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Weightier than Mount Tai: the life and legacy of Ali Khamenei

This week, millions of Iranians are filling the streets of Tehran, Qom and Mashhad for the funeral of Seyyed Ali Khamenei, assassinated by the US and Israel on 28 February along with members of his family. Delegations from around a hundred countries have come to pay their respects; not one Western leader is among them.

In this video, Carlos Martinez asks who Ali Khamenei actually was, and why the most powerful country on earth considered him so dangerous: his lifelong defence of Iranian sovereignty after a century of foreign domination; his unmatched support for the Palestinian struggle; the social transformation of Iran under sanctions; his orientation towards the multipolar world; and the austere scholar behind the Western caricature – the man Nelson Mandela called “my leader”.

Transcript

This week, millions of people – the authorities actually expect more than ten million by the end of the week – are filling the streets of Tehran, Qom and Mashhad for the funeral of Seyyed Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated by the US and Israel on the 28th of February, together with several members of his family – including his 14-month-old granddaughter.

The funeral had to be delayed for four months, because the country was under bombardment. And now that the ceasefire is holding – for the moment – the Iranian people are finally able to bury their leader. Delegations from around a hundred countries have come to pay their respects. Not a single Western leader is among them.

So in this video I want to ask a simple question: who was Ali Khamenei, and why are millions of people mourning him? Why did Nelson Mandela call him “my leader”? And why did the most powerful country on earth consider this eighty-six-year-old cleric, poet and scholar so dangerous that it carried out an extrajudicial assassination of him and his family?

Donald Trump called Khamenei “one of the most evil people in history” – this from a war criminal and close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein, so make of that what you will. The BBC and CNN will tell you he was a dictator, a fanatic, a tyrant. What they don’t do is explain why his coffin is now surrounded by one of the largest crowds of mourners in human history.

Khamenei’s legacy is deeply entwined with the history of Iran, and the project of defending Iran’s sovereignty.

For most of the last century and a half, Iran was not allowed to govern itself. In 1907, Britain and Tsarist Russia simply divided the country between them into “spheres of influence” – without consulting a single Iranian.

In 1953, when the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, committed the unforgivable crime of nationalising Iran’s oil, the CIA and MI6 organised a coup, overthrew him, and installed the Shah as a dependable guardian of Western energy interests. For the next quarter of a century, Iran’s oil flowed west, and the Shah’s secret police tortured anyone who objected.

One of the people they tortured, incidentally, was a young cleric named Ali Khamenei, who was imprisoned six times under the Shah’s dictatorship.

The Revolution of 1979 ended Iran’s century of humiliation. And whatever else you want to say about the Islamic Republic, it has stuck firmly to its promise of asserting its sovereignty. The Revolution ensured that Iran would never again be anyone’s client state.

Khamenei embodied that principle for over forty years – as president from 1981, and as Supreme Leader from 1989.

In February this year, when the bombs started falling on Tehran and his advisers begged him to move to a secure location, he refused. He said that since millions of ordinary people in Tehran had nowhere to go, he was staying put. He was in his own home, not a bunker, observing Ramadan, and that’s where he was killed.

What did he stand for? I’d point to four things.

The world says no: Iran, the Global South and the end of the unipolar moment

The US-Israeli war on Iran has been defeated – and the world’s response to it, above all from China and the Global South, reveals how profoundly the global balance of forces has shifted. In the article below, Carlos Martinez argues that Iran’s victory provides important evidence that the unipolar moment is over.

The criminal US-Israeli war on Iran has wrought devastation on a horrendous scale. The campaign has included the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and numerous other political leaders and scientists; the bombing of schools, hospitals, bridges and energy infrastructure; and, from April, a naval blockade of Iran’s ports. Aerial attacks have killed around 3,500 civilians, including 168 children at an elementary school in Minab, in one of the gravest single atrocities since the Vietnam War.

