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Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
8-25-26
HEO/GED
The expression “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry” applies to those frustrating situations that appear to offer no means of escape. But whenever I am forced to return to the topic of the unprovoked US war against the Iranian people, a third alternative comes to mind: anger.
As I watch the video above, I feel intense animosity toward the menagerie of right-wing ideologues that has captured the US body politic, with a degenerate New York City con man as their mascot.
The speaker in the video, Trita Parsi, opposes the Trump administration’s war. He and other bourgeois strategists favor a more diplomatic approach—what they call "soft power," as opposed to the hard power of military might.
In truth, there has never really been a "soft power" approach. The diplomacy of capitalist states is always backed by the threat of violence. Long before military might is brought to bear, economic leverage is applied. The news reports we hear over the years regarding UN debates and votes obscure the reality: the US and former colonial powers routinely blackmail weaker economies to force votes in their favor.
In a completely unprovoked attack, the US and its Zionist partner dropped thousands of tons of bombs on Iran and launched hundreds of missiles, killing heads of state and the children of high-ranking officials. Yet this mass violence has failed to force the Iranian government to accept the status of another US client state in the region. Recognizing that bombing did not bring about Iran’s surrender, the US has piled new sanctions on top of those it has imposed for decades—an "economic D-Day," as the administration calls it.
Trump has been calling heads of state in the Gulf, warning of dire consequences if they continue to trade with Iran in violation of US sanctions. The Trump team arrogantly announces that the US does not have infinite patience.
What incredible arrogance.
The US is a declining world power, and Iran’s refusal to surrender its sovereignty to US imperialism reflects this shifting balance. For Iran, a country with thousands of years of history, the threat is existential. It is fighting for its very survival as an independent state. Surrender is simply not an option.
In the US, we have the famous slogan “Live Free or Die,” the state motto of New Hampshire. “These colors don’t run” is another favored American idiom. Yet American commentators rarely expect other nations—whose cultures and existence are just as vital to them—to demonstrate that same determination to defend their homeland. But Iran means it.
The current US stance proves that it is not Iran that has been intransigent in negotiations; it is the US and the real estate speculators representing American interests in these talks, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, both ardent Zionists.
While Trita Parsi chides the US in the video relying solely on hard power and insists a diplomatic solution is possible, he remains a representative of US imperialism. Factions within the ruling class may disagree on tactics, but they do not differ when it comes to defending the capitalist system and the so-called free market. He can only offer solutions aimed at maintaining the existing economic order. But capitalism cannot solve the very crises that are fundamental to its nature.
Ultimately, nothing that Mr. Parsi suggests will work in the long run either; and that long run is getting shorter.
The only solution to the capitalist system’s decline—which threatens to end life on this planet through climate catastrophe or nuclear war—is the ending of this system of production that has reached its historical apex. The only resolution to this crisis is the building of a global federation of democratic workers’ states in which production is consciously planned and set in motion on the basis of human need, as opposed to capital accumulation and profit for a tiny minority. This is not utopian. Thinking that humanity has a future under capitalism is.
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