Peace and Justice Post

Keith Jones, WSWS, 9 July 2026

US President Donald Trump has relaunched American imperialism’s illegal war of aggression against Iran, after repeatedly making Hitlerite threats in recent days to destroy the country’s basic infrastructure and rain death and destruction on its people.

Speaking Wednesday on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump effectively repudiated the 60-day truce reached between Washington and Tehran last month. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” he declared. He went on to vow that the US will continue the campaign of air strikes launched on Iran in the early hours of Wednesday morning. “We’re going to hit them ‌hard tonight,” boasted the fascist would-be dictator president. 

This was coupled with a flurry of other threats, including the possible resumption of the US blockade of Iranian ports and the “takeover” of Kharg Island, Iran’s principal Persian Gulf oil export hub.

On Tuesday, Washington canceled the oil export sanctions “waiver” that it had granted Tehran as part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that underpins the truce. Hours later, the US mounted air strikes on more than 80 targets in southern Iran, killing, according to Iranian authorities, eight military personnel.

In his characteristic gangster-style fashion, Trump denounced Iran’s leaders in his Wednesday remarks, reveling in his capacity as the head of the US imperialist war machine to order execution air strikes like that which killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei at the war’s outset. “I do not want to deal with them any more, they are scum. They are sick people,” he snorted.

Tehran, for its part, has warned that the US is in breach of the MoU. An Iranian Foreign Ministry statement issued Wednesday said America’s “repeated illegal attacks against Iran,” the re-imposition of sanctions on Iranian oil and Israel’s continuing aggression against Lebanon “have rendered important and fundamental parts” of the truce agreement “ineffective.”

Iran has responded to the Pentagon’s Tuesday night attack with counter-strikes on US military bases in Kuwait and Bahrain and by warning the region’s other oil sheikdoms that they will be similarly targeted if they continue to facilitate US aggression.  

The truce has been hanging by a thread since it was formally signed by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on June 17.   

Trump has repeatedly threatened to renew hostilities even as more information has emerged about the depletion of US missile stocks and the damage Iran has inflicted on US bases across the region.

The truce, coming after a long stream of proclamations from Trump, his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and other minions about an overwhelming US “victory,” represented a debacle and humiliation for Washington. While unleashing massive wanton violence and suffering, the Trump administration manifestly failed to achieve any of its stated objectives—regime change, the elimination of Iran’s nuclear program and ballistic missile arsenal, and the cessation of its support for Hezbollah and other regional allies.  Moreover, Iran was quickly able to establish effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, choking off energy and other exports from and to US allies. Trump himself made reference to the devastating impact US imperialism’s illegal, unprovoked war has had on the world economy, when in justifying the truce he invoked the threat of an economic catastrophe akin to the Great Depression.

Yet some three weeks later Trump and the US oligarchy on whose behalf he rules have recklessly reopened hostilities, threatening to plunge the region and world into an even larger conflagration and economic morass.

They do so in the face of a massive show of popular opposition to US imperialism on the part of ordinary Iranians. Since July 4, millions of Iranians have joined what are to be six days of funeral observances for Ayatollah Khamenei and family members, including his 14-month-old granddaughter, who were killed in the February 28 decapitation strike with which the US and Israel launched their criminal war.

Even sections of the Western media have been forced to concede the popular character of the funeral observances and the palpable mass anger and mood of defiance, as well as genuine anguish, that have characterized them. They have mobilized what remains of the Islamic Republic’s traditional base among the urban and rural poor but also broad sections of working people with deep-rooted grievances against Iran’s bourgeois nationalist regime. They recognize that imperialism represents the greatest obstacle to realizing the social and democratic aspirations of Iran’s workers and toilers and are implacably opposed to the bipartisan drive of the US political establishment to reduce Iran to the type of neo-colonial bondage that existed under the bloody rule of the US-installed Shah prior to the 1979 revolution.

On Wednesday, the funeral possession passed over into Iraq, which like Iran has been the victim of decades of US imperialist aggression, including the invasion and occupation launched in 2003 under a web of lies about “weapons of mass destruction.” There it was similarly greeted with mass outpourings of popular anger against US imperialism and its Israeli attack dog  

The Trump administration’s belligerence is born of crisis—a crisis that is itself rooted in the ever-accelerating decline in the world position of US imperialism and the basic contradictions of the capitalist social order. It faces mounting opposition and growing political radicalization at home as manifested in the mass participation in the “No Kings” protests and a wave of strikes involving broad sections of the working class across the country, from auto parts workers, to educators, healthcare workers and transit workers. Terrified of this growing threat from below, Trump rails against the danger of “communism” and accelerates his drive to impose a presidential dictatorship.

As for the ostensible opposition party, the Democrats, they work with the trade union bureaucracy to contain and suppress working class opposition. Their objections to Trump’s policies largely revolve around questions of US imperialist foreign policy and strategy. This has been exemplified in their response to the Iran war. The entire Democratic Party leadership, including Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, supported the narrative used to justify their war—that Iran, a historically oppressed country, is an aggressor and a threat. Insofar as they have made criticisms, it has been over procedural issues (such as the administration’s failure to give Congress a role in planning and overseeing the war) and Trump’s maladroit conduct of it.

The Democrats joined with powerful sections of the military-security establishments and financial oligarchy in attacking Trump for agreeing to a truce with Iran that failed to achieve any of Washington’s war objectives. California Senator Adam Schiff called it “a thorough capitulation,” while his Connecticut colleague, Chris Murphy, termed it “essentially a surrender to Iran.”

Trump’s relaunching of the war on Iran unfolded against the background of a NATO summit dominated by the imperialist powers’ competing agendas in what is a developing global war for the control of resources, markets, production networks and strategic territories akin to the imperialist world wars of the last century—only on a far greater and more lethal scale.

The European powers, joined by Canada, used the summit to escalate the war on Russia, boasting of their accelerating rearmament drive and role in providing their Ukrainian proxy with the capabilities of striking deep inside nuclear-armed Russia. Trump, meanwhile, denounced them for not being more supportive of the US-Israeli war on Iran, demanded Greenland be ceded by Denmark to the US, reiterated his support for a US-Russia deal to end the Ukraine war at the expense of America’s NATO “allies” and threatened to cut off all US trade with Spain.

The imperialist powers and the capitalist system they lead are dragging humanity to the abyss. The only progressive answer to their rival predatory agendas for rearmament and war, austerity, and the evisceration of democratic rights is the revolutionary mobilization of the international working class. The World Socialist Web Site has long insisted that the same crisis of global capitalism that is fueling global war is intensifying class conflict, creating the objective conditions for the emergence of a mass movement of the working class for socialism.

The critical question is to politically arm the growing working class counter-offensive with a revolutionary socialist program, strategy and leadership. It is to this task that the International Committee of the Fourth International and its respective national Socialist Equality Parties are dedicated.