Tim Lawrence

 Ansar Allah, Iran and the imminent collapse of 500 years of colonialism and neocolonialism

11 September 2026

It’s really very simple. Western European powers had a really good time asserting their control over the world through capitalist extraction, colonialism and slavery. They did this before they introduced domestic democratic systems that were always infected with colonialism. And after they lost their colonies they never managed to rid themselves of their arrogant, basically racist mindset because they’d never seen the world in any other way.

Western European states aligned with the US as it emerged as the main opponent of the Soviet Union in the postwar era and then became a unipolar power. They supported whichever part of the world the US sought to dominate—Latin America, Asia, Africa and eventually Eastern Europe—through a cocktail of bombing campaigns, foreign invasions, and aid/currency/debt manipulation, all tied to the petrodollar. According to the Lancet, this economic strategising resulted in 38 million deaths between 1971 and 2021. All in the name of Western democracy and moral superiority.

The US viewed the UK as its most influential and faithful European ally. Israel became its main strategic foothold in West Asia. Along the way, the US drew Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE and other West Asian nations into its alliance. It guzzled oil in return for more petrodollars and the promise of military security. It sought to dismantle every West Asian and North African country that possessed oil reserves or natural resources or transit routes that it wanted to use in the interests of its own citizenry or keep away from the US--in particular, in addition to the states already listed, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria. Both approaches were completely unethical as far as the US was concerned because they stood in the way of US control and profiteering.

Europe cheered on US neocolonialism every step of the way.

US-led NATO broke the promise made to the Russia after German reunification that it wouldn’t seek to expand eastward of the former German Democratic Republic. Whatever your view on the war in Ukraine, this expansionism continued right up to the point where NATO countries encouraged Ukraine to join both NATO and the EU even though this crossed Russia’s ultimate red line—one that Russia promised would be met with a military response. You might believe the expansionism was justified—but expansionism it was and remains.

Any West Asian or North African grouping of countries that stood up to the explansion of US-Euro neocolonial hegemony was branded terrorist or a fascist. The West claimed to be acting in the name of democracy but in fact saw democracy as a threat—not a desirable model of governance—when it took root in areas it wanted to dominate.

Avaricious colonialism inevitably gave birth to resistance.

The US with different levels of Western support fought and lost wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, killing millions of civilians along the way.

After toppling Iran’s democratic government to impose the shah, the US and UK triggered the Islamic Revolution.

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine led directly to the formation of Hamas, a resistance movement that won the first democratic elections held in Gaza following the Oslo Accords.

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon led to the formation of Hezbollah, a resistance movement.

The Western alliance’s attempt to strangle Iran, followed by two Israel-US wars on the country, led Iran to deepen its resolve, retaliate and seize the Strait of Hormuz.

The US goal of controlling Burkina Faso has led that country to cut off all relations with the US.

Western support for Saudi Arabia led it to support the Saudi-backed “Internationally Recognised Government” in Yemen against the popular uprising of Ansar Allah (the Houthis), and now Ansar Allah are hitting back.

You don’t have to support or oppose these resistance movements to understand that they’re not terrorists, they’re resistance movements. If you attempt to dominate, strangle or kill someone, and that someone struggles against the attempt, they are resisting. If the attempt to dominate, strangle or kill is violent, which invariably it is, then its reasonable for the resistance to be violent. Overall it’s been striking how the violence of the resistance pales in comparison to the violence of those who want to dominate.

To object to resistance on moral grounds is hypocritical and basically racist. Listening to Western leaders demand again and again that Iran should be punished for not adhering to a nuclear deal that the US tore up before it assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei, who’d issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, and along with Israel bombed a site where Iran was developing its nuclear capacity is laughable.

Why should Iran adhere—and to what? On what basis should countries in the West be able to do whatever they want while insisting that they should decide what non-Western powers can do—especially those that don’t bow down to their demands? How can this be anything but a form of neocolonialism?

