Iranian Sovereignty and the Axis Under Late Neocolonialism

Late neocolonialism has frayed the political sovereignty regime that twentieth-century national liberation built. This article argues that the Islamic Republic of Iran contested that erosion by converting forced, partial delinking into a sovereignty envelope: extending state-level defense–industrial capacity to peoples, movements, and states possessing none. Drawing on US planning documents and Iranian, Arab, and Western strategic scholarship, this study traces defensive industrialization, development under sanctions, and the class composition which sanctions remolded. Against the proxy framing, it shows that Iran absorbs the commodity form so that weapons reach its allies as use values rather than as sales. Sovereignty and the wars it engenders in turn damage core realization circuits by eroding their political conditions—the domestic assent on which war-making rests. Such sovereignty functions as a rising wage share: not a qualitative break with capital, but a slow erosion of its command.