Understanding hybrid war tactics helps to explain why Trump’s rhetoric oscillates between threats of war and phony offers of peace.
Israeli attack on Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting studio in Tehran on June 16, 2025. (Avash Media/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY 4.0)
By Jeffrey D. Sachs and Sybil Fares
Common Dreams
The question is not if the U.S. and Israel will attack Iran, but when.
In the nuclear age, the U.S. refrains from all-out war, since it can easily lead to nuclear escalation.
Instead, the U.S. and Israel are waging war against Iran through a combination of crushing economic sanctions, targeted military strikes, cyberwarfare, stoking unrest, and unrelenting misinformation campaigns. This combination strategy is called “hybrid warfare.”
Both the American and Israeli deep states are addicted to hybrid warfare. Acting together, the C.I.A., Mossad, allied military contractors and security agencies have fomented chaos across Africa and the Middle East, in a swath of hybrid wars including Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen.
“[E]conomic sanctions, targeted military strikes, cyberwarfare, stoking unrest, and unrelenting misinformation campaigns. This combination strategy is called ‘hybrid warfare.'”
The shocking fact is that for more than a quarter century, the U.S. and Israeli militaries and intelligence agencies have laid waste to a region of hundreds of millions of people, blocked economic development, created terror and mass refugee movements, and have nothing to show for it beyond the chaos itself.
There is no security, no peace, no stable pro-U.S. or pro-Israel alliance, only suffering. In the process, the U.S. is also going out of its way to undermine the U.N. Charter, which the U.S. itself had brought to life in the aftermath of World War II.
The U.N. Charter makes clear that hybrid war violates the very basis of international law, which calls on countries to refrain from the use of force against other countries.
There is one beneficiary of hybrid war, and that is the military-industrial-digital complex of the U.S. and Israel, with firms like Palantir and others profiting from their AI-supported assassination algorithms.
President Dwight Eisenhower warned us in his 1961 farewell address of the profound danger of the military-industrial complex to our society. His warning has come to pass even more than he imagined, as it is now powered by AI, mass propaganda, and a reckless U.S. foreign policy.
We are witnessing two simultaneous hybrid wars in recent weeks, in Venezuela and Iran. Both are long-term C.I.A. projects that have recently escalated. Both will lead to further chaos.
Hybrid War Against Venezuela
Map of Orinoco tar sands assessment unit by USGS, 2009. (USGS/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
The United States has long had two goals vis-à-vis Venezuela: to gain control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves in the Orinoco Belt, and to overthrow Venezuela’s leftist government, in power since 1999.
America’s hybrid war against Venezuela dates to 2002, when the C.I.A. helped to support a coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez.
When that failed, the U.S. ramped up other hybrid measures, including economic sanctions, the confiscation of Venezuela’s dollar reserves, and measures to cripple Venezuela’s oil production, which in fact has collapsed. Yet despite the chaos sown by the US, the hybrid war did not bring down the government.
Trump has now escalated to bombing Caracas, kidnapping President Nicolas Maduro, stealing Venezuelan oil shipments, and imposing an ongoing naval blockade, which of course is a continuing act of war.
It also seems likely that Trump is thereby enriching powerful pro-Zionist campaign funders who have their eyes on seizing Venezuelan oil assets. Zionist interests also have their eye on toppling the Venezuelan government, since it has long supported the Palestinian cause and maintained close relations with Iran.
Netanyahu has cheered on America’s attack on Venezuela, calling it the “perfect operation.”
Hybrid War Against Iran
A USAF F-15E Strike Eagle flies in formation with Israeli air force F-16C and F-16D Fighting Falcon aircraft over Andravida Air Base, Greece, April 2016. (Ioannis Lekkas/US Dept. of Defense/Wikimedia Commons)
The United States and Israel are simultaneously escalating their ongoing hybrid war against Iran. We can expect ongoing U.S. and Israeli subversion, air strikes, and targeted assassinations.
The difference with Venezuela is that the hybrid war on Iran can easily escalate into a devastating regional war, even a global war. In fact, even U.S. allies in the region, especially Gulf countries, have been engaged in intensive diplomatic efforts to persuade Trump to back down and avoid military action.
