Defend Iran – Defeat U.S./Israel War Threatening World War III
Skyrocketing Oil/Gas Prices Sets Stage for World Economic Crisis

For Workers Action Against the War and Deportations!
Break with the Democrats and Republicans –
For a Revolutionary Workers Party

Quagmire. That’s the word Donald Trump fears like the plague, especially with midterm elections coming up in November. With the U.S./Israel war on Iran in its fourth week, the White House and Pentagon are panicked, desperately looking for ways out of the hot mess they have plunged the world into.  Trump wanted to avoid a “forever war” like the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, that lasted a generation. But for all the murderous firepower they have unleashed against Iran, the imperialist and Zionist warmongers have only managed to provoke the largest disruption of oil supplies in history. The reason this hasn’t already led to a market meltdown is that Wall Street power brokers seem to believe in Trumpian fairy tales about non-existent “peace talks.” Trump’s “exit strategy” seems to be to stage an apocalyptic air/ground attack.

For liberal believers in the fiction of “international law,” the present war on Iran (like the one last June) is one of the most blatantly lawless actions in the long history of Western gangsterism against Asia, Africa and Latin America. It began on February 28, with the assassination by an Israeli airstrike of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Kamenei, a top cleric of the Shiite branch of Islam, along with several of his relatives. Hours later, a “double-tap” strike by a pair of U.S. cruise missiles hit an elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab, killing at least 175, over 100 of them children. This was a heinous war crime by any measure, while state-sponsored murder of heads of state is considered a violation of sovereignty and international humanitarian law. But of course, as the whole unprovoked war by the United States and Israel was a massive violation of Iranian sovereignty, this just shows again that international law is a myth.

Within hours of the February 28 attack, the League for the Fourth International issued a statement calling to “Defend Iran – Defeat U.S./Israel War!” In the face of the brazen assault by the genocidal Israeli strongman Benjamin Netanyahu and the would-be Yankee emperor Trump, we emphasized that it is the duty of all revolutionary socialists, class-conscious workers and opponents of imperialist world domination to stand on the side of semicolonial Iran against the imperialist and Zionist aggressors. We called for international workers action against the war and to stop U.S. arms shipments, and while giving no political support to the stifling clerical mullah regime, to defend Iran as part of the struggle for workers revolution, And, as we did in the “12 Day War” on Iran last June, we declared “Iran Has the Right to Nuclear Weapons to Deter Israeli and U.S. Nuclear-Armed Terrorists.”¹

For years, right-wingers in the U.S. and Israel have called to “bomb, bomb Iran,” but despite all the hype in the “mainstream” media, which is 90% unvarnished war propaganda, the macho posturing of the clueless U.S. war secretary Pete Hegseth, and the fabrications of the non-stop liar-in-chief Trump, the war is not going well for the aggressors. Meanwhile, Iran has been able to set off by far the largest oil supply crisis in history by hitting refineries and gas processing plants in the Persian Gulf area and closing the chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas passes. Not only has this sent gasoline prices skyrocketing (over $8 a gallon in California, close to $10 in Germany), it will soon cause a huge worldwide food crisis for lack of urea and nitrogen for fertilizer as the planting season begins. The war is not about to end any time soon, and may escalate exponentially.

The Israeli militarists, fresh off their horrific genocide in Gaza, want to use this war to nail down their domination of the Middle East, taking a step toward their goal of a Greater Israel from the (Mediterranean) sea to the (Euphrates) river, by annexing the West Bank and occupying southern Lebanon. The swashbuckling would-be dictator in the White House, coming after his Pirates of the Caribbean escapade of kidnapping Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and seizing control of the country’s oil sales, said he was just taking a little “excursion” in the Persian Gulf. The ill-prepared and bloody U.S./Israeli adventure could easily backfire on them. But if faced with defeat, the crazed Zionists could be tempted to use their nuclear arsenal, and the mercurial Trump is gearing up to deliver a “knock-out blow” to Iran, which has been his obsession for decades. Yet you can’t KO a country of 90 million with one spectacular bombathon.