This is a war of aggression, pure and simple. There has been no Security Council authorisation, and UN human rights experts have denounced the assault as a violation of the most basic principles of the UN Charter. The pretext – that Iran was on the cusp of acquiring a nuclear weapon – is the same threadbare story Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling since 1992, and is roughly as credible as Tony Blair’s claim in 2003 that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

But something distinguishes this war from the Iraq war a generation ago. In 2003, Washington could assemble a “coalition of the willing”, browbeat the UN, and assume the world would fall into line. In 2026, the world is conspicuously refusing to do so. And the war has not merely been opposed – it has been defeated. As of late June it stands suspended under an interim memorandum of understanding whose terms read like a list of concessions wrung from Washington. The response to this war – above all from China and the Global South – tells us a great deal about how profoundly the global balance of forces has shifted.

Imperialism vs multipolarity: how the war on Iran backfired on the US

The US-Israeli war on Iran was meant to halt the world’s drift towards multipolarity. Instead it accelerated it.

In this talk from the webinar “Imperialism vs Multipolarity: US and China’s clashing visions” (organised by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group), Carlos Martinez argues that the war on Iran is the sharpest illustration we have of two clashing visions of world order – a declining empire that rules through sanctions, blockades and bombing, and an emerging multipolar order based on sovereignty, development and peace.

The presentation covers:

What the war was really about: Iran, Palestine, the Belt and Road, and the containment of China
Why Iran survived in 2026 what Mossadegh’s Iran could not in 1953
China’s role: buying Iranian oil in defiance of sanctions, the UN Security Council veto, economic and diplomatic support
How the outcome has strengthened Iran, weakened the US, isolated Israel, and accelerated the rise of the multipolar world

Watch the full webinar: Imperialism vs Multipolarity: US and China’s clashing visions.

Transcript

I’m going to make Iran – rather than China or the US directly – the main focus of my remarks, because the war there is the sharpest illustration we have of the two clashing visions we’re discussing today.

First I’ll talk about how the Iran war relates to the overall global struggle between imperialism and multipolarity.

Second, how the emerging multipolar reality has shaped the outcomes of that war.

And third, how those outcomes are, in turn, reshaping the trajectory of the multipolar project.

Going to Tehran: the book that predicted this mess in Iran

In 2013, two former US national security officials – Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett – published a book called Going to Tehran. In it they argued, on the basis of insider experience, that the United States was making a strategic mistake of historic proportions in its policy towards Iran; that the Islamic Republic was a stable, legitimate, rational political entity; that decades of US sanctions, isolation and threats would fail; that Iran would emerge from any direct confrontation stronger, not weaker; and that the only rational US course was the kind of grand rapprochement Nixon achieved with China in 1972.

The US foreign policy establishment declined to read it. Months into a war on Iran that the US is manifestly losing, every one of the Leveretts’ predictions has come to pass – and the establishment is implicitly conceding it. Robert Kagan in the Atlantic. Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Dan Shapiro in the Washington Post.

In this video, Carlos Martinez reviews Going to Tehran, explains its central arguments, and makes the case that it is one of the most important unread books of the twenty-first century.

Sources and further reading:

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, Going to Tehran (2013)

Robert Kagan, “Checkmate in Iran”, The Atlantic (May 2026)

Gideon Rachman, “Iran is beating Trump at the art of the deal”, Financial Times (May 2026)

Mohammad Marandi’s interviews on multiple channels

Transcript

Hello and welcome. Those of you who, like me, listen to a lot of interviews with Said Muhammad Marandi will know that he is one of the most incisive and insightful analysts of Iran’s politics and foreign policy. He’s also one of the most candid and direct. He’s been recommending a book that he says is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Iran, called Going to Tehran.

It’s written by two former US national security officials and was published in 2013. Marandi often says that if the US foreign policy establishment had read it and paid attention to it, then some of the disasters of the last few months could have been avoided. So I read it.

It’s excellent. You should probably read it, too. And in this video I’ll give an overview of the book and try to explain why it’s so important, why it’s so relevant.

So who are the authors? Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett are not anti-imperialist pragmatists. They are in fact former senior US national security officials. Flynt worked at the CIA, then at the State Department, then on the National Security Council where he ran Middle East policy under George W. Bush in 2002 to 2003. Hillary served at the State Department and on the NSC and was the US delegate in talks with Iran on Iraq, Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda in the early 2000s.