The war on Iran has a history even longer than the war on Venezuela. The U.S. started to make deep trouble for Iran back in 1953, when democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil in defiance of then-called Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (today’s BP).
The C.I.A. and MI6 orchestrated Operation Ajax to depose Mossadegh through a mix of propaganda, street violence, and political interference. The C.I.A. installed the Shah and backed him until 1979.
Mossadegh at his court martial, 1953. (Ebrahim Golestan, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons)
During the Shah’s rule, the C.I.A. helped to create notorious secret police, SAVAK, that crushed dissent through surveillance, censorship, imprisonment, and torture. Eventually, this repression led to a revolution that swept Ayatollah Khomeini to power.
Amid the revolution, students seized U.S. hostages in Teheran when the U.S. admitted the Shah for medical treatment, leading to fear that the U.S. would try to reinstall him in power. The hostage crisis further poisoned the relations of the U.S. and Iran.
From 1981 onward, the U.S. has plotted to torment Iran, and if possible, to overthrow the government. Among the countless hybrid actions the U.S. has undertaken, the U.S. funded Iraq in the 1980s to wage war on Iran, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, but failing to topple the government.
The U.S.-Israeli objective vis-à-vis Iran is the opposite of a negotiated settlement that would normalize Iran’s position in the international system while constraining its nuclear program.
The real objective is to keep Iran economically broken, diplomatically cornered, and internally pressured.
Trump has repeatedly undercut negotiations that could have led to peace, starting with his withdrawal from the 2016 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that would have monitored Iran’s nuclear energy activities while removing U.S. economic sanctions.
Understanding the hybrid war tactics helps to explain why Trump’s rhetoric oscillates so abruptly between threats of war and phony offers of peace.
Hybrid warfare thrives on contradictions, ambiguities, and outright deceit in U.S. intentions. Last summer, the U.S. was supposed to have a round of negotiations with Iran on June 15, 2025, but then supported Israel’s bombing of Iran on June 13, two days before the negotiations were to take place.
For this reason, signs of de-escalation in recent days should not be taken at face value. They can all too readily be followed by a direct military attack in the coming days.
The world’s best hope is that the other 191 countries of the U.N. aside from the U.S. and Israel finally say no to America’s addiction to hybrid war: no to regime-change operations, no to unilateral sanctions, no to the weaponization of the dollar, and no to the repudiation of the U.N. Charter.
The American people do not support the lawlessness of their own government, but they have a very hard time making their opposition heard. They and almost all the rest of the world want the U.S. deep state brutality to end before it’s too late.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the U.N. Broadband Commission for Development.
Sybil Fares is a specialist and adviser in Middle East policy and sustainable development at SDSN.
This article is from Common Dreams
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Well done!
It is my understanding that Iran also sells its oil to countries in their own currency, not in dollars. The other country that did that was Venezuela. It would seem that many of our targets have refused to bow to the demands of the Anglo-Zionist imperial regime.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the targets are also socialist, choosing that oil proceeds benefit the people and the country, versus supplying profits to US Oligarchs. We claim to spread democracy to these poor countries being oppressed by socialism, but we really are spreading oligarchy and the system of capitalism, which is 100% extractive. It’s almost like the government is controlled by the oligarchy. ;)
We are thieves and pirates who plunder what we want from the world, but as Mark Carney noted, the days of our unipolar control have burst though we are trying to ignore it. The worst thing Obama did was sell his “US exceptionalism” to the world, because we are far from exceptional. His delusions brought about the Trump/MAGA regime.
Sachs and Fares have only narrated what has been only too obvious to the reading public. One cannot but notice that in elucidating the concept of hybrid warfare they have left out some other aspects to it including biased lawfare, crypto-crookery, bio-chemical interjections and perhaps even atmospheric if not also space-based climatic interferences. Under Trump the hybrid warfare has also assumed the unsettlingly features of phony diplomacy, phony threats and phony escalations to facilitate hydrocarbon rip-offs !