The world is on a knife edge. Israeli rulers would be happy to see Iran break up and collapse economically. But if Donald Trump were to carry out any of his multiple threats (to obliterate Iran’s electrical energy system, to seize control of its oil, to grab its cache of enriched uranium and to militarily unblock the Strait of Hormuz), it all could explode dramatically. It could force Iran’s allies Russia and China to intervene more directly rather than just by supplying information (satellite feeds for targeting), technology (advanced radar systems) and limited amounts of weaponry (advanced drones, anti-ship missiles). The Iran war, even more than the NATO imperialist proxy war against Russia over Ukraine, has the potential to trigger initial skirmishes of a third world war. China, a bureaucratically deformed workers state and recipient of 90% of Iran’s oil exports, is after all the ultimate target.

From the get-go, a clear majority of the U.S. population (59% in opinion polls) has been opposed to war with Iran, a number that has only grown. Three quarters (74%), including a majority (52%) of Republicans, oppose sending ground troops into Iran.² Yet as we write, two Marine expeditionary units and the headquarters staff of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division are bringing infantry to the war zone. The Democrats complain that Trump has not spelled out his war aims and invoke the War Powers Act (which Democratic presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden all ignored) to get Congress involved, but they have not directly opposed the war (and the establishment liberal New York Times says it “could” support a war). That’s why there have been no major protests against the Iran war, as the opportunist left is always looking to build a class-collaborationist, “popular front” antiwar movement together with Democratic “doves.”

More than ever, the situation cries out for the leadership of a genuinely communist party to defend Iran on a class basis against the imperialist/Zionist attackers, and to mobilize powerful workers actions against the war, as part of the struggle for international socialist revolution – the only way to put an end to imperialism and its endless wars.

Trump’s War on Iran Stuck in Quicksand

On the part of the U.S. and Israeli rulers, this war is being waged without the usual hypocrisy about “human rights” and “democracy” in which the Western imperialists have cloaked their wars for domination in since World War II. At the Munich Security Conference on February 14, two weeks before the war on Iran began, U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio delivered a paean of praise to the “great Western empires” and “Western civilization” based on “Christian faith,” coupled with xenophobic vituperation against “mass migration.” The White House revels in domination, posting war propaganda with footage from video games mixed with scenes of destruction of Iran. Responding to criticism of the bombing of a water desalination plant, Trump said of Iranians, “They are among the most evil people ever on earth. They cut babies’ heads off. They chop women in half,” recycling some of the lies used to justify Zionist genocide in Gaza.

This racist rhetoric spewed out in soundbites from aboard Air Force One spurs Muslim-bashing tweets and statements from MAGA (Make America Great) Republican congressmen and an orgy of Islamophobia on social media. But, of course, it is the U.S. that is slaughtering young girls and boys in an Iranian school, and it is the Israeli Murder Inc. that has made assassinations a centerpiece of state policy. By one count, the Zionist state carried out over 2,700 assassinations in the first seven decades of its existence, far more than any other “Western” state.³ Israel has made a special target of Iranian nuclear scientists, killing at least 19, including three by air strikes in June 2025 and the current war. The predictable result has been to produce mass revulsion in Iran against the attackers.

U.S. and Israeli leaders and war planners had convinced themselves that by murdering Khamenei, they would spark an uprising by the Iranian masses yearning to be free of the heavy-handed theocratic mullah regime. (Reputedly, this line was pushed by the head of Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency.) Nothing of the sort happened. There were a few videos of small groups cheering on the night the war started, February 28, and after that, zero. Instead, the next day, huge crowds turned out across Iran to mourn the slain ayatollah, many tearfully holding photos while chanting “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” One look at the photos of the tens of thousands dressed in black packed into Tehran’s Engelab Square made it clear that the Islamic Republic still had fervent mass support such that, together with its hard-nosed repressive apparatus, it could not be brought down simply by “decapitating” it.