Certainly it’s worrying that the West’s bossiness is accelerating us to the point of a catastrophic implosion. It’s also interesting to see how the West is continuing to behave as if it’s in charge of world affairs when it’s weaker than at any point since the beginning of the colonial era in the 16th century. Its level of delusion of comic as well as tragic.

At the beginning of his current presidency, Trump attempted to bomb Ansar Allah to pieces. After three months he gave up. Now Ansar Allah, whose fighters wear sandals, are tearing their way through Yemen and destroying the Saudi imposed “Internationally Recognised” (yawn) government. Ansar Allah have stopped Saudi ships navigating the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and are now in complete control of the entire coastline.

The latest news indicates that Ansar Allah have also taken out Saudi Arabia’s main pipeline—so how is Saudi Arabia going to do any trade in oil—and how are Western powers, which have been so self-righteous when it comes to placing trade embargoes on Russia and Iran, going to get the oil they’re addicted to? The level of stupidity is comic as well as tragic—because working people will bear the brunt of any economic collapse.

As has become legendary, Trump believed Netanyahu’s PR ruse that regime change in Iran would be easy, especially after the US crashed the Iranian economy last December—something Bessent boasted about at Davos. The collapse triggered peaceful street protests by merchants that Mossad and the CIA then hijacked (see my post on 26 August for a detailed analysis of this). But instead of collapsing under the economic pressure and the foreign-sponsored insurrection, Iran stands resilient, controls Hormuz and has taken out the US military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and now Jordan. These countries exchanged oil for defence and petrodollars but now find themselves defenceless and are worrying about the value of their US bonds as the US teeters under its record debt and declining economic grip.

The fragility of US-Western hegemony was already apparent before Israel and the US launched two unprovoked wars on Iran. The BRICS alliance was already on the rise. China was behaving in a far more intelligent way than the US in terms of introducing anti-poverty programmes, investing in green technology and infrastructure, and maintaining its industrial base while showing itself to be diplomatically mature. One way or another, the collapse of the West has been looming for a while, even if the ramping up of its moralistic bravado could cover the cracks if you happened to live in earshot—as I and most of us do.

But the fragility is now exposed to all. Two supposedly weak countries that the West has bullied and disdained for years—Iran and Yemen—are all set to inflict a historic defeat on the US that implicates most of Western Europe, parts of Eastern Europe, Australia and Canada—and of course Israel.

Israel lies at the epicentre of the failure of neocolonialism, a grotesque case study in expansionist, racist, psychopathic and in many ways fascistic behaviour built on Western trade, weaponry and diplomatic support, delivered on tap for decades. The collapse of support in the US and Europe for a project that was rooted in apartheid from its inception is astonishing. Already electorates are asking to know why, in an era of poverty and huge economic insecurity, their governments should be sending money to Israel rather than investing in their own economies.

It’s still hard to predict exactly how Israel’s expansionism will be reversed, how it will be made to withdraw from Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and how it will finally be forced to accept the need for justice, whether that comes in the form of two states or one secular democratic state. But the tide of history is only moving in one direction and it’s impossible to imagine any circumstances that can reverse the direction of travel.

The sweeping international support shown for the ultimately limited proposals introduced by UK foreign secretary Ed Miliband earlier this week suggests that we’ve arrived at a turning point. Clearly Miliband was radically underestimating the scale of Israel’s crimes when he said there is evidence of “some war crimes” and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. What about the genocide, Ed? And a history of ethnic cleansing that goes back to 1948? Nevertheless he went further than any UK government has gone before and his speech became the prompt for an outpouring of agreement: it is time for the West to do something about Israel.

It would be more diplomatic if I didn’t mention that Iran and Ansar Allah have been saying this about Israel all along and the neocolonialist West is yet again playing catch-up. It will probably take decades for the West to come to terms with a history it has expunged from the school curriculum. Maybe it will never come about. But at least the 500-year period of colonialism followed by neocolonialism—all of it rooted in hypocrisy, fake superiority, greed and racism—is coming to an end.