Capital at the Chokepoint
Inter-Imperialist Rivalry and the War on Iran
In 1916, writing from Zurich as the European empires drove their working classes into the trenches, Lenin argued that war was not a departure from capitalism but its consequence. Monopoly capital, having saturated its home markets, presses outward: into colonies, into resource territories, into financial dependencies. When competing capitalist powers collide, the result is war.
He called it Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. One hundred and ten years later, the Strait of Hormuz is burning.
The United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026, with nearly nine hundred strikes in twelve hours, the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, and the declaration of regime change as an explicit war aim. In response, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, and as a result, twenty percent of the world’s oil supply stopped flowing. The global working class, from factory workers in Ulsan to LNG-dependent households in Bangkok to Indian migrants stranded in the Gulf, began absorbing costs they did not choose, could not stop, and will not recover from.
Leninist analysis begins not with the stated justifications of states but with two questions: whose interests does the violence serve, and whose bodies absorb its costs.
The Petrodollar as Imperial Instrument
The petrodollar system is the institutional mechanism by which American financial capital has extracted tribute from the global economy since 1974. Oil is priced and traded in US dollars. Oil-exporting states recycle their surplus dollars into American Treasury bonds and financial markets; the United States runs perpetual current-account deficits financed by that recycled capital, and global energy trade generates the demand for dollars that underwrites American monetary dominance.
The petrodollar is not a currency convention but a system of power: every nation that buys oil must first acquire dollars, and by acquiring dollars, sustains the financial conditions required for American capital to maintain its global dominance. As Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research observed in its analysis of Gulf monetary arrangements, the petrodollar regime prevented Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters from using their surpluses for industrial diversification, channeling those surpluses instead back into American financial circuits.
By 2025, Iran had deepened its yuan-denominated energy trade with China to the point where dollar exclusion was no longer hypothetical. The strikes of February 2026 were the answer.
Since the early 2000s, Iran has been contesting this system, exploring pricing oil in euros and yuan, proposing alternative exchange mechanisms outside dollar-denominated channels, and entering into bilateral energy agreements with China structured to reduce dollar dependency. The pattern predates Iran.
The cases accumulate. Saddam Hussein announced a switch to euro-denominated oil sales in 2000; the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, and oil sales reverted to dollars. Muammar Gaddafi proposed a pan-African gold-backed dinar for oil trade; NATO forces intervened in 2011, and Gaddafi was killed. Nicolás Maduro promoted oil trade outside the dollar and deepened ties with China and Russia; the Trump administration abducted him in January 2026, weeks before the Iran strikes began. The petrodollar war theory, that the United States intervenes militarily against states that threaten the dollar denomination of energy trade, is not a conjecture. It is a record.
The Geography of Imperial Competition
The Strait of Hormuz is a chokepoint on the conditions of capital accumulation for every industrial economy that transits it. Lenin’s inter-imperialist rivalry framework holds that competing capitalist powers contest not only raw materials but also investment outlets, trade routes, monetary systems, and the institutional rules that govern global exchange.
The geography makes the argument convincing. China is the world’s largest crude oil importer; roughly forty percent of its total oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Japan and South Korea import seventy to ninety percent of their crude from the Middle East, the vast majority through the same passage. Together, China, Japan, South Korea, and India account for sixty-nine percent of all crude and condensate that transited the strait in 2024, consuming more than thirty-five million barrels per day. The Strait of Hormuz is not a regional waterway but the energy lifeline of the economies positioned to contest American dominance.
American military power at the Strait of Hormuz does not protect American energy security; the United States no longer depends on Gulf oil. What it protects is the dollar’s indispensability as the medium through which all that oil is purchased. And it preserves the capacity to threaten, at will, China’s energy supply: the one power positioned to contest American imperial dominance in the coming decades.
Israel’s war aims are not identical to America’s. Israel struck to eliminate a nuclear program and degrade the regional axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis that Tehran has funded and armed for decades. The United States struck to enforce a monetary order. The convergence of those interests produced Operation Epic Fury. Their divergence will shape what comes after. Establishment commentary has declined to name what the Strait of Hormuz actually is: a lever the United States has demonstrated it is prepared to pull.
