The US Culture of Misunderstanding in Iran & the Middle East

July 25, 2026
Andrea B. Rugh
Washington, D.C. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – It has become increasingly clear that effective international communication is impossible without basic knowledge of world cultures. US officials say as much when they admit that failures in Afghanistan and Iraq were due in large part to ignorance of culture and pushing too many programs that conflicted with local values. In Afghanistan, for example, the US pushed tribal leaders to adopt a centralized form of government, when decentralization was a more familiar pattern of the past. It left the Afghan government only controlling Kabul in the end. The US also insisted that USAID-funded projects be staffed by 25 percent Afghan women. But in practice, few Afghan women had the requisite skills or the willingness to join their projects. Even when they did, social norms required that they be accompanied and transported everywhere—costly provisions that forced the cancellation of projects.

U.S. Imperialism Resurgent

July 25, 2026
Costas Lapavitsas
Evidence has been accumulating for more than a decade that the world has entered a period of profound geopolitical turmoil. Large-scale war has become a permanent feature of geopolitics, manifested in the fighting between Russia and Ukraine since February 2022—with the direct and indirect involvement of the United States and its allies—and in the devastation of the Middle East and destruction of Palestinian society and people by Israel. Alongside open violence, there has been widespread economic coercion applied by the United States, including massive commercial sanctions on Russia, freezing the reserves of its central bank, and using interbank payment mechanisms to isolate the Russian and other economies from the global monetary and financial systems.