National Sovereignty, Anti-Imperialism, and the Iranian Resistance: A Third World Marxist Defence of Iran's Right to Resist Imperialist and Zionist Aggression Bisharat Abbasi The renewed imperialist assault on Iran has once again exposed one of the deepest political and theoretical weaknesses of large sections of the contemporary Left. At precisely the historical moment when the world is witnessing the accelerating disintegration of the unipolar imperial order and the emergence of a new multipolar configuration of international relations, many who continue to describe themselves as communists or socialists have abandoned one of the most fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism: the defence of oppressed nations against imperialist aggression. Instead of beginning their analysis from the concrete realities of imperialism, national sovereignty, and the global hierarchy of power, they begin with an abstract moral critique of the internal political character of the Iranian state, thereby reproducing, consciously or unconsciously, the ideological framework through which imperialism itself justifies war, sanctions, regime change, and national destruction. This inversion of Marxist analysis is neither accidental nor theoretically innocent. It reflects the profound influence of Eurocentric political categories, liberal human rights discourse, and the Cold War ideological legacy that has increasingly shaped sections of the Western Left and, unfortunately, many of its intellectual imitators in Third World countries. Marxism-Leninism has never argued that only socialist governments possess the right to defend themselves against imperialist aggression. On the contrary, Lenin consistently maintained that the struggle against imperialism constitutes an objective historical contradiction that often unites diverse social and political forces against a common enemy. The national liberation struggles of the twentieth century were never led exclusively by communist parties. They included revolutionary nationalists, social democrats, peasants, religious leaders, and anti-colonial intellectuals whose ideological positions differed significantly from Marxism. Yet Marxists supported these struggles because the defeat of imperialism objectively weakened the global capitalist order and expanded the possibilities for independent historical development. The decisive question was never whether every anti-imperialist movement fully embodied socialist principles; rather, it was whether imperialism would be strengthened or weakened by the outcome of the struggle. Iran must therefore be understood not as an abstract theocratic state detached from world history, but as a concrete political formation situated within the geopolitical structure of contemporary imperialism. Since the 1979 Revolution overthrew one of Washington's closest regional allies, Iran has remained one of the principal targets of American strategic planning. Decades of sanctions, economic warfare, covert operations, assassinations of scientists and politicians, cyber attacks, diplomatic isolation, and repeated military threats demonstrate that the central contradiction is not between liberal democracy and religious government, but between an imperialist project seeking regional domination and a state refusing incorporation into the imperialist order. Whatever criticisms one may advance regarding Iran's internal political system, the reality remains that its continued political independence constitutes a significant obstacle to the consolidation of complete imperial control over West Asia. This is precisely where many orthodox communist parties, Trotskyists, and Western Left intellectuals reveal the limitations of their analytical framework. Their method frequently reduces international politics to an evaluation of domestic political institutions while neglecting the global hierarchy of capitalist power. Instead of asking which social forces benefit from the weakening of Iran, they ask whether Iran sufficiently conforms to their preferred model of socialist democracy. Such an approach reverses the entire logic of Lenin's theory of imperialism. Imperialism does not wage war primarily because governments fail to satisfy liberal democratic standards. It wages war because independent states disrupt the geopolitical, military, and economic architecture upon which global capitalist accumulation depends. Iraq, Libya, Yugoslavia, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran have all been subjected to varying forms of imperialist pressure not because they shared identical political systems, but because each represented, in different ways, obstacles to imperial hegemony. The persistence of this confusion within sections of the Pakistani Left is particularly unfortunate because Pakistan itself confronts multiple forms of neocolonial dependency and internal contradictions. One would expect intellectuals shaped by the historical experience of colonialism to recognise that national sovereignty remains an indispensable condition for any meaningful social transformation. Yet many self-described progressives and Marxists have instead adopted the language of Western liberal interventionism, selectively invoking democracy, human rights, women's rights, or religious freedom only against states targeted by Western geopolitical strategy while remaining remarkably silent regarding allied monarchies, military dictatorships, occupations, and genocidal violence supported by the same imperial powers. Such selectivity reveals not universal ethics but geopolitical alignment with imperialism disguised as moral philosophy. Third World Marxists and the genuine Marxists/ Marxist-Leninists in the West have consistently rejected this Eurocentric reduction of politics. From Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh to Amilcar