assembly had proposed to 78 percent of Palestine. The colonizers said they had accepted the partition plan, but they implemented not one of the plan’s provisions.

For the next 40 years, Palestinians tried to recover their country, pursuing a vision of one democratic state in all of Palestine.  They met with no success. After decades of struggle, the PLO accepted what has become known as the two-state solution. At the time it appeared that an independent Palestinian state comprising 22 percent of Palestine, as prescribed by the two-state “solution”, had some hope of coming to fruition. But after decades of a failed “peace process” it became obvious to Palestinians that they had been sold a bill of goods. Instead of getting a Palestinian state on one-fifth of Palestinian territory, they were presented with ongoing colonization of the West Bank, the Judaization of East Jerusalem, and a concentration camp in Gaza.

Let’s examine the first part of the argument: Communists must allow Palestinians self-determination to decide the solution to the problem of Jewish colonization of their homeland.

Alain Alameddine and Saman Hasan are active in the Palestinian-led One Democratic State Initiative. They argue that “Standing against the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine in the name of Palestinian self-determination is a laughable contradiction. Democracy is, by definition, rule of the people. Democratic states are precisely the tool by which people self-determine.”

On top of being a laughable contradiction, opposing the call for a decolonized Palestine is, for communists, an ideological contradiction. Following Lenin’s lead, communists have always favored decolonization, but somehow their support for decolonization has stopped short of Palestine. Lenin didn’t call for the liberation of the world’s oppressed people, except the Palestinians.

Furthermore, no communist would ever have said “The French must be allowed the self-determination to decide whether to accept the partition of their country into a German colony with a capital at Paris (comprising 60 percent of France), and a French state with its capital at Vichy (comprising 40 percent.)  Nor would they have said that the French have accepted that their country should be partitioned, as evidenced by the agreement of their government with the Germans, so we’re going to support the French right to a self-determined “two-state solution.” Any communist who accepted a two-state solution for France would have been justifiably denounced as a collaborator with German colonialism, and hardly a communist at all.

There’s a further contradiction. Pro-Zionist communists say their support for the two-state solution is based on letting Palestinians lead the way, the only true anti-colonial position. The problem with this argument is that pro-Zionist communists have never allowed Palestinians to lead the way.

  1. They supported the transfer of 56 percent of Palestine to Jewish colonizers in 1947, even though Palestinians were vehemently opposed.
  2. Today, they continue to support the two-state proposal despite the fact that most Palestinians oppose it.

The only lead pro-Zionist communists have ever followed is that of Moscow, and today, China and Cuba.  Moscow reversed the position of the communist movement in 1947 from anti-Zionism to pro-Zionism and from support of one secular democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine to support for the Jewish colonization of the better part of the Palestinians’ homeland. The volte-face was carried out for Soviet geopolitical aims. Stalin believed the Zionists were committed socialists whose opposition to Britain would make them good allies. Leaving aside the question of whether this policy turned out to be an opportunist blunder, it’s absurd that pro-Zionist communists today mimic a policy based on the realpolitik of a state that has been dead for 35 years!

To sum up, many communists think they’re anti-Zionist because they criticize Israel and (say they) stand with the Palestinians (though it’s not clear how they can claim to stand with the Palestinians while supporting a two-state solution the Palestinians oppose.) Anti-Zionism is a rejection of the project of establishing an ethno-supremacist Jewish state in a colonized Palestine. Supporting the two state “solution”, a euphemism for supporting the Jewish colonization of 78 percent of Palestine, is not anti-Zionism. It is the very opposite.

The pro-Zionist two-state “solution” position is clearly at odds with the communist tradition of opposing colonization. It is also at odds with the call for one secular democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine, the position of the communist movement before the Soviet Union’s 1947 realpolitik volte-face, as well as that of the Palestinian Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Finally, we should recognize the absurdity that lays at the heart of pro-Zionist communist support for the two-state proposal. It assumes that Palestinians would actually prefer the occupation of 78 percent of their land over its liberation. This idea is as absurd as the notion that the French would have preferred a state based at Vichy to the liberation of all of France.

