Vijay Prashad: Israel and the US Miscalculated the War on Iran

Twenty-five days into open war between Israel, the United States and Iran, the historian and Tricontinental Institute director Vijay Prashad joined Nous Podcast to explain what had actually changed on the ground, and why. Prashad's argument, laid out over the course of the conversation, is that Israel and the US planned for a swift "domination strike" on the model of the 2003 invasion of Iraq: decapitate the leadership, destroy the military infrastructure, and force capitulation. What they encountered instead, he said, was a state that had spent decades preparing for exactly this scenario.

A "domination strike" that failed

Prashad described the initial assault as an old-fashioned regime-change operation modelled on Iraq: kill the leader, blast the military infrastructure, and negotiate a surrender on the winner's terms. The strike on a school that killed scores of Iranian children, he argued, was not collateral damage but a deliberate act of terror meant to break civilian morale quickly.

It did not work, he said, because Iran was never going to fight the war Israel and the US had scripted for it.

Eight layers of leadership

Central to Prashad's account is the structure of Iranian religious and political authority, which he said the war planners misunderstood badly. Ali Khamenei, he pointed out, was never the most senior marja among the roughly fifty-six recognised in Shia Islam; he only became a marja in 1994, and even that was contested. The most senior marja in the world, Ali Sistani in Iraq, condemned the war on Iran but has pointedly not called on Shia militias across the region to mobilise — what Prashad called "blowing the whistle."

Because of this dispersed structure, he said, Iran can absorb what would elsewhere be a fatal decapitation. Khamenei's death, on this account, becomes politically inconsequential: succession passes smoothly, and the symbolism of continuity — the king is dead, long live the king — undercuts the strategic logic of assassinating a head of state.

Iranian society, Prashad added, has a cultural memory built for exactly this kind of endurance. Shiism's history, he said, is one of holding sorrow and struggle inward rather than capitulating, a disposition reinforced by the scale of casualties Iran already absorbed in its war with Iraq in the 1980s.

An escalation ladder Iran still controls

Prashad's central military argument is about sequencing. Iran began with basic missiles that Israeli and US defences intercepted, then moved to cluster-munition missiles that began penetrating both Israeli and US defences and hitting radar installations across the Gulf. The message to Gulf Arab states hosting American bases, he said, was blunt: a US base is not a shield, it is a target.

Crucially, he argued, Iran has held back the bulk of its escalatory options. He cited roughly 2,000 small boats kept in underground shelters, unreleased and capable of creating chaos in the Strait of Hormuz; a Shia militia mobilisation in Iraq and Bahrain that Sistani has not authorised; and Hezbollah's continuing strikes on Israel from southern Lebanon, which he said has already displaced one in five Lebanese people.

Iran has "filtered" the Strait of Hormuz rather than closed it outright, letting some shipping through while demonstrating the capacity to shut down a route carrying 84 percent of the oil bound for Asia. The asymmetry, Prashad argued, is the whole story: the United States' only remaining escalatory option is nuclear war, while Iran still has rungs left on its ladder. "When you are stuck on the escalation ladder where one side has options and the other doesn't, the side that has options has won," he said — which is why, he noted, Iranian officials have begun publicly declaring victory, not in the sense of having defeated the US militarily, but in the narrower sense that Washington has run out of moves.

Prashad also pressed on what a nuclear exchange would actually cost the United States geopolitically. Iran's population of 100 million, he argued, can absorb losses in a way that makes any genocidal campaign against it a long, costly proposition rather than a quick one — and any move to escalate toward nuclear weapons would force a reckoning in Japan, the one American ally with direct historical experience of nuclear attack, and open space for China and Russia to act. He pointed to Taiwan as the clearest illustration of how stretched Washington already is: China, he said, could move on Taiwan right now and the US would be too consumed by West Asia to respond, yet Beijing is deliberately holding back rather than exploiting the opening.

A civilisational tie India keeps disowning

Before turning to policy, Prashad insisted on a point he considers foundational: northern India and Pakistan cannot be understood, he said, without a thousand years of relationship to Iran — not merely linguistic but deeply cultural. He pointed to Mirza Ghalib's debt to Persian literature as one marker of this, and argued that Hindi cannot be "Sanskritised" past a certain point without losing its Persian grammar entirely. "We are an integral part of each other," he said of India and Iran — which made India's turn against Tehran, in his account, a rupture with its own intellectual inheritance, not only a diplomatic realignment.

India's disgraceful retreat, traced to 2005

Asked about India's response to the war, Prashad rejected the framing that this is primarily a story about Narendra Modi's foreign policy. The turn, he argued, predates the BJP: in 2005, the government of Manmohan Singh voted against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency to secure India's entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, in what Prashad called a scandalous decision he still remembers protesting in the streets of Madras. Normalisation of ties with Israel, he added, began even earlier, under Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s.

