On Friday, June 13, the fascist Netanyahu regime and its main ally and protector, US imperialism led by Donald Trump, once again deployed their criminal machinery of destruction and death against Iran. But this time, the Zionist bombings have not gone unpunished: Tehran has been responding for days with a wave of missiles that have directly hit Tel Aviv and infrastructure such as Israeli refineries and power plants.
According to official Iranian government data, the toll from this military aggression is more than 1,300 wounded and 224 dead, the vast majority of them civilians, including dozens of children. These deaths include 14 of the country's most prominent nuclear scientists, 20 high-ranking officers, including the head of the Revolutionary Guard, and the two top officials of the Intelligence Service. It is the most destructive attack on Iranian territory since the war with Iraq in the 1980s.
Netanyahu and Trump's declaration of war has put the Middle East under the real threat of a conflagration that could involve many other countries, including nuclear-armed powers like China and Russia, Iran's military and geostrategic allies.
Unlike what happened a few months ago during the height of the Zionist offensive against Gaza and Lebanon, the Israeli military aggression has been met with much more force: more than 200 Iranian missiles in nine different waves have managed to overcome the Iron Dome, the theoretically impregnable anti-missile shield, hitting the Weizmann Institute, a center for military research, and numerous residential areas and facilities in cities such as Tel Aviv, Haifa, and others. The Zionist government has so far acknowledged 14 deaths and dozens of injuries.
Netanyahu has also expanded his attacks on the Houthis in Yemen, threatening to inflict "unprecedented pain" on any Arab country that even thinks of supporting the Iranian regime. Coming from the Nazi-Zionist Führer who is orchestrating the Holocaust against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, this is no bravado that can be ignored.
Once again, the Zionist regime’s criminal actions could not have been carried out without the determined support of US imperialism and the militaristic, racist, and fascist Trump government. Asked by the Wall Street Journal if he was aware of this “warning,” the US president’s response leaves no room for doubt: “Warning? It wasn’t a warning. We knew what was happening (…) I told the other side (Iran): ‘You have 60 days to reach an agreement. ’ On day 61, they (Israel) attacked. Today is, in fact, day 61, and it was a very successful attack. They should have reached an agreement, and they can still do so while they have something left; they still can”[1].
The objectives of Israeli and US military aggression
To understand how we've reached this critical point, and how the situation may evolve in the coming days and weeks, the first thing is not to be fooled by the propaganda machine of the Western media. They are all once again justifying US and Israeli aggression by resorting to the Iranian nuclear threat. But it's absurd to think that this new bloodbath is for defensive rather than aggressive purposes.
In reality, we are witnessing a new chapter in a well-designed strategy from Washington and Tel Aviv to impose their political and military objectives in the Middle East by blood and fire.
The attack on Iran seeks to close the circle initiated by the genocide and mass expulsion of the Palestinian people from Gaza, the occupation and annexation of the West Bank, the weakening of Hezbollah and its allies in Lebanon, and the invasion of southern Syria, completing the division of the country between the US, Turkey, and Israel. Crushing Iran, also with the understanding that China would not dare to force a response, was the next step. But this time the stakes were too high, and the response was swift.
Netanyahu, the Nazi-Zionist far-right, and the key sectors of the Israeli ruling class that support them are willing to do anything to complete their plans to establish Greater Israel, including drowning the Middle East in blood and corpses. This war is part of the same process that seeks to consolidate a totalitarian regime within Israel itself, which has already condemned 20% of the Arab population to apartheid and has passed a battery of anti-democratic laws similar to those implemented by Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco to silence any internal opposition.
For Trump, the objectives are several and entirely interrelated. First, to halt the unstoppable rise of China's influence in the Middle East, which has already displaced the US as the main trading partner and foreign direct investor for all countries in the region. China receives 50% of the oil and gas it consumes from the reactionary monarchies of the Persian Gulf and has developed trade agreements and investments (ports, transportation and infrastructure, high technology, etc.), integrating them into its plans for the Silk Road. This explains the growing estrangement between Washington and Saudi Arabia, the most solid and stable foothold of US imperialism within the Arab world during the second half of the 20th century and one of its main oil suppliers until the global crisis of 2008-2009.
Inseparable from this objective, Washington's strategists urgently need to regain their power of intimidation after their defeats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the devastating blow represented by the outcome of the imperialist war in Ukraine, which they themselves promoted.
This escalation of war has a third, no less important vector: the economic and industrial decline of the United States, which has placed the imperial power in a very compromised position in the face of China's global advance, and consequently at a historic crossroads for maintaining its supremacy.
All these factors explain the political crisis shaking the Trump administration. Resorting to increasingly aggressive measures, US imperialism is lashing out like a rabid animal. The bellicose and reactionary nature of its policies is setting the world and the US itself ablaze. In addition to the social uprising against its racist, anti-worker policies and semi-dictatorial measures, there are divisions within the ruling class itself, driven by the risk that Trump's trade war could provoke a deep economic recession. Trump, this representative of the most rotten part of the Yankee economic establishment, the far-right plutocrat who leads the International Nazi Brownshirts, is encountering a response he never expected.
