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Joshua Scheer
What is unfolding around Iran is not simply another regional war—it is the latest violent convulsion of an empire trying to preserve a crumbling order through force. Washington’s assault, backed by Israel and justified through the familiar language of “security,” has once again revealed the central logic of U.S. foreign policy: when political influence weakens, military escalation follows. But this time the response from Tehran is striking at something deeper than military prestige. By linking passage through the Strait of Hormuz to oil sales in Chinese yuan, Iran is confronting not only warships and sanctions, but the monetary foundation of American hegemony itself.
For decades, U.S. power has rested on a system in which nations were compelled to trade strategic resources in dollars while accepting sanctions, debt pressure, and military encirclement as the price of survival. That arrangement allowed Washington to export inflation, finance endless wars, and punish disobedient states without ever calling it colonial rule. Now, under bombardment, Iran is answering that architecture with economic counterforce—turning shipping lanes, corporate infrastructure, and currency settlement into instruments of resistance. The result is a reminder that empire’s greatest weakness often appears when those it seeks to discipline begin attacking the mechanisms of control rather than merely enduring them.
The deeper irony is that a war sold as a demonstration of American strength may instead hasten the fragmentation of the very order it was meant to defend. Each threat against oil transit, each move away from dollar settlement, each regional demand to remove U.S. bases pushes more states to imagine a world less dependent on Washington’s financial commands. Empires often mistake coercion for permanence; history usually corrects them. What Ben Norton documents here is not only military escalation, but the possibility that another imperial overreach is accelerating the decline it hoped to prevent.
In this video, Ben Norton examines how the expanding war against Iran is colliding with the foundations of U.S. global power—not only on the battlefield, but in the currency system that has sustained American dominance for generations. As Tehran responds to military assault by tightening control over the Strait of Hormuz and demanding oil transactions in Chinese yuan rather than dollars, the conflict begins to expose the economic architecture beneath empire: the petrodollar order, sanctions power, and the dependence of global trade on Washington’s financial reach.
Norton argues that what U.S. policymakers expected would be another demonstration of overwhelming force is instead generating blowback across energy markets, shipping routes, and international currency politics. Rising oil prices, pressure on corporate infrastructure, and renewed momentum for dedollarization suggest that the costs of war are no longer confined to missile exchanges—they are spreading through every layer of the world economy. What emerges is a picture of imperial power meeting resistance not only through armed retaliation, but through efforts to weaken the financial mechanisms that made decades of intervention possible.
At the center of the analysis is a deeper anti-imperial question: what happens when states targeted by sanctions, military pressure, and regime-change strategy begin using economic leverage of their own? This video situates Iran’s response within a wider global shift, where more countries are questioning whether permanent dependence on the dollar—and submission to U.S. coercion—remains sustainable. Whether or not Tehran succeeds, the confrontation reveals that wars launched to preserve hegemony often accelerate the fractures already running through it.
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