Jordan Shilton, WSWS.org, May 20, 2026
US President Donald Trump menaced Iran with another military onslaught on Tuesday, declaring, “We may have to hit them one more time.” Just hours after claiming to have “paused” an imminent resumption of the bombardment of Iran, Trump asserted that the US military was “locked and loaded,” and that he could make a decision on whether to attack by early next week.
Trump’s gangster-like threats are the authentic voice of world imperialism, which is determined to impose colonial chains on Iran and the entire region as part of the new redivision of the world among the major powers that is already well underway. The communique released by the G7 finance ministers yesterday after two days of consultations in Paris underscored this fact, with all members signing on to a statement that blamed the victim of the criminal US/Israeli war of aggression for the economic disaster it has produced.
The finance ministers and central bankers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US insisted that “a swift return to free and safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz and a lasting resolution to the conflict are imperative.” While not uttering a word about the unprovoked onslaught on Iran launched as negotiations were still ongoing on 28 February or the thousands of Iranian civilians slaughtered by indiscriminate American and Israeli bombing, the G7 finance ministers, displaying typical imperialist double-standards, hypocritically began their main communique with the statement, “We are united in our condemnation of Russia’s continued brutal war against Ukraine and escalatory actions aimed at undermining collective efforts to broker peace.”
The glaring inconsistency of the imperialists’ moral outrage manages to consistently coincide with the global predatory interests they are pursuing. American imperialism is determined to regain the domination over Iran it lost following the 1979 revolution as part of a drive to consolidate its hegemony over the energy-rich Middle East by sidelining its rivals, above all China. The European imperialists have endorsed the war because they hope to secure their own share of the spoils with a revival of the barbaric methods associated with colonialism and because they require continued US support for their war against Russia.
The governments supposedly engaged in “collective efforts” to “broker peace” are in fact the chief protagonists in a rapidly escalating third world war. Trump travelled to Beijing last week to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in what was billed as a summit to stabilise relations between the world’s two largest economies. But behind the diplomatic niceties, the American financial oligarchy for which Trump speaks has no intention of permitting China’s steady economic rise at the expense of the US and is openly preparing for war with China.
Trump’s failure to reach any substantive agreement in Beijing is now being followed just days later with another round of threats on the part of Trump to exterminate Iran, which not coincidentally is one of China’s most important oil suppliers.
The erratic outbursts by Trump and frequent explosions of militarist violence are indications of US imperialism’s weakness, not its strength. For the past 35 years, Washington has sought under successive administrations to offset its precipitous economic decline by deploying brutal military force. This uninterrupted series of wars has only deepened American imperialism’s crisis, both by aggravating social tensions to the breaking point and exacerbating the rivalries between the imperialist powers as they compete to secure markets, raw materials, cheap labour and strategic influence under conditions of a worsening world capitalist breakdown.
Imperialism—whether of the American or European variety—can offer no way out of this crisis other than by further escalating wars.
Trump’s threats to resume the war on Iran have been punctuated with discussions on whether he will order an invasion of Cuba, which the White House is now absurdly accusing of playing host to Iranian military advisers and possessing 300 drones supplied by Russia and Iran. Military operations on the Caribbean island aimed at toppling the Castroite regime would mark the second US-led “regime change” operation in Latin America in less than six months, following January’s invasion of Venezuela to abduct President Nicolas Maduro and try him as a common criminal in a New York courtroom. Trump may be plotting a parallel scenario to seize the 94-year-old Raul Castro, who will reportedly soon be indicted in a US court.
In Europe, the continent’s imperialist powers are fuelling the war on Russia—a nuclear-armed power—with reckless abandon. Germany in particular has taken the lead in assisting Ukraine to develop drone technology and supplying it with long-range weaponry capable of hitting targets deep inside Russia. Kiev has felt emboldened over recent weeks to strike high-rise residential buildings in Moscow and energy infrastructure. These provocative acts of aggression, which have only increased after the Kremlin’s threat earlier this year to bomb manufacturing facilities in NATO countries, are designed to produce a retaliatory strike by Russia that can be exploited as justification to expand the war.
The European imperialist powers are subordinating all of society’s resources to waging war, with Germany approving €1 trillion for war spending and all NATO members committing to allocating 5 percent of their GDP for the military. The destruction of public services and worker rights needed to fund this mad rearmament drive is being justified with hysterical anti-Russian propaganda.
Carsten Breuer, the top commander of the German Armed Forces, declared in a joint interview with his British counterpart in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that Russia—which has proven incapable after four years of war to conquer even half of Ukraine’s territory—could attack a NATO country by 2029. Europe’s rearmament drive is not only aimed at Russia, but is motivated at the most fundamental level by the ruling class’ recognition that US imperialism—long an ally—is now a rival in the struggle to carve up the world among the major powers.
The sharpening of inter-imperialist antagonisms and acceleration of a third world war confirm that the same basic features of capitalism identified by Lenin in his analysis of imperialism apply today with full force. Lenin wrote at the height of the bloody slaughter of World War I, “Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.”
This understanding was central to Lenin’s conception of the epoch as one of wars and revolutions, i.e., not only a period of imperialist reaction, but one in which crisis-ridden capitalism had created the objective conditions for the working class to offer a socialist road out of the impasse.
The same capitalist contradictions propelling all of the imperialist powers to engage in world war are driving the only social force that can stop this catastrophe into struggle: the international working class. The US-instigated war on Iran has already, within less than three months, triggered sharp spikes in energy, fuel and food prices. Strikes and protests have involved workers across continents, from the ongoing national strikes against price rises in Kenya and Bolivia, to Monday’s one-day national strike that hit wide swathes of the Italian economy against war and the Gaza genocide.
The intensification of the class struggle demonstrates the urgency of the fight to build an international anti-war movement on the basis of a revolutionary socialist programme. The initial anger among workers expressed in the strikes must be developed into conscious opposition to imperialist war, linking the fight to defend jobs and living standards with the struggle against imperialist barbarism and the capitalist system that is its root cause. This movement must end the domination of society by the financial oligarchy and its relentless quest for profit and plunder by setting as its goals the conquest of political power by the working class and the socialist transformation of society.
(Photo credit: Mohsin Raza/Reuters)
(Photo credit: Getty Images)