Alain Alameddine and Saman Hasan of the One Democratic State Initiative point out that “A number of movements such as Citizens in a State (Lebanon), the Democratic Popular Unity Party (Jordan), Democratic Socialists of America (USA) [though this is unclear: see comments below, and] Diem25 (Europe)” support some version of one democratic Palestinian state in Palestine. And of course, so too does the Green Party of England and Wales, whose recent support for this position, has been widely covered in the news media.  Ironically, it is reformists, not revolutionaries, who are taking the lead in building anti-Zionist platforms and calling for decolonization of Palestine.

Communists must do more than oppose genocide and accept Israel’s existence as a settler colonial state. As Alameddine and Hasan write “The Israel you have seen over the past three years is the one we have been seeing over the past 78 years. It is the only Israel there is—a danger to Palestine,” the Levant, “and the world. The time for non-solutions is over. We must push forward the dismantling of the settler state and the establishment of its antithesis,” one secular democratic Palestinian state in all of Palestine.

Would Lenin Support the Two State “Solution” or a Decolonized, Secular, Democratic State in All of Palestine?

7 October 2026

By Stephen Gowans

Many Communist parties are pro-Zionist, even if they express solidarity with Palestinians. Their pro-Zionism lies in their support for the so-called two-state “solution,” a proposal to create a Palestinian state in historic Palestine, alongside a Jewish state. What makes this position pro-Zionist is its acceptance of a colonial Jewish state.

Israel, conceived as that part of Palestine colonized by Jewish settlers by the end of the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli War, is based on the colonization of the greater part (78 percent) of historic Palestine. (What Israel is, in fact, as opposed to in theory, is based on the colonization of all of historic Palestine, plus the Syrian Golan Heights, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s stick with so-called Green Line Israel, the Jewish state before it took over the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.). Hence, endorsement of the two-state “solution” is, in part, an endorsement of the colonization of the greater part of Palestine.

Pro-Zionist Communist parties call for a Palestinian state to be created on the 22 percent of the Palestinians’ homeland that Jewish colonizers failed to colonize from 29 November 1947 to 20 July 1949. Even if one were to (incomprehensibly) accept the legitimacy of colonization, why would one accept such a grossly unbalanced division of territory, considering that Palestinians outnumber Israeli Jews? (There are about nine million Palestinians living in historic Palestine and refugee camps versus about 7.4 million Israeli Jews.) Two-state supporters somehow think their proposal is fair, though it’s difficult to see how giving part of one people’s country to another is fair, or how a division that gives four-fifths of the territory to settlers and one-fifth to a greater number of natives is equitable, notwithstanding the fact that giving away any of it to another people is unfair to start.

Some supporters of the pro-Zionist Communist parties say that the parties’ backing of the two-state proposal is based on what Palestinians and their political leaders want, and that they’re only reflecting the aspirations of the Palestinians themselves. This is clearly not the case, since the Communist movement’s support for partition—and hence for the Zionist colonization of a part of Palestine—dates to late 1947, when Palestinians were overwhelmingly opposed to giving up part of their country to Jewish colonizers. (The proposal, which the Soviet Union endorsed, assigned 54 percent of Palestine to Jewish settlers, who made up only one-third of the population, while the Palestinians were allocated 42 percent, even though they comprised two-thirds of the population. Two percent was to be internationalized.) Despite fierce Palestinian opposition, the Communist movement backed the colonialist project anyway because it accorded with the geopolitical goals of the Soviet Union. The views of Palestinians didn’t count. Moscow saw the Zionists as committed socialists whose opposition to Britain marked them out as anti-imperialists and, therefore, potential allies. This position turned out to be, not only a moral and ideological blunder, but a political one, as well. The Zionists, as it soon became evident, were not allies.

Communists continued to back a colonial Zionist state in Palestine during a period when all Palestinian political leaders called for one democratic state in a decolonized Palestine, the very same position that, ironically, Communists themselves had staked out prior to reversing course in late 1947. For example, on the eve of the Communist volte-face, Communists of the British Empire called for “the creation of a free, independent and democratic Palestinian state, which will guarantee equal rights of citizenship with full religious freedom and full opportunities to develop their culture to all its inhabitants, Arab and Jewish.” Arab and Palestinian political leaders adopted the same position, but after 1947, their views didn’t matter much to the Communist movement. It continued to accept the Jewish colonization of part of Palestine.

If Communists couldn’t legitimately use the excuse in 1947 that they were docilely reflecting the political preferences of the Palestinians, they still can’t. A Gallup poll released yesterday, shows that six of 10 Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem (Gaza for understandable reasons couldn’t be surveyed) are opposed to the two-state proposal.

