AMIDST THE ONGOING US–Israeli war against Iran and the wider region, renewed attention has turned to the forces shaping US policy in the Middle East. A common interpretation presents the current war as an Israeli-led adventure, driven either by the power of a pro-Israel “lobby” or by Benjamin Netanyahu’s supposed influence over the Trump administration.
In this account, Israel has dragged the United States into a conflict that cuts against its own strategic interests. This perspective has even found an echo among racist and isolationist currents on the MAGA far right, where figures such as Tucker Carlson have called for a break with Israel in the name of an exclusionary “America First” nationalism.
Such framings are both wrong and politically dangerous. By exceptionalizing Israel as a state uniquely capable of bending American policy to its will, they obscure the longstanding place of the US–Israel alliance within the larger structures of American power. But the problem runs deeper than a mistaken reading of this particular relationship.
It reflects a widespread approach that interprets foreign policy as the outcome of competition among state officials and interest groups, severed from the class relations and material structures of US capitalism. American strategy in the Middle East is thereby reduced to a series of contingent policy choices, rather than understood through the historical development of US imperialism and the region’s changing place within global capitalism.
This approach abandons the core Marxist insight that the capitalist state is an institutional form of ruling-class power, which serves to mediate the conflicts inevitably appearing between and within classes.1Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Alongside its repressive and ideological functions, the capitalist state attempts to guarantee the “general conditions of production which cannot be assured by the private activities of the members of the dominant class.”2Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 1995), 475.
Once this view is jettisoned, state policy becomes personalized in the decisions of individual rulers, and the class relations that underpin the state disappear from view. In liberal accounts, Trumpism is treated as an aberrant expression of an irrational narcissist rather than as a political form emerging from a crisis-ridden global capitalism.
An analogous problem appears in ostensibly more radical Third Worldist traditions, where the state is viewed primarily through the prism of national confrontation with imperialism. Its class character, and the domestic social relations through which imperialism operates, are pushed into the background.
This abstraction of state power from class relations is part of a more general tendency to reduce imperialism to a policy choice of war and military conflict. Yet, as Lenin forcefully argued more than a century ago, imperialism cannot be separated from the economic structures of capitalism and reduced to one policy among others.3Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline,” in Selected Works, 1(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963 [1917]), ch. 7, Marxist Internet Archive, marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch07.htm.
War may be among its most visible forms of appearance, but imperialism is now a permanent feature of the capitalist world market, structured through the systematic transfer of value from dominated regions (and subordinate classes in those regions) towards the leading centers of accumulation.4It is beyond the scope of this article to fully discuss the ways in which this occurs, but they include the export of capital through foreign direct investment, the direct control and extraction of natural resources, and the enormous debt-service payments made by countries in the Global South. Unequal exchange in trade constitutes a further route, as do systems of migrant labour in which the costs of reproducing workers are borne largely in poorer countries while the value generated by their labor is appropriated elsewhere. More recently, unequal ecological exchange has become a central dimension of these transfers. Without this emphasis on imperialism as a constitutive feature of a specifically capitalist world market, organized around the value relation, forms of exploitation and domination operating during supposedly peaceful periods disappear from view.
The failure to take capitalism itself as the starting point for understanding the contemporary world order is also evident in the language now common across much of the Left, often borrowed uncritically from mainstream political science. Concepts such as “multipolarity” frame analysis of the world order around states as the principal actors competing for power on a geopolitical chessboard, rather than understanding the national scale as an internally related element of a single, hierarchically integrated capitalist totality.5Todd Gordon and Jeffrey Webber, “Complex Stratification in the World System: Capitalist Totality and Geopolitical Fragmentation,” Science & Society 84, no. 1 (January 2020): 95–125; Adam Hanieh, “Multipolar Illusions: The Gulf Arab Monarchies and the Trajectories of the Post-2011 Middle East.” Globalizations (April 2026): 1–20.
