By the East Bay Syndicalists
We condemn the unprovoked joint war launched by Israel and the U.S. against Iran starting on February 28, 2026, in no uncertain terms. There was no warning about this surprise attack, which unfolded from a secret plan hatched between U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “decapitate” the Iranian leadership. As such, this planned aggression, which actually interrupted ongoing negotiations between Iranian representatives and Jared Kushner, could not be publicly debated. By contrast, even the Iraq invasion of 2003, for all its horrors and atrocities, to some extent was discussed ahead of time in the media, while U.S. Congress authorized the Bush administration to use force against Saddam Hussein’s regime—in violation of international law.
The war on Iran began with the ghastly bombing of a girls’ school in Minab that killed nearly two hundred school-aged girls and staff. Besides murdering school-girls and assassinating high-ranking Iranian religious and military authorities, the Israeli and U.S. militaries have engaged in the widespread bombing of hospitals, oil depots, and historic monuments. An oil spill from a wrecked Iranian drone carrier is currently threatening the Hara biosphere reserve, a large mangrove forest, in the Persian Gulf.
To some extent, this new war is an expansive follow-up on the previous sneak attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities that Trump ordered in June 2025. At least 13 U.S. soldiers have been killed since February 28, 2026—and this is surely an underestimate—while over more than half of U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf have been damaged by retaliatory attacks by Iranian drones and missiles. Of course, for the Trump regime, only the violence it directs at the Iranian people and State is real—not the losses inflicted by the Iranian military, whether against the U.S., Israel, or their regional allies, the Gulf autocracies: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
For now, since April 8, 2026, both Iran and the U.S./Israel have been engaged in a ceasefire. (To be clear, the war on Iran surely doesn’t help the Palestinians in Gaza in any way.) Nevertheless, the blockade that Iran has established on the narrow Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, thus choking off much of the global oil trade, still remains in place, although ongoing negotiations seek to lift it. Israel’s invasion and newfound occupation of southern Lebanon, together with its targeted bombing of Lebanese healthcare workers and facilities, continue unabated, despite the ceasefire that was declared between Hezbollah and Israel in mid-June 2026.
To Trump, though, the consequences for Iranian and Lebanese civilians, maritime workers stranded in the Strait, and the U.S. working class are immaterial. As he admitted on May 12th: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.” (A telling modern-day spin on Après moi, le déluge! and “Let them eat cake!”) Meanwhile, even the Wall Street Journal acknowledges that U.S. Americans have had to pay $45 billion more on gasoline and diesel since the war began, compared to the same period last year—undoubtedly, largely due to the oil shock provoked by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
As the May 2026 summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping has shown, the power of U.S. imperialism is definitely waning. (Trump definitely got played by Xi in Beijing.) The war on Iran only accelerates this process of decline, as is seen in the rapid depletion of U.S. anti-missile defenses and degradation of U.S. radar systems by Iranian counter-attacks—to say nothing of the U.S.’s arbitrary halt of arms sales to Ukraine amidst the latter’s war of national liberation against Russia.
For the U.S. to become bogged down in another Middle Eastern quagmire also serves the interests of the Chinese State: while the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz increases prices for China as the world’s largest net oil-importer, it also greatly boosts global interest in the Chinese electric-vehicle industry. The war’s weakening of the U.S. military, taken together with Trump’s personal sycophancy toward Xi and Putin, also emboldens the Chinese leader to invade Taiwan, thus coming ever-closer to accomplishing a major personal and political goal—regardless of the consequences to the Taiwanese people, much like the Iranian, Ukrainian, and Palestinian people.
While Trump wants to “win” this war he launched with ill-defined and wavering objectives, he has also at times expressed the wish to walk away from it. Trump must know how extremely unpopular the Iran war is with the U.S. public, so his indifference to this fact merely reflects his malignant narcissism and authoritarianism—or may telegraph MAGA’s nefarious plot to rig (or even cancel) the midterm elections of November 2026. Whereas this senseless war could serve to accelerate the green transition, in a huge plus for humanity and nature, it also unfortunately vindicates the North Korean ruling dynasty’s strategy of developing nuclear weapons to consolidate power and pre-empt attacks by Western imperialists. As such, the war on Iran anticipates greater nuclear proliferation in the near future, a dynamic that in turn lowers the threshold for nuclear war, thus making the world far more dangerous.
An irony of the war on Iran is that the blockage of the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz has made clear the danger to many countries from being dependent on that region for their energy needs—oil and liquified natural gas. This has in fact led to an even bigger push for installing renewable energy gear in many countries, such as solar panels and wind turbines. Trump has wanted to promote fossil fuel consumption and build the profits of the oil industry, but his war of choice on Iran is now ironically having the opposite effect.
In conclusion, more protests and ideally strikes are needed to force the U.S. and Israeli governments to halt their aggression and negotiate a lasting peace treaty with Iran that includes provisions of reparations for reconstruction and guarantees of non-repetition.
Finally, these imperialist wars on Iran and Lebanon, with all their gratuitous violence, make it doubly imperative that we organize grassroots opposition specifically against fossil-fuel capitalism, because it’s this system that creates such disastrous global setbacks.