09.04.2026

Politics of civilisational threat

The most revealing feature of the fragile US-Israeli two-week ceasefire with Iran is its vagueness. Yassamine Mather assesses the internal and regional effects of the war

Washington speaks in the language of total dominance, which Donald Trump pushed to its most extreme form, when, on April 7, he warned that “a whole civilisation will die tonight” if Iran did not meet his demands over the Strait of Hormuz.

A day later, a tentative two-week ceasefire begun, with Trump describing Iranian proposals as a “workable” basis for negotiation. Reporting has linked that pause to an Iranian 10-point plan, though it is better understood as a contested framework for further talks than as a settled peace on Tehran’s terms.

Precisely for that reason, both sides can present the pause as a victory. The US and Israel claims the ceasefire is proof that overwhelming pressure forced Iran onto the back foot, Trump even talking about there being a “new regime” in Tehran (obvious nonsense). Meanwhile, Israel continues to bombard Lebanon as a prelude to re-establishing a buffer zone all the way up to the Litani River. As for Iran it presents its survival, its continued leverage over Hormuz and the fact of negotiations on terms it helped shape as evidence that it has triumphed.

But the social meaning of the war remained visible even at the moment of de-escalation: Associated Press, reporting on April 7, said strikes destroyed half of Tehran’s Khorasaniha Synagogue and nearby residential buildings, while the BBC showed Iranians forming human chains at bridges and power plants after Tehran urged people to gather outside potential US and Israeli targets. In other words, the threat to destroy civil infrastructure did not remain at the level of rhetoric: it entered directly into the field of mass fear, symbolic defence, collective exposure and the widening destruction of social life itself.

To understand why this war between two unequal sides has lasted so long, it is necessary to distinguish between air supremacy and air superiority. Air supremacy means an enemy has effectively no functioning airforce, no viable radar network and no surviving missile architecture. It is the ‘empty room’ scenario: the dominant force flies where it wants, when it wants, at little cost. Air superiority is weaker than that: one side remains dominant, but still faces some resistance. Air denial is different again. It does not require control of the skies: it only requires making the skies sufficiently dangerous that the stronger power cannot operate as if risk has disappeared.

That is the contradiction now confronting Washington. No doubt the United States retains overwhelming military superiority, but it has not transformed the conflict into a risk-free exercise. The repeated need for escalation, the resort to threats against civilian infrastructure and the political theatre of emergency operations - all point in the same direction: the sky is not ‘owned’. It is contested. Even where the US remains the more powerful military force, Iran’s strategy has been to preserve enough retaliatory and defensive capacity to make every step more costly, slower and politically dirtier than the White House wants to admit.

That is why the credibility gap matters. Imperial power rests not only on bombs, carriers and aircraft, but on the perception of superiority. If the world believes you are unstoppable, much resistance collapses before the battle begins. Trump’s political narrative has depended on exactly this image: that US force is overwhelming, clean and final. But, the more the war produces scenes of damaged cities, disrupted infrastructure, emergency rescues and improvised retaliation, the harder it becomes to sustain the fantasy of frictionless dominance. The real lesson is not that the United States is weak: it is that even overwhelming force cannot eliminate the enemy’s capacity to resist and impose costs - and therefore punctures the myth of total control.

Widening targets

This dynamic is obvious in the widening targets set. The bombing of universities marks a major escalation, because it shows the war moving beyond immediate battlefield objectives and into the sphere of social reproduction. Iranian officials have said that more than 30 universities have been damaged since the war began in late February.

These are not marginal sites. Universities such as Sharif and Shahid Beheshti are important, when it comes to research and education, as well engineering training and the broader intellectual infrastructure of the country. To bomb them is not merely to destroy buildings: it is to attack future capacity - the continuity of research, the material basis of laboratories and the social institutions through which skilled labour is reproduced.

The same is true of the attacks on petrochemical and energy infrastructure in the south. Reports this week confirmed strikes on facilities in Asaluyeh, Bushehr province, as well as attacks on petrochemical facilities in Mahshahr. Associated Press reported on April 6 that Israel said it struck what it described as Iran’s largest petrochemical facility in Asaluyeh, claiming that the country’s petrochemical sector had suffered a severe blow and that facilities linked to a very large share of exports were knocked out of service.

The political meaning is obvious. Petrochemical infrastructure is not just an export machine. It is a concentration of working class life, technical labour, logistics, maintenance, contract work and regional dependency. In Bushehr province and the wider South Pars corridor, the destruction of a single industrial node can ripple outward through transport firms, subcontractors, repair crews, local markets and dependent households. These strikes threaten tens of thousands of direct jobs and a much wider layer of indirect employment, while also undermining state revenue, industrial capacity and regional social stability.

For the Iranian working class, the war appears less as abstract geopolitics than as a collapse in the ordinary conditions of survival. Wages do not rise at the speed of crisis, but prices do. For families living on fixed incomes, public-sector salaries, casual labour or daily wages, the first effect of war is a collapse in real income. Bread, transport, electricity, rent and basic staples absorb a larger share of household budgets, just as work becomes more precarious. The result is familiar and brutal: meals are skipped, diets deteriorate, small debts become permanent and electricity or heating are treated as luxuries rather than necessities.

