“… that it is precisely the international strength of the US and her irresistible expansion arising from it, that compels her to include all the powder magazines of the whole world into the foundations of her structure, i.e., all the antagonisms between the East and the West, the class struggle in Old Europe, the uprisings of the colonial masses, and all wars and revolutions. On the one hand, this transforms North American capitalism into the basic counter-revolutionary force of the modern epoch, constantly more interested in the maintenance of ‘order’ in every corner of the terrestrial globe; and on the other hand, this prepares the ground for a gigantic revolutionary explosion in this already dominant and expanding world imperial power”.
At the time of writing, the “ceasefire” between the US and Iran continues to hold despite the US imposition of a naval military blockade. The US imposed the blockade after the US/Iran talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, had ended without agreement. Trump implemented this reckless act fuelled by rage after failing to force Iran onto its knees. Trump is doing the opposite of what he had demanded when he trawled the bottom of the political sewer he swims in, insulting the Iranian regime as “crazy bastards”. He demanded they open the Straits of Hormuz, or he would end Iranian civilisation, that is annihilate the country.
The US had initiated the talks in an attempt to secure an agreement for the resumption of oil and gas flows after Iran retaliated through the effective closure of the Straits. The closure had throttled supplies sparking a surge in oil, gas, fertiliser, helium and dozens of other petroleum products prices leading to a slowdown in a world economy. A world economy that has still failed to recover from not only the 2022 fuel price increases and supply shocks, but the 2008 global financial crisis, is now headed toward a global recession and possibly a depression.
Oil prices have immediately soared above the $100 level – the very thing that had pressured Trump to initiate the talks. The economic crisis in the US itself will only gain more speed.
Even more dangerously, the US blockade implies US soldiers boarding tankers from eg France, Japan, China, India and South Korea. These countries had secured passage through the Straits by agreement with Iran and on their terms. This could be interpreted as an act of war, once again inflaming the fears throughout the war of the possibility of a world war.
The blockade is already proving to be unenforceable. It is also increasing tensions between the Trump administration and the US military over the purging of generals and other high ranking officers. US Centcom (Central Command) has in effect redefined the blockade’s rules of engagement as applicable only to vessels that have docked at Iranian ports. Russian, Indian and Chinese tankers, are reported to have secured exemptions by docking their tankers, fully laden with Iranian oil, at ports in UAE or Oman on their way out of the Straits.
Trump increasingly resembles a predator caught in quicksand – the more it wriggles, the deeper it sinks, dragging Netanyahu along with him into further isolation in a world recoiling from it in abhorrence. The view that the US and Israel pose the greatest threat to humanity is only being reinforced.
Whilst the US has not openly declared that the war will resume, it continues to put plans into place for a ground invasion to, in Trump’s words, ‘take control of Iran’s oil”. The voices warning that in addition to a significant increase in casualties seizing control of Kharg Island would entail and holding it would require troop deployments on the physically hostile terrain on the Iranian mainland. Should Iran’s public statements that it has 1m under arms hold true, this would ensure that the war rages for years with no other outcome possible for the US than a Vietnam quagmire. Voices in the US pointing to this scenario are growing louder. There is no appetite in the US military or the population for a repeat of the humiliation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump exploited this sentiment with his populist electoral promise of an end to “forever wars”. Trump is alienating his own MAGA base in this blatant repudiation of his campaign promises. In the psyche of the US ruling class and the military, the Vietnam defeat, suffered mid-war, looms even larger.
It is not surprising therefore that as the blockade’s failure is clear for all to see, Trump has announced further talks within the remaining period of the two weeks “ceasefire”. Nonetheless the “ceasefire” continues to be threatened by Israel. It has renounced the agreement initially supported by Trump, that the “ceasefire” applies to its war on Lebanon as well, and has carried out new attacks on villages and Red Crescent facilities in the country. Iran, in turn has fired more missiles on Israel. All these developments have unfolded even though neither Iran nor the US have stated that the negotiations have collapsed. A resumption of the US attacks under the pressure of Israel’s continued provocations cannot be ruled out.
The Tail and the Dog: US/Israeli interests Under threat of divergence
Israel carried out the most barbaric of its attacks on Lebanon killing over 300 after the ceasefire’s announcement was a brazenly calculated attempt to collapse the ceasefire. Reflecting the pressure the US was under not appear to be under Israel’s command, Trump exerted pressure on Netanyahu to “go easy on Lebanon.” Trump’s whimpering plea is a desperate attempt to counter the widely held view that the Israeli tail is wagging the US dog.
