The Trump administration is preparing to launch a new and catastrophic war against Iran. “A massive Armada is heading to Iran,” Trump declared Wednesday on Truth Social. “Like with Venezuela, it is ready, willing, and able to rapidly fulfill its mission, with speed and violence, if necessary.” Citing the June 2025 US-Israeli bombing campaign that killed over a thousand Iranians, he threatened, in the language of a Mafia boss, “The next attack will be far worse!”
The deployment of a massive armada to the Persian Gulf, combined with these public threats, makes clear that the course has already been set toward major military action.
The scale of the buildup is immense. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by three guided-missile destroyers, entered Middle Eastern waters this week after transiting from the South China Sea. The US now has 40,000 troops in the region, five air wings across five countries, F-35 and F-18 fighter jets, Tomahawk missiles and additional Thaad and Patriot air defense systems. Two destroyers have been positioned near the Strait of Hormuz.
On Thursday evening, the New York Times published an article, co-authored by five of the most prominent reporters covering the White House, Pentagon and foreign policy establishment, outlining Trump’s “new military options against Iran.” The Times, speaking for the Democratic Party, is actively involved in legitimizing and preparing public opinion for a criminal act of aggression.
The article reviews in detail an “expanded list” of military options presented to Trump, including “American forces” carrying “raids on sites inside Iran” and airstrikes against nuclear and missile infrastructure. Among the options, the Times writes, is for a series of strikes that “would cause such turmoil that it could create the conditions on the ground for Iranian security forces or other forces to remove the 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.”
What this “removal” would involve and who the “other forces” might be, the Times does not say, but the language is clearly intended as a threat of assassination by US or Israeli forces.
The authors write that Trump’s posture toward Iran follows “a similar approach to Venezuela, where the United States amassed forces just off its coast for months as part of a pressure campaign to oust Nicolás Maduro.” When this “failed,” they write, “U.S. forces … attack[ed] the country and capture[d] him. He and his wife are now being held for trial in a federal detention center in Brooklyn.”
To avoid military attack, the Trump administration is demanding that Iran give up civilian nuclear technology that it is legally entitled to possess, hand over all of its uranium to the United States, abandon its regional allies and eliminate ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel—ensuring that Israel can attack at will without fear of retaliation. Under conditions in which decades of sanctions have already devastated the Iranian economy, acceptance of these terms would reduce Iran to a vassal state of the United States.
These “demands” recall those made by Austria-Hungary on Serbia in July 1914, ahead of the outbreak of World War I, crafted not to be accepted but to serve as pretext for a war already decided upon.
The socialist evaluation of this war is not determined by the Iranian government’s policies—however repressive they are—but by the historic character of both countries. The United States is the most powerful imperialist country in the world. Iran is a historically oppressed nation, subjected to a US-sponsored coup in 1953 that installed a tyrannical regime and decades of punishing economic sanctions and military threats. This is an imperialist war against a former colonial country, the purpose of which is to enslave the Iranian people.
American imperialism has sought for decades to topple the bourgeois-clerical regime in Tehran as part of the broader project of constructing a “New Middle East” under US hegemony. The present military escalation is a continuation of the destruction of Iraq, the war in Syria and the US-backed Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Over the past 16 months, Israel has killed more than 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza. It has also bombarded Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, all designed to weaken Iran. Israel is now poised to directly join any US attack on Iran.
The protests in Iran caused by US-led sanctions have been seized upon by Washington and its allies as justification for regime change, while they cynically promote the Shah’s son, US-based Reza Pahlavi, as the potential leader of a “new Iran.” Claims that 30,000 protesters were killed have been promoted by Western governments and media, despite the highly dubious sourcing of these figures. The same imperialist powers denouncing Iran for its crackdown are allied with Saudi Arabia—which beheads political dissidents—and Israel, which has carried out a genocide in Gaza. The hypocrisy is obvious.
For its part, the bourgeois-clerical regime in Tehran, hostile to the democratic and social aspirations of the impoverished mass of the population, still hopes to strike a deal with imperialism to regain access to the capitalist world market and global investment.
The brutal eruption of US imperialist violence is driven by an effort to resolve an escalating economic crisis and maintain its global hegemony through military force. Over the past year, the value of the dollar has plunged by 10 percent. The price of gold, a hedge against the dollar, has surged above $5,500 per ounce, up nearly $700 in a single week. The US federal debt stands at $38.4 trillion and is growing by $8 billion per day. All three major credit rating agencies have downgraded US sovereign debt, and Deutsche Bank has warned of “a crisis of confidence in the U.S. currency.”
Iran possesses the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves and second-largest natural gas reserves. As with Venezuela, it supplies 90 percent of its oil exports to China, making it a critical source of energy for Washington’s chief rival. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil passes daily. US control of Iran would give Washington a stranglehold over the energy supplies of China, India, Japan and Europe.
Greenland, which Trump is demanding be handed over by Denmark and its autonomous government, contains rare earth minerals essential to Chinese industry. The ultimate target is China itself—and Russia, which in the face of the US-NATO instigated war over Ukraine has expanded its military-strategic ties with Tehran.
A new war would not remain confined to Iran. It would engulf the entire Middle East. Iran could respond by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, triggering a global economic crisis. How would China respond to such an act of aggression, which is clearly directed at it as well? To advance its predatory global agenda, American imperialism is setting the region ablaze and potentially igniting a global conflagration.
Beyond the deepening economic crisis, the Trump administration is confronting a growing social and political crisis at home. It faces mass opposition to its efforts to establish a police state in the United States. Millions have been shocked and galvanized into political action by the killings of Renée Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on January 24 in Minneapolis.
The administration sees yet another war as a way out of these mounting crises. It intends to use war not only to pursue its imperialist aims abroad but also as a pretext for intensifying repression at home—branding Trump’s domestic political opponents as “terrorists.”
Over the past week, the Democratic Party has intensified its efforts to suppress opposition to Trump’s developing dictatorship and reach a political accommodation with the White House. On Thursday, the House and Senate passed bipartisan legislation to avert a government shutdown, which includes the extension of funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—the agency overseeing ICE and CBP operations—for two more weeks. The deal also green lights the continuation of military operations, including those directed at Iran.
The Democrats’ central concern is to preserve “stability” at home as the United States prepares to launch a new imperialist war. The entire political establishment supports American imperialism and its war aims. The working class cannot rely on the United Nations, international courts or any institution of the capitalist state to defend its interests.
The only viable basis for opposing war is the independent mobilization of workers in every country against the capitalist system and the financial oligarchy that it serves.
The struggle against war must be inseparably connected to the fight to defend democratic rights, jobs and living standards. The same administration preparing a criminal war abroad is carrying out mass arrests at home, gutting social programs and overseeing mass layoffs. War, dictatorship, austerity and repression are all expressions of the response of the financial oligarchy to the deepening crisis of capitalism.
A war against Iran would be a crime not only against the Iranian people but also against the American working class. The fight against imperialist war must be advanced through the mobilization of workers in every country in a common struggle to overthrow the capitalist system and establish socialism on a world scale.