The Long Downturn and the Declining Hegemon
The Iran war is not an expression of imperial strength. Robert Brenner’s analysis of the post-1973 global economy explains why. For Brenner, the defining feature of the past half-century has been a persistent decline in manufacturing profitability across the advanced capitalist economies, the result of inter-capitalist competition that generates overcapacity faster than declining sectors can be cleared. The shale revolution that decoupled American energy security from Gulf oil made the United States the world’s largest oil producer. It changed nothing about the structural conditions of the long downturn. It was financialized investment under conditions of cheap debt: unconventional extraction chasing returns in a low-profit environment rather than flowing into productive manufacturing.
Every declining hegemon follows the same terminal sequence. Giovanni Arrighi identified it across three prior cases — Dutch, British, American — reading Kondratiev’s long waves through the lens of hegemonic transition. Productive accumulation gives way to financial accumulation. As the underlying position weakens, military enforcement of monetary privilege becomes more aggressive. The Nixon shock of 1971, the unilateral suspension of dollar-gold convertibility, marked the moment American financial accumulation superseded productive accumulation as the engine of imperial reproduction. The petrodollar arrangement negotiated with Saudi Arabia three years later was the institutional response: a new foundation for dollar dominance built on energy denomination rather than gold reserves.
The convergence of three frameworks — Leninist imperialism theory, Brenner’s long downturn, Arrighi’s hegemonic transition — was already being mapped onto American imperial practice in the work the author undertook with Peter McLaren in Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), written in the third year of the Iraq occupation.
The Iran war of 2026 confirms what the analysis predicted: American military force is not a sign of imperial dominance but its substitute. The terminal sequence is determined, not inevitable: declining hegemons have choices, and the choice made here was force. It is a declining hegemon defending a petrodollar system that its own deindustrialization has made impossible to sustain by other means. China’s patient accumulation across Belt and Road corridors, its refusal to confront American military power while quietly extending capital across the Global South, maps onto the ascending phase Arrighi identified in every prior hegemonic transition: the strategy of a power that does not need to fight for what American decline is already delivering.
China’s Imperial Caution
Some on the left argue that China cannot be analyzed as an imperial power because it has not engaged in military action to defend its overseas interests. China did not intervene when Maduro was removed under American coercion. It did not intervene when Iran was struck in the twelve-day war of June 2025. It has not intervened as Iran burns. If China were imperialist, or so the argument goes, it would behave as imperialists do.
The argument, however, mistakes the form of imperialism for its content. Lenin defined imperialism not by military aggression alone but by the export of capital, the formation of monopolies, the division of the world among finance capital, and the territorial division among great powers. China’s Belt and Road Initiative has extended Chinese capital to more than one hundred and fifty countries. Its twenty-five-year strategic partnership with Iran is an investment option, not a defense commitment. A weakened, post-conflict Iran dependent on Chinese reconstruction capital is, from Beijing’s perspective, a more tractable partner than a sovereign Iran capable of playing competing powers against each other. Chinese imperial strategy operates through accumulation rather than occupation. Its restraint in the face of American military aggression is not weakness but patience.
Iran’s Class Contradictions
The Islamic Republic is not a victim of imperialism: it is a capitalist state with its own class character, its own repressive apparatus, and its own record of violence against the working class it claims to defend. A Leninist analysis requires both facts simultaneously. The Communist International must enter into temporary alliances with bourgeois nationalist movements in colonial and semi-colonial countries, but must never dissolve its independent proletarian politics into support for capitalist governments, however anti-imperialist their rhetoric.
The IRGC controls an estimated thirty to forty percent of the Iranian economy through a network of bonyads, quasi-religious foundations that function as vertically integrated conglomerates exempt from taxation and insulated from civilian oversight. The regime that American bombs are now targeting is the same regime that massacred protesters in January 2026 — workers, teachers, women, students — who had taken to the streets over food inflation of forty-two percent, the collapse of the rial, and five decades of theocratic repression. Rights organizations place the death toll in the thousands; some reports, citing classified security documents, put the figure as high as thirty-six thousand, amid an internet blackout that prevented independent verification.
The Comintern theses were explicit on this point. Opposing imperialist aggression and refusing political solidarity with Tehran’s ruling class are independent of each other. The working class must fight for the defeat of the American and Israeli war on Iran, and must maintain its political independence from the theocratic state. Political support for the ruling class of a state at war is not required by opposition to the war itself. Conflating them is the error Lenin named directly: anti-imperialism cannot mean political support for khans, landowners, and mullahs.
The Iranian working class has two enemies: the imperial powers bombing its cities, and the theocratic state that has spent four decades suppressing every organization through which it might fight back.