In the days since then, the U.S. and Israeli mad bombers have continued to strike at the Iranian capital and other large cities. Although the U.S. claims to have struck 8,000 “military targets,” it has clearly hit many residential areas. When the Israelis “eliminated” Iran’s de facto leader, security chief Ari Larijani, on March 17, they battered a whole neighborhood. A March 7-8 strike against an oil depot and a refinery on the city outskirts enveloped Tehran in a toxic black rain. Meanwhile, the bombing has damaged a number of Iran’s cultural jewels and UNESCO World Historic Sites, including Isfahan’s blue-tiled Jameh Mosque and the Golestan Palace in Tehran, seat of the Qajjar dynasty. Predictably, there has been a hardening of Iranian nationalist sentiment in the face of the imperialist and Zionist marauders, effectively pushing people into the arms of the regime.

The Supreme Leader of the MAGA cult and the would-be King of Israel both brag about their military prowess. On March 6, Trump said of Iran, “Their army is gone. Their navy is gone. Their communications are gone. Their leaders are gone. Two sets of their leaders are gone — they’re down to their third set. Their Air Force is wiped out entirely.” A few days later, he added, “They have no anti-aircraft apparatus at all. They have no radar,” summing up: “Our military is the best. It's the most powerful in the world, and they're hitting them very hard.” (This brings to mind Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ boast during her 2024 campaign: “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”) Much of this may be true, although we’ll see about the anti-aircraft and radar, since on March 19 a U.S. F-35 “stealth” bomber was hit by Iranian fire. Many of the U.S. attacks have been by “stand-off” missiles fired from well outside Iranian airspace. But Iran has responded “asymmetrically,” and powerfully, with military measures that have sent Washington and Tel Aviv into panic mode.

At the outset, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), fired off huge numbers of missiles and drones (over 1,200 a day), getting the U.S. and Israel to fire off a large portion of their available interceptor missiles, which are very expensive. That the number of Iranian launches has fallen off to much lower levels (30 to 40 a day) doesn’t mean that their missiles or launching vehicles have mostly been destroyed, but rather that they are at a sustainable level for waging a long war. Moreover, in that first barrage, the Iranians were able to hit the vital radar bases for the U.S.’ THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-ballistic missile defense systems in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. And Iran also hit most of the U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf area, so that today, “Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable” (New York Times, 26 March).

So much for Trump’s facile claims that Iranian missiles are inaccurate. From videos online one can see that they struck with pinpoint accuracy. Moreover, to shoot down swarms of drones (cost around $30,000 each), the U.S. and Israel are using Israeli “David’s Sling” interceptor missiles ($1 million each), Israeli Arrow 2 and 3 interceptors ($3 million each), Patriot PAC-3 interceptors ($3.7 to $7 million each), and THAAD interceptors ($12.6 million each). Not very cost-effective. On March 21, Iran struck two towns bracketing Israel’s nuclear weapons facility at Dimona with its hypersonic Fattah-2 missile that neither the U.S. nor Israel is able to intercept. And on March 24, the British Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) reported that the attackers used 11,000 munitions (worth $26 billion) in the first 16 days of the war, and that Israel will run  out of most of its missiles in somewhere between three days (!) and three weeks.⁴

But far more powerful has been Iran’s one-two punch of shutting down oil and gas plants and preventing passage through the Strait of Hormuz of any but friendly vessels. Clearly, and by the admission of loose-lips Hegseth himself, the White House and Pentagon did not expect this, at least not so early on. When Israel, in a major escalation, attacked the South Pars natural gas field, on which most of Iran’s electrical energy generation depends, the IRGC struck at the world’s largest liquified natural gas (LNG) plant, putting it out of commission for at least five years. Iran already hit a refinery in Kuwait, and could easily do the same to numerous other installations in the Gulf. And by limiting transit through the Hormuz choke point, it has reduced shipping by over 90%, leading to a shortfall in oil supplies of at least 11 million barrels a day, or 10 percent of total supplies, which will almost inevitably soon lead to a mammoth world economic crisis.

