A Primer on the Axis of Resistance: A World-Historical Force for Liberation

After the fall of Syria to zionist-imperialist mercenary forces in 2024, many proclaimed the end of the Axis of Resistance, calling it “a house of cards” run by Iran, which was nothing more than “a paper tiger.” These were common conceptualizations that echoed zionist-imperialist talking points, parrotted by scholars and analysts across the political spectrum. But the Axis of Resistance is now stronger than it has ever been, completing dozens of operations a day during the Ramadan War. Its members use both conventional and non-conventional military strategies to fight the most powerful empire in world history.

Put simply, the Axis of Resistance is a world historical force for liberation that has taken its rightful place in history along with the anti-colonial warriors of the Caribbean and Latin America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Third World national liberation struggles of the mid-twentieth century; and the wars of liberation in Southern Africa. Those victories are lodestars. The Axis of Resistance follows in their light.

1. The Axis of Resistance Wages A War of Liberation Against Colonialism and Imperialism.

The Ramadan War of 2026 marks a profound break in the global order, heralding the accelerating decline of U.S. imperialism as it makes way for the rise of a multipolar world order. One of the driving forces behind this historic transformation is the Axis of Resistance: a cohesive, multi-front coalition comprising the governments of Yemen and the Islamic Republic of Iran; the courageous fighters of Hezbollah in Lebanon; the diverse political formations of Iraq and Syria; and, most centrally, the entirety of Palestinian resistance factions. This formation represents the organic reply of the colonized to their colonizers. The Axis of Resistance is no mere alliance of convenience. It is a world-historical force—a living, breathing countercurrent to the predatory logic of imperialism.

Conceived by the late General Qassem Soleimani, the Axis has methodically dismantled the imperial strategy of regional fragmentation. Its operational logic is straightforward but devastating: an assault on one front is an assault on all. When Gaza is bombed, Hezbollah strikes northern Israel. When the U.S. attacks Iran, Iraqi militias target U.S. bases in Syria and Jordan. When the siege of Gaza tightens, Yemen threatens the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. This is no loose partnership but a singular, integrated war machine—drawing on local knowledge and decentralized command to wage a drawn-out war of attrition against the most powerful empire in history.

The consequences for the imperial core have been catastrophic. Despite unleashing genocidal violence and overwhelming conventional force, the U.S. and the zionist entity can claim no strategic victories. Instead, they face economic distress and internal fragmentation. Iran has asserted sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, and has restored deterrence through precise, devastating operations such as True Promise 3 and 4.

For over two centuries, European imperialism and its North American successor have subjugated the peoples of West Asia. Into this region—an ancient cradle of civilization—the West implanted “Israel”: a European settler colony, forged in the crucible of Zionist ideology, imposed onto Palestinian soil in 1948 as a mercenary garrison for Western capital. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the United States and Europe began exporting white settlers to Palestine, dispossessing the Indigenous population of land and home. This process was never a mere migration. It was an acceleration of capitalism’s centuries-long project of ongoing primitive accumulation, a violent expropriation and plundering of land, labor, and resources of all West Asia.

Today, “Israel” is precisely that: a mercenary entity. Its sole purpose is the destruction of any force that dares oppose U.S. imperialism. Like all settler states, the zionist entity is neither legitimate nor organic to the region. It is a settler outpost, armed, financed, and shielded by another militarized white settler state—the United States. Israel has trained and aided fascist movements worldwide: the apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia, the murderous contras in Nicaragua, and the genocidal juntas in Guatemala that slaughtered over 200,000 Indigenous Mayans. Before the zionist entity even existed, the zionist movement collaborated with Germany’s Nazi Party and Italy’s National Fascist Party to uproot Jews from Europe.

2. The Axis of Resistance Confronts the Largest Empire in History.

U.S. imperialism rests on a foundation of capitalism and white supremacy. The United States is the largest and most powerful empire the world has ever known. Its military bases encircle the planet and its violent military commands preserve U.S. interests. It imposes blockades and sanctions on more than one-third of the world’s population—most of them non-white. It remains the only government in history to have deployed nuclear weapons in warfare. The United States has never known peace: from the genocide of Indigenous nations in North America to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, the U.S. empire wages perpetual war against humanity and against the Earth itself.