This has now been followed by US-initiated so-called negotiations between the Lebanese government and Israel in Washington. This quisling Lebanese government responded to Israel’s latest violation of the November 2024 US and France brokered cease fire, in which Israel has devastated southern Lebanon and openly declared its intention to seize 10% of Lebanese territory, by declaring Hezbollah’s activities illegal as of March this year.
The credibility of an arrogant US already lies shattered after twice bombing Iran mid-negotiations in coordination with Israel. Having initiated the ceasefire, the US needed to resurrect its credibility as a serious negotiator and has announced the resumption of talks after the first round ended in a stalemate. This back and forth underlines the reality that the “ceasefire” was forced on it after its Isael-coordinated war had proven to be a colossal miscalculation.
The derision heaped on Trump, depicted as dog-walked by Netanyahu under the threat of further, more damaging Epstein revelations, is fully understandable, but over-stated. It does not take account of the reality that Trump’s ascension to the presidency represents the dominance of one wing of a divided ruling class. Trump’s continuation of the “iron-clad” support Biden had pledged in the Gaza genocide and marching in lockstep with Netanyahu also on Iran, is a consolidation of the dominance of the Silicon Valley billionaire wing that funded him.
In the final analysis, the US imperialist ruling class as a whole has its own separate interests. Its attitude towards Israel was described by former US General and Secretary of State, Alexander Haig as “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk, does not carry even one American soldier, and is located in a critical region for American national security”. Israel will continue to enjoy that protection, however, for as long as US interests are not threatened by its actions. The US’ support for Israel is based on the US’ interests first and foremost. AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee), the only group exempted from registering as a foreign lobby, has politicians in both party political wings of US imperialism on its payroll. Such is AIPAC’s influence that such a break would reverberate through both the Republicans and the Democrats with deeply damaging effects.
However indistinguishable US/Israeli political language, foreign and war policy may be, the crisis created by the Iran war could create a divergence both within the US ruling class and consequently a collision with Israel. It is not an accident that Israel is not included in the negotiations. At some point Trump will be faced with a choice between the latitude Israel is allowed to undermine the ceasefire from without or preserving it in pursuit of the US’ own broader geo-political strategic interests.
A decisive factor in the calculations of both wings of the ruling class is the working class. A majority of American particularly amongst youth, have turned against Israel including the majority of under 40s in the Republic Party. Trump poll ratings have already been pushed under water by the betrayal of his promise of an end to “forever wars”. To this is now being added to the increase in fuel prices and accompanying rising cost-of-living. One of the unintended consequences of this war is that Israel’s conduct has led it to become one of the most hated states in the Middle East and worldwide. This is reflected both in the quantity and the strident tones of the increasing number of governments, sensitive to the views of their own citizens, denouncing Israel. Within Israel itself, there is growing opposition to the war as well as backstabbing of Netanyahu by the opposition for not attaining the objectives of the war they have backed all the way.
Israel has taken the US’s diplomatic cover, financial and military support as a license for its genocidal rampage, turning it into the US’ Frankenstein monster. It could prise open the divisions in the US ruling class and produce a pushback against a foreign policy that threatens its interests as a whole. The US’ attitude towards “allies” has been amply demonstrated several times before.
The Global Consequences of the War
The disastrous consequences of previous US wars and its post WW2 foreign policy have been more or less localised to the countries and the regions around them. Those costs have been borne mainly by the working class, urban and rural masses in the form of social deprivation and political repression, chaos and the economic subjugation and strangulation of their countries by imperialism.
This war, however, has had global consequences economically and politically as we will outline in the series of articles on the US war on Iran. The Great Accelerator that the CWI described the Trump regime as, has sped up the global political and economic crisis. The global economy has not recovered from 2008 global financial crisis – the worst crisis since the 1930s world depression – by the end of Trump 1.0. Under his second coming, Trump has overseen the deepening of the crisis.
Concomitantly, Trump has widened the hair-line fractures in western imperialism driving them towards open breaks. The pace of his destabilisation of the foundations of the entire architecture of post WW2 global and economic governance, built under US supervision, has increased. The very edifice of a post WW2 order originally designed as a “pax Americana” the Trump regime has consciously committed itself to dismantling, including the imperialist political alliances with the EU and Nato itself, is shaking.
The Isfahan Heist Disaster
The talks in Islamabad, Pakistan took place against the background of the US’s failure to achieve its main objectives: regime change, the destruction of Iran’s missile arsenal and eliminating its nuclear weapons production capabilities. The timing of the ceasefire was precipitated by the disastrous failure of the heist of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile at the Isfahan nuclear facility.