What has changed since, on his account, is not the direction of Indian policy but the scale of its silence. He pointed to Modi's remark calling Israel "the fatherland" and India "the motherland," and to India's failure to condemn either the assassination of Iran's supreme leader or the killing of Iranian sailors aboard an unarmed ceremonial vessel — a guest of the Indian Navy — torpedoed by a US submarine in Sri Lankan waters as it sailed home. Prashad framed this less as a legal failure than a moral one: a government that talks constantly about Indian values failing to observe the most basic norm of hospitality toward a guest.

He linked India's posture to a wider regional realignment: Modi could not move toward Israel, he argued, until Gulf Arab states had already done so through the Abraham Accords. "It's not like Modi's in the lead here," he said. "Don't give him that much credit."

Sovereignty, Zionism and the road not taken

Pressed on the deeper history, Prashad situated the current war against a much longer arc: Iran's sense of itself as a state stretches back roughly 2,500 years, to a Safavid-era statecraft tradition that Iranians, unlike Indians under British colonialism, never lost access to as a living political inheritance. The 1979 revolution, in his reading, was a reassertion of that continuity against a Shah who had tried to impose a foreign-backed, persianised monarchy.

On the question of Zionism, Prashad pointed to an internal Jewish debate, over a century old, between messianic traditions that located Jewish identity in a spiritual relationship rather than a bounded territory, and the territorial nationalism that eventually won out. He invoked the correspondence between the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin and a Jewish contemporary in Jerusalem on the meaning of emancipation, arguing that this messianic strand was never intellectually defeated so much as politically sidelined. He also pointed to the Ottoman millet system — under which Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities in cities like Jerusalem, Haifa and Beirut governed themselves within a shared imperial structure — as evidence that coexistence had been institutionally available before a German-inflected ideology of "blood and soil" prevailed instead.

It was in this context that Prashad posed the question of how the descendants of the Holocaust's victims came to preside over what he described as their own structural version of the violence done to them — not as an act of individual cruelty, he stressed, but as something that becomes structural once it is backed by wealth, weapons and state power.

Arms, media, and manufactured consent

Prashad extended the argument about structural violence to the political economy of the war itself. He noted that in the United States much of broadcast television is owned by arms manufacturers such as Westinghouse and General Electric, and that opposition to this nexus carries real costs: British activists convicted over protests against the arms manufacturer Elbit Systems received long prison sentences, and public statements of support for them were briefly criminalised.

He offered a personal illustration closer to home. A planned public conversation with Noam Chomsky at the Mumbai literature festival was cancelled hours before it was due to take place, he said, after word spread that the two intended to open by discussing Tata Consultancy Services' business in Odisha and its role, along with Tata Cloud Services, in supplying systems used by the Israeli military. The event's cancellation over a topic that had not even been raised publicly yet, he argued, showed how little scrutiny large Indian conglomerates are willing to tolerate.

What intellectual courage requires now

Prashad closed by turning to what he sees as a broader intellectual failure, one not confined to any single tradition. He pointed to the same weeks of war having also seen the death of Jürgen Habermas, the prison sentencing of Tariq Ramadan, and renewed scrutiny of intellectuals entangled with Jeffrey Epstein — evidence, in his reading, of how easily public intellectual life gets captured by proximity to power and celebrity rather than sustained explanatory work.

Drawing on a volume of Ho Chi Minh's writing he once edited, Prashad noted Ho Chi Minh's argument that a communist cadre's task is to be worth emulating — a formulation he said maps closely onto the Shia concept of the marja taqlid, a figure followed not by imitation of conclusions but by adoption of method. Real intellectual work, he argued, cannot stop at "cataloguing catastrophe"; it has to expand what people believe is possible, in conversation with movements in Indonesia, Africa and Latin America rather than only documenting loss.

He ended on what he called the standing rebuke Iran poses to its critics in the Gulf: it has shown, for nearly half a century, that a state can be Islamic and republican at once — proof, in his telling, that resistance to Iran has never really been a sectarian dispute, but a dispute over whether monarchy is negotiable at all.

The conversation closed on a genealogy Prashad said deserved to be taken seriously rather than treated as a curiosity: an interconnected tradition of political thought running from the nineteenth-century reformer Jamal al-Din al-Afghani through Muhammad Abduh, Abul Kalam Azad, Abul A'la Maududi and Ali Shariati to Ayatollah Khomeini — a lineage in which a Shia revolutionary could cite a Sunni scholar's writing on freedom fighters in India without contradiction. He cited a 1915 fatwa from Al-Azhar, the Sunni seminary in Cairo, recognising Shia jurisprudence as a fifth legitimate school of Islamic law alongside the four Sunni schools, as evidence that the sectarian frame imposed on the region from outside has always been thinner than it looks.

Prashad closed by returning to a phrase he said should anchor any such intellectual project: not armchair theorising, but a discipline that runs "from metaphysics to the masses." An intellectual tradition that cannot explain the present to the people living through it, he suggested, has already failed at the only task that matters.