Europe and the United States have always answered anti-colonial resistance with genocide and other forms of violent coercion. From the Americas to Africa to Asia, this is their hallmark. The genocide against the Palestinian people accelerates or decelerates only according to the shifting demands of capital. We are now witnessing an escalation—a direct response to the deepening crisis of U.S. imperialism.

In the last 50 years alone, the US and the zionists have directly or indirectly invaded Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. This violence extends to the region’s neighbors: Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia. They also conducted covert operations to uproot the region’s Arab Jews. All these peoples—of West and Central Asia, East and North Africa—are unified by the violence they suffer at imperialist hands.

The Axis of Resistance is the organic response to these wars. As a world-historical formation, it has sharpened the global contradictions between imperialism and national liberation to an unprecedented degree. It has irrevocably damaged the standing of both U.S. imperialism and zionism. Zionism today remains under a conflagration no level of defense or genocidal aggression can contain. U.S. military bases have become increasingly vulnerable as the Resistance consolidates its regional power. These developments are decades in the making—forged through successive imperialist wars that targeted the Resistance countries. The material realities have now produced an ideological war against U.S. imperialism and zionism, unifying the world against the genocidal character of Washington and Tel Aviv. Throughout the whole region, popular sentiment is in favor of the Resistance.

U.S. imperialism’s demise is announced by its most desperate and depraved acts—acts that only intensify the contradictions they seek to resolve. From the French genocide in Haiti to the British genocide in Kenya, the US-led genocide in Palestine follows a hideous precedent. But extirpative warfare cannot reverse the tide of history. The Axis of Resistance stands among the foremost forces leading the world into a new era.

The Axis of Resistance, therefore, represents the unity of all militant, anti-imperialist, grassroots, popular and working-class forces, seeking to decisively end U.S. hegemony in West Asia and, by dealing a decisive blow to U.S.-led imperialism, the planet itself. To do so, it must destroy imperialist hegemony and defeat the empire’s foremost mercenary: “Israel.”

3. Steadfastness and Patience are Paramount.

The Axis of Resistance wages a protracted war of attrition that strategically raises the cost of occupation and aggression, rendering the colonial regime unsustainable. The most conspicuous evidence of the success of protracted war is the battlefield defeat of the empire’s military forces, social strife among zionist settlers, division within the empire’s ruling class, political and social crises in its vassal states. economic implosion including capital flight, declining investment, currency devaluation, austerity, large flows of settler emigration, and decline in agriculture and other activities.

To the Resistance, patience is paramount. Imperialist powers seek to avoid attrition by prosecuting quick, decisive conventional wars—the model of 1967. Resistance movements, by contrast, employ popular guerrilla tactics, hit-and-run campaigns of attrition, as demonstrated in Lebanon’s liberation of 2000. Revolutionary warfare is a contest of strategic endurance: the nimble, popular resilience of the resistance against the lumbering, bureaucratic inertia of the imperialist military.

Since February 2026, the Resistance’s strategic patience has been vindicated on an extraordinary scale. The Axis withstood the U.S.-Israeli assault that widened to target Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. It deepened its coordination and expanded its capabilities. Iran’s successive operations—True Promise 3 and 4—have significantly degraded the imperialist war-making infrastructure across the region. The strikes were not symbolic. They were precise and devastating, establishing a new strategic reality. There is no return to the status quo ante. The Strait of Hormuz is under Iranian sovereign control. The Bab al-Mandab stands as a trump card in Yemen’s hand, capable of closure at a moment of the Resistance’s choosing. Deterrence, though tested by land invasions of Lebanon, has been restored—again and again. The enemy’s celebrated "victories" are, in every case, followed by the Resistance’s unyielding return.

