Vance, Hegseth, Miller. Washington D.C. DoD: Alexander Kubitza
The withdrawal of the US from peace talks in Islamabad at the weekend after one single (albeit long) session shows the intractability of the conflict between the US and Iran. US vice president JD Vance said they had broken down because Iran refused to give a commitment not to develop a nuclear weapon. He made no mention of the opening of the Strait of Hormuz to shipping traffic, whose closure has been a key card held by Iran.
What happens now? Trump is threatening a naval blockade of the Strait. He has to either escalate the conflict, including continuing the bombing campaign, ordering an extremely risky ground invasion, or continue to negotiate. Already the war in Iran has turned out a political defeat for US imperialism on a very substantial scale. Trump’s increasingly deranged ramblings and threats can’t hide the fact that his brutal plan to bomb Iran into regime change and therefore take control of one of the largest and most important countries in the Middle East has been a failure on so many levels. Escalation of the war will be at huge cost.
The Iran war follows on from the catastrophe that was the War on Terror: 25 years in which US imperialism and its allies – most importantly Britain – invaded and occupied first Afghanistan then Iraq. Both occupations ended in ignominious defeat for the two powers. Support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide in Gaza paved the way for the five week bombing of Iran by Israel and the US, and the massive attacks on Lebanon by the IDF and Israeli air force.
Despite the posturing of Trump and his crazed evangelical Christian secretary for war, Pete Hegseth, Iran has shown the limitations of air wars and of the overwhelming military and technological superiority of the US war machine. Regime change has never successfully been achieved by bombing (unsurprisingly if you think about it), and the US seriously underestimated the Iranian ability to use its depleted military to maximum effect and to think strategically about how it could defeat the US.
I have long been amazed at the glib way Netanyahu and Trump talked about war with Iran, and their dismissal of any potential damage to their own side. Iran is a country the size of western Europe with a population of over 90 million. The Islamic Republic obviously has high levels of internal opposition, but it also has a level of support which goes far beyond the top of government. Iran has experience of wars, notably the decade long war with a US-backed Iraq led by Saddam Hussein. It responded to the bombing not just by firing missiles at Israel, but at targets in the Gulf States just across the Persian Gulf, including US bases. These autocratic oil rich powers depend on the stability of the region as both a playground for the wealthy and a centre of gas and oil production, as well as for airlines, tourism, logistics and more. This has been well and truly shattered.
Crucially Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to traffic, leading to shortages in many parts of the world, a rise in the price of oil and gas, and falling stock markets as serious economic crisis loomed – something that is almost certainly on the cards regardless of the outcome of the peace talks. This will further impact the already stagnant economies in many parts of the world and contribute to an economic and cost of living crisis which is already impacting on working class people. The cost of the war has already been astronomical – an estimated $22-31 billion for the US in the first five weeks of the war, of which 10 percent is destroyed military equipment.
The cost to the people of Iran and Lebanon has been far greater, with thousands dead, many more injured, huge damage to buildings and infrastructure. The whole episode is a grotesque war crime for which the US and Israel should pay reparations. Trump’s claim that he was doing this for the people of Iran is one of the most disgusting. Despite being egged on by the discredited monarchists who claimed millions would welcome the bombing, that hasn’t happened. Indeed there is some indication that the government has been strengthened politically by the war. This will likely make it harder for anyone wanting to protest to do so. There must be many Iranians regretting any support they might have had for Trump.
We don’t know how the next stages of this war will turn out, but we have some idea of the wider implications of this latest war. Firstly it has hugely exacerbated existing tensions between the US and the old imperial powers of Europe. Trump is furious that Britan, France and Germany refused to join in trying to open the Strait of Hormuz and has constantly criticised them for not directly joining in what even they thought was a reckless and illegal war.
The insults thrown at Keir Starmer – who is complicit in the war since the US is dispatching bombers from RAF Fairford and from the base in Diego Garcia – show that the ‘special relationship’ is dead. More significantly, Trump is threatening to leave Nato which has underpinned European military organisation since the Second World War and has always had the US at its centre.
One conclusion we must draw is that hot war and international tensions are a permanent part of our world. We have seen Israel off the leash with its genocidal attacks on the Palestinians. We have seen the build-up of Western military hardware aimed at China in the Pacific, some of which had to be rushed to the Middle East during the assault on Iran. The war in Ukraine is in its fourth year. Casualties only last month were estimated in their tens of thousands on both sides in what has become a terrible war of attrition.
We should be in no doubt that our rulers are delivering more wars as the crisis of a declining US imperialism continues. Trump since January has attacked or threatened Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland and Iran. If they support a genocide in Gaza – as the European and US governments have done – then they will support attacks on civilians as we have seen in Iran and the level of deaths in Ukraine. It is this war on which the European powers are fixated. They are gearing towards war with Russia and are doubling down on rearmament and conscription across the continent.
This means making working class people pay with their living standards and potentially with their lives for imperialist wars which set them against working class people of different nationalities. One glance at the pathetic characters who pass as ministers in Keir Starmer’s Labour government – I’m talking about Yvette Cooper as Foreign Secretary and John Healey at Defence – shows how utterly incapable it is of defending working-class interests or standing up to the warmongers.
The June 20 International Anti-War Conference here in London is an antidote to all this and needs to be built on a mass scale to prepare us for the struggles ahead.
Source: Counterfire