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The Iranian Protests Explained by Daniel Falcone

  In this interview, international relations scholar   Stephen Zunes   and Middle East historian   Lawrence Davidson   help to unpack the Iranian protests and explain their relevance within the context of U.S. and Israeli national interests. Daniel Falcone:   Jeffrey St. Clair  of CounterPunch, recently cited filmmaker  Jafar Panahi’s  insistence that change in Iran must come from the will of the people, not from outside intervention. As U.S. and Israeli involvement tends to strengthen  hardliners , how do you explain the balance between international solidarity and the risk of external actors undermining Iran’s sovereignty and  social movement ? Lawrence Davidson:  One has to ask what these terms,  international solidarity , and risk from external actors, mean in today’s international environment. If international solidarity means, for instance, the solidarity of reactionary countries that have somehow made an allian...
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Weaponizing America’s Economy in Service of Israel by Jamal Kanj

  E mpires rarely fall on the battlefield; they implode under the weight of their own arrogance and corruption. The hubris radiating from the White House suggests that this old imperial truth is once again asserting itself. Unable to compete in the global economy it once championed, Washington now weaponizes its economy turning trade, finance, currency, and credit into instruments of blackmail. Washington has changed the “rules-based international order” into tariffs, sanctions, asset seizures, secondary penalties, and financial intimidation. Economic power morphed from competition and as a means of exchange into a tool of retribution. Nowhere this tool is used more obsessively by the U.S. government than in service of Israel. Long before Israel’s genocide in Gaza, successive U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, abandoned any pretense of restraining the increasingly unhinged Jewish supremacist state. Instead of enforcing international law, Washington built a paral...
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