Just two days after US President Donald Trump’s return from Beijing, the White House is making active preparations for a renewed onslaught against Iran.
The New York Times reported Friday that the United States and Israel are “engaged in intense preparations — the largest since the cease-fire took effect — for the possible resumption of attacks against Iran as early as next week.”
Trump’s state visit to Beijing, the first by an American president to China in nearly a decade, was dominated by the crisis triggered by the war on Iran. Despite a public show of goodwill between Trump and Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping, no public agreement was reached on the resolution of the Iran crisis, and no official communique was issued.
Despite the massacre of more than 3,000 Iranians and the destruction of 81,000 civilian structures, the United States has achieved none of its goals. It has neither overthrown the Iranian government, nor broken Iran’s military, nor gained control over the Strait of Hormuz.
On Sunday, Axios reported that Trump is expected to convene his top national security team in the Situation Room on Tuesday to discuss restarting combat operations. The meeting follows a Saturday session at Trump’s Virginia golf club attended by Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
Sunday evening, after a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump posted on Truth Social: “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them.”
He followed with an AI-generated image of a map of the Middle East overlaid with the American flag, with red arrows pointing at Iran from every direction—hinting at a US ground invasion of Iran.
Trump had earlier posted an image of himself pressing a red button on a command console, with mushroom-cloud explosions shown on an overhead screen—in the latest signal that he is considering the use of nuclear weapons in Iran.
According to the Times account, the Pentagon options under consideration include the deployment of US troops inside Iran, which “would come with big risks of casualties.”
In escalating the Iran war, Trump speaks not only for himself but for the entire financial oligarchy. Having launched the war, Trump has staked the prestige of American imperialism on subjugating Iran. Failure to achieve that aim is seen by the ruling class as a catastrophe that would accelerate the collapse of the dollar-denominated financial order on which American capitalism’s solvency depends.
Dominant sections of the US media are openly agitating for a US ground invasion of Iran. In a Sunday op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, titled “How to Finish the Job in Iran,” Seth Cropsey—a former deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations—wrote that Trump must “follow through on the threat of catastrophic force. That means preparing for a multistage operation, including boots on the ground, that forcibly reopens the Strait of Hormuz to accelerate the collapse of the Iranian state.”
Cropsey pointed to the desperate crisis facing US imperialism: “If oil remains around $150 a barrel for the rest of the year, inflation will accelerate, while key industries see their supply chains derailed. Mr. Trump has a narrow window in which to end this crisis favorably, reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and ensure an economic rebound while securing American interests and prestige. But that requires deploying the full spectrum of American power.”
The push for renewed strikes continued on the Sunday talk shows. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Trump’s most prominent foreign-policy ally, in an appearance on Meet the Press, called for the United States to resume bombing Iran’s energy infrastructure. “What President Trump has done has been amazing militarily,” Graham said. “But there’s still more targets to be had. And there’s things we can do to hurt. The energy infrastructure is their soft underbelly. If you go back to the fight, I’d put energy on top of the list.”
The Democratic Party offered no opposition to the planned escalation. Instead, the Democrats who appeared on the Sunday talk shows largely devoted their foreign-policy remarks to condemning what they considered an insufficiently belligerent posture by Trump toward China at the Beijing summit.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared: “For the sake of democracy and the stability of the global economy, Trump must not sell out Taiwan.” The Democrats’ complaint is that the war Trump launched against Iran has distracted the United States from the conflict with China.
The war against Iran is at the same time a war against the American working class. The inflationary crisis triggered by the war has produced a massive surge in the cost of energy and food. NBC News reported that fresh vegetable prices have risen more than 44 percent on an annualized basis over the past three months. Gas is at a national average of $4.51 a gallon, and Brent crude has jumped roughly 50 percent since the start of the war.
Responding to the disastrous increase in the cost of living, Trump told reporters at the White House this month: “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.”
The administration has made the connection between war abroad and the assault on social programs at home explicit. At a White House Easter luncheon on April 1, Trump declared: “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. We have to take care of one thing: military protection.” “We’re fighting wars,” he said.
The costs of the war are mounting on the Treasury as well. Pentagon Comptroller Jay Hurst conceded at congressional testimony last week that the war has cost $29 billion, a figure that excludes damage to American bases. Harvard public-policy economist Linda Bilmes told Fortune in April that she was “certain we will spend $1 trillion for the Iran war.”
The escalation of the war on Iran comes amid a major upsurge of the class struggle. Some 3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers walked off the job at midnight Friday, shutting down the busiest commuter line in the United States in the first LIRR strike since 1994.
The 1,300 United Auto Workers members at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan, have twice rejected concessionary contracts in the past six weeks and are pressing the union for an immediate strike. The 1,000 UAW members at American Axle’s Three Rivers, Michigan plant voted by 98 percent on May 12 to authorize a strike when their contract expires on May 31.
The immediate trigger of these struggles is the cost-of-living crisis created by the war. The defense of workers’ living standards cannot be separated from the fight against the war.
Trump’s threats to annihilate Iranian society must be treated with the utmost seriousness. The administration is a criminal, gangster regime that will stop at nothing—including the use of nuclear weapons—to advance the interests of the American ruling class.
The struggles in transit and the auto industry show the way forward in the fight against Trump’s schemes for war and dictatorship. The murderous Trump regime, and its enablers in the Democratic Party, must be opposed through the method of the class struggle and the program of socialism.