US and Israel’s decision to bomb Iran has put the world in a very dangerous place. Trump’s initial address, informing the world that military action had started, claimed that this was an attack to ‘liberate the people of Iran.’ Nothing could be further from the truth.
Instead this action could very easily spiral into a wider conflagration, not just in the Middle East but across the world.
The brave mass movement in Iran against Khamenei’s rule only two months ago left the regime vulnerable. Trump and Netanyahu saw an opportunity to rid the Middle East of a state they see as the major obstacle to their control of the oil fields — and their political domination of the region.
The excuse for the attack was the apparent failure of Iran to commit to not producing its own nuclear capability. The arms race and the fear of nuclear annihilation is a real one. But the main driver of the potential of nuclear Armageddon is not Iran but the US and Israel. The US is the only country to have used nuclear weapons, and Israel is the sole nuclear power in the Middle East. The recent actions of the Israeli government in carrying out a genocide of the Palestinian people show it would not flinch from using even more barbaric means to further Israeli state interests.
History repeats itself
Trump framed the rationale for the attacks in his speech historically. He referenced 1979, when a revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran, the US-backed dictator. But this war is not about the liberation of Iranian people today. It is much more motivated by revenge for the loss of US interests in the region nearly 50 years ago.
The real aim of this war is regime change. The US have a long history of such attempts to further US interests in the region. In 1953, backed by the UK, the democratically-elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup. The US replaced him with the pro-US absolute monarch, the Shah of Iran, who ruled as a dictator until 1979 with the support of the US and Britain.
In 1979, a workers revolution ousted the West’s puppet. But the main beneficiary of the revolution was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who ushered in an Islamic state.
It is this history that Trump is trying to reverse, to make Iran once again the playground of American corporations and US interests.
Does anyone seriously believe if the people of Iran took Trump’s word and rose up and took matters into their own hands and re-established the shuras (workers councils, the democratic working class organisations that sprang up out of the revolution in 1979), he would welcome them?
We only have to see how he is trying to deal with working class opposition in the US to get the answer to this question!
Liberation does not come from dropping bombs at 30,000 feet. It only can come from Iranian workers themselves. In fact, the bombing will make it far more difficult for real democratic working class forces to emerge to take control over their own lives.
Trump’s ‘forever wars’ are a sign of his weakness
Whilst Trump’s primary reason for the attack on Iran is the ‘America First’ doctrine of reshaping the global world order in US interests, his weaknesses at home are a secondary but not insignificant factor.
Last September, Trump delivered a speech to his top military stating that the United States was facing an ‘invasion from within’, and that the military must prepare to fight this enemy at home, rather than engaging in wars abroad. Instead US troops would be deployed to sort out the ongoing problems confronted by ‘ordinary’ Americans.
This speech was a recognition that that the US could not continue with the failures of the ‘forever wars’. From Vietnam to Iran, from Afghanistan to the occupation of Iraq, the US has shown it is not invincible. In fact these military adventures revealed the weakness of the US’s ability to police the globe in the way it once could.
This reflected the line that Trump has given to his MAGA base about ending ‘forever wars’ and an attempt to reassure this base that these promises were being kept, especially in light of growing criticism about the Epstein files.
Fast forward a few months from this speech, and we have seen threats to annex Greenland, the kidnapping of the Venezuelan President and his wife, and now an attempt at regime change in Iran backed by enormous military firepower.
So why the turnaround? In part, the action in Venezuela and threats to Greenland represent an attempt to halt long term US economic decline by asserting control over resources and trade in the US’s backyard, what Trump has labelled the ‘Western hemisphere’. This strategy was outlined in the US National Security strategy in November 2025.
The action in Iran in part reflects Trump’s willingness, emboldened by his ‘success’ in Venzuela (and egged on by Netanyahu), to seize advantage of an opportunity to take back control of a country seen as key to America’s interests in the Middle East. This opportunity was created by Israel’s wiping out of the Hamas leadership, weakening of Hezbollah and Houthi rebels, and the genocide of the Palestinian people. The bloody suppression of the mass uprising in Iran then provided the excuse.
The attack on Iran is also a response to the growing unrest in the US itself to Trump. The magnificent resistance to ICE across the US has thrown Trump on the back foot. The ongoing scandal about the Epstein files has meant that a war abroad is seen by Trump as an opportunity to unite his base, providing a distraction from his growing domestic problems.
This is a dangerous gamble for Trump. In his speech informing the world of the war on Iran he warned that American lives will be lost for this ‘noble’ cause. Even before body bags start to arrive back on US soil, many Americans are asking what is the justification for another ‘forever war’, and ‘why is it our kids and not yours that are going to die for this ‘noble’ cause?’
Working class Americans will pay for this war in an increase in petrol and food prices and cuts in their wages.
Trump’s realignment of the world order is working in one important sense. Trump gains confidence to continue his ‘forever wars’ because every time he invades another country (breaking international laws and agreements), he faces no real opposition from other Western leaders. NATO countries have increased their arms spending, enabling Trump’s New World Order. Mainstream political leaders may complain, some may utter some words of criticism, but most have gone along with him.
Keir Starmer has allowed Trump to attack Iran from British bases ‘defensively’, targeting Iranian missile sites. This will mean more atrocities like the bombing of a school in Minab in Southern Iran, because Iran will move missile launchers and bombs will go astray. It will also mean that British bases like Akrotiri become targets.
We must build a movement that demands of our government that Starmer opposes Trump’s ‘forever wars’. We must demand a stop to the bombing of Iran now.
We should organise local protests and emergency branch meetings to pass motions calling on our government to not assist with Trump’s wars and call for an end to the bombing now.
– Sean Vernell, UCU