This state-centric framing treats national economies as homogeneous units and obscures the domestic and regional class relations through which they are integrated into the world market. It is especially apparent in accounts that look to the growing influence of capitalist states such as China and Russia as evidence, in itself, of a weakening imperial order, without examining how the position of these states within the world market is shaped by the interplay between their internal class dynamics and the protracted crisis of global capitalism.
This global crisis has been accelerating since the economic crash of 2008 and is marked by a series of interconnected tendencies: the stagnation of profit rates alongside recurrent financial bubbles, the existence of vast pools of surplus money capital in search of valorization, a huge rise in public and private debt, chronic overproduction across many economic sectors, and the stark reality of the climate emergency. All states—including China—are navigating these same systemic pressures, which have intensified rivalries among the major capitalist powers.
Starting from the vantage point of the world market—the whole rather than the parts—allows us to see interstate competition as a political expression of capitalism’s underlying contradictions, not their cause. The history of the Middle East makes these dynamics especially clear.
Oil’s significance lay in what it did for the wider logics of capitalist accumulation.
The region’s centrality to the imperialist world order emerged through its changing place within global capitalism, beginning with the transformation of world energy use in the mid-twentieth century and extending to the more recent rise of China. Such a history cannot be explained through appeals to a supposedly enduring affinity between US settler-Protestantism and Zionism, nor as a struggle for the direct seizure or control of oil supplies.
Oil’s significance lay in what it did for the wider logics of capitalist accumulation.6See Hanieh, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and Making of the World Market (London: Verso Books, 2024) for a full account of this argument. This included its integration into global finance and the monetary arrangements that underpinned US power, as well as the transformation of social relations within the region itself. The Gulf monarchies became the clearest embodiment of this process, emerging as key institutional sites for the reproduction of US imperial dominance.
In the context of a prolonged crisis of capitalism, of which the relative decline of the United States is one reflection, this history helps explain the accelerating violence of US imperialism in the Middle East.
Two Pillars of American Power in the Middle East
Around the time of the Second World War, the global energy system shifted definitively from coal to oil as the primary fossil fuel (although this so-called “coal-to-oil transition” did not mean a decline in coal consumption, which has continued to grow, reaching record levels in 2025). The rise of oil enabled major transformations in capitalism itself, including a vast expansion of global energy use whose consequences are now starkly visible in the climate emergency. It also reshaped transport, industrial production and the waging of war, while underpinning the emergence of new sectors such as petrochemicals, which replaced many naturally occurring materials with synthetic products derived from petroleum.7Hanieh, Crude Capitalism.
Oil’s emergence as the dominant fossil fuel was closely tied to the consolidation of the United States as the leading capitalist power after the war. Unlike most European countries, the United States possessed vast domestic oil reserves, while American companies dominated international production.
As global demand rose, Washington sought to protect domestic supplies from export pressures that might push up prices at home. US reconstruction plans therefore encouraged Western Europe to meet its growing energy needs through imported oil, with the Middle East offering supplies that were cheap, abundant, and readily transportable. More Marshall Plan aid was spent on oil than on any other commodity, and most of that oil came from the Middle East.8David S. Painter, “The Marshall Plan and Oil,” Cold War History 9, no. 2 (2009): 159–75. The coal-to-oil transition in Western Europe was therefore as much a Middle Eastern development as a European one.
But these two interlinked postwar transitions—to oil and US dominance—took place alongside the crumbling of the old European-controlled order in the Middle East. Anticolonial and Arab nationalist movements were erupting across the region, especially in Egypt where a British-backed monarch, King Farouk, was toppled in a 1952 coup led by the popular military officer, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser’s victory inspired a range of social struggles across the region, with widespread calls by political movements to nationalize oil resources and use this wealth to reverse the effects of colonial domination.
As British and French power receded in the face of these anticolonial struggles, the United States moved to establish itself as the dominant external force in the Middle East. This new US-led regional order rested on two principal alliances. The first was with Saudi Arabia and the other oil-rich Gulf monarchies.
