> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://rebelnews.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Trump’s Attack on Iran – Four Lessons on US Imperialism - URL: https://rebelnews.ghost.io/trumps-attack-on-iran-four-lessons-on-us-imperialism/ - Published: 2026-03-14T19:08:17.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-01T07:53:42.000Z - Author: Brian O'Boyle - Tags: Features, International, News, Opinion, Abraham Accords, anti-imperialism, China, imperialism, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Trump, US imperialism, #Migrated-1790841191722, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-10-01 07:53 On February 28, Donald Trump launched his bombing campaign in Iran. Within 24 hours the US had managed to kill most of the country’s political leadership, including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. However, it is rapidly becoming clear that Trump’s ‘forever war’ will likely backfire. Bombing Iran is deeply unpopular among the American electorate, with just 20 percent supporting the war. It is also unpopular among Trump’s MAGA base, many of whom believed him when he promised to end US involvement in overseas conflict. But beyond these domestic considerations other problems are already piling up. Oil and gas prices are rising rapidly with important costs for Trump’s electoral base and the capitalist economy; Trump’s regional allies have been bombed and their economies upended; China looks well insulated thanks to its dominance in global shipping and its vast stockpiles of fossil fuels, and most of the world now hates Israel and the US even more than they used to. Why would the US ruling class risk so much with an attack on Iran? This article attempts to explain the wider logic of US imperialism in the region and assesses whether their strategy will succeed. It does this with four lessons on US imperialism. #### 1\. Bombing Iran is an attempt to restore a vital imperialist asset The US lost a major asset following the Iranian Revolution (1979). The US managed to tame Arab Nationalism during the Yom Kippur War (1973) when Israel defeated the combined forces of Egypt and Syria, thanks to enormous help from the US military. This defeat was crystallised at the Camp David Accords in 1978 when Egypt moved away from the Soviet Union and signed a peace agreement with Israel. Thus, for a brief moment, US imperialism had the three most powerful Middle Eastern states under its influence – those of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Egypt. However, the Iranian Revolution created four powerful setbacks for US imperialism: - It changed the regional power balance and created a powerful enemy for the main US proxy in the region – Israel. - It destroyed the ‘twin pillar security strategy’ of the US (based on Iran and Saudi Arabia) and precipitated far more regional instability. This then led to the Iran-Iraq War and eventually to the defeats of US imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan. - It created a hostile force that became a fulcrum for anti-US imperialism in the region (what they call Radical Islam). - It removed the world’s third largest oil reserves from the US and eventually into the service of China. It is in the context of these major defeats that Trump’s bombing campaign must be understood. Remember that the Trump Administration stood back while hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in January and it did nothing as thousands were butchered by the Iranian Regime. US generals have no interest in supporting this form of people power from below. Instead, they want to destabilise the regime from above so that they can impose their own puppet government. Failing this, the US will allow the lives of ordinary people to descend into chaos as the price for dismantling the power of its regional enemy. To understand why, we need to go beyond the conflict itself. #### 2\. The US want to revive the Abraham Accords One reason for October 7 was the threat to Palestine from the Abraham Accords. In the weeks before Hamas launched their attack, it looked increasingly likely that the Saudi Regime would normalise relations with Israel and then work alongside them to build a regional centre of US sponsored capital accumulation. The Hamas attack, and the subsequent Israeli genocide, have made the Abraham Accords much more difficult to achieve. Public opinion in the Arab street makes it far more difficult for the Middle Eastern ruling classes to normalise relations with Israel, but Trump is not giving up. He calculates that by removing the Iranian regime he will increase the regional power of Israel and thus pressure the remaining Arab ruling classes to revive the Accords. In other words, Trump wants the US military to do what diplomacy failed to achieve – to strong-arm the region into a more integrated centre of capitalism with Israel at its core. Historically, the US has pursued its imperialist objectives through these types of regional strategy with trusted local partners. After World War Two, the US helped to rebuild Germany as the centre of Western European capital accumulation. This strategy created new markets for US capital and commodities. It broke open the European colonial empires (of the UK, France and Germany) for US investment, and it helped to limit the influence of the Soviet Union. The US did much the same in Southeast Asia through their support for rebuilding Japan and now they want a major phase of Middle