The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 2 The joint attack by Washington and Tel Aviv on Iran, which began on February 28th and was dubbed Operation Epic Fury by the Americans, has been described as an epic gamble by the vast majority of international commentators, starting with the decision to eliminate Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader and a key figure for Shia Islam in Iran and beyond. While Tel Aviv is said to be intent on degrading Iran's military capabilities, and thus weakening it in the long term, what motivates US intervention, even according to Israeli sources, is regime change : something akin to the script followed in Venezuela at the start of the year. However, according to Le Monde , Washington's approach amounts to an exercise in strategic improvisation , owing both to the unilateral decision to attack and to the contradictory series of justifications put forward to l...

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Pages 4 and 5 At the time of writing, bloody repression seems to have quelled the mass protests in Iran that began in late December and spread to nearly 200 towns and cities across all of Iran’s 31 provinces. The dynamics of these protests recall those that erupted in 2017 and 2019: both were similarly marked by rising living costs and subsidy cuts, abuses by the religious police in enforcing the veil on women (especially students), and the involvement of ethnic minorities. According to international estimates, the victims of those previous waves of repression amounted to 400 and 550 respectively, while there is still uncertainty about the scale of today’s massacre, with estimates ranging from 2,000 to 20,000 victims. Iranian government sources, quoted by Reuters , mention 2,000-5,000, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei himself, in a speech on January 17 th , speaks of thousands of deaths and enormous damage c...