Through the 1940s and 1950s, American oil firms had come to fully control Saudi oil production. Saudi Arabia, however, was not immune from radical, left-wing movements and labor agitation, and there was even a Nasserist current within the Saudi ruling family. Faced with these challenges, the US gave unqualified support to a conservative faction of the Saudi monarchy, supplying arms, training the Saudi National Guard, and backing them against both internal rivals and regional nationalist currents.
The second key pillar of American power in the Middle East was Israel—especially after the 1967 war in which Israel defeated Egypt and a coalition of other Arab states, dealing a major blow to Nasserism and other radical political currents in the region. From the perspective of the US, Israel could be used to destabilize and wage war against any state or movement in the region that was perceived to be inimical to US (and wider Western) interests in the region. From that moment on, the US begun to supply Israel with billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware and financial support each year.
Settler Colonialism and the US–Israel Alliance
Much like Apartheid South Africa, the specificity of the US alliance with Israel rested upon the fact that Israel is a settler colony: a country founded upon the dispossession of the original Palestinian population and the ongoing racial exclusion of Palestinians who remained on the land (either under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or as Palestinian citizens of Israel).9See Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox and Rafeef Ziadah, Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine(London: Verso Books, 2025) for a longer discussion of settler colonialism and the US–Israel relationship.
A substantial proportion of Israeli society benefits from this dispossession and violence against the Palestinian population, and they have come to see these privileges in racialized and messianic terms.10Sai Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2022). With this distinct social structure and reliant upon external support for its survival, Israel is a much more dependable ally of the US than a normal “client” state (like Egypt or Jordan, for instance, which must always respond to social and political pressures from below).
This is why Israel, despite having a higher GDP per capita than the UK, France, and Italy, has received more cumulative US foreign aid than any other country in the world. Indeed, in 2021, before the genocide in Gaza began, Israel received more US foreign military financing than the entire rest of the world combined. Former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig once described Israel as “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world.”11Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C., The Ultimate Ally, n.d., embassies.gov.il/washington/Obama_in_Israel/Pages/The-Ultimate-Ally.
And Joe Biden, speaking in 1986, called Israel “the best $3 billion investment we make,” arguing “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”12See the undated C-SPAN video clip of Joe Biden speaking during the June 5, 1986, session of the US Senate, available at tinyurl.com/2hsdzfx2.Alongside this military and economic support, the US state has also continually worked to block any international censure of Israel. Since 1945, more than half of all UN Security Council resolutions that the US has vetoed have been those critical of Israel.13Hope O’Dell, “How the US has Used Its Power in the UN to Support Israel for Decades,” The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, December 18, 2023, globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/how-us-has-used-its-power-un-support-israel-decades. This US support to Israel is not tied to one particular US president or party—it is bipartisan and permanent.
None of this means that US and Israeli leaders always agree on tactics, or that Israeli governments do not respond to their own domestic political pressures and perceived interests. Relations between imperial powers and their regional allies inevitably generate disagreements, and tensions between Washington and Tel Aviv have surfaced repeatedly over the past six decades. In June 1990, amid mounting frustration with Yitzhak Shamir’s government and its obstruction of negotiations with the Palestinians, Secretary of State James Baker publicly recited the White House telephone number and told Israel: “When you’re serious about peace, call us.”14In reality, US interest in pursuing these negotiations had nothing to do with “peace.” See Hanieh, Knox and Ziadah, Resisting Erasure for a discussion of these 1990 negotiations, known as the Oslo Accords.
Similar differences have appeared during the current war, including Netanyahu’s repeated insistence that Israel can act alone and no longer depends upon American approval. Israel exercises considerable but nonetheless subordinate autonomy in pursuing its own interests, but tactical disagreement should not be mistaken for a rupture in the underlying strategic relationship. The US–Israel alliance remains central to both the accumulation of Israeli capital and to the reproduction of US power across the Middle East.