In the aftermath of the targeted assassinations of the Ayatollah and other senior leaders of the Iranian government, the United States unleashed an unprecedented aerial campaign. More than 18 000 bombs were dropped in upwards of 10 000 waves of attacks, all with the intention of breaking the resolve of the Iranian regime. Despite the intensity and scale of this relentless bombardment, the leadership remained in place, and the regime did not collapse. At the same time, Iran’s strategic response—effectively shutting down the Straits of Hormuz—resulted in severe oil and gas shortages, further destabilising the region and exerting economic pressure on the US and its allies. Confronted with the failure of military escalation to achieve its objectives, and with the mounting costs of the energy crisis, Trump began to seek a way to de-escalate the conflict and find an exit strategy.
Had the Isfahan heist succeeded, Trump would’ve been able to “declare victory and walk away” as many much more sober-minded analysts and advisors had counselled. The Isfahan imbroglio made the talks an unavoidable necessity.
This was the US’s most chastening embarrassment. It cost at least four aircraft two of which the US destroyed after their failure to take off from the improvised runway. Even worse for the US’s prestige and projection of “peace through strength, the downing of an F15 fighter jet was the first confirmed warplane loss in over 20 years. To distract attention from the disastrous failure of the mission to seize Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, the US’s propaganda machine has gone into overdrive to focus entirely on the rescue of one of the pilots. Speculation is rife that the US is concealing the number of casualties suffered. The rescued pilot has yet to be shown on television.
This disaster so enraged Trump that he issued profanity laden tweets threatening to end Iranian civilisation and to bomb the country back into the stone age. These deranged messages attracted worldwide public revulsion and considered so outrageous that even some US senators described them as genocidal.
Tobogganing Toward Disaster: The Iran War and Global Capitalism
The combined economic and political consequences of the war have been disastrous not only for the US but for imperialism as a whole. Its war strategy, such as it is, has been shown to be completely incoherent. The US has swung in bewilderingly different directions. It has attempted to squeeze the last breath out of Iran’s economy through sanctions over nearly 50 years. Yet, in shock at the impact of Iran’s effective closure of the Straits of Hormuz, he had been warned about but disregarded, he lifted sanctions on Russia to mitigate the impact of the disastrous disruption to global oil flows thereby easing the sanctions on Iran itself. After France, Japan and South Korea amongst others had entered into agreements with Iran to allow their tankers passage through the Straits on its terms, the US has now imposed a blockade on the Staits sending oil prices soaring upwards once again. It initially accepted Iran’s 10-point negotiating position including that Lebanon would be part of a ceasefire, as workable, only to repudiate it afterwards.
In 2025 the cumulative effect of the near-50-year sanctions intensified under Trump plunged the economy into deeper crisis. As is customary with capitalist governments, the Iranian regime passed on the burden of the crisis by utilising the neo-liberal measure of devaluing its currency by 70% leading to inflation reaching close to 50%. This sparked another wave of massive protests after the 2022 Woman, Life Freedom protest movement for women’s rights over the death of 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Jina (Mahsa) Amini who had died in police custody, following her arrest by the “morality police” for not wearing her hijab “correctly”.
With the same casual hypocritical posturing as champions of women’s rights by a regime led by a convicted sexual felon accused by a woman of having raped her as a 13-year old as part of the ring of Epstein sex trafficking depravity, the US proclaimed support for the 2022 protests. Throughout its post WW2 history, particularly in the neo-colonial world, the US has carried out assassinations, set up paramilitary death squads, instigated coups and created drug cartels to destabilise countries, carry out regime change and installed dictatorships at the cost of tens of millions of lives – all in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.”
In Iran itself, in the 1951 elections, the Iranian masses commenced with the establishment of freedom and democracy leading to the first democratically elected president, Mohammad Mossadeq taking office in 1953 on a programme to nationalise the oil industry. In collaboration with Britain, the US ensured that the very “freedom” and “democracy” they claim to be the torch bearers of, were extinguished. They overthrew Mossadeq and installed their puppet, Shah Rehza Pahlavi who presided over a 26-year reign of terror. This time the US attempted to exploit and subvert the protests against the Islamic regime to clear the way for another puppet regime headed by the son of their puppet overthrown in the 1979 revolution.
