THE war around Bab al-Mandab (the doorway to the Suez Canal) has brought into sharp focus the instability of the regional order in West Asia. Saudi Arabia has renewed its military campaign in Yemen, while Ansar Allah has intensified attacks on Saudi airports and energy installations. The tensions between Saudi Arabia and Yemen go back over a decade, with no end in sight through diplomacy (now foreclosed) or through warfare.

EVER since the end of World War II, the United States – along with the former colonial powers of the region, Britain and France – dominated the region of West Asia from the Mediterranean Sea to the Hindu Kush mountains.

DONALD Trump’s campaign to bring Greenland under United States control has often been dismissed as bluster. That is a mistake. Behind the language of a property deal lies a serious attempt to revive an old imperial principle: that Washington may decide the political and economic future of the entire Western Hemisphere. Greenland, strategically placed between North America and Europe, has become a test of that claim – and of whether the sovereignty of a small Indigenous nation counts when it conflicts with the ambitions of a great power.

ON September 2, fragments from a US missile tore through the roof of a wedding celebration in Kuhestak, in Iran’s southern county of Sirik. Four people were killed, including a child, and 68 were wounded. The United States has made a custom of bombing weddings – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and now Iran. When US Vice-President J D Vance was asked about the dead, he shrugged: ‘Things happen’. The sentence should be entered into the record of this war. Imperialism turns other people’s catastrophes into the passive voice.

The war against Iran must not be understood as an isolated eruption of aggression by US hyper-imperialism. Nor can it be explained merely by the obsessions of Donald Trump, the expansionist ambitions of Israel, or the influence of the most reactionary sections of the US ruling class. The war belongs to a much wider crisis. The United States is lashing out because the foundations of its power are weakening, while its ruling class has neither the political imagination nor the social capacity to repair them.