The rejection of the two-state proposal meshes with the view of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist party active in the Palestinian armed resistance. It vehemently opposes the two-state proposal and calls, instead, for a single, secular, democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine.

Palestinian opposition to what scholar Khalid Rashidi has called “the two-state illusion” is understandable. In 1988 the PLO dropped its goal of achieving a democratic state in a decolonized Palestine in favor of the two-state proposal. Since then, it has become clear that neither Israel, nor its partners in North America and Western Europe, have any intention of allowing the vision of a Palestinian state to come to fruition.  The two-state proposal has proved to be a mirage, peddled to Palestinians to pacify them with pie in the sky while Jewish colonizers gradually Judaize that part of historic Palestine they have yet to formally annex.

Israel has taken over much of the West Bank, and in ways that make anything remotely resembling a viable Palestinian state impossible to achieve. Even were there a genuine will to create a Palestinian state in the small part of historic Palestine the two-state proposal deigns to grant the Palestinians (and time has demonstrated that there isn’t), the project—never politically or morally acceptable to begin with—is long past feasible.

The Green Party of England and Wales—perhaps hearing the echoes of the British Empire Communists’ call for a single, decolonized, democratic state in Palestine—has recently called for the same. Ironically, a reformist party has staked out an unequivocally Leninist position, while the heirs of Lenin (some of them) have clung mightily to a reformist position.

The Green Party’s call for decolonization has prompted the One Democratic State Initiative to ask what is keeping other left organizations from doing the same. The Initiative is a Palestinian political project aimed at shifting the focus of those involved in the Palestine question from solidarity with Palestinians and criticism of Israel alone, to campaigning for decolonization, much as Communists campaigned for the decolonization of South Africa and the establishment of one, democratic state, where blacks and whites live as equals.  

Communists need to consider what the ODSI asks. Will their involvement with the question of Palestine be limited to rhetorical solidarity with Palestinians and criticism of the Jewish state—undertaken within the framework of the pro-Zionist two-state illusion—or will they reject colonization, as Leninists must, and endorse what the movement once supported: a decolonized secular democratic state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for all, regardless of ethnicity or religion?

Legal Illegal: The Question of Whether this War is Legal is the Wrong Question

2 March 2026

Stephen Gowans

Democrats are incensed that the US war on Iran is illegal. But how many US wars and other interventions, including sanctions, have been authorized by the Congress and blessed by the UN Security Council? Since 1945, the year the UN Charter came into force, most US wars and sanctions campaigns have either been undertaken without Congressional approval or have contravened international law or both. Criminal US wars and sanctions are not an anomaly; they’re the norm.

Reacting to the norm as if it’s an aberration is part of an ideological process of maintaining the legitimacy of the US state. The state’s lawless conduct is reliably characterized as a departure from the norm, rather than the norm. “This isn’t who we are. We uphold and live by international law. The current war is an exception.” No, it’s not. It’s precisely who you are.

Reacting to the norm as if it’s an aberration is a reflection of what the philosopher Charles Mills called ‘the epistemology of ignorance” – refusing to see what’s staring you in the face. For example, one can only believe that the United States is a beacon of liberty and paladin of democracy by refusing to see that:

  • the country carried out a genocide of the indigenous people and stole their land;
  • enslaved millions of Africans and exploited their labor;
  • didn’t give women the vote until 1920;
  • failed to provide blacks even formal civil liberties until 1965;
  • established formal colonies in Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands, and informal colonies around the world;
  • practices democracy for the few billionaires and political impotence for the many;
  • defends and upholds the exploitation of wage and salary earners as a matter of law and high moral principle.

There has been a substantial increase in freedom and democracy since 1776, but that’s only because the people who were so long denied these advantages fought long and hard to win them. It would be more accurate to say that contained within the US nation has been a movement of the oppressed and exploited that has fought heroically against a contending movement of oppressors and exploiters. The two movements continue to define political struggle in the United States today, and around the world.

Democrats and liberals who oppose this war (mainly because it’s Trump’s war), also contribute to maintaining the fiction that the US state is legitimate by demonizing the war’s victims. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman began his blog today with a shockingly puerile assertion: “The Iranian regime is evil, and it would be a good thing if this war leads to its demise.” In other words, maybe the war is illegal, but the Iranian regime is heinous, so we can be assured that at the end of the day Washington’s intentions are good and everything will work out for the greater benefit of humanity. Apparently, childish analysis disqualifies no one from winning a Nobel Prize in economics. It may even be a prerequisite.