Eastern capital accumulation built around the Israeli state. The Abraham Accords envisage a free trade area that would tie the Gulf states into trade and security relations with Israel – and through Israel, to the US corporate sector. The plan is to foster extensive trade, security and technology relations by funnelling the vast resources of the oil rich states into Israel’s advanced technology sectors, particularly in AI, biotechnology, state security apparatuses and agri-technology. Trump has amassed enormous investment pledges from the region’s most reactionary states, with The White House claiming the following on their website: - **UAE**: A $1.4 trillion, 10-year investment framework and $200 billion in new commercial deals. - **Qatar**: A $1.2 trillion economic commitment. - **Saudi Arabia**: A $600 billion investment commitment. But foreign (western) investors still need to be convinced that this new investment regime is free of the threat of Iran and its proxies. The current bombing campaign is designed to achieve this. #### 3\. The ultimate aim is to take on China Since 2000, the Western states have declined from 80 percent of the global economy to just 58 percent. China has been the major beneficiary of this decline, with an economy that is now bigger than the US in purchasing power parity and a global trade surplus worth $1 trillion annually. The US is terrified that China will get ahead of them in artificial intelligence and begin to dominate global capitalism. But taking them on directly is made difficult by two considerations: (1) China controls the rare earth processing facilities the US needs to build its domestic AI infrastructure, (2) major US corporations have supply chains through China that need to be protected. Thus far, the US has adopted a number of containment strategies for their ‘China problem’. The first is their pursuit of military dominance, with the US currently spending nearly three times as much on the means of destruction ($1 trillion versus $350 billion). This gives the US ruling class the hard power to strong-arm states that are thinking about moving closer to China. Secondly, the US has sponsored strategic allies as alternative sites of accumulation in Southeast Asia – particularly Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. It has also used these allies to create island chains in the South China Sea that contest China’s control of the sea routes necessary for its vast global exports. China has responded to this US containment strategy with its own $4 trillion ‘Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)’ – a strategy to integrate much of Asia into Chinese circuits of capital accumulation at the same time as it creates alternative (land and sea based) routes for its exports. The Middle East is particularly strategic in this context. Over the last two decades, China has increasingly regarded the Middle East as an essential sea route at the end of the BRI. In this context, it is important to remember that China relies on the Middle East for 60 percent of its European trade and that most of China’s Russian oil flows through the Suez Canal. China is currently the Middle East’s largest commercial partner with trade flows rising from $265 billion in 2017 to $507 billion in 2022\. It is also the world’s biggest consumer of Middle Eastern oil, with 50 percent of its energy imports coming from the Gulf States. All of this has given China significant soft power in the region which it has deployed to encourage Middle Eastern countries to nudge towards it politically. But China currently lacks the regional hard power to provide adequate security for its vast interests in the Middle East. One way that China has sought to ‘square this circle’ is through its relationship with Iran. When America re-imposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic in 2018, China continued to buy vast quantities of Iranian oil. Iran and China also signed a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’ in 2021 which was estimated to be worth 10 percent of the entire budget for the Belt and Road Initiative ($400 billion). The centre point of this deal is the joint development of the Port of Chabahar and a new oil terminal near the Jask port, south of the Strait of Hormuz. And an important mark of China’s growing influence following this agreement was its ability to broker a détente between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023\. This was a direct threat to the Abraham Accords as it promised to pave the way for improved relations among the region’s two most powerful states and to potentially reduce Iran’s isolation. This would have posed a significant challenge to US hegemony, so the US has used the chaos that followed October 7 to bury this possibility. Indeed, one reason the US has consistently supported the high risk strategies of the Israeli state has been their own desire to bury any possibility that China might gain from Israel's international isolation. They know how hard it will be to rehabilitate Israel through international diplomacy so they are seeking to do it through a regional accumulation strategy that will protect their own proxy, reduce China’s influence on the region and expand US circuits of capital accumulation. The genocide, the regional destruction and the widespread killing all flow from these wider imperialist objectives. #### 4\. US Imperialism is likely to lose The stakes are clearly very high. The prize of a Middle East dominated by