The US and Israel collaborated by arming Kurdish forces in Iraq, inserting armed Mossad and CIA agents amongst the protestors to shoot at police, attack police stations and mosques. The aim was to create a sense of anarchy the US could use as a cover to intervene to restore “stability” under another dictatorship. Believing that it had sufficiently weakened the Iranian regime, it commenced the war by its decapitation strategy, assassinating the Ayatollah and the other members of the Iranian leadership followed by the barbarity of indiscriminate bombing. The strategy has backfired spectacularly. It has strengthened rather than weakened the Iranian regime as the population rallied to defend the country against the US led by the demented, megalomanic barbarian in the White House installed and funded by the Silicon Valley tech billionaires inspired by Nazi ideology.
The strategy has backfired as the Iranian regime has retaliated by effectively closing the Straits of Hormuz. throwing the US’s tactics into bewildering disarray. The grip of the sanctions first imposed in 1979 and intensified repeatedly after that, intended to achieve Iran’s economic strangulation and reduction to failed state, has now been significantly weakened. They failed to prevent Iran from building up a massive and sophisticated ballistic missile arsenal and drone production capability. Iran has clearly planned for this eventuality particularly since the Iraq war. Through this war, the US has in fact enabled the Iranian regime to break the impact of sanctions through the increased revenue from the tolls it has imposed on “non-enemy” ships passing through the Straits of Hormuz.
No to war – US out of Iran and the Middle East – Worker Unity for a Socialist Middle East
MWP is completely opposed to all weapons of mass destruction above all nuclear weapons by all countries including Iran itself. Expenditure on their production is a colossal squandering of society’s resources. Far from being a deterrent, they pose a threat to the very existence of humanity. The US’ demand for Iran to prevent it from having nuclear weapons, supported by all capitalist governments and the mainstream media, is the most cynical expression of imperial arrogance.
The US, vying with Russia to possess the most nuclear warheads, is the only country in the world to have detonated atom bombs. The US incinerated over 100 000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the Japanese army had been defeated and when its ruling class had initiated diplomatic moves to end the war. One of Trump’s first acts on coming to power the first time was to amend the US Nuclear Arms Posture. In 2018, Trump amended its policy to explicitly renounce the “no first use” policy – one, it emphasised in the policy review, it had never supported in any event. The US furthermore arrogated to itself the right to deploy nuclear weapons even in response to non-nuclear conventional weapons. Such was the worldwide revulsion over Trump’s tweet threatening to end Iran’s civilisation that the White House took the extraordinary step of specifying that the administration was not considering using nuclear weapons after Vice President JD Vance, speaking in Hungary, discussed “tools in our tool kit that we so far haven’t decided to use.”
The MWP condemns the US war on Iran and Israel’s expansion of its genocide from Gaza, the West Bank to the Lebanon and beyond. We demand the withdrawal of all US troops from and closure of its bases in the Middle East and worldwide. We call for the unity of the working class and resistance to all attempts at divide-and-rule on national, ethnic and religious grounds. We reject the neo-liberal capitalist policies of all government in the region including those of the Iranian regime that it has implemented since it hijacked the 1979 revolution and preserved the very capitalist system that had sparked the revolution. We reject the repressive policies against trade unions, the women’s movement, genuine working class opposition campaigning for democratic rights against religious oppression and for socialism.
The potential disaster the US/Israeli war in Iran can only be averted by the independent action of the working class masses themselves. We call upon the Iranian working class to create a mass workers party to unite in Iran and with the working class masses throughout the Middle East suffering under the US-supported feudal family and de facto military dictatorships. The impact of the Arab Spring on the US working class was demonstrated in the occupation of Madison Capital in Wisconsin inspired the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, mass solidarity demonstrations in several cities including New York, site of the emergence of the Occupy Movement. Only on the basis of a socialist programme and revolutionary internationalism can the knot between the 1979 revolution and the Arab Spring be retied and the rich traditions of socialism in the region be revived.
As US imperialism leads humanity, in Trotsky’s words, “tobogganing towards disaster with their eyes closed”, the choice facing humanity is no longer just between barbarism or socialism as Rosa Luxembourg put it, but nuclear annihilation or the socialist transformation of the world.
The first in this series of articles on the US war on Iran war will cover the impact of the war on Iran and Lebanon, on the global economy, and the perspectives for the class struggle in Iran and internationally. This will be followed by articles that will address the question why, despite the Iranian regime being as neo-liberal capitalist as the US itself, the US is attempting to overthrow it; the possibility of a nuclear and/or world war; and finally, the tasks facing the working class in the struggle to overthrow capitalism and the creation of a socialist world.
