No War in Iran: The Legacy of Trump's Aggression and Biden's Trajectory Moving Forward

No War in Iran: The Legacy of Trump’s Aggression and Biden’s Trajectory Moving Forward

Speech by Autumn Lake for the Youth Against Empire webinar on January 30, 2021 

We are entering a very interesting new period for organizing the movements for peace and justice with the recent removal of Donald Trump from, and the election of Joe Biden to, the presidency of the United States. The Anti-War movement in particular is going to face an interesting set of challenges during this new period, especially with the US’s continuation of its over 4 decades of near-constant aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

We can’t talk about where the Biden administration is going without first understanding what was left by the previous administration. It’s important to note that many progressive organizations from Venezuela to the Philippines have extended their congratulations to the people of the United States for voting Donald Trump out of office, with many millions here and all around the world breathing a collective sigh of relief that the most bare-faced and honest manifestation of the evils that America has wrought has been removed from power. We’ve seen this administration enact brutal economic sanctions that critically endangered the ability of targeted countries to provide basic needs to their people. We’ve seen this administration escalate tensions with the People’s Republic of China, leading to a significant increase in anti-Asian hate crimes here in the US. We’ve seen this administration deepen ties with brutally repressive governments the world over, including Saudi Arabia and Israel. This administration’s management of the COVID-19 crisis led to the deaths of 400,000 people in the US alone, and it oversaw the brutal crackdown against the movement for black lives as they rocked the entire world with this summer’s uprisings against police brutality.

Most relevant to our discussion today, however, are the conditions surrounding the US’s continued campaign against Iran that the Biden administration has inherited from Donald Trump and his war criminal lackeys such as Mike Pompeo. Trump banned immigration from Iran with his racist Muslim ban. He pulled the US out of the JCPOA – aka the Iran Nuclear Deal. He ordered the assassination of General Qassim Soleimani in Iraq this year. Donny and Mike have ramped up the US’s brutal sanctions that continue to devastate Iran’s ability to provide for its people and combat COVID-19. Just over the summer, the US seized oil from Iranian ships, which threatened the country’s ability to export goods and support its own economy. The US stepped up a “deterrence” posture in the final days of Trump’s administration, deploying B-52 bombers, deploying a nuclear submarine, and retaining an aircraft carrier in the region. In his address given eight days before the keys to the house were handed to Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that “Al Qaeda has a new home base: it is the Islamic Republic of Iran…We ignore this Iran-Al Qaeda nexus at our own peril…we must defeat it;” a clear last-ditch effort to further villainize Iran and limit any potential for scaling back US aggression.

It’s no wonder that so many who seek an end to US aggression against Iran, are relieved that Trump is finally out of office. The thing is, many of the organizers in UNAC and UNAC’s member groups have been around for a long time. The group I represent, the Anti-War Committee out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, got our start following the Clinton administration’s bombing of Iraq in 1998. During the Obama administration, the homes of several AWC members were raided by the FBI specifically because of our anti-war and international solidarity work. Our own experience with the Democratic Party tells us that this struggle doesn’t slow down when a more put-together imperialist takes office.

Trump didn’t have a history of public office to draw upon, and we had to rely directly on his words and rhetoric to anticipate his actions. Joe Biden, on the other hand, has served in federal public office for almost 50 years, and in his first 2 weeks as president has already shown that his history is a more reliable indicator of his trajectory than any of his rhetoric or promises he’s made. When we consider how Biden will handle affairs with Iran, we have to remember that this is the same Joe Biden that was Vice President when the Obama administration’s campaign against Libya devastated the most prosperous country on the African continent and created the conditions that allowed for open-air slave markets in the country. The Joe Biden that has already appointed established war criminals to his cabinet, including Antony Blinken, who helped spearhead the US’s support for the Saudi-led coalition currently waging genocidal war in Yemen, and Avril Haynes, an architect of the Obama administration’s targeted drone strike campaigns.

It’s hypothesized that Biden’s approach to foreign policy may have the appearance of being more diplomatic, due to relying on ties with allied countries instead of the direct aggression of the Trump administration, but this reliance on allied efforts will, in effect, will create a broader means of applying pressure on Iran. When he served as the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden called for the implementation of “coordinated international sanctions” on Iran. Indeed, his own voting record shows that he is unwavering in his enthusiasm for sanctions against Iran in nearly all cases. While he served as Vice President, the Obama administration asserted itself in other territories in the Middle East, including backing longtime US allies Israel and Saudi Arabia, in order to apply continued pressure against the Islamic Republic.

It’s clear that the US war machine will not slow down now that Donald Trump is no longer in office. The US’s decades-long campaign against Iran will continue with the same intent and intensity even if the specific form has changed. It is our duty as anti-war organizers in the imperial core to continue to resist the US war machine and to dispel the mountain of propaganda that the US and its allies continue to put out against Iran.