Published on June 25, 2025 by Walter Grobe
English translation done by Google, with corrections by the author
Ukraine, Israel-Iran: these two events have something in common that is given too little attention in the public debate. These wars are not just about sovereignty – for example, which parts of Ukraine are under the control of which states, or whether Iran can decide which nuclear program to pursue – but, in my view, the warring parties‘ central concern is controlling their own populations.
And even more: they support each other in this, precisely by waging war against each other.
In the case of Israel-Iran: as much as large segments of the population in Iran desire liberation from the current regime and may fight for it, Israel’s attacks essentially give the regime a boost of legitimacy that it has long since forfeited. There are likely very few citizens who do not desire military defense against such pretensions from a foreign power, as Israel announces with thankfully openness. Israel not only claims control over Iran’s nuclear policy, but also makes it clear that it claims, or already has, air sovereignty over the entire country. Any fundamental internal political development in Iran is now under threat of being targeted with Israeli and/or US bombs, as has long been the case with Lebanon and Syria.
Navid Kermani, a writer with a German passport, Iranian roots, and connections to the country and Israel, notes that the democratic movement in Iran was already severely damaged years ago by the Israeli government’s declaration of support for it. („Süddeutsche Zeitung,“ guest article, June 22, 2025). This strengthened the Iranian regime’s slander that the democratic movement is a tool of Israeli subversion, and that democrats, as Israeli agents, belong to the gallows. Perhaps also worthy of note in this context is the Israeli government’s announcement that it bombed Evin Prison in Tehran; the regime is holding domestic political opponents there.
Kermani also reports from the other side that one of his Israeli interlocutors, who is participating in demonstrations against his government’s Gaza war, is complaining about the Iranian rockets that hit the demonstration site. While this may be a rather small-scale example, the Iranian regime is certainly complicit in driving Israeli citizens who disagree with their government’s extreme violence back under its „protection.“
My thesis: both regimes are working to ensure that no real opposition, no real democratic turnaround, can emerge on the other side; Despite all the raging promises of mutual annihilation, they stabilize each other, or more precisely: they do so through this kind of propaganda. It is unlikely that Iran will abandon its nuclear programs, whatever they may be, and one can assume that it is at least secretly supported in this by others, such as Russia and China. But both the mullahs and Netanyahu have likely pushed domestic criticism into a corner, at least for the time being.
Do we remember the protracted war between Iran and Iraq from 1980 to 1988, shortly after the mullah regime seized power in Iran? The war served both the mullahs, who had just gained a still shaky grip on power, and Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein to consolidate their brutal power structures – and the US, in alliance with Israel, supported both regimes in this. The so-called Iran-Contra affair revealed, among other things, that Israel was also involved in US arms deliveries to the mullah regime, even though the US and Israel allegedly rejected it.
The war was ultimately characterized primarily by the fact that, regarding the border issue, its alleged cause, everything remained the same, but the youth of both countries were forced to murder each other on a horrific scale, and the respective opposition forces were cornered as alleged enemy agents. Only after this war did the mullahs gain a firmer footing.
The Ukraine war is difficult to directly compare with the conflicts in the Middle East, at the center of which is Israel. However, even in the case of the disputes over Ukraine, both the regimes in Russia and Ukraine, whose basic political-economic structures can perhaps be characterized – simplifying – as ‚ racketeered oligarchies‘ perceived as a heavy burden by large sections of the population, have apparently been able to consolidate against their own populations and their democratic demands for the time being – through war.
What does „multipolarity“ mean?
One might want to dismiss the parallels I draw based on these examples as arbitrary and unrealistic. But I won’t let up and simply go higher, to the global level, where, in my view, changes are taking place under buzzwords like „multipolarity“ that, in my view, can best be categorized in a similar way.
The official portrayals of global conflicts are about territories, for example, Taiwan or the division of Ukraine; the deeper issue is whether there are serious systemic differences between rival superpowers like the USA and China, such as between democracy and autocracy, or between aggressor and defender, such that taking sides is unavoidable. Put simply, it’s about one’s own state or group of states offering better opportunities for the future of humanity than their respective rivals or opponents.
