When you fuel your vehicle here in the Philippines and wince at the price, which has surged above ₱100 a liter for diesel alone, you may be told that Iran’s “blockade” of the Strait of Hormuz is to blame.
But the truth exposes this as deliberate distortion. While the United States and Israel were actively negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran in Geneva—talks described by Omani mediators as making “significant progress,” with a deal “within reach”—they launched a massive assault on Feb. 28. They assassinated Iran’s head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They bombed the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing at least 165 young girls. They struck a factory in Isfahan, killing 15 workers. They damaged 56 museums and historic sites, including four Unesco World Heritage Sites.
And yet, even after this betrayal, Tehran has continued granting safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz to ships from Pakistan, India and Türkiye—and is in talks with China, France and Italy to do the same. The Strait is not the cause of this crisis; it is the consequence of American and Israeli aggression. The narrative blaming Iran for our economic pain is a lie designed to shield the real culprit: the United States and Israel.
But for the Philippines, there is a cruel irony: Even as our Asian neighbors negotiate directly with Tehran to secure their energy supplies, Manila cannot. While Pakistan, India and Türkiye exercise independent foreign policies that allow them to engage with Iran, the Philippines remains bound by its status as a staunch US ally in Asia.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration has deepened military ties with Washington, hosted expanded US troop presences, and aligned itself unequivocally with American strategic interests. That alignment—that subordination of national sovereignty to imperial diktat—has cost us any seat at the negotiating table. We pay the price at the pump not because Iran blocks the Strait, but because our own government has surrendered the diplomatic independence that might otherwise secure our livelihood.
Empire’s first conquest
There is a bitter historical symmetry in all of this. The United States first emerged as a global imperial power right here, in our archipelago. In 1898, the Treaty of Paris transferred the Philippines from Spanish to American colonial rule—a transaction that ignored the existence of the Philippine Republic, already declared free.
When Filipinos refused to trade one colonizer for another, Washington unleashed a brutal three-year war of conquest. Over 600,000 Filipinos perished, mostly civilians, from bullets, disease, and scorched-earth tactics ordered by generals who spoke of turning Samar into “a howling wilderness.”
Hindsight tells us that rather than an aberration, the Philippines was the template. The same logic that drove American troops to pacify our ancestors now drives American bombs to fall on Tehran: the refusal to accept that any nation, anywhere, might insist on genuine sovereignty.
Why Iran is targeted
This brings us to the central front of the global struggle today: the US-Israeli war on Iran. Let us be absolutely clear: This is not a conflict about nuclear weapons or human rights. The US aim is not to improve the lives of Iranians, but to destroy a state whose crime is its sovereignty and its refusal to submit to imperial diktat.
To understand why Iran stands as the primary obstacle to US-Israeli domination, one must trace the long arc of its anti-imperialist struggle—a history written in oil, blood and betrayal. It begins in 1908, when British prospectors struck oil at Masjed Soleyman, giving birth to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and inaugurating a century of plunder.
For decades, Iran received a paltry 16% of the profits from its own resource while Britain grew wealthy. The first serious challenge came in 1951, when the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry. His reward: imperial vengeance. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 orchestrated a coup that toppled his government, reinstalled the monarchical dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and returned Iranian oil to Western control.
The Shah, now Washington’s “man in Tehran,” ruled through Savak, the American-trained secret police. In 1963, he launched the “White Revolution”—a program that enriched the monarchy and dispossessed peasants. The following year, he signed the Capitulation Bill, granting US military personnel diplomatic immunity—a humiliation that prompted Ayatollah Khomeini, then in exile, to deliver his famous denunciation: “They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog.”