Impunity for the genocide in Gaza emboldens Netanyahu and Trump
As was the case with the policy of appeasement that facilitated Hitler's attacks on various European nations, the intervention supporting Franco, or the persecution and extermination of Jews, communists, and ethnic minorities... Trump and Netanyahu have been emboldened by the complicity shown by all Western governments in the Holocaust against the Palestinian people, starting with those who issue statements of condemnation and shed crocodile tears while maintaining the sale and purchase of weapons and other investments and trade exchanges with Israel.
Also, due to the cowardly submission displayed by the Arab and Muslim capitalist regimes, including Iran, which have looked the other way while Israel devastates Gaza, annexes the West Bank, and takes control of southern Syria. As we have denounced in various articles and statements, behind this passivity lies diplomatic and economic pressure from the capitalist regimes of Russia and, even more so, China.
The policy of the US's rival imperialist bloc has been to quietly criticize the most savage actions of Netanyahu and Trump while also maintaining all its business dealings and exchanges with Israel, including the purchase and sale of weapons and military technology. China is the Zionist regime's second-largest trading partner after the US and, in some key sectors, its first. But it hasn't lifted a finger of its immense power and economic influence to strike at Netanyahu's murderous regime, neither by breaking relations with it nor by decreeing an embargo against companies and countries that trade with Tel Aviv. This is the plain and simple truth, which also answers those on the left who have spent months vainly nurturing hopes that China, Russia, or the Tehran regime would prevent Zionism from continuing to massacre the Palestinian people.
It is also important to note that the capitalist, fundamentalist, reactionary, and corrupt regime of the mullahs has not hesitated to repeatedly employ the army and police to bloodily suppress the social uprisings led by the Iranian working class and women over the last decade, or to crush the struggle for their language, culture, and democratic-national rights of the Kurds and other ethnic and religious minorities. If it has now responded differently to Zionist military aggression, it is because its very survival is at stake.
Iran, a red line for China and Russia
In all likelihood, Tehran's decision to launch a military response of this magnitude has had the logistical support of China and Russia. Weakness invites aggression. When two rival imperialist powers or blocs clash, if one pursues combat with greater determination and tenacity, it can gain the upper hand (even if it is objectively inferior economically) and shape the dynamics of events, even if only temporarily.
China and Russia decided not to support the Assad regime in Syria and instead allowed the unopposed advance of the fundamentalist militias organized by Erdogan's Turkish regime, with US support and Israeli complicity. They did so because the outcome of an intervention was uncertain, and regime change in Damascus did not decisively affect their vital interests in the region.
Similarly, they have stood idly by in the face of the genocide in Gaza. Any intervention on their part (or that of their Iranian ally) could destabilize a region whose stability they consider key to their businesses and interests. And, even more worrying for them, it could unleash a mass revolutionary movement that would spread throughout the Middle East. Something Xi Jinping and Putin fear as much as the rest of the capitalist and imperialist leaders.
But Iran is the country in the region with which China has the most substantial long-term investment and partnership plans. Both China and Russia have maintained treaties of support and military cooperation with the Iranian regime for decades, and it is clear to everyone that Iran is its most reliable geopolitical ally in the Middle East.
The fall of the mullahs' regime, or any action on their part that amounts to surrendering to Trump and Netanyahu, would be a significant blow to the international authority of China and Russia and a boost to Trump's policies of seeking strong concessions and measures favourable to his companies through military interventions and threats.
Trump is resorting to interventionist and warmongering policies not only in the Middle East but around the world, financing and promoting Islamic fundamentalist terrorism in African countries that have become closer to Russia, and intensifying his support for far-right leaders and forces in Latin America to try to regain ground in his backyard, where China has also encroached on his position. This is also the case in Asia, as demonstrated by the recent coup in South Korea and the growing US interventionism in Taiwan and the Philippines.
The US is preparing for a new phase of the inter-imperialist struggle, and after what happened in Ukraine, it is doing so with even greater determination to give its adversaries no respite. And Beijing and Moscow are well aware of this.
Mass struggle with an internationalist program to defeat militarist imperialism
There's a historic quote attributed to Napoleon: “war is the most complicated equation”. The situation in the Middle East could evolve in different directions over the coming days, weeks, and even months. But one thing is clear: the Israeli and US military aggression against Iran has put the region and the world at risk of open war with unpredictable consequences, and with nuclear powers involved.
If Trump and Netanyahu double down on war against Iran, powers like China and Russia will be directly challenged and forced to intervene.
The fear of a long war, where for the first time the Israeli population will suffer firsthand the death and destruction caused by Zionist policies, and which could force Washington to become directly involved—something it is trying to avoid for fear of the revolutionary consequences within the US itself—could force Trump and Netanyahu to back down from their warmongering plans toward Iran and seek some kind of agreement or compromise.
But even in that case, what the events in the Middle East demonstrate is that the Zionist genocide against the Palestinian people, and the warmongering and militaristic policies of all governments, will continue. The school of capitalist barbarism is providing great lessons, and the conscience of millions is suffering a genuine earthquake.
There is only one path that can sweep all this capitalist and warlike scum into the dustbin of history: the mass mobilization of the working class and the oppressed throughout the world under the banner of the international socialist revolution.
If you want peace, fight for socialism! Down with Zionist aggression against Iran!
Stop the genocide in Gaza! For the Socialist Federation of the Middle East!
[1]Trump reveals he knew about Israel's plans to attack Iran
[1] Trump reveals he knew about Israel's plans to attack Iran