Oil prices have already risen by over 50% to upwards of $100 a barrel, while LNG and jet fuel prices have doubled. Market experts say that oil at $150 would be “catastrophic,” but if the present cutoff persists, it could easily reach $200 a barrel. Economists are already detailing what this could mean for food supplies in Africa, where a lack of fertilizer could lead to widespread famine throughout the continent. The supply of generic medications from India would more or less shut down. There would be sharply increased inflation in the advanced capitalist countries, and interest rates would escalate (as they are already doing). This could spell bankruptcy for many major investment and private equity companies which have heavily loaded up on debt ($200 billion in the last two years) to finance artificial intelligence (AI) data centers that are voracious energy consumers. Iran’s “energy weapon” is extremely powerful.

As Trump Escalates, Fight for Workers Revolution!

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has been pushing for a full-bore war on Iran ever since the fall of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 to Sunni Islamist terrorists backed by Turkey, which was a result of the Zionist state’s assassination two months earlier of the leadership of the Shia Islamist Hezbollah movement in Lebanon. Much has been made of Marco Rubio’s admission that Israel talked Trump into it. (Rubio walked back this clearly true statement when isolationists in Trump’s MAGA base objected to fighting “Israel’s war.”) But both U.S. and Israeli leaders figured they were on a roll and it would be an easy win, that the Islamic Republic was spent (witness the January 2026 protests). Trump told the New York Times (1 March) that the Iran war would last “four to five weeks,” that it “won’t be difficult,” and “What we did in Venezuela” was “the perfect scenario.” Didn’t turn out that way.

In a video message on February 28, Trump told Iranians “Bombs will fall everywhere, and once we’re done, take control of your government.” After his call for regime change fizzled, he demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” of Iran. (White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt “clarified” that this would be when Trump “as commander-in-chief of U.S. armed forces determines” that Iran is “in a place of unconditional surrender.”) As that went nowhere, lately he has been pushing a 15-point so-called “peace plan,” which would amount to surrender. When Iranian leaders said they weren’t interested in negotiations and there were no talks taking place with the U.S., Trump responded, “Of course they’re negotiating. They’ve been obliterated.” He cannot comprehend an ideologically committed regime or army that would fight to the end.

Trump’s shillyshallying back and forth has reached ridiculous proportions. On Saturday, March 21, he issued an ultimatum saying that Iran had “48 hours” to open the Strait of Hormuz or he would order the bombing of Iranian power plants. Iranian spokesmen said that in that case they would bomb energy and desalination plants in the U.S./Israel-allied Gulf states. Then, with hours to go, Trump said he was extending the deadline by five days because “strong talks” were underway. The speaker of Iran’s parliament called this “fake news” and sources in Tehran said they certainly wouldn’t talk with Trump envoys Steve Witikoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, the two con artists who pretended to be negotiating as Trump was preparing to launch the war. Then, as the new deadline approached and stock exchanges were tumbling, Trump announced that he was extending the deadline for another ten days, to April 6.

It was, once again, time to TACO, quipped Wall Street insiders, using the acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” coined after his draconian Liberation Day tariffs, which went up and down, with deadlines set and canceled according to the U.S. president’s whims. These could be set off by perceived insults or the vagaries of “Mr. Market,” the embodiment of the S&P 500, Dow Jones and other indexes of investor confidence coined by Yves Smith and her informative (and frequently perceptive) website, nakedcapitalism.com. For the real estate mogul Trump, it’s always about profit, property and personal aggrandizement. (In addition to issuing a gold commemorative coin with his image front and back, his signature will be on all U.S. paper currency.) It’s surely noticeable that he repeatedly launches his invasions, wars and ultimatums (Venezuela, Iran …) after trading closes in New York on Friday evening, and his climb-downs before markets open on Monday.