The revolutionary tide crested in 1979, when the Iranian people swept away the US-backed Pahlavi regime and established the Islamic Republic—the first modern state to ground itself in anti-imperialism and resistance to Western domination. On Nov. 4, 1979, revolutionary students seized the US Embassy, holding 52 diplomats for 444 days. Washington responded with frozen assets, economic warfare, and waves of crippling sanctions that continue to this day—an economic siege denying Iran access to banking, trade, medicine and food.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, launching the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, he did so with the backing of over 50 countries, including the United States, which became his most crucial patron. The United States provided satellite intelligence used to target chemical weapons attacks, while the US Navy attacked Iranian vessels and shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 civilians aboard.
All the while, Iran bled alone. And through it all, Israel—once Iran’s ally under the Shah—received billions of dollars in US aid, developed nuclear weapons in secret, and waged a long shadow war that has now erupted into open confrontation.
Dual reality
Before the 1979 Revolution, Iran was a society marked by deep educational inequality. The four decades since the revolution present a dual reality. On one hand, the Islamic Republic has overseen a profound social revolution, lifting literacy, expanding education, and improving health outcomes for all, especially women and the rural poor—the very populations that the pre-revolutionary monarchy neglected. On the other hand, the economy, while showing resilience and periods of growth, has been repeatedly shattered by externally imposed war and the most comprehensive regime sanctions in modern history.
One of the most transformative acts of the Islamic Republic was the immediate establishment in 1979 of the Literacy Movement Organization, paired with heavy investment in educational infrastructure. The results have been dramatic. Literacy among those over age 6 rose from 47.5% before the revolution to over 90% by 2024. Among the critical 10-to-49 age group, literacy rates reached 97.8% for men and 96.1% for women in 2023–2024.
The literacy gap between men and women has narrowed significantly. Women’s literacy increased two-and-a-half times, and today, women constitute the majority of university entrants in Iran.
Yet these gains exist under constant siege.The Iranian Foreign Ministry has documented how US sanctions systematically violate fundamental rights: the right to life, as medicine becomes scarce; the right to health, as medical equipment is blocked; the right to education, as Iranian scholars are barred from international collaboration; the right to development, as infrastructure projects stall.
Even the UN International Court of Justice in 2026 ordered the US to ease sanctions on humanitarian goods, ruling they “may have a serious detrimental impact on the health and lives of individuals on the territory of Iran.” Washington ignored the ruling.
This is economic warfare—what Iranian officials call “economic terrorism”—designed to strangle a nation into submission. The data refutes the simplistic narrative of a “failed state.” Instead, it reveals a nation that has successfully invested in its human capital while its economic potential has been systematically targeted and crippled by imperial powers seeking its subjugation.
Lies that justify war
The justifications for this war are built on a foundation of lies.
First, the nuclear lie: All reliable US intelligence assessments have consistently stated that Iran has not pursued a nuclear weapon since 2003. As a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Iran has the right to develop peaceful nuclear energy—a right the treaty explicitly guarantees to all member-states.
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—a multilateral treaty endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231 and signed by Iran, the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany—placed Iran’s nuclear program under the most rigorous inspection regime ever negotiated with the IAEA (or the International Atomic Energy Agency), in exchange for sanctions relief.
Yet in 2018, President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the deal, violating a binding international agreement that inspectors confirmed Iran was fully honoring. Just hours before the Feb. 28 attack, Iran had agreed to a new deal with unprecedented IAEA inspections covering all its facilities—a fact that the aggressors simply ignored.
Second, the imminent-threat lie: The Pentagon itself admitted there was no intelligence indicating an Iranian attack was planned.
Third, the “liberation” lie: The US has no legitimate opposition to back, no plan for Iran’s future. It is repeating the catastrophic logic of Iraq and Libya—smash the state and let chaos reign, hoping a compliant client emerges from the rubble.
The weaponization of dissent
In the face of this sustained assault, we must critically examine how the empire and its intellectual fellow travelers weaponize legitimate grievances. When, amidst US bombs falling on Tehran, some respond by focusing exclusively on the Iranian government’s internal policies, we must ask: What is the material effect of this argument?
Greg Shupak exposes how leading US newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times explicitly advocate for bombing Iran and intensifying sanctions by framing these as a means to “help” Iranian protesters. This is performative concern that masks a 70-year history of US efforts to dominate Iran.