To return to the lawlessness of US wars. The trouble with dwelling on the illegality of US interventions, as if they could be expected to be otherwise given that they almost always are illegal, is that, not only does this buttress the notion that the conduct of the US state is, at its core, legitimate (when it clearly is not), but avoids asking the relevant question: Why is this intervention being undertaken?  For surely, if we’re troubled by the kinds of wars, both military and economic, that the United States and its pals wage against what are usually largely defenseless countries and peoples, we should want to know what causes them, so that we can know how to put an end to them.

Since February of 2022, the month Russia tried to conquer Ukraine, I’ve spent much of my time studying the origins of major wars. This has led me to the works of international relations (IR) scholars, including the neo-realists, the most visible of whom, these days, is John Mearsheimer. IR scholars can be commended, Mearsheimer included, for seeking the root causes of war, rather than indulging in pointless moral sermonizing. But they can’t be commended for their analyses.

Take Mearsheimer, for example. He began by articulating a model of major wars based on security competition within an anarchic inter-state system. States, he argued, try to maximize their military power in order to defend themselves against the possible aggressions of rival states. On this basis, he predicted that the United States would avoid major wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe in order to concentrate on containing China, its closest near-peer rival. When Washington embroiled itself in major wars in the Middle East, contrary to Mearsheimer’s theorizing, he declared the Middle East an anomaly, and attributed the failure of his theory to account for US conduct to an alleged hijacking of the US state by Israel and its lobbyists.

In fact, Mearsheimer’s argument that the Israel lobby runs US foreign policy, while allowing him to get out from under the failures of his “offensive realism” thinking, is part of the same ideological process of maintaining the legitimacy of the US state that is expressed in portrayals of illegal US warfare as a departure from the norm. Don’t blame the US state for its malignant wars on West Asia; at their core, the US policy- and decision-makers are decent and benign human beings who want to do the right thing. The trouble is that they have fallen under the sway of the Israeli Svengali.  The idea that Jews lurk in the shadows manipulating world events refuses to die.

I have leaned toward Lenin’s analysis of war, articulated in his voluminous writings from 1914-1918 on the first world war. The obvious limitation of Lenin’s thinking is that it is based on one war and the events leading up to it. He didn’t undertake an historical survey of wars, and obviously, could not take account of wars that have been fought since. Moreover, he used the term imperialism in a highly inconsistent way which has led to no end of confusion. All the same, I have found his thinking to offer a useful way to think about war waged by major powers.

Unfortunately, those who might be interested in Lenin, often read him second hand, rather than exploring what he said in his own words, free from the interpretations of others. Furthermore, on matters of war, they usually consult his pamphlet on Imperialism, which, in my view, is the least interesting and useful of his war-related work, though, sadly, the most frequently consulted.

Unlike IR realists, such as Mearsheimer, who are IR theorists because they want to advise the US foreign policy establishment on grand strategy, Lenin’s aim was to understand the origin of war in order to bring about a world whose realization would mean the end of war. In this respect, his concerns resonate best with those of anti-war activists, a compelling reason for turning to him rather than Mearsheimer and his IR colleagues, whose careers in academe tend to depend on how helpful their work is to a US foreign policy establishment whose aim is to exploit other countries and cement US domination over the rest of humanity.

Back to legality. Should it matter whether a war is legal? Who decides what is legal or illegal? It certainly hasn’t been people trying to free their country or class from exploitation. The United States and other large powers wrote international law and control the Security Council. If the Security Council says a war is legal, does that make it just?

I would argue, and so did Lenin, that a just war is one that brings us closer to a world free from the exploitation of one class by another and of one state by another. That is a just war, worth fighting, even if it is condemned by the US Congress and prohibited by international law and the Security Council.

Musical coda

What Might Lenin Have Thought About the US-Israeli War on Iran (and the War in Ukraine)?

Facit indignatio versum

(Indignation makes my verses) – Juvenal

1 March 2026

Stephen Gowans

In his analyses of the causes of the first world war, Lenin stressed the importance of understanding the policies the belligerent states pursued before the war. Borrowing from the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, the Bolshevik leader argued that war is politics by other (namely, violent) means. Clausewitz put it this way: “War is policy itself, which takes up the sword in place of the pen.” Lenin echoed Clausewitz: All “war is but a continuation by violent means of the politics which the belligerent states and their ruling classes had been conducting for many years, sometimes for decades, before the outbreak of war.”