For this reason, explanations centered on the supposed power of an “Israel lobby” invert the relationship between Israel and the US. The lobby thesis presents US policy as the outcome of pressure exerted by a sectional interest group upon an otherwise neutral state. It is therefore a profoundly liberal perspective, which separates the making of state policy from the material relations through which the US state attempts to organize and represent ruling-class interests. It also obfuscates the imperialist nature of US capitalism—and its bloody history elsewhere in the world—because it implies that the US would actually be a force for good were it not for the malign influence of foreign actors.
Explanations centered on the supposed power of an ‘Israel lobby’ invert the relationship between Israel and the US.
Of course, this does not mean that there is no such thing as a network of well-organized groups that lobby and campaign for Israel. But we need to understand these organizations as a means through which US imperial policy is articulated and sustained at the domestic level—not as the source of that policy.
They are a disciplining tool, used to police and repress political movements (and speech) on Palestine. This is especially important at moments like these, where there is widespread popular sympathy for the Palestinian struggle and the dominant ideological narrative around Israel is under severe pressure. These pro-Israel organizations also form a key route through which anti- Palestinian racism is promoted and normalized.
In all these ways, they help translate the structural alliance between the United States and Israel into domestic political pressure and ideological consent. But to see them as the underlying reason for US support to Israel is to let the real problem—the imperialist interests of US capitalism—off the hook.
Oil and Global Finance
These two pillars of American interests in the Middle East—Israel and the Gulf monarchies—acquired even greater importance in the wake of major changes to the world oil industry through the 1970s. Following the establishment of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960 and the subsequent nationalization of oil production across major exporting states, the direct control of Western firms over world oil was substantially weakened.
In 1970, Western oil companies controlled more than 90 percent of reserves outside the United States and Soviet Union. A decade later, their share had fallen to less than one-third. Nationalization also deprived these firms of their former power to administer oil prices, contributing to the sharp price increases of the 1970s.
In this context, the US relationship with Saudi Arabia, the world’s leading oil exporter and the dominant force within OPEC, became essential to ensuring that “Third World” control over crude supplies would not be used to challenge the wider global order. This role became even more important after the 1979 Iranian Revolution overthrew the Pahlavi monarchy, removing another key ally of Washington and one of OPEC’s most powerful members. From that moment on, Saudi Arabia used its influence within OPEC to contain more confrontational strategies and to ensure that oil production and pricing remained compatible with the stability of the world market and its strategic relationship with the United States.
Yet oil’s significance extended far beyond its role as a physical commodity. From the 1970s onwards, the organization of oil production and revenues became deeply embedded in the reconstruction of a new international monetary and financial system centered on the United States. This shift coincided with the transfer of control over oil extraction and pricing from the major Western companies to the producing states, just as the collapse of Bretton Woods inaugurated a system of floating exchange rates no longer anchored to gold.
With oil firmly established as the world’s leading fossil fuel, the price increases of the 1970s generated immense financial surpluses, estimated at $1.7 trillion for Middle East OPEC members between 1965 and 1986 (with Saudi Arabia accounting for more than 40 percent of this total).15Hanieh, Crude Capitalism, 179. These surpluses, widely described as petrodollars, were channeled through US financial markets and Euro–American institutions, helping to reinforce American financial dominance at a moment when the shape of the post-Bretton Woods order remained deeply uncertain.
The US alliance with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies was crucial to this process. As the leading power within OPEC, Saudi Arabia ensured that the organization’s members priced their oil exports in dollars (up until the mid-1970s, around 20 percent of international oil transactions were conducted in British Sterling).16Stephen Galpern, Money, Oil, and Empire in the Middle East: Sterling and Post-War Imperialism, 1944–1971(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). This helped cement the US dollar as the international reserve currency, because all countries were forced to hold large quantities of dollars to fund their imports of the world’s most important commodity.
