The question of why the U.S. government began a war with Iran is unsettled. The ostensible reasons, whether stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons or protecting Iranians’ human rights, are not believable.
Iran mostly likely not was developing nuclear weapons. There had been Iran’s closely-monitored agreement in force from 2016 to 2020 not to do so, the U.S.-Israeli bombing attack on nuclear facilities in June 2025, and Iran’s reported agreement immediately prior to the war to “zero stockpiling” of enriched nuclear material.
Additionally, any U.S. government that so easily tolerates human rights abuses occurring within the United States and in certain allied nations would have to be reluctant, it seems, to fight Iran strictly on that account.
Recent commentary on the war centers on strategic considerations concerning U.S. economic sustainability and restoration of U.S. economic and political power in the world. Imperatives in these areas might indeed impel nervous U.S. decision-makers to start a war. They center on oil trading and the marketing of oil.
Why this war?
Argentinian economist Alejandro Marcó del Pont looks at geographical considerations affecting access to oil.
“[T]rue power” he states, “lies in the prerogative to close, to deny, to choke off. And in this equation, keeping the straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb [the narrow passage at the south end of the Red Sea] open constitutes a structural challenge not only for Tehran or Riyadh, but above all for the major economies of East and South Asia.
“The impact is of an earthquake of varying intensity: an existential vulnerability in Japan and South Korea, a perfect storm over booming India, and a surgical blow to the foundations of China’s growth…. [T]he constant thread running through this second Trump administration has been the geopolitical reconfiguration of the global energy sector. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz might not be a strategic ‘mistake,’ but rather a deliberate feature of the conflict….
“And then there is China, the real elephant in the room.… For Beijing, the crisis transcends the economic and becomes a strategic vulnerability of the first order…. The argument is that the blockade of the straits is a deliberate move by Washington to choke off China’s energy ‘lifeline’ and, in doing so, halt its geopolitical rise.”
China receives around 90% of the oil exported by Iran. And 37.7% of oil produced by the Persian Gulf nations and passing through the Strait of Hormuz goes to China. Marcó de Pont is asserting that the U.S. government started this war to block, or to at least control, the flow of oil and natural gas to nations seen as threats to U.S. interests.
Economist Michael Hudson agrees with Marcó del Pont on geopolitical realities. Hudson observes that the U.S. seeks “to threaten countries with economic and financial chaos, by closing off the U.S. market to their exports and by blocking their access to oil and gas from Russia, Iran, and (until just recently) Venezuela.”
Hudson explores another dimension. He suggests that, “America’s floundering attempts to reverse the loss of its economic power…has left it with few major levers to exert control over other countries…. [N]ow that the United States has de-industrialized and become debt-ridden, it has abandoned and indeed reversed these rules that served it 80 years ago. What U.S. officials call national security strategy is how to recover and maintain America’s control over other countries by weaponizing the dollar-centered financial system and its foreign trade.”
Elaborating, he asserts that U.S. warmakers want “Iran’s economy…to be closely intertwined with that of the United States, its export earnings and its monetary reserves held in the form of U.S. Treasury bonds and U.S. corporate securities.” This purpose aligns with the fact that the “entire region has become economically and politically linked to the U.S. economy. It is an investment outlet for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Arab sheikdoms (and their wealthy elites) to hold dollarized savings.”
Oil in charge
The U.S. government in the 1970s arranged for the oil-producing Gulf nations and Saudi Arabia to sell their oil exclusively for U.S. dollars. They would purchase U.S. bonds and other financial assets with their accumulated dollars. In return, the U.S. would provide military protection, advanced weaponry, and interest income.
That understanding of five decades ago is the basis for why, ever since, the value of the U.S. dollar has depended on the selling price of oil. This arrangement has long served the vital U.S. undertaking of shoring up a U.S. economy sustained through borrowing. The dollar’s value, based on oil, has remained stable and predictable. Managers of U.S. public debt obligations gain assurance not only that instruments of U.S. debt will find buyers but that also interest rates they pay will not unduly fluctuate.
