As President Trump left the White House for his trip to China in the 11th week of his Iran war, reporters asked him how much the American people’s dire financial situation was motivating him to make a peace deal with Tehran. “Not even a little bit,” was his answer.
Trump went on: “The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon. I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all.”
That was not a casual remark by the president and it should serve as a wake-up call to people and to conscious revolutionaries who have to make it clear that he speaks for the interests of the ruling class he represents.
The United States and its chief ally Israel illegally attacked Iran on February 28. Though a ceasefire was ostensibly declared in April, the United States did not hesitate to provoke Iran militarily in the Strait of Hormuz. Israel has relentlessly bombed southern Lebanese border villages to expand its northward occupation through ethnic cleansing. There is little certainty as to how long it will continue or where things are headed.
The respective sets of demands United States and Iran have for ending the war have changed little in the last few months. Despite whatever changes there may be, the demands are worth understanding in terms of how both countries’ leadership view their places in the world. The Trump administration’s demands contain no conditions for cessation of military action on any front, whereas Iran’s specifically call for cessation of military action across all fronts – Iran, Lebanon and Gaza. For Iran, the U.S. plan would leave Iran virtually defenseless against two hostile actors who openly say Iran’s destruction is their goal. The United States and Israel see a strong, sovereign, culturally unified Iran as potentially fatal to U.S.-Israeli hegemony in the region.
Contrary to President Trump’s oft-repeated lie, Iran has repeatedly stated that it has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons. Rather, the United States, the only country to attack another nation with nuclear weapons, has unilaterally abrogated multiple arms control treaties, and is investing $2 trillion in a new generation of nuclear weapons. It was the United States, not Iran, which violated and withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. Israel also has nuclear weapons – undeclared and uninspected. Two nuclear powers attacking Iran, claiming to stop it from pursuing a nuclear program, is the height of hypocrisy.
While demonstrating its capability for self-defense through strategic retaliatory strikes, Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz is a powerful economic lever Iran can effectively leverage against enemies with superior firepower. Iran’s regional allies – the axis of resistance – Hezbollah which is slowing Israel’s advance into southern Lebanon and Ansar Allah (also known as the Houthis) in Yemen, which mounts both retaliatory attacks and diverts cargo ships headed for Israel.
The Gulf states that host many of the U.S. military bases have taken enormous hits by Iranian retaliatory strikes that have put the U.S. military at a distinct disadvantage. Although Lebanese civilians bear the heaviest casualties, the Israeli military is taking heavy loses they have not experienced in recent memory at the hands of resistance forces. In spite of the devastation the United States and Israel could inflict, evidence is mounting that neither of them can achieve their goals militarily. In a very real sense, this is an inflection point.
Israel’s expansionist ambitions and U.S. efforts to maintain regional dominance through brute force are fatally delusional. Neither government recognizes the consequences their actions will have on their own countries or on the global economy. The oblivious behavior of Donald Trump at all turns bodes ill for his party at the midterm elections and Trump’s chances of finishing out his term are in question. Even if those things come to pass – if the Democrats re-take Congress and Trump is forced to contend with a House and Senate that stands in opposition to him, it is incumbent upon us to ask what will happen with the situation they inherit.
WAR ECONOMY AND FASCISM
The longer the illegal U.S. war against Iran rages on, the more devastating the impact on the global economy will be. For the first time since World War II, U.S. national debt held by the American public has surpassed the gross domestic product (GDP). Costs of basic necessities have been rising steadily as the Trump administration slashes government jobs and public sector spending with no counterbalancing measures to ease the suffering of working people and poor.
It is a mindset in which the state acts like a corporation, its unilateral spread of data centers that drive artificial intelligence (A.I.) projects increase the economic toll on residents and the ecological toll with the water they use.
Our ruling class has made it clear that it has no use for people whose labor they can no longer exploit for profit. Its only answer is force. Fascism happens when there are no rational solutions left to address the crisis the people face. It is essential to connect the human and socioeconomic costs of wars waged in our names. The number of members of Congress who are willing to move against the trend of perpetual war is very small, but it indicates that the message is getting through to them that the public does not want war. The extent to which opponents in Congress are willing to go is very limited at this point but they are forced to respond. The U.S. war on Iran is projected to cost $2 billion a day at a time when inflation shows no sign of reversing. A majority of people polled in the United States now hold an unfavorable opinion of not just the war but of Israel, the costliest and most politically influential U.S. ally in the region. The staggeringly high cost of gasoline, food and other manufactured goods are what make it concrete. There are more people publicly speaking out against going to war against Iran and their government’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon, even among military personnel and veterans.
Mike Prysner, director of the Center on Conscience and War, said in a recent Al Jazeera podcast that since the war started the Center has been fielding record numbers of calls from service members who have taken steps to file as conscientious objectors, many such callers citing Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people and the bombing of a children’s school in Minab, Iran at the beginning of the U.S. war on Iran in making their decisions. “I think that represents a real shift in public consciousness. The American people are opposed to this war. That’s what’s reflected in the military. But people in the military in particular are young Americans, people who have gone through a significant shift in their consciousness in this country, people who grew up as children during the War on Terror and remember its lessons…”
OUT OF CRISIS, OPPORTUNITY
The immorality of war is evident not just to activists, but to the majority of people who bear the cost of daily living, who are raising families. For revolutionaries, this is an opportunity for work and for realizing that their collective strength is educating and politicizing in their respective fronts of struggle however they can. There are many ways to go about it. Helping people to see war not as an isolated incident but as an historical pattern; explaining seemingly difficult situations to reveal who profits from the waste of war, the waste of life, in terms of its ecological devastation, of human ingenuity and labor, and not least, of human worth. People we work with and are close to may have questions about what they are seeing. Conscious revolutionaries, who have a vision of what the society we need could look like, have something to offer.
Published on June 3, 2026.
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