Iran, China and the multipolar moment

Recorded in Changsha, China, this wide-ranging conversation between Carlos Martinez and Danny Haiphong focuses on some of the most urgent questions in contemporary world politics: the Iran ceasefire, the Strait of Hormuz, the collapse of US military credibility, and what it all means for China and the multipolar world.

Carlos argues that Iran is playing a sophisticated and restrained game – responding precisely and proportionately to every US provocation, never escalating beyond what the situation requires. The IRGC’s recent seizure of Israel-linked vessels attempting to bypass Iran’s Hormuz regulations was not aggression but enforcement: Iran exercising sovereign control over its territorial waters in response to a US blockade that itself violates the ceasefire terms. With 34 Iranian oil tankers having bypassed the blockade and reached global markets, the attempt to economically
strangle Iran is visibly failing.

The military picture for the US is stark. Drawing on Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) analysis, Carlos and Danny detail the extraordinary depletion of US munitions – nearly half of Patriot and THAAD interceptors, 45 percent of precision strike missiles, 30 percent of Tomahawk stockpiles – expended in just 40 days of hostilities. Replacing these systems will take years. Meanwhile Iran has been rapidly replenishing its stockpiles of missiles and drones. The asymmetry is decisive: Iran has more cards to play, more escalation options unused, and a population of 93 million ready to defend their country. A land invasion, Carlos notes, would be the greatest US military defeat since Vietnam, and perhaps in history.

The conversation turns to the deeper strategic logic of the conflict – which is not only about Iran, but about Palestine, regional hegemony, and the long-term objective of suppressing China’s rise. Control of Venezuelan oil, disruption of Iran’s energy relationship with Beijing, dominance of the Strait of Hormuz: these are moves in a long game aimed at encircling China before a potential hot war in the Pacific. The irony, Carlos argues, is that the war has achieved the opposite – depleting US military capacity, accelerating the multipolar trajectory, and motivating the countries of the ‘intermediate zone’ in Europe and elsewhere to engage more deeply with China as a stable and responsible global actor.

How Iran forced Trump to beg for a ceasefire

After 40 days of US-Israeli military aggression, Iran forced Washington to the negotiating table – on Iran’s terms. Trump agreed to a two-week ceasefire based on a 10-point Iranian proposal that included the lifting of all sanctions, acceptance of Iran’s enrichment rights, payment of war reparations, and the withdrawal of US combat forces from the region. This is a historic defeat for the US empire and a historic victory for the Iranian people. In the video below, Carlos Martinez breaks down:

The crucial China-Russia veto at the UN Security Council – which happened just hours before the ceasefire and closed off the US escalation pathway, leaving Trump with no option but to negotiate.

Iran’s 10-point proposal and what it means – compared to what Trump and Netanyahu actually set out to achieve.

Why the ceasefire is not a capitulation but a continuation of the battlefield by diplomatic means.

The “too early to celebrate” critique – and why the Iranian leadership, not foreign commentators, gets to decide how Iran resists.

The war on Iran was supposed to demonstrate US power. Instead it has demonstrated its limits. The Iranian people have paid an enormous price – we honour that by taking their victory seriously.

The embedded video is followed by the transcribed text.

After 40 days of war the US has pushed for a two-week ceasefire with Iran, with negotiations towards a lasting peace beginning this Friday in Islamabad. It’s worth pausing to understand just how significant this moment is, and why it happened the way it did.

Let me start with something that happened just hours before the ceasefire was announced. At the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Bahrain — backed by Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — put forward a resolution calling on states to “coordinate efforts to protect commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.” This was, in plain terms, the US trying to use the UN to legitimise military action to forcibly reopen the Strait on its own terms.

Bahrain had already watered the resolution down significantly — removing any explicit authorisation of force — in an attempt to get it through. It didn’t work. China and Russia vetoed it.

The resolution provided for a major escalation, with the Gulf states fully involved, quite possibly involving a ground invasion. China and Russia’s veto took away that escalation pathway and left the Trump regime with no option other than to beg for a ceasefire on Iran’s terms.