War also disrupts the mechanics of production. Factories slow under supply problems and power disruptions. Construction work stalls. Informal and temporary labour is hit first and hardest. Those without secure contracts have no cushion: when the work stops, the income stops immediately. Fuel shortages intensify the crisis. For delivery workers, taxi drivers and commuters, fuel is not a consumer good, but a condition of labour itself. When shortages hit or prices spike, the working class suffers a double blow: life becomes more expensive, and access to work becomes harder. The pincer closes from both sides.

Displacement sharpens this class divide further. Middle class households may have savings, vehicles or second properties to fall back on, but working class families often have none of these. To be displaced under bombardment is therefore not only to flee danger, but to lose both shelter and income at once. On April 7 reports from Tehran describe civilian panic, preparation for infrastructure collapse and large-scale movement out of the capital, even if exact numbers remain hard to verify. The point is not the precise displacement figure on any given day, but the social fact of fragmentation: workers do not simply relocate; they become stranded, cut off from employment, networks and the means to restart life elsewhere.

Steel matters

The widening target now appears to have included another decisive layer of Iran’s material reproduction: the steel industry. If the bombing of universities signalled an attack on scientific and technical labour, and the strikes on petrochemical infrastructure targeted export revenue and industrial energy capacity, then the attacks on major steel complexes pointed toward something equally strategic: the disabling of one of the central pillars of Iran’s industrial economy.

Reports on strikes against Mobarakeh Steel in Isfahan and Khuzestan Steel suggested a qualitative escalation. These are not marginal factories. They sit at the core of Iran’s steel production, feed raw materials into a wide range of downstream sectors and contribute significantly to non-oil exports and foreign currency earnings. Their disruption therefore carries consequences far beyond the immediate site of attack. It affects manufacturing supply chains, state revenues, employment and the country’s ability to sustain industrial activity under wartime conditions.

Whatever the precise military rationale, the economic meaning is clearer. The Times of Israel explicitly framed at least part of the logic in terms of the attack’s “economic effect” on Iran. There have also been claims that part of these companies’ output is linked to supply chains serving the defence sector. But, even where military justifications are invoked, the broader reality remains that the destruction of steel capacity is not a narrow strike on a single node: it is a blow against a strategic industrial base, whose effects radiate quickly through the wider economy.

This matters because steel is not simply another commodity: it underpins construction, cars, household appliances, infrastructure, pipelines, machinery, shipbuilding and parts of the oil, gas and petrochemical chain. To strike steel production is therefore to strike industrial life itself. The immediate effect is disruption of output and exports. The wider effect is rising costs, bottlenecks across dependent sectors, pressure on employment and a deepening of wartime economic fragility. In the short term, it may also increase Iran’s dependence on imported steel, above all from China - further tightening the relationship between military vulnerability and external economic dependence.

The employment effects are equally serious. Beyond the tens of thousands directly employed at the two complexes, far larger numbers in subcontracting, transport, maintenance, fabrication and dependent firms are exposed to prolonged disruption. Once again, the burden falls hardest on workers with the least protection: contract labour, temporary workers and those in small and medium-sized downstream industries with little capacity to absorb prolonged shortages or shutdowns.

The Gulf monarchies built their recent prosperity on an image of stability, investability and secure connectivity Their airports became global hubs, their cities financial and tourism centres, and their energy infrastructure the anchor of global supply. But the war has exposed the fragility beneath that image. Iranian strikes and threats against regional infrastructure have forced governments back toward emergency calculations, even where they seek to restore normalcy quickly. The central problem is geographic and strategic: these states are close enough to the battlefield to remain vulnerable, yet not powerful enough to insulate themselves fully from its consequences.

Asymmetry

That vulnerability has economic consequences. Even massive defence spending cannot erase the asymmetry between highly expensive infrastructure and relatively cheap drones or missiles. Insurance costs rise. Logistics become more difficult. International firms reassess risk. Gulf rulers may decide to move closer to Washington for immediate security reasons, and in practice closer to Israel as well, but this is driven by expediency, not trust. The deeper fear is entrapment: being dragged into a war not of their choosing, becoming priority targets and sacrificing autonomy in exchange for incomplete protection. Some might decide they need better relations with China.

At the global level, the energy shock is already visible. Market reporting on April 7 showed oil prices jumping sharply with Trump’s ultimatum. That volatility matters everywhere, but especially in countries heavily exposed to imported hydrocarbons. China is a crucial case. It remains deeply dependent on oil imports, including from the Gulf and Russia, yet it is also better insulated than many advanced economies because of its energy mix, coal base, large strategic reserves and its long-term shift into renewables and electric transport. Even so, a conflict that disrupts shipping, damages infrastructure and pushes prices upward imposes costs across petrochemicals, transport and manufacturing, and leads to expectations of inflation.

The larger lesson is that this war reveals the limits of modern imperial power. The United States can destroy an enormous range of targets; Israel can widen the geography of destruction. But neither can turn war into a clean, one-sided, managerial process. The more they try to do so, the more openly they threaten bridges, power plants, universities and industrial complexes, and the more clearly the real content of the war emerges.

Trump’s threat that “a whole civilisation will die tonight” is therefore not an incidental outburst. It is the expression of the need for escalation, even though in this case it was actually part of negotiations for a ceasefire. When a state begins to speak in those terms, it is no longer claiming merely the right to defend itself or disable an adversary’s weapons. It is claiming the right to hold an entire society hostage.