This brings us to a related tactic: the call for “nuance.” The demand to simultaneously condemn both US bombs and the Iranian state is not a principled middle ground but a sophisticated shield for imperialism. Such “centrism,” as Shambhavi Siddhi contends, is a luxury that erases material reality: The priority is opposing the immediate destruction of a nation, not performing distance from its government to appease liberal audiences.
The rhetoric of women’s liberation crescendos not during the slow violence of sanctions, but precisely when a besieged state fights for its survival. This discourse weaponizes women’s rights to justify war, masking the fact that sovereignty is the precondition for any genuine liberation—a country under bombs cannot be a country where women exercise freedom.
Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in the recent “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. A 2025 study in the Journal of Islamic Revolution Studies analyzing the uprising found that its discourse established a “hostile relationship” with the Islamic Republic while aligning closely with Western and monarchist opposition forces. The research identifies this external alignment as one of nine factors explaining why the movement “did not become hegemonic and declined”—not because Iranian women lack genuine grievances, but because the movement’s capture by forces seeking regime change rather than women’s liberation ultimately undermined its credibility.
This pattern of appropriation extends beyond gender politics to the labor movement itself. Helyeh Doutaghi’s field analysis of the December 2025 South Pars Gas Refinery protest provides ground-level evidence. When 5,000 contract workers struck for better wages and conditions, Western-funded media outlets immediately tried to hijack and reframe the movement as an “anti-regime” uprising.
But the workers themselves shattered this narrative. They publicly repudiated US attempts to co-opt their struggle, recognizing that attacking domestic security institutions plays directly into the hands of those seeking to justify external intervention. Their central slogan framed wage theft as an assault on the nation itself, binding class consciousness to anti-imperialist awareness—proving, as the scholar Max Ajl argues, that under imperial siege, patriotism is not reactionary but a working-class ideology.
4 lessons from Iran’s stance
Sovereignty forged under siege. Despite decades of crippling sanctions, Iran has built and sustained a functional state structure that refuses subservience. This proves that a viable national sovereignty model can exist outside imperial orbits.
Anchor of regional resistance. Iran has positioned itself as the principal state actor upholding the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist cause across West Asia, providing material support to Hezbollah, Palestinian resistance groups, and others. This has transformed the regional balance against US-Israeli hegemony.
Contesting imperial control. Iran has demonstrated the capacity to strike US military assets directly and in technological forms never seen before, shattering the myth of unchallengeable US dominance. Crucially, Tehran has not imposed a blanket blockade on the Strait of Hormuz; it has instead demonstrated selective control. While US-allied vessels remain barred, ships from Pakistan, India and Türkiye have been granted safe passage. This is the calibrated exercise of sovereignty—a message that Iran, not Washington, now determines which nations’ economies feed through the Strait.
The demonstration effect. By withstanding direct assault and retaliating effectively, Iran’s resistance reveals the declining potency of US power—psychologically empowering other movements for national liberation to believe that victory over imperialism is achievable.
Paying for bombs we never dropped
In the Philippines, from the jeepney driver whose daily boundary can no longer keep up with relentless oil price increases, to the student skipping meals, the farmer watching input costs climb, the worker whose paycheck shrinks with every price spike—this war is not Tehran’s alone. It lands here, in our pockets, on our plates, in our futures.
The US empire is waning, its contradictions exploding in its face. From the bayonets that once ruled our own archipelago to the bombed schools of Tehran, history indicts imperialism. But from that same history rises the resistance of the masses. As Iran stands tall, it fights a war for all of us—proving that sovereignty is possible, that a world beyond empire can be built.
Until we break free from that grip, we will keep paying for bombs we never dropped, with blood we never chose to spill. CS
Read more: War and the basic human imperatives
Sarah Raymundo is an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Center for International Studies and a member of the national executive board of the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan).
The references for her piece may be accessed at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/