4. Beware of Psychological Operations and Counterinsurgency.

Every anti-colonial revolution faces counterrevolution, what colonizers call “counterinsurgency.” These campaigns aim at destroying resistance forces and seek to isolate, delegitimize, and criminalize anti-imperialist resistance, fostering the internalization of despair.

The imperialist-zionist assassination campaign against resistance leaders—from Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah to Ismail Haniyeh to Hachem Safieddine, and perhaps most significantly, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—embodies this strategy. Militarily, it seeks to incapacitate organizational structures. Psychologically, it aims to demoralize the population. But it has largely failed. The Resistance’s command and control structures remain intact. Leadership is prepared for martyrdom and replacement. Governance and military capabilities continue to function. Targets are struck with the same regularity, the same precision.

Social media is a fertile ground for imperial psyops: rumors of adventurism among Palestinian leaders, false claims that Iranian leaders have been tricked by imperial promises, fictions of back-channel communications with arch enemies, manufactured disagreements among resistance factions. These are designed to fracture the united anti-imperialist front. Do not believe them.

Collective punishment—the mass slaughter of civilians, the destruction of urban centers, schools, hospitals, municipal infrastructure—aims to destabilize society and isolate the Resistance from its popular cradle. The zionist genocide in Gaza, now expanded to Lebanon and the broader region, echoes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. settler practices against Indigenous nations: forced removal through genocide and racial cleansing. It also resembles British counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau, French repression of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN), British brutality in Palestine (1936–1939), and U.S. tactics in Korea and Vietnam.

But the unity and steadfastness of the Palestinian, Lebanese, Yemeni, Iraqi and Iranian peoples continue to provide that cradle. No military technology can defeat the courage and faith of these masses. Victory takes time. It demands sacrifice. It also demands discipline.

Syria remains a principal battleground for Western counterrevolution. The NATO-orchestrated offensive by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—an al-Qaeda affiliate, armed with U.S. weapons and supplies, supported by NATO intelligence and Turkish-Qatari political and economic backing—aimed to destroy a central link in the Axis of Resistance. The Syrian contras publicly thanked the zionist entity for weakening Hezbollah. This coordinated imperialist effort sought to fragment the Resistance Front and isolate Lebanon. It has failed.

We must resist all forms of counterinsurgency. Exercise discipline on social media and in organizing spaces. Reiterate: the resistance endures, it is in its strongest position ever, and enemy media cannot be trusted—not in its declarations of victory, certainly not in its silences about defeat.

5. Liberation is Imminent.

The resistance is the greatest prophylaxis against the divisive strategies of imperialism. Unity shines a light on imperialism’s contradictions. Divisions feed the imperialist agenda. We must forge a single path toward victory and liberation.

The unity of the Arab and Iranian peoples stands juxtaposed against the growing internal contradictions within the zionist entity: political strife, former generals warning of national ruin, religious figures speaking of inevitable collapse. Suffering massive emigration to home countries in the West, the project of a zionist state is showing clear signs of abandonment.

We know how this story concludes. We have seen it from South Africa to Haiti. The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Algeria's loss of more than a third of its population—followed by expulsion of the French. The U.S. exit from Vietnam in utter humiliation. The expulsion from Afghanistan. The pummeling of U.S. forces by the Iraqi resistance.

U.S. imperialism’s goal of achieving full-spectrum domination is regionally translated as a set of three objectives: destroy the Resistance, demilitarize the region, and subdue its peoples. After nearly three years of kinetic genocidal violence, after the murder of tens of thousands of people, after the destruction of key life-giving infrastructure in the region—they have no material victories to report. The Resistance has only to foil the enemy's objectives, and it is triumphantly doing so.

The Resistance is not obligated to emerge unscathed. It is only required to endure, to persist, and to win. It is doing so. The enemies’ economies are in tatters. Their societies are fracturing. Their project is beginning to sink and their “allies” are jumping ship.

Liberation is not a distant hope. It is the imminent horizon of our present struggle. The Axis of Resistance—now more unified, more capable, and more determined than ever—is leading us there.

Trust the resistance. Do not despair. The dawn of victory is upon us.