US president Donald Trump asserted that Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu would “do whatever I want him to do” over Iran last week (Photo: Flickr / Official White House by Andrea Hanks)
The US had launched renewed strikes on southern Iran as Socialist Worker went to press on Tuesday afternoon.
The airstrikes hit Iranian missile sites near Bandar Abbas, a major port and navy base.
The US Central Command dressed up the assault as “self‑defence strikes to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces”.
In reality, the US is jockeying for position in negotiations. The strikes came as Iranian negotiators arrived in Qatar for talks on ending the war and after Donald Trump boasted of a potential agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
The Trump administration has boasted that it “decimated” the Iranian military which was “no longer a threat”.
But the US’s own spooks tell a different story. The New York Times newspaper says Trump’s “public portrayal of a
shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what US intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors”.
US intelligence services say the Iranian regime “regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities”.
This includes “evidence that Iran has restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz, which could threaten US warships and oil tankers transiting the narrow waterway”.
The US sank most of Iran’s naval forces.
But the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a key political, economic and military player in the regime, “retains hundreds of small speedboats that can be used to lay mines in the strait”.
And it “still fields about 70 percent of its mobile launchers” and “has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile”. This includes ballistic missiles, which can target other states in the region, and shorter-range cruise missiles.
The regime has “regained access to roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage and launch facilities nationwide”. They are now assessed to be “partially or fully operational,” NYT sources say.
The US’s failures in Iran have increased tensions between Trump and Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
The pair shared a vision of turning the region, from Gaza to the Gulf, into a high tech capitalist paradise.
This came against the backdrop of global imperialist competition between the US and China, whose political and economic influence extends into the Middle East.
Netanyahu pushed for the US and Israel to launch the war on Iran and appears to have convinced Trump in February that the Iranian regime would collapse quickly.
Israel is the watchdog state of US imperialism in the Middle East and its genocide would not be possible without US arms and funding.
But it has developed to become a powerful capitalist state, no longer wholly dependent on US aid and grown as a regional imperialist power.
And, after two years of genocide, it emerged as the ascendent power in the regional system of competition between Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey.
Israel’s rise as a regional imperialist power means it is able to strain at the leash more. Netanyahu, for example, has fought to scupper negotiations between the US and Iran both this year and last year.
When the regime did not collapse and closed the Strait of Hormuz, Trump began searching for an off-ramp.
Israel pushed back, seeing a prolonged war as a way of weakening its regional rival—and has urged for a return to full-on war since the ceasefire.
But Israel remains dependent on the US—and, with elections coming up, Netanyahu doesn’t want to lose Trump’s support.
The US president asserted that Netanyahu would “do whatever I want him to do” over Iran last week.
Whatever the outcome of the negotiations this week, Trump’s war on Iran will have deepened the crisis facing US imperialism.
But, just like the declining British Empire in the 20th century, it will continue to unleash brutality to hold on to its position in the world.
The shocks caused by the Strait of Hormuz closure are already causing pain for millions of working class people across the world.
The response from the Labour government in Britain will be to double down on “fiscal restraint”—austerity 2.0.
Real wages have started to shrink in the US, Britain, Germany and other states in the Global North.
In Britain, the bosses’ Financial Times newspaper says “average earnings grew at an annual pace of just 0.1 per cent in real terms in the three months to March”. And they “are set to fall outright as inflation rises over the coming months against a backdrop of very weak hiring”.
An urgent task is to popularise the slogan, “We won’t pay for Trump’s war”—and to push for strikes this autumn.
The Stop War Coalition is organising an international conference against war in London on Saturday 20 June.
It says, “We are hurtling towards more wars and greater global instability at an alarming rate.
“The governments of Europe are responding with massive rearmament programmes and increasing moves towards conscription. Both must be resisted as a matter of urgency.
“The follow-up conference to the Paris Peace Conference held in October 2025 could not come at a more critical time.”
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