For the US, it also meant that the international demand for dollars exceeded any domestic needs, so the US could spend more abroad than it earned with less concern for the inflationary or exchange rate worries that constrained other countries. And with the dollar functioning as the global reserve currency, the US gained huge leverage over other states through the threat of sanctions or exclusion from the US banking system.
The recycling of Gulf oil revenues into US financial markets formed the other side of this arrangement, with Saudi Arabia and the neighboring monarchies investing heavily in Treasury bonds and other dollar-denominated securities. In this respect, a series of confidential agreements channeled Saudi oil revenues into US markets, and by the end of the 1970s, the Saudi kingdom held around one-fifth of all Treasury notes and bonds owned by foreign governments.17David Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
The Gulf states also became major purchasers of American arms and military hardware, which provided another route for the Gulf’s financial surpluses to support US capital. This subordinate integration of the Gulf into a US-centered global capitalism not only helped underpin American financial dominance, it also strengthened a domestic capitalist class within the Gulf whose accumulation became increasingly tied to that wider US-centered global order.
China’s Rise and American Decline?
Since the early 2000s, the relative position of the United States within the world economy has weakened. The brief period of seemingly unchallenged American supremacy following the collapse of the Soviet bloc has given way to the rise of China and other states outside the traditional Euro–American core.
Since the early 2000s, the relative position of the United States within the world economy has weakened.
At the turn of the millennium, the United States functioned as the principal engine of global economic demand, accounting for roughly 20 percent of world merchandise imports. China, by contrast, absorbed less than 4 percent of global imports. Since then, the US share of world imports has declined to around 14 percent, while China’s share has risen to approximately 10 percent.18Calculated by author from WTO Stats Dashboard, Merchandise Trade, stats.wto.org/dashboard/merchandise_en.html.
Alongside this pivot in the global consumption of goods, the US share of world GDP has fallen sharply since the mid-1980s.19US share of global GDP fell from 40 percent to about 26 percent between 1985 and 2024. American firms no longer hold such an overwhelming lead in the various lists of the world’s biggest companies.20The number of Chinese firms on the Global Fortune 500 overtook the US in 2018 and remained that way until 2024, when the US regained leadership (today there are 139 US firms compared to 128 Chinese). China’s representation on this list has risen from just 10 firms in 2000. While China’s rise has largely been at the expense of Japanese and European firms, there has also been a drop in US control of big capital: in the past 25 years, the US share of the Global Fortune 500 has fallen from 39 percent to 28 percent (calculated by author from Forbes Global Fortune 500 lists). And American control of various key technologies, critical minerals, and global supply chains has eroded substantially.
Internally, the US is marked by intensifying social problems and weakened state capacity—including a deepening public health crisis, mass incarceration, political dysfunction, and an ongoing collapse of essential infrastructure. China, meanwhile, has become a major center of production and capital accumulation, increasingly able to translate its economic weight into political influence.
The Middle East has played a key role in enabling this eastward shift in the structure of the world market. China’s industrial rise was critically dependent upon a massive increase in energy consumption, with the country’s oil consumption doubling between 1998 and 2009 and then doubling again between 2009 and 2024.
By 2025, China accounted for 16 percent of the world’s oil consumption—more than the whole of Europe combined and second only to the US (at 19 percent).21Energy Institute, Statistical Review of World Energy, 2026, 35. Similarly rapid growth in Chinese energy consumption can be seen in natural gas, coal, and of course renewables.22China’s gas consumption doubled between 2015 and 2025, and is now 10.6 percent of the world’s share, third behind Russia (11.5 percent) and the US (21.8 percent). China consumes 55 percent of the world’s coal and has around one-third of the world’s renewable supply.
Most of this new Chinese demand for oil and gas was met through imports from the Middle East, primarily the Gulf. According to UNComtrade data, as of 2024, the Gulf monarchies were supplying around one-third of China’s crude oil imports and one-quarter of its liquified natural gas (LNG), making them China’s largest external oil supplier and second-largest source of LNG.23Calculated from UN Comtrade database, comtradeplus.un.org.