The Distribution of Ruin
The first week of the war made the asymmetry visible. South Korea’s KOSPI fell sixteen percent, Japan’s Nikkei ten percent, Chinese markets 2.3 percent. Beijing’s insulation from the immediate shock reflects not luck but decades of deliberate strategic petroleum reserve stockpiling and supply chain planning, the preparation of a ruling class that has been planning for a world after American naval dominance since before this war began.
South Korea’s LNG stockpiles were nine days from exhaustion in the first week of March. Japan’s strategic crude reserves cover one hundred and fifty days; its LNG (liquefied natural gas) reserves cover two to four weeks. India holds fewer than thirty days of petroleum reserves and has nearly ten million citizens living in the Gulf states now under Iranian missile fire: conditions shared by working classes in countries that did not vote for this war, did not authorize it, did not benefit from the shale revolution that insulated American capital from its consequences, and have no mechanism to refuse its costs.
When asked about rising fuel costs, Trump offered a single sentence: “If they rise, they rise.” It was not a gaffe. It was a confession: the American ruling class articulating, without embarrassment, that the consequences of its war fall on someone else. The petrodollar system is this indifference, inscribed in the rules of global finance and practiced without interruption for fifty years.
The Iranian worker, the South Korean chipmaker, the Indian laborer in the Gulf, the Bangkok household rationing power: they share a condition and no common politics. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union refused to handle military cargo during the Iraq war. Twenty-three years later, no dockworker federation, no seafarers’ union, no labor international has made a comparable refusal. Who organizes across these fractured dependencies? Lenin diagnosed the problem in 1916 from Zurich, watching a war kill millions he could not reach. He named the system. He could not stop it, and the analysis alone was not enough. It is not enough now. What is missing is not the theory. It is the political force capable of acting on it.
That gap — between the diagnosis and the capacity to act — is where this war, like every imperialist war before it, deposits its dead.
Sources and Further Reading
Theoretical Framework
Lenin, V.I. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). The foundational text for the inter-imperialist rivalry argument developed in this essay. Available in full at marxists.org.
Brenner, Robert. The Economics of Global Turbulence. New Left Review, 1998; expanded as a book by Verso, 2006. The primary source for the long-downturn argument and for the analysis of falling manufacturing profitability in the post-1973 global economy.
Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. Verso, 1994. The source for the hegemonic transition framework and the terminal sequence of declining empires. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. Verso, 2007. Extends the analysis to Chinese accumulation strategy.
Kondratiev, Nikolai. “The Long Waves in Economic Life.” Review of Economic Statistics, 1935. The original long wave thesis, later elaborated by Schumpeter, Wallerstein, and Arrighi.
McLaren, Peter and Ramin Farahmandpur. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. The convergence of Leninist imperialism theory, critical pedagogy, and American imperial practice developed in this essay draws on the theoretical framework constructed in this book.
Petrodollar System
Spiro, David E. The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets. Cornell University Press, 1999. The most rigorous scholarly account of how the petrodollar arrangement was constructed and maintained.
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. “The Road to De-Dollarisation Will Run through Saudi Arabia.” Newsletter No. 50, December 2022. tricontinental.org.
Current Conflict — Empirical Sources
Britannica editors. “2026 Iran Conflict.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, updated March 2026. britannica.com.
Fortune. “Asia faces an energy shock from the Iran war and a closed Strait of Hormuz.” March 5, 2026.
Fortune. “Oil worries and Iran war hammer Asian stocks, with Korea’s KOSPI taking the biggest hit.” March 9, 2026.
Nikkei Asia. “South Korea to cap fuel prices as energy costs soar over Iran.” March 9, 2026.
CNBC. “The Strait of Hormuz is facing a blockade. These countries will be most impacted.” March 3, 2026.
Al Jazeera. “US, Israel bomb Iran: A timeline of talks and threats leading up to attacks.” February 28, 2026.
House of Commons Library. “US-Israel strikes on Iran: February/March 2026.” March 2026. commonslibrary.parliament.uk.
On the Left and Iran
Black Agenda Report. “On the Coloniality of Solidarity: Iran, Imperialist Aggression, and the Western Left’s Blind Spot.” March 2026.
Left Voice. “Defend Iran, but Don’t Support the Theocracy.” March 2, 2026. leftvoice.org.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Beijing Doesn’t Think Like Washington — and the Iran Conflict Shows Why.” March 2, 2026. carnegieendowment.org.
Chatham House. “China is playing the long game over Iran.” February 27, 2026. chathamhouse.org.