Iran, the United States and Imperialism
By Syed Farid Alatas
Professor, National University of Singapore
Recent events, namely the abduction of Venezuela’s President, Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores by the United States, the US and US-backed Israeli war of against Iran, the unjust blockade of fuel shipments to Cuna and, of course, the Israeli genocidal war against Gaza with full US backing, have all merely served to confirm the reality of imperialism in our contemporary lives. If Western imperialism took the form of direct colonial rule since the European conquest of the Americas in the late fifteenth century till the mid-twentieth century, today it operates indirectly through the economic, political and cultural control of the Global Majority via persuasion, intimidation, threats and intervention. Despite the vast majority of the world having undergone formal decolonization, we are still subject to domination, particularly by the United States, that the form of economic controls or political coercion. This is what President Sukarno, at the Asian-African Conference of 1955, also known as the Bandung Conference, referred to as neocolonialism.
Recently, two chief diplomats, the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and the Iranian Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, spoke at separate international forums and reflected in their speeches two widely differing visions of what the world should be like. One was a grotesque display of the imperialist impulse while the other a plea for international order, respect and peace.
Araghchi spoke at the Al-Jazeera Forum in Doha, held on February 7-9 this year. He spoke about the right to self-determination [of Palestinians], of the need to maintain the utmost respect for international law, and of the importance of struggling against an order in which borders are temporary, sovereignty is conditional, and security is determined by military occupation. Araghchi spoke in the context of the Israeli colonization of Palestine, but he could just as well have been speaking about Venezuela or Iran. What the Iranian diplomat was calling for is the decolonization and deimperialization of the world.
This comes at a time when the United States is working to consolidate imperialism and rewesternize the world. This brings us to Rubio’s speech which was delivered at the Munich Security Conference; one week after Araghchi spoke in Doha. Remember that Rubio was addressing the Europeans. In the early part of his address, Rubio glorified the founding of America, never once referring to the genocide that the European “discoverers” perpetrated against the natives. Instead, he referred to the Christian faith as a sacred inheritance brought from Europe by those who settled what they called the “New World,” but which was known to the indigenous natives as Abya Yala. Rubio stressed that “[we] are part of one civilization – Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.” He went on to recount the great scientific and cultural achievements of Western civilization, without making any reference to the significant contributions of the Chinese, Indians and Muslims to the making of the modern West, not to mention Europeans and American racism, misogyny, slavery and colonialism that the modernization and industrialization of the West was founded on.
Not only was Rubio’s speech completely devoid of a multiculturalist sensibility, it secreted xenophobia. He lamented opening “our doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.” He glorified the bombing of Iran in June 2025 as well as the abduction of Venezuela’s president and first lady.
Bemoaning the anti-colonial movements that contributed to the decline of the Western empires, Rubio called for the renewal and restoration of Western civilization to “build a new Western century.” He noted that for five centuries, Western civilization had expanded through the work of its missionaries and soldiers, and settled continents and established empires. But, the West began to contract from 1945. Rubio told the audience in Munich that President Trump and the United States wanted to work with Europe to return to the Western age of dominance.
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