When oil from Iraq and Iran are included in these figures, the wider Persian Gulf region was the source of around 55 percent of China’s crude imports.24UN Comtrade figures. As a result, the geographic axis of the Gulf’s commodity exports have shifted away from Western markets, becoming increasingly tied to an “East–East hydrocarbon axis” that links Gulf energy exports to Chinese/East Asian industrial growth and manufacturing.
This eastward shift, however, has not meant a rupture with the Gulf’s longstanding integration into dollar-denominated assets and American financial institutions. US Treasury data show that Gulf holdings of American securities, including Treasuries, corporate debt and equities, rose from $611 billion in 2017 to more than $1 trillion by 2024, surpassing those of long-standing US allies such as France and Germany.25See Hanieh, “Multipolar Illusions,” for a fuller mapping of the size of these petrodollar surpluses and Gulf investments in US financial markets.
Unlike China and Japan, whose portfolios remain heavily concentrated in long-term Treasury debt and whose overall share of US securities has declined since 2017, Gulf investors have expanded their exposure to US equities. Their holdings of American stocks nearly tripled over this period and now account for around five percent of total foreign investment in US companies.
The same pattern is visible in the portfolios of Gulf sovereign wealth funds, which have become major investors in American firms. By 2024, Gulf sovereign wealth funds controlled an estimated $4.9 trillion in assets, up sharply from just over $3 trillion in 2020. This represented around 40 percent of global sovereign wealth fund capital and included several of the world’s largest funds, among them the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Mubadala Investment Company, the Kuwait Investment Authority and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Despite an expansion in the absolute size of investments in East Asia and elsewhere, US markets remain the key geographical focus of Gulf sovereign wealth funds by a substantial margin.26One analysis of the seven largest Gulf sovereign wealth funds found that investments in China ranged between 2 and 5 percent of total allocations in 2024 compared to 10 to 52 percent of allocations for the US. The Gulf’s largest sovereign wealth fund, ADIA, has more than half of its assets in the US, and just 5 percent in China. M. Smith, “Gulf Wealth Funds Put Investing in US Well Ahead of China,” AGBI, March 8, 2024, agbi.com/banking-finance/2024/03/gulf-wealth-funds-put-investing-in-us-well-ahead-of-china/.
Arms transfers provide another mechanism that continues to tie the Gulf as a key global surplus zone to US capitalism. Between 2021 and 2025, the Gulf monarchies absorbed around one-fifth of global arms exports, most of them supplied by the United States.27Data in this paragraph drawn from SIPRI, Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2025, March 2026, sipri.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/fs_2603_at_2025.pdf. Saudi Arabia was the largest recipient of US arms over this period, accounting for approximately 12 percent of total American exports.
Nearly 80 percent of Saudi arms imports came from the United States, alongside 62 percent of Kuwait’s, 48 percent of Qatar’s and 42 percent of the UAE’s. Alongside redirecting Gulf financial surpluses into American military and high-technology industries, these weapon purchases further embed Gulf armed forces within US systems of training, maintenance and command, thereby reproducing long-term forms of strategic dependence.
The persistence of these financial and military linkages complicates simplistic narratives of an imminent transition away from a dollar-centered monetary order. China’s economic weight has grown substantially, but its financial markets remain less liquid and more tightly regulated than those of the United States.
China’s rise has reoriented the geography of Gulf trade, but it has not displaced the region’s subordinate integration into a US-centered global capitalism.
The renminbi continues to play a limited role in global reserves, cross-border lending and energy pricing. As one of the principal surplus zones in the world economy, the Gulf monarchies remain structurally tied to US financial markets and share a strong interest in the continuation of dollar supremacy. China’s rise has reoriented the geography of Gulf trade, but it has not displaced the region’s subordinate integration into a US-centered global capitalism.
