The US war on Iran may have seemed like an irrational move by a president who is as reckless and impulsive as he is destructive. But there was a geopolitical logic behind the attack, based on Washington’s desire to deny China access to vital resources.

The resource wars between China and the United States have accelerated the determination of both sides to escape their dependencies on each other. These tensions force the rest of the world to absorb the disruption of two great powers dismantling the integrated economy they spent fifty years building together.

The cost is paid by the children inhaling radioactive dust around Baotou, by the Cuban families navigating a blackout, by the sailors stranded in the Gulf waiting for great powers to finish their argument. Furthermore, resource wars require authoritarian consolidation at home to manage these social costs. That consolidation is visible in Beijing and Tehran, in Tel Aviv and Caracas, and increasingly in Washington itself.

The Left’s task is not to pick sides in this war but to name it for what it is: a struggle between states for control of the materials that power the next industrial revolution, conducted at the expense of the people who live nearest to those materials and furthest from the decisions about how they are used.