The Iran War and America’s Fascist Rebirth |
CounterPunch Exclusives
CounterPunch Exclusives
The Iran War and America’s Fascist Rebirth
Photograph Source: U.S. Navy photo – Public Domain
The onset of “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran was accompanied by a promise to keep America safe from a rising Iranian nuclear threat. President Trump announced “major combat operations,” claiming that nuclear talks with Iran had failed after just days, and that “our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”
The conflict has destabilized neighboring countries, with hundreds of Iranian missiles fired at Kuwait, UAE, and Qatar as Iran announced it was targeting U.S. “military assets” in the region. Reporting also suggested that Iranian missiles have targeted civilian infrastructure in neighboring countries. The New York Times reported that “U.S. officials reaffirmed that there would be no letup in the American and Israeli strikes” after nearly a week of conflict, “which they said had devastated Iran’s ballistic missile program and its naval fleet.” CBS reported that “Americans are being urged to leave 14 countries in the region because of ‘serious safety risks.” Human rights reporting within less than a week of the onset of U.S.-Israeli strikes estimated that more than 1,000 Iranian civilians were killed.
The stakes of this conflict extend well beyond Iran’s alleged nuclear threat, and Trump’s justification for war does more than invoke national security. The structure of his argument reflects a governing logic associated with fascist politics, in which national death is declared, enemies are cast as existential threats, and executive authority expands in the name of survival. Fascism is not reducible to uniforms or formal dictatorship. It is defined by a recurring pattern: the nation is described as degraded, rebirth is promised, enemies are framed as mortal dangers, and emergency becomes the justification for concentrating power.
Roger Griffin famously defined fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism, the myth of national rebirth after periods of alleged decadence and decline. Classical fascist movements did not merely lament decline; they treated civilizational decay as a condition that demanded rupture. Rebirth was not merely ornamental language but a structural horizon that directed political action toward the reconstruction of the state. Violence was justified as regenerative because it was tethered to an institutional project that sought a new political order.
Trump’s rhetoric adopts the language of decline and rebirth yet departs from this classical model in a decisive way. In his second inaugural address in January 2025, he declared that........