Recent commentary has it that, “Because oil was and is so fundamental to nearly every industry, the ‘petrodollar’ became ubiquitous, and the dollar became the cornerstone of the global economy.” To preserve the petrodollar arrangement and the consequent predictability of the dollar’s value becomes a principal objective of this war. Free-floating dollar valuation poses the risk of rising interest rates charged by buyers of U.S. debt. In view of $1 trillion in interest already due in FY2026, that’s no small problem.
Further aggravation derives from oil producers now increasingly selling their products for the Chinese yuan and other currencies and no longer the dollar. Persian Gulf producers supply half of China’s imported oil; Saudi Arabia is the top exporter among them. Venezuela sent more than half of its crude oil exports to China in 2025, in return for yuan.
Capitalism evolves
U.S. imperial ambitions centering now on control of financial and trade mechanisms testify to an evolution. The owning classes, the monopolists in particular, have had to periodically adjust their methods. The particular calculations leading to this current U.S. war represent one step along the way.
V.I. Lenin in 1916 mentions that, “Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism.”
After World War II, imperialism lost its bloom. Former colonies became independent nations. The political influence of a recovered Soviet Union extended globally. U.S. anticommunist wars in Asia ended inconclusively or disastrously. Stagflation—inflationary pressures accompanied by diminished growth—afflicted the U.S. economy.
Neoliberalism took hold, as an adjustment. The effect, according to analyst John Bellamy Foster, was “to subordinate the state to the market while also using the state apparatus to enforce market relations.” Foster elsewhere indicates that neoliberalism “involves a systematic shift in the ‘boundary line’ between state economic activities and the private sector. This boundary line has now shifted decisively against the state, leaving little room for the state’s own consumption and investment, outside of the military sector, and with the state increasingly subsidizing the market and capital through its fiscal and monetary operations.”
Money talks
Neoliberalism, he reports, enabled U.S. capitalists to devise a means other than industrial production for accumulating great wealth: “With the growth of excess capacity and stagnant investment, money capital increasingly flowed into the financial sector, which invented new financial instruments with which to absorb it.… [Therefore,] neoliberalism is a historical-structural product of an age of mobile monopoly-finance capital that now operates globally through commodity chains, controlled by the financial headquarters of the multinational corporations.… All of this has culminated in a globalized process of financialization and value capture.”
Making money via financialization involves the buying and selling of instruments of debt. U.S. high-rollers have long realized that they will not profit from the debt of others as long as the dollar’s value has no basis in a thing of value, like gold or oil—hence, the petrodollar system.
Dire consequences
The risk to the rest of us is terrible. Says Foster: “[T]he conditions of our time are those of epochal economic, social, and ecological crises, accompanied by intensified imperialism and war.” Foster refers to “a new imperialism that is generating increasing global inequality, instability, and world struggle, made worse in our age by declining U.S. hegemony, which points to the prospect of widening and unlimited war.… Science now tells us that the capitalist juggernaut, if present trends continue, will soon undermine industrial civilization and threaten human survival itself—with many of the worst effects occurring during the lifetime of today’s younger generations.”
Michael Hudson also sees the Iran War and its ramifications as harbingers of catastrophe ahead. He states that, “We are seeing the economic version of what the 1960s called Mutually Assured Destruction. (1) Today’s world is threatened with a more economic kind of global collapse.… [And] this economic and political diplomacy is driving the world toward World War III.”
Disaster on the way represents capitalism in crisis. Changing modes of capitalism have yielded that skewed form of imperialism leading to war that is our concern here. The message of Marxist analyst Samir Amin in his 1998 book Spectres of Capitalism still resonates: “[C]apitalism is incapable of overcoming its fundamental contradictions.” That’s so, not least, because working people, the great mass of humanity, have yet to mobilize and say, No!
For the sake of human survival, under threat currently from wars and environmental collapse, the time is now for capitalism-in-charge to end. The need is great for a future of peace and human decency under socialist auspices.
As with all op-eds and news analytical articles published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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