So, what policies were the belligerents pursuing by the pen, before they took up the sword? The answer, in Lenin’s view, explained what caused the war. If “you have not studied the policies of [the] belligerent groups over a period of decades … then you don’t understand what this war is all about,” he wrote.

All the belligerents, argued Lenin, were pursuing the same policy: they were reaching across the world for opportunities to dominate its economic surpluses wherever they could be found.  They had been able to do this, for a time, without each greatly impeding the other. However, they had arrived at the point where this was no longer possible. The sum total of opportunities had been completely claimed, and acquiring new ones, could only mean encroaching upon the opportunities that other states, or more specifically, other ruling classes, claimed for their own. The cause of the war, then, was “the whole policy of the entire system of European states in their economic and political interrelations.” The war, said Lenin “steadily and inevitably grew out of this system.”

The word ‘system’ is important. Lenin saw powerful states as actors hopelessly entangled in a system of inter-state relations which pit one against the other for economic advantage. This was a system in which individual states, acting on behalf of, and as the instruments of, individual ruling classes, competed for opportunities to exploit labor and acquire raw materials in order to appropriate as much of the world’s economic surpluses as they possibly could. As a class, said Engels, the bourgeoisie has a common interest and this community of interest, which is directed against the proletariat inside the country, is directed against bourgeois of other nations outside the country. What do ruling classes do? Exploit the labor of subordinate classes. So, when the common interest of one ruling class is directed against the common interest of another, it is directed against encroaching on territory over which the other exploits labor.  The community of interest against the ruling classes of other states took both non-violent (by the pen) and violent (by the sword) forms. “These policies,” argued Lenin, “show … continuous economic rivalry between the world’s … greatest giants, capitalist economies.”  

In light of his analysis, Lenin believed that the question of which belligerent fired the first shot in the war—that is, which, in today’s terms, launched a war of aggression contra international law—was beside the point, for each was pursuing a policy that would inevitably lead to war.  As he put it: “This war is the continuation of a policy of … conquest, of capitalist robbery on the part of [the states] involved in the war. Obviously, the question of which [state] was the first to draw the knife is of small account to us.” Why? To reiterate: “Everybody was preparing for the war; the attack was made by the one who considered it most auspicious for himself at a given moment.” Another would have turned to the sword first, if, in the moment, violence was the means judged to be most suitable to the pursuit of policy.  For this reason, Lenin refused to blame Germany for starting the first world war, even though the Kaiser declared war on Russia and France and invaded Belgium.  “For decades,” explained Lenin, “three bandits (the bourgeoisie and governments of England, Russia, and France) armed themselves to despoil Germany. Is it surprising that the two bandits (Germany and Austria-Hungary) launched an attack before the three bandits succeeded in obtaining the new knives they had ordered?”

Much of the discourse on the current war in Ukraine is concerned with the question of which state started it. If we take Lenin’s view, the question is of no consequence, since the origin of the war lies not in Valdimir Putin’s decision to send Russian troops thundering across the border into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, or the decisions of US and NATO leaders to renege on their promises to assuage Russian security concerns by forbearing from NATO expansion into the former Russian sphere of influence. It lies instead in the rivalry between the Atlantic Alliance and Moscow for the economic interests of their respective ruling classes.

When I say the economic interests of the ruling classes I don’t mean specific deals, or pipeline routes, or mining concessions, although they may be involved. I mean, something broader: the ability of a ruling class to exploit opportunities for capital accumulation over as wide a territory as possible—which means at home, and if the state is strong enough, abroad. The existence of multiple ruling classes obviously complicates matters. Since there are multiple states, hence multiple ruling classes, there are multiple ongoing efforts to exploit the same economic spaces. This isn’t to say that security concerns aren’t relevant. The first job of a ruling class is to survive. Security concerns very likely played a part in Moscow’s decision to try to conquer Ukraine. But why do exploiting ruling classes want to survive? To exploit.