Cabral, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney, Thomas Sankara, Domenico Losurdo, Radhika Desai, Gabriel Rockhill, Torkil Lauesen and many others, the central insight has remained remarkably consistent: the principal contradiction confronting much of humanity continues to be the contradiction between imperial domination and national sovereignty. Without sovereignty there can be no independent economic development, no democratic planning of productive forces, no meaningful redistribution of wealth, and no socialist transition. A nation permanently subjected to sanctions, military encirclement, economic sabotage, or foreign intervention cannot freely determine its own historical path. National self-determination therefore constitutes not the culmination of socialist transformation but one of its indispensable preconditions. The defensive war waged by Iran against imperialist and Zionist aggression must therefore be understood within this historical framework. Every sovereign state possesses the right under international law to defend its territorial integrity against external military attack. More importantly, every oppressed nation possesses the historical right to resist domination by imperial powers seeking to determine its political future through force. To deny Iran this elementary right because one disagrees with its domestic political structure is to establish a principle that ultimately legitimises imperial intervention itself. If sovereignty becomes conditional upon ideological conformity with Western liberal norms, then no genuinely independent state remains secure from imperialist and foreign aggression of any sort. This does not require Marxists to abandon class analysis. Iran remains a complex social formation containing multiple class contradictions, political tensions, and ideological struggles. Marxists retain the right, and indeed the responsibility, to analyse these contradictions critically. Yet such criticism must remain independent of imperialist strategy. The task of transforming Iranian society belongs to the Iranian people themselves, not to foreign governments deploying missiles, sanctions, covert operations, or regime-change projects. Marxism has always distinguished between internal revolutionary transformation and externally imposed political restructuring. The latter invariably strengthens imperial domination rather than popular emancipation. History repeatedly confirms this conclusion. The destruction of Iraq did not produce democracy; it produced occupation, sectarian fragmentation, and immense human suffering. The destruction of Libya did not liberate its people; it dismantled one of Africa's highest human development states and plunged the country into prolonged instability. The continuing attempts to overthrow the Syrian government generated catastrophic humanitarian consequences while empowering extremist imperialist stooges. These experiences should have permanently discredited the fantasy that imperialist intervention serves progressive ends. Yet sections of the contemporary Left continue to recycle precisely the same narratives whenever another independent state becomes the target of Western strategic hostility. A genuinely dialectical Marxist position therefore refuses two symmetrical errors. It rejects the liberal fantasy that imperialist war becomes progressive when directed against governments with objectionable or questionable domestic policies. Equally, it rejects the notion that supporting national sovereignty requires abandoning critical analysis of internal class relations. Instead, it recognises that the contradiction between imperialism and national independence possesses its own objective reality, one that cannot simply be dissolved into debates over domestic political institutions. Today, as the international system moves towards multipolarity, the defence of national sovereignty has acquired renewed historical significance. The weakening of unilateral imperial domination creates greater political space for the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to pursue independent developmental strategies. Every successful act of resistance against imperial coercion contributes, however modestly, to this broader transformation of world politics. Conversely, every successful regime-change operation strengthens the mechanisms through which imperialism disciplines the entire Global South. For Third World Marxists, therefore, solidarity with Iran in the face of external aggression is not primarily an expression of a total ideological agreement with the Islamic Republic. It is an affirmation of a universal anti-imperialist principle: that no nation should have its political future determined by foreign military power, economic coercion, or colonial domination. The Iranian people alone possess the sovereign right to determine the character of their own state and the direction of their own historical development. That principle remains as fundamental today as it was during the great anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. Ultimately, the question before Marxists is not whether Iran perfectly embodies socialist ideals. It is whether we stand with the right of oppressed nations to resist imperial domination or whether we permit imperialism to redefine aggression as humanitarianism and conquest as liberation. For those committed to the Marxist-Leninist and Third World Marxist traditions, the answer remains unequivocal. We defend the sovereignty of nations against imperialist aggression because without sovereignty there can be neither genuine democracy, independent development, nor the historical possibility of socialism itself. The road to human emancipation has never passed through imperial missiles, economic sieges, or externally engineered regime change. It has always passed through the self-determination of peoples struggling to shape their own destiny.