trade and security relations between the oil rich Gulf States and the US backed Israeli technology sector is enormous. It would transform the entire region into a US proxy; it would create an enormous lever in the battle with China, and it would embolden the MAGA right in its attempts to reshape Europe’s role in US hegemony. It would also enrich Trump and his cronies enormously, but the size of the potential prize on offer has forced the US to overreach. Writing in the *Financial Times*, Gideon Rachman speculates that the ease with which the US secured ‘Regime Alteration’ in Venezuela may have lured his Administration into a false sense of security – that it may have convinced them that the shock and awe of ‘Epic Fury’ would immediately throw up an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez or at least destabilise the Iranian Regime sufficiently that it would collapse. Already these calculations look wildly optimistic. The Iranian Regime has been preparing for a US attack through a strategy defined by Robert Page as ‘horizontal escalation’. This involves decentralising its wider command, lulling the US into a long war of attrition and deliberately destabilising the region. The Iranian leadership calculates that it can only survive if the costs for the US and its allies steadily increase. This means creating chaos in global capitalism and driving a wedge between the Arab masses and their rulers. To achieve their first objective, the Iranian Regime has engaged in the strategic deployment of low cost warfare (drones etc.) to destabilise oil and money markets and disrupt global supply chains. The Iranian Regime has watched Trump operate over the last 14 months. They understand how sensitive he has been to attacks on the dollar, particularly any major selloffs of US Treasuries. By attacking oil and gas facilities and threatening ships in the Strait of Hormuz the Iranian Regime are creating inflationary pressures in fossil fuel markets that reverberate into the money markets. This puts enormous economic pressure on the US Administration or as Luke Groeman has recently put it “Iran does not have to defeat the US military, just the US Treasury Market”. To achieve their second objective, the Iranians are deliberately drawing their enemies into a long war that will only harden opinion against them – and show that Iran cannot be quickly defeated. Robert Page captures this part of their strategy in the following remarks: “horizontal escalation is not simply about hitting a wider array of targets, it is about changing how the enemy perceives the risks \[of engagement\] …. The longer the conflict goes on, the harder it becomes for \[Arab\] rulers to sustain a partnership with Israel without sacrificing legitimacy at home”. The US wanted to cow the Iranian Regime as a warning shot of their awesome power in the region. They wanted to remove the main block on the Abraham Accords and get on with US-led capital accumulation that would weaken China and undermine its vast investment in the region. What they have so far achieved is regional chaos, universal revulsion and an acknowledgement that the US Empire is in steady decline. As Gideon Rachman recently concluded “Trump was able to start this war at a time of his choosing but he may not be able to end it on the same terms. Epic Fury risks turning into epic failure”. This may well turn out to be the case, but the devastation for ordinary lives in the meantime will be simply enormous. #### Lessons for Socialists All of this creates four lessons for socialists and progressives. 1. **Western Imperialism – led by the US military – is the world’s biggest terrorist**. There will never be liberation at the end of a bomb. The US and its allies are the cause of the destruction, the genocide and the destabilisation of the Middle East; they have ruined the lives of millions of people, and they will never be the solution. We must oppose western imperialism and denounce their role in creating yet more bloodshed, chaos and destabilisation in the region. 2. **The Iranian Regime is no friend of ordinary people**. The Iranian regime is deeply reactionary. It has repeatedly murdered its own people and only opposes US imperialism to maintain its own grip at home. The rhetoric of Palestinian liberation is also deployed for its own political cover. We stand with the people of Iran against their rulers and the western imperialists. 3. **China also has imperialist ambitions.** The Chinese Communist Party was more than happy to prop up a deeply reactionary theocracy in order to further its own ambitions in the region. In this context, we must reject the ‘campist’ idea that we should support the ‘lesser of two evils’ or that we should whitewash the crimes of the Iranian Regime or the Chinese Communist Party just because they oppose the US for their own reactionary reasons. 4. **The main enemy is at home**. Our government tells the truth about the horrors of regimes that oppose western imperialism, but it never denounces Trump for his crimes against humanity. It will hand bowls of Shamrock to a US war monger and play nice with the Israelis in football. The Irish elites claim they stand for international human rights, but they are whitewashing the slide into western authoritarianism to protect Ireland’s role as a major tax haven for US corporations. No act will be too obscene for the craven Irish elites, so Irish people must expose the brutality, the lies, and the hypocrisy of western imperialism.