Trump’s formula for the “art of the steal” is simply to bully everyone into submission. It certainly has worked with the European imperialist “allies,” who were convinced to give up inexpensive Russian oil and gas, which were the foundation stone of German heavy industry, leading to the collapse of whole sectors of Germany’s economy. Now, after enduring the U.S. president’s accusations of cowardice for failing to participate in his war on Iran, the Europeans have been browbeaten into declaring that they might join in patrolling the Strait once the fighting is over. America Firster Trump, who at first said the U.S. and Israel could go it alone and didn’t even alert his closest friends in Europe, like Italy’s fascist premier Giorgia Meloni, about the impending attack on Iran, then declared that he didn’t need their help anyway. The whole point was to make them complicit in this criminal enterprise. 

An unspoken reason for Trump’s backtracking on his 48-hour/five-day/ten-day ultimatum to Iran to open the Strait is that it would take that long for the U.S. ground forces slated to carry out the assault – the 11th and 31st Marine Expeditionary Units and the 82nd Airborne – to arrive in-theater. One possible target is Iran’s oil export facility on Kharg Island, which Trump has obsessed about taking since at least as far back as in a 1988 interview with the London Guardian. This has led to a spate of articles in just about every major newspaper about what it would take to conquer and hold the island, which is only 15 miles off the coast, in easy range of Iranian artillery, short-range missiles or drones, with no place for troops to hide. They all cited the disastrous 1915 battle of Gallipoli against Turkey in World War I when Australian and New Zealand troops were chewed up attempting to seize control of the narrow mouth of the Dardenelles near Istanbul.

Even the U.S. Naval Institute chimed in with an article on “The Battle of Gallipoli's Sobering Lessons for the Strait of Hormuz,” which could be summed up as “Been there, done that, never again.” The consensus being that attempting to hold Kharg Island would be a suicide mission, attention turned to other islands near the entrance of the Hormuz Strait, but all have similar problems. The likelihood, then, is that the U.S. and Israel would unleash a monster “shock and awe” bombing campaign, declare that they had destroyed Iran’s military forces, and leave it to the Europeans to figure out how to navigate the Strait (possibly by paying tolls to Iran). If the Iranian regime remains in place, however weakened, there is no way the outcome could be claimed as a victory for the West. If the Islamic Republic falls, it will turn the region into a tinderbox. Welcome to the quagmire.

Some leading capitalists are getting alarmed. It’s one thing to unleash market chaos, cause businesses to go bankrupt and subject working people to escalating inflation with stratospheric tariffs which cannot reindustrialize the U.S. It’s another matter altogether to potentially set off a world conflagration. Trump’s “AI and crypto czar,” Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks, declared on March 14 that it’s time to “declare victory and get out” rather than escalate the war on Iran. Some in the ruling class see Vice President JD Vance (who softly questioned the Iran war) as a sane alternative to the war-crazed president and his “let-Trump-be-Trump” foreign policy/national security chief Marco Rubio. But beware, while Trump is definitely certifiable, Vance is a board-certified fascistic ideologue who would turn young men into cannon fodder and young women into baby factories to replace the fallen soldiers. Impeachment is not an answer.

On the left, it is striking how little response there has been to Trump’s Iran adventure. With a deeply unpopular war, where are the mass antiwar marches, as occurred in the lead-up to George Bush II’s invasion and occupation of Iraq? On 15 February 2003 there were over a million protesting in the streets of Rome and London, and hundreds of thousands in Berlin, Sydney, Melbourne and New York. Today there are only tiny demos of at most a few hundred people here and there. Even the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and its ANSWER Coalition, which specialize in popular-front peace demos, have not called a national mobilization. Instead, the PSL and the rest of the U.S. left are tagging along with the March 28 “No Kings” marches called by Democratic Party front groups like 50501, Indivisible and moveon.org. The same outfits are pushing the “May Day Strong” coalition’s pretend “general strike,” not based on workers exercising their collective power but taking individual action (“no shopping,” calling in sick) on May 1. Their real purpose is to get out the vote for the Democrats in November.