US Imperialism and Endless War
Liberal commentary frequently presents Trump as a maverick and unpredictable president whose administration has been captured by right-wing extremists or evangelical reactionaries. The problem with this view is that it detaches the capitalist state and its policies from the class relations and systemic pressures, global and national, that they mediate.
Whatever Trump’s personal characteristics, his administration represents a clear political project that is attempting to manage the relative decline of US power within a world capitalism marked by a set of deep and interconnected crises. The domestic face of this imperial strategy is an aggressive nationalism built around racism, attacks on migrants, climate denialism and reactionary politics around gender and sexuality.
These ideological forms help to organize consent for militarization, justify the expansion of state repression and redirect the social anger generated by declining living standards towards racialized and politically vulnerable populations. They also prepare the population for sacrifice in the name of a nation supposedly besieged by foreign competitors and enemies within. The spread of similar far-right politics elsewhere points to a wider crisis of capitalist rule rather than a peculiarly American pathology.
The Middle East occupies a decisive place within these efforts to reorganize American global power. Central to this has been the long-running attempt to bind the region’s two historic pillars of US influence, Israel and the Gulf monarchies, within an American-led bloc. The Abraham Accords marked a major advance in this project, with the UAE and Bahrain normalizing relations with Israel in 2020 (something that could not have happened without Saudi consent).
Through these agreements, the US aims to reaffirm its regional dominance in the face of the accelerating economic pull of the East. Gulf oil is indispensable to Chinese capitalism, while the recycling of Gulf surpluses continues to support the monetary and financial structures of US global power. In any intensified conflict with China, a US-led bloc incorporating the Gulf and Israel would be of enormous strategic consequence.
The genocide in Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran (and elsewhere in the region) must be understood within this larger context. These wars arise from an attempt by the US to reassert its regional primacy and are aimed at weakening those political movements and states that continue to stand outside US interests in the region, notably Iran.
Recognizing this fact does not mean that these wars will necessarily achieve their strategic objectives. The destruction of Gaza has generated enormous popular anger across the world and deepened Israel’s international isolation. The war against Iran may further weaken the order it is intended to defend (although a key determinant here will be what happens in Lebanon). These uncertainties express the growing difficulty of reproducing imperial power in a period of systemic crisis.
In assessing these possible futures, left analysis must move beyond a purely geopolitical framing of these conflicts. An unqualified opposition to imperialism does not require the suspension of class analysis. Iran is itself a capitalist state, governed by a ruling class whose formation has been closely tied to the state apparatus and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards.
The accumulation of this class has been partly enabled by the US sanctions regime, which created privileged opportunities for politically connected capital (helped also by the expansion of economic ties with China).28Ida Nikou, “Governing Crisis—Sanctions, Austerity and Social Unrest in Iran,” MERIP, January 24, 2026, merip.org/2026/01/governing-crisis-sanctions-austerity-and-social-unrest-in-iran/. The result has been an increasingly polarized social order and the sustained repression of workers, women, students, and oppressed nationalities (especially the Kurdish minority). These conditions have generated repeated waves of revolt over the past decade, including the mass mobilizations that preceded the latest US–Israeli bombardment.
Yet the global history of US intervention demonstrates that the current attacks have nothing to do with liberating populations from repressive states. A consistent anti-imperialist politics must also be consistently anticapitalist, resisting external intervention in all its forms while recognizing that genuine emancipation cannot be delivered by any capitalist state. ×
Notes & References
- Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
- Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: Verso Books, 1995), 475.
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline,” in Selected Works, 1(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963 [1917]), ch. 7, Marxist Internet Archive, marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch07.htm.
- It is beyond the scope of this article to fully discuss the ways in which this occurs, but they include the export of capital through foreign direct investment, the direct control and extraction of natural resources, and the enormous debt-service payments made by countries in the Global South. Unequal exchange in trade constitutes a further route, as do systems of migrant labour in which the costs of reproducing workers are borne largely in poorer countries while the value generated by their labor is appropriated elsewhere. More recently, unequal ecological exchange has become a central dimension of these transfers.