The Imperialism of Peace

Lenin’s analysis produces the interesting and important concept of the imperialism of peace. If war, in Lenin’s view is simply one means of pursuing a policy for economic space and opportunity, then soft-power, diplomacy, and other non-violent forms of inter-state intercourse, are but alternative methods of pursuing the same policy.  In the words of the German-Polish Marxist, and cofounder of the German Communist Party, the martyred Rosa Luxemburg, policy is pursued as either war or armed peace. Peace treaties may stay a violent hand for a time, but they do not eradicate the rivalry that gives rise to war. On this matter, Lenin and Luxemburg were ad idem with the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that a “treaty of peace makes an end to the war of the moment, but not to the conditions of war which at any time may afford a new pretext for opening hostilities” (emphasis added). This is a radical view. To end war, the conditions of war must be eradicated. Peace treaties simply paper over the problem and fail to address the root of war.

In the view of Lenin, Luxemburg, and Kant, inter-state rivalry is ubiquitous and interminable; competition among states is always present, even when violence is absent from their intercourse. If we define war as the effort of one ruling class to impose its will on another, then states are always at war, even if they are not using violence to get their way. Kant again: “A state of peace among men who live side by side is not the natural state, which is rather to be described as a state of war: that is to say, although there is not perhaps always actual open hostility, there is a constant threat that an outbreak may occur” and “the separate existence of a number of neighboring and independent states…is in itself already a state of war.”

Incessant struggle, even in times of formal peace, calls to mind the observations of numerous other thinkers. Lenin’s view was hardly novel.

Clinias of Crete, a character in Plato’s final dialogue, The Laws, contended that “Even what most men call peace is but a name. The reality is that every state, by a law of nature, is engaged at all times in an undeclared war against every other state.”

In 1651 Thomas Hobbes argued in Leviathan that: “In all times kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independence, and in ceaseless competition [for power], are in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns, upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbors; which is a position of war.”

British prime minister Pit the Elder in 1763 accurately predicted that the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years’ War, would be nothing but an armed truce.

French marshal Ferdinand Foch presciently characterized the Treaty of Versailles as “not a peace [but] an armistice for 20 years.”

While every state may be at war with its neighbors, some states are more able, as a matter of their great size and strength, to wage it. Washington is at war with every state (that is every other ruling class) that does not submit to US hegemony. Almost always the war is carried out as the imperialism of peace. For decades, Washington has waged war on Iran by mainly economic means, punctuated, every now and then, by violence, but violence has been the exception. The rule has been daily non-violent coercion extending over decades. The US war on Iran aims to contain and weaken the state so that it is incapable of extending its own domain to territory the US state currently dominates; to demonstrate to other states that what happens to countries that fail to toe the US line is that they will be menaced, throttled, and undermined by the United States, its proxies, or both; and to make Tehran more compliant with US demands favorable to US ruling class interests.    

Washington has long held Iran in a cruel economic vice that has immiserated Iranians. The predictable and intended outcome of this campaign has been civil unrest. The program has paid off handsomely for Washington, with the Iranian economy collapsing under the weight of US cruelty. Iranians took the street to demand their government provide relief from the pain, relief Tehran had not the power to provide. Even capitulating to US demands would not bring about the desired relief, since Washington refused to provide any immediate easing of its sanctions. On 20 January, The Wall Street Journal quoted US Treasury Scott Bessent: “U.S. financial pressure ‘has worked because in December, their economy collapsed. This is why the people took to the street. This is economic statecraft, no shots fired.’” To be clear, the reason why civil unrest erupted in Iran was because the United States brought it about, not by accident, not unintentionally, but by malice aforethought.

Bessent’s acknowledgement that the collapse of the Iranian economy is the product of US “economic statecraft”, which is to say the imperialism of peace, is virtually absent from the analyses of the quality, but all the same, Chauvinist and pro-imperialist, US media. No matter how sound their analyses might otherwise be, they cannot help but propagate the fiction that the collapse of economies undermined by US “economic statecraft” is due to the “economic mismanagement” of the targeted “regime.”  Thus, the victim is blamed for the miseries the US ruling class visits upon the victim’s citizens. This is true of the US imperialism of peace in Venezuela and Cuba as much as Iran.