The League for the Fourth International and its U.S. section, the Internationalist Group, have politically opposed the Islamist regime in Iran from our inception. We continue to uphold the position of our predecessor organization, the international Spartacist tendency, in 1979 when we called, uniquely on the left, for “Down with the shah, No to Khomeini,” fighting for workers revolution in Iran while warning that the “Islamic Revolution” was a reactionary-led movement. The vast majority of the left, both inside Iran and internationally, instead embraced the nascent Islamist regime, which shortly rounded up thousands of leftists and executed hundreds. Today, the born-again International Communist League, which masquerades as the continuation of the Spartacist tendency while renouncing almost everything it stood for, including the Marxist line taken in 1979 and calls for an “anti-imperialist united front” with the mullah regime. As a speaker at a March 7 LFI educational on Iran trenchantly put it, this amounts to telling the next generation of Iranian leftists to “stick their necks in the noose” again.

Meanwhile, much of the Iranian left, including the Europe-based Rahe Kargar (Organization of Revolutionary Workers of Iran), the Stalinist Tudeh (Masses) party and the Islamic leftist People’s Fedayin have taken a “third camp” position, equally opposed to the Islamic Republic and the U.S./Israel foreign aggressors. On the other hand, a small Khuzhestan Vanguard Socialist Workers’ Cell reports that workers occupied oil and petrochemical factories in Mahshahr in southern Iran, setting up barricades to defend them against foreign invaders and supporters of the imperialist puppet Pahlavi dynasty. Several Kurdish groups have formed a coalition hoping to establish an Iranian version of the U.S.-puppet Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq, as we noted in our February 28 statement. But having been repeatedly used and abandoned by the U.S. and Israel, these groups are reluctant to invade, and in any case are blocked by the pro-Iran central government of Iraq.

In the bourgeois opposition milieu, many of the “moderate” Islamists who rose up in 2009⁵ are going along with the heir to the bloody Pahlavi dynasty, who seeks to take power as a puppet of U.S. imperialism, just as his father was installed by the British imperialists in 1941 and seized full power in 1953 in a CIA-orchestrated coup d’état. But Washington is not enamored of the Pahlavi pretender, who has little organized support inside Iran, and Israeli assassinations have killed all of the regime figures that the Trump regime was looking to as the equivalent of Delcy Rodríguez, the U.S. collaborator now running Venezuela. As Trump said on March 3, “Most of the people we had in mind are dead…. Now we have another group. They may be dead also based on reports. So, I guess you have a third wave coming in. Pretty soon we're not going to know anybody.” But the Iranian government is not acting like a headless regime.

We Trotskyists of the League for the Fourth International calls to defeat the imperialist/Zionist war and defend Iran with international workers action, and to fight for workers to power. Against the Zionist oppression of the Palestinian people, we call for an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East based on the powerful proletariats of Egypt, Turkey and Iran. The struggle against this ruinous war is inseparable from the fight against the onslaught of the Trump regime against the U.S. population, notably the mass deportations and violent attacks on immigrants and their supporters by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents who are becoming a fascistic paramilitary force spearheading the drive to install Bonapartist police-state rule. Imperialist war abroad invariably goes hand-in-hand with racist repression “at home.”

From Iran and Palestine to Europe and the United States, the fight must be for workers revolution to overthrow decaying imperialism, which is violently lashing out as it seeks to stave off its demise. In 2022, Trump said of Democrat Biden’s war on Russia over Ukraine that we could “end up in World War III and there will be nothing left of our planet” because “ignorant people” running the government “didn’t have a clue” about the dangers of escalation. The same can be said of Republican Trump’s war on Iran. But it’s not just the Republicans: the fundamental policies of U.S. imperialism have been and are bipartisan, as was true throughout the anti-Soviet Cold War and ever since counterrevolution destroyed the Soviet Union and the East European deformed workers states in 1982, and as they are today in Ukraine, Palestine and Iran. To fight against the drive to world war, it is crucial, in the U.S., to break with the Democratic and Republican parties and build a revolutionary workers party on the authentically communist program of Trotsky’s Fourth International. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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