The now common term „multipolarity“ suggests that the US has now had to abandon its claim to sole global leadership in light of China’s growing strength, and that perhaps a more peaceful world regime is possible in which the various powers are better balanced. In fact, however, we are not seeing the US and its supporters relinquishing global leadership, but rather expanded bombing campaigns, and no tendency among the Chinese leadership to settle for second place.
Jan Opielka wrote a detailed analysis of this in the „Berliner Zeitung“ of June 24, 2025, which I largely agree with.
Both claim that it is about their own state or group of states („the West“ – „BRICS“) offering better prospects for the future of humanity than their respective rivals. The US, as is well known, has never been particularly reluctant to proclaim its capitalist, exploitative order as the supposed messiah of humanity; the Chinese government, which now also presides over a variant of turbo-capitalism and its international expansion, invokes the historic task of reclaiming China its rightful international leadership, as one of the long-standing leading international cultural nations, if not the true center of the world – after its historic humiliation at the hands of Western imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
But what will become of these seemingly mutually exclusive claims when internal conditions are now becoming significantly more similar?
If, in the age of digitally capturing every aspect of life, government control of citizens is progressing at a similar pace in both the West and the East, if there are no longer any significant qualitative differences between a Chinese social credit system and the disempowerment being promoted in the West, for example, through the abolition of cash? If systematic efforts are being made everywhere to transform the responsible citizen of a democracy into a 24/7 controlled work slave and happy consumer?
And even more: when the supposedly fundamentally different government systems in the US, the EU, Russia, and China agree and mutually support each other in international bodies like the World Health Organization (WHO, jointly developing global ‚pandemic‘ and vaccination regimes? When their diplomats meet cooperatively, without being significantly disrupted by the wars they are simultaneously waging against each other, as in Ukraine, or by the planning and gigantic armaments they are simultaneously pushing forward in preparation for further rival wars? When a biological weapons laboratory like the one in Wuhan is jointly operated by the US and China? When a significant portion of the US national debt is still held by China today, and large-scale US-China capital ties continue to be advanced across continents? When the US government lets its own population stare down the barrels of Marines under the pretext of combating illegal migration?
Perhaps we can get closer to reality if we do no longer classify the contradictions between governments, especially so-called systemic contradictions and territorial conflicts such as those between the USA and its Western satraps (EU) on the one hand, and China on the other, as the most important contradictions driving global political developments.
In other words: perhaps we can get further if we classify the contradictions that separate and alienate the systems in both East and West from large parts of their respective populations as no less dynamic than territorial wars.
Very simply, I would say: today, the world, with its more than 8 billion people, is governed by a relatively uniform economic system, in which the capitalist exploitation of human labor and the ruthless exploitation of nature are the universal fundamental law. The various – and certainly fiercely rival – powers face the common problem of maintaining their power in the face of all the social and democratic demands of the majority of the world’s population, and in the face of the destructive results of their own mismanagement. It will not be possible in the long run to continually blame the respective opponents for the catastrophes in order to maintain exploitation and disempowerment in their own spheres.
A scheme like this: the rival systems in East and West, North and South, should be viewed more as the representatives of one and the same global, unsustainable economic-political system than as autonomous, essentially different entities struggling with one another for a better future for the world – I consider such a conceptual model to be useful in light of current developments. In all military confrontations, their common concern is that fundamentally emancipatory developments do not occur, either in their own or in the enemy’s sphere.
Such a scheme would not have been entirely appropriate a few decades ago. However, many people cling to political categories of the past and are less able than ever to grasp current developments.
My own limited horizon allows me, for now, to perceive only hints of real social developments that would be essentially more humane and sustainable than the global regime described. More time and experience are probably needed with its new, brutal and subtle mechanisms of control, seduction, mass destruction, and division. It is a deadly system in which the lives of masses do not count, are deliberately destroyed, and the autonomy and creativity of the vast majority of humanity are fundamentally denied – it is killing itself and will be negated by life.
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