As shocking and deplorable as the current US-Israeli attack on Iran is, is it any more shocking and deplorable than the decades-long dropping of economic atom bombs on the people of Iran by the US state and its bootlicking vassals, Canada, the UK, Germany, and so on? Indeed, it may turn out that US “economic statecraft” has created more misery in Iran than will be created by all the US and Israeli bombs that will be dropped and all the missiles that will be fired in the current campaign of violence. This isn’t to lessen the gravity of the violence unleashed on the Iranians, but to point out that a program of deliberately wrecking an economy and immiserating a people in order to expand the domain over which US and allied billionaires can dominate the world’s economic surpluses is equally deplorable and is as richly deserving of condemnation and opposition as the use of violence to achieve the same end.

Mendacity

As to the claim that Washington and its toadies are engaged in an operation to deter an Iranian threat, we can dispense with this piece of nonsense immediately. The notion that Iran is developing a nuclear arsenal and ICBMs to reach the United States is the kind of bald-faced, shameless, mendacity in which the US administration specializes. As the New York Times reported two days ago:

President Trump and his aides assert that Iran:

  • Has restarted its nuclear program;
  • Has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days; and
  • Is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States.

But:

  • There is no evidence that Iran has made active efforts to resume enriching uranium or trying to build a mechanism to detonate a bomb.
  • American intelligence agencies believe Iran is probably years away from having missiles that can hit the United States.

What’s more, US intelligence is of the view that Iran is not actively pursuing nuclear weapons.

Iran, a country dwarfed in population, GDP, and military assets by the United States alone, to say nothing of the United States and its allies, is no more of a threat to the United States than a Boy Scout troop armed with peashooters is a threat to a platoon of US Marines. All threats the chronically mendacious Washington cites are greatly inflated because Washington regards as a threat any state that 1) does not submit to US “leadership” and 2) has a means of self-defense. Iran will only be characterized as a non-threat when it has given up every means of defending itself. Indeed, US demands in its phony negotiations with Iran can be understood as an ultimatum to surrender all means of self-defense or face a withering attack.

Even if Iran had ICBMs and nuclear-warheads to place atop them it still wouldn’t be a threat to the physical safety of any person in the United States. North Korea is a nuclear-armed state with, what might very well be the ability to deliver warheads to the continental US by ICBMs, but it is hardly a threat. The reason why is that Pyongyang can’t survive a war with the United States, and therefore would never start one. The same would be true of a nuclear-armed Iran. What a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat to is Washington’s latitude to bully Tehran and impose its will on the state. That, in turn, is a threat to the US ruling class project of dominating as much of the world as possible. This, of course, is the aim of every exploiting ruling class, but few have the resources to pursue the goal. Most must be content with defending spheres of exploitation within their own territory, either by resisting the aggressions of larger states seeking to encroach on their own domestic sphere of exploitation, or coming to an arrangement that makes concessions to the larger state’s menacing demands. As for Iran, its failure to follow the path of North Korea is largely responsible for the peril in which it now finds itself. No country in Iran’s position that wishes to pursue an independent path free from the domination of the United States (or any other meddling great power) can afford to be without a nuclear deterrent.* Washington may sincerely believe Tehran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program and developing ICBMs because it makes sense for the Iranian state to do so in light of Washington’s own conduct.  It should be clear by this point that a view that is consistent with Lenin’s would deny that Washington will ever refrain from behaving in ways that encourage its victims to proliferate. The raison d’etre of the US ruling class is not to live in peace with other ruling classes, but to weaken them and turn them into vassals, and if that can’t be done, to crush them. Letting them be is not an option, any more than choosing not to try to score goals is an option for a hockey team.

International Law

Lenin’s view of war raises a question about whether international law has any practical significance. I would say that the answer is manifestly in the negative and I would hardly be alone in this view. Kant, for example, observed that “Codes [of international law] whether couched in philosophical or diplomatic terms, have not—nor can have—the slightest legal force, because states, as such, are under no common external authority.” Nothing has changed in two hundred years to contradict Kant’s thinking. Large powers and their proteges regularly violate international law without the slightest reservation and do so with impunity. They get away with it because there is no overarching, independent, authority equipped with the means to enforce compliance with international law. The strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must. Given this sad reality, it is “an illusion,” remarked the Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding, “to preach international law in a world … of capitalist struggle where [the] superiority of weapons is the final arbiter.”

