A half century after the empire’s loss of an important sphere of influence, the commander-in-chief, facing scandal and suffering from ill health in his old age, has launched a war. He’s hoping to reconquer lost territory and, most importantly, the riches under its soil. He assures us that, despite the economic pain we may endure during the campaign, it will all be worthwhile in the end.
Failing to assemble a serious coalition of allies, it is only weeks before confidence in certain victory gives way to an overwhelming sense of defeat. Initiative passes to the enemy. The war has become a quagmire.
The moral and political sense of defeat will meet with the social pressure cooker at home. The resulting explosion will lead, not only to the fall of the empire, but to the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class.
If you thought for a moment that you were reading about Donald Trump and the war in Iran, you can be forgiven. But this is the fate that met Louis Napoleon and the Second French Empire. Its humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War to reassert control over the coal-rich left bank of the Rhine led directly to the Paris Commune.
It wouldn’t be the last time the defeat of an empire abroad sparked revolution on the home front. The 1905 Russian Revolution erupted after a similarly humiliating defeat of the Russian Empire at the hands of the Japanese. The miserable failure of the Tsarist regime in the war and the economic hardships caused by it were the powder ignited by the Bloody Sunday massacre.
Closer to the present, the heroic colonial revolutions which swept the globe in the middle of the 20th century produced similar results in the imperialist metropoles. The loss of colonial possessions caused widespread disillusionment with the ruling class and led millions of workers to question the legitimacy of the entire social order.
Take France after World War II. The Việt Minh waged a nearly decade-long war of independence against France in Indochina (present-day Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam). The French were forced out of the region in 1954—just in time to try, and fail, to put out other anti-colonial fires in North Africa. France lost its colonies in Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, and Algeria triumphed in its eight-year war of independence in 1962.
These defeats represented a dramatic demotion of France as an imperialist power, delegitimizing the whole regime for an entire generation. Despite relatively high standards of living and the strongman rule of De Gaulle, within just a few short years, repression of student activists triggered a revolutionary movement in which 10 million workers went on strike and effectively seized control in dozens of industries.
The movement lasted a month. The working class had effectively taken power before Stalinists and reformist leaders demobilized the workers and handed power back to the bourgeoisie. For Western European capitalists, this was a harrowing brush with death—and it wouldn’t be their last.
The fascist regime in Portugal was even more dramatically and directly affected by its defeat in the colonies. Beginning in 1961, the regime waged 13 years of grinding war against independence movements in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. Given the economic importance of these colonies to the Portuguese ruling class, they desperately clung on long after defeat was all but an established fact.
The impact on the military was unprecedented. In April 1974, a military coup toppled the dictatorship and established a republic with conservative General Spinola as president. The fall of the dictatorship uncorked the pent up aspirations of the masses and left-wing soldiers who immediately clashed with Spinola.
The following months witnessed a dramatic radicalization of the revolution. Mass mobilizations, strikes, and factory occupations forced the resignation of Spinola and the nationalization of banking, energy, and other industries that were owned by oligarchs loyal to the fallen dictatorship.
The ruling class was paralyzed in the face of working class mobilization. The cover of Time magazine carried the headline: “Red Threat in Portugal.” The article raised the question bluntly: would Portugal be “Western Europe’s first communist country?” Ultimately, as in France, it was the Stalinists and reformists that provided the ruling class with the breathing room they needed to regain the initiative.
The war on Iran is shaping up to be a debacle. Trump’s ever-shifting goals for the campaign range from the improbable to the ludicrous. With energy and fertilizer prices rising, war is causing far-reaching economic devastation.
But it’s not merely the economic impact that will be significant. From the elevation of Luigi Mangioni to folk-hero status to revulsion at the crimes revealed in the Epstein files, the entirety of the US establishment is already in a deep crisis of legitimacy. The political fallout from a defeat in Iran could very well feature heavily in the story of the Third American Revolution.