AGAINST overwhelming odds, Iran has won a defining battle in what is a long, historical war. Even if Israel’s unrelenting bombing of Lebanon scuppers the fragile ceasefire and talks scheduled in Islamabad between US and Iranian delegations break down, Tehran has, at great cost, stared down the biggest military power the world has ever known.
Some are linking the current moment to the heyday of anti-colonial Third World internationalism marked by the Bandung conference, and even the Congress of the Peoples of the East hosted by Lenin in Baku shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. A new anti-imperialist dawn, then? Upheaval of the post-Cold War order is certainly intensifying. Beijing’s role as Tehran’s guarantor to the ceasefire confirms that an imperialist war which, beyond the Zionist fantasy of regime change in Iran, was also supposed to reinforce Washington’s encirclement of China, backfired spectacularly.
I offer here a few tentative theses on how to interpret what has just transpired and what we might expect next.
The US empire, and its Zionist outpost, will continue to deploy violence when and where possible. Washington’s relative economic decline, including the real prospect that even dollar hegemony is under threat — in the Strait of Hormuz and beyond — can only be masked by resort to more naked coercion. Other than Lebanon, let us not forget that a ‘ceasefire’ has supposedly been in effect in Gaza since October 2025. Tel Aviv will inevitably push for war with Iran again, Trump may actually follow through on his threats against Cuba, and all manner of proxy conflicts old and new will remain hot. Things will get worse before the prospects of a lasting peace marked by a new hegemonic order take meaningful shape.
Old alliances in South and West Asia as well as North American and Western Europe, among other regions are breaking down, but new alliances are still tentative. Take the UAE, which in some readings is standing completely apart from the rest of the GCC. This view is accentuated in Pakistan by the report that Abu Dhabi has recently demanded the hybrid regime pay back $3.5 billion in full. One way or the other, it is clear that the ‘East’ — or the ‘Global South’—– is far from being an ideologically coherent entity that stands unified vis-à-vis the Western heartlands of the capitalist world system. Pakistan’s ties with its immediate neighbours India and Afghanistan is a case in point about the long and hard work which needs to be done if there is a future in which the peoples of South and West Asia flourish together.
Iran’s resistance has galvanised the public.
Shifts in global and regional geopolitics that are coeval with faltering US hegemony represent the possibility of a new dawn, but ultimately the liberation of the ‘Peoples of the East’ has as much to do with domestic politics as what happens in regional and global arenas. We need look no further than our own country to understand this complex dialectic. By all accounts, Pakistan’s militarised ruling class remains committed to the classed, racialised and gendered logics of the colonial capitalist order that subjugate the mass of the people. The current regime can and should claim credit for playing the role of mediator between the US and Iran, but this does not make it less accountable for its excesses within. A repressive apparatus bred on foreign dependency does not become less so because of skillful diplomacy. The Third World internationalist project, to take the obvious historical pa-rallel, was ultimately undone by both internal and external contradictions, both operating in tandem. If a new era of multipolarity and even anti-imperialist politics and economics is on the horizon, it must take concrete shape both in the international arena and within nation-state boundaries.
Hope is important, demonstrative and sometimes even contagious. Iran’s resistance has galvanised a global public in much the same way as the Palestinian cause did in the months after October 2023. The challenge, as ever, is for this growing global voice to take on more concrete form with time, beyond the polarising logics of social media, which can just as soon turn those who otherwise share a desire for an emancipatory future against one another. A concrete anti-imperialism can bask in the glow of Iran’s resistance to empire whilst also focus on the hard task of unifying popular resistance within. Given the reactionary nature of most of the world’s regimes, one ought not to be naïve about what is to come. But Antonio Gramsci insisted the optimism of the will must not be relinquished.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, April 10th, 2026