In the aftermath of protests that led to anti-government riots, mayhem, and—according to official government figures—the killing of close to 3,200 people, Iranians inside the country are now calm but remain in a state of shock and mourning. While many are angry at the government for a host of reasons, the collective sense is that the nation is currently experiencing an existential threat directed from the United States and Israel.
The US and Israel have effectively expanded their conflict from Palestinian to the streets of Iranian cities, with the goal of toppling the Iranian government. When peaceful protests turned into riots—led by the most fascistic elements of the monarchists and materially supported by Israel—these groups attacked and destroyed almost everything within their reach. They burned mosques, cultural centers, libraries, grocery stores, ambulances, fire trucks, and civilian cars. They killed hundreds of unarmed Basijis and innocent bystanders, including children and ordinary protesters, using pistols, shotguns, knives, machetes, and through lynching. Undoubtedly, Iranian police also ended up killing many innocent people.
While the US-led 1953 coup against Iran’s popular prime minister defined the Iranian psyche toward America for decades, the 12-day US-Israeli war against Iran in June 2025, along with the recent bloody hybrid conflict, will endure in the national memory for years to come—even if the United States does not start another war.
If the US or Israel expects anything good to come of this for them, they must be dreaming. Despite all divisions and shortcomings—in which the Iranian government has played a significant role—the collective sense in Iran is that the US and Israel are determined to divide, destroy, and conquer the country. Iranians are unlikely to fall into the trap of the hybrid war designed and implemented by the US and Israeli.
Hasn’t causing chaos always been Plan B, for when Plan A regime change / colonisation / resource grabs / etc fails?
On the basis of – better have chaos than give them any chance to recover or regroup and fight back! Rather like a scorched earth policy.
We got stung thinking Islamic warfare working for awhile in Afghanistan against the USSR and might punish OPEC for an oil embargo risking the Shah and a Saudi King. Instead we got a deal for Reagan to be helped for election for military arms due to the Carter gambit of sending Iraq to punish Iran for instead taking Embassy hostages. The jke on us is we are still suffering from the Reagan era still today with economic and military excess starving social reality and the entire progressive 60-s policy reversal of reality for 20th century strategic imperial folly.
It can confuse when hybrid seems it has always been high-bid .
A musical chairs approach
A different Auctioneer
The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was founded in 1908, following the discovery of a large oil field in Masjed Soleiman, Iran. It was the first company using the oil reserves of the Middle East. APOC was renamed Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in 1935, and eventually became the British Petroleum Company (BP) in 1954, as one root of the BP Company today. For half a century, profit from the company flowed into European hands. Not only did the British government own a majority share but revenue that Iran did receive was used to re-pay debts owed to European creditors, which earlier shahs had incurred. Other cheap concessions in Iran were also obtained by Europeans, to their benefit and Iran’s cost.
The company, too, reneged on agreements to train Iranian technicians and engineers. It paid Iranians considerably less than foreigners and accommodated Iranian workers in sub-standard housing. The 1953 Iranian coup d’état, which supported the reigning Shah and removed an elected Prime Minister, was sparked by the company’s nationalization. After the coup, a new contract was negotiated giving Iran a 50 percent share.
Iran’s subsequent alienation from the West (beginning in 1979), which owes much to how the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company profited from exploiting Iran’s oil over many years, can be attributed in part to the irresponsible way that a “game” was played in other people’s territory, with little thought to what the consequences might be. The degree to which the prosperity of former colonial powers was gained at the cost of others is an issue that a world community of nations committed to justice and a fairer distribution of resources needs to address.
– newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Anglo-Iranian_Oil_Company
Iran daring to nationalise their oil industry to improve their own country instead of remaining as a slave to Britain, stood wholly against the West’s covert (and continuing) goal of eventually taking over the Middle East to gain ownership of its oil.
Hence, Iran is made the mortal enemy of the entire Western world, simply for minimising the profits of a few parasitic foreign elites in the process of looking out for themselves.
One reason (not the only reason of course) the Iranian revolutionaries kept the hostages for well over a year is bc they were hoping to use them as a sort of bargaining chip to compel the Western-Zionist media to give much needed coverage to their vast audience of the atrocities and brutalities committed by the CIA/Mossad-Shah’s SAVAK.