I point this out because much discourse about war, apart from ignoring the imperialism of peace, attaches itself to outraged diatribes against the failure of various states (usually the United States and Israel, the accustomed miscreants) to abide by international law. Carrying on a discussion as if international law and the rules-based order have any significance as guardrails on the conduct of powerful states, focusses attention in the wrong place. The Tartuffe of international law, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, admitted in his vaunted World Economic Forum address what anyone not stultified by the propaganda of the United States and its international lickspittles already knew: That “the story of the international rules-based order was partially false; that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient; that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying vigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” If Venezuela, Iran, or Cuba were to violate international law, they would be held accountable and punished by the UN Security Council, largely a plaything and instrument of the United States.** When the United States and its proxies (Israel especially) violate international law, as they regularly do, nothing happens, except that a chorus of progressive voices bleats fecklessly about US and Israeli crimes, on the assumption presumably that ‘speaking truth to power’ will make the malefactors mend their ways. As the nineteenth-century French novelist Balzac is reputed to have observed: “Laws are spider webs through which big flies pass and little ones get caught.” Despite all the bleating, the big flies continue to pass through the spider webs with scarcely a concern.

To echo Hilferding, it is an illusion to preach international law in a world of struggle among states where the superiority of weapons is the final arbiter. As Lenin, and before him, Marx, argued, though not precisely in these words, inter-state war ends when inter-state rivalry ends. And inter-state rivalry ends, when states end. What should not be forgotten is that the long-range project of socialism is not only the end of class, which is to say the end of exploitation of one group by another, but, as a consequence of this, the end of states.  We say, declared Lenin in a lecture on war and revolution, our aim “is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.”

Notes

*On the other hand, nuclear weapons would not be a panacea for Iran. While they would very like dampen the war-lust of Washington and Tel Aviv for bombing Iran, they would do little to stop the US-led siege warfare that cripples the country and immiserates its people.

Moreover, Iran’s geopolitical situation is different from that of North Korea, and concluding that what is strategically sound for North Korea is also strategically sound for Iran, may be an error.

North Korea borders two significant powers, Russia and China. As states outside the US orbit, Russia and China are willing to trade with Pyongyang if it’s to their advantage. This makes the DPRK less vulnerable to US economic warfare than Iran, which is isolated geographically from China.

Additionally, Iran is located in, what is for Washington, a strategically important region. West Asia produces a substantial fraction of the world’s petroleum resources, which Washington aims to control in order to exercise leverage over China, Japan, and Europe, which depend on energy imports from the region. In order to control the region, Washington needs regional states to be submissive to US preferences. Inasmuch as Iran refuses to act as a US client, it has been the target of US conventional and economic warfare.

North Korea, in contrast, occupies territory that is less strategically significant for Washington, and therefore, Pyongyang can be more readily ignored. It matters little from the US coign of vantage that North Korea zealously asserts its independence. Doing so doesn’t affect US strategic interests. While it is true that China is considered the United States’ single most important strategic threat, and North Korea abuts China, Washington’s focus on the Indo-pacific region is mainly confined to maintaining control of the First Island Chain, the belt of islands running from Japan through Tawain to the Philippines and Malaysia.

An independent North Korea, then, is less of an impediment to US geopolitical ambitions than an independent Iran, and the United States is therefore less likely to be moved to attack it, nuclear arms or otherwise. It’s not clear that the same calculations apply to Iran. Why take a gamble on attacking North Korea, if the outcome might be a nuclear counter-strike? On the other hand, Washington might be prepared to gamble on attacking a nuclear-armed Iran, in light of Iran’s greater strategic importance.

** While the Security Council by no means invariably produces resolutions reflecting US preferences, on matters that do not abridge the interests of other permanent members, the council tends to go along with US wishes. Witness, for example, UNSC Resolution 2803 of 17 November 2025, which effectively ceded Donald Trump a personal autocracy over Gaza.  It is from this very same resolution that Trump’s Board of Peace was born.  There has been much talk about Trump using his Board, of which he is the chairman, as an alternative to the Security Council.  A case might be made that the Security Council is not the plaything and instrument of the United States, for if it is, why would Trump seek to establish the Board of Peace as a new Security Council? It’s true that a whole loaf is better than nine-tenths of one, but wanting a whole loaf doesn’t prove that you don’t already have nine-tenths of it. In any event, the Board of Peace is comprised, apart from its chairman, of leaders of states with insignificant power that have joined to curry favor with the US president. The Board’s power is in no way equal, much less greater, than that of the Security Council.  It may be able to compel its few members to go along with Trump’s whims, but the Security Council, in theory anyway, can compel the compliance of every UN member state.