- Todd Gordon and Jeffrey Webber, “Complex Stratification in the World System: Capitalist Totality and Geopolitical Fragmentation,” Science & Society 84, no. 1 (January 2020): 95–125; Adam Hanieh, “Multipolar Illusions: The Gulf Arab Monarchies and the Trajectories of the Post-2011 Middle East.” Globalizations (April 2026): 1–20.
- See Hanieh, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and Making of the World Market (London: Verso Books, 2024) for a full account of this argument.
- Hanieh, Crude Capitalism.
- David S. Painter, “The Marshall Plan and Oil,” Cold War History 9, no. 2 (2009): 159–75.
- See Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox and Rafeef Ziadah, Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine(London: Verso Books, 2025) for a longer discussion of settler colonialism and the US–Israel relationship.
- Sai Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2022).
- Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C., The Ultimate Ally, n.d., embassies.gov.il/washington/Obama_in_Israel/Pages/The-Ultimate-Ally.
- See the undated C-SPAN video clip of Joe Biden speaking during the June 5, 1986, session of the US Senate, available at tinyurl.com/2hsdzfx2.
- Hope O’Dell, “How the US has Used Its Power in the UN to Support Israel for Decades,” The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, December 18, 2023, globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/how-us-has-used-its-power-un-support-israel-decades.
- In reality, US interest in pursuing these negotiations had nothing to do with “peace.” See Hanieh, Knox and Ziadah, Resisting Erasure for a discussion of these 1990 negotiations, known as the Oslo Accords.
- Hanieh, Crude Capitalism, 179.
- Stephen Galpern, Money, Oil, and Empire in the Middle East: Sterling and Post-War Imperialism, 1944–1971(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- David Spiro, The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
- Calculated by author from WTO Stats Dashboard, Merchandise Trade, stats.wto.org/dashboard/merchandise_en.html.
- US share of global GDP fell from 40 percent to about 26 percent between 1985 and 2024.
- The number of Chinese firms on the Global Fortune 500 overtook the US in 2018 and remained that way until 2024, when the US regained leadership (today there are 139 US firms compared to 128 Chinese). China’s representation on this list has risen from just 10 firms in 2000. While China’s rise has largely been at the expense of Japanese and European firms, there has also been a drop in US control of big capital: in the past 25 years, the US share of the Global Fortune 500 has fallen from 39 percent to 28 percent (calculated by author from Forbes Global Fortune 500 lists).
- Energy Institute, Statistical Review of World Energy, 2026, 35.
- China’s gas consumption doubled between 2015 and 2025, and is now 10.6 percent of the world’s share, third behind Russia (11.5 percent) and the US (21.8 percent). China consumes 55 percent of the world’s coal and has around one-third of the world’s renewable supply.
- Calculated from UN Comtrade database, comtradeplus.un.org.
- UN Comtrade figures.
- See Hanieh, “Multipolar Illusions,” for a fuller mapping of the size of these petrodollar surpluses and Gulf investments in US financial markets.
- One analysis of the seven largest Gulf sovereign wealth funds found that investments in China ranged between 2 and 5 percent of total allocations in 2024 compared to 10 to 52 percent of allocations for the US. The Gulf’s largest sovereign wealth fund, ADIA, has more than half of its assets in the US, and just 5 percent in China. M. Smith, “Gulf Wealth Funds Put Investing in US Well Ahead of China,” AGBI, March 8, 2024, agbi.com/banking-finance/2024/03/gulf-wealth-funds-put-investing-in-us-well-ahead-of-china/.
- Data in this paragraph drawn from SIPRI, Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2025, March 2026, sipri.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/fs_2603_at_2025.pdf.
- Ida Nikou, “Governing Crisis—Sanctions, Austerity and Social Unrest in Iran,” MERIP, January 24, 2026, merip.org/2026/01/governing-crisis-sanctions-austerity-and-social-unrest-in-iran/.