Version imprimableBut seriously, amidst the swirling uncertainties about whether the war is really over and what comes next, there are some things we need to be clear about. First, this was a hideous imperialist war with horrific global consequences, a whole world of collateral damage.
Second, once having launched the war, it was essential that the United States and Israel be defeated in their aims of total regional conquest. We have to say out loud that this was not only “Trump’s war of choice,” as many Democrats do, but that it deserved to lose.
Third, we say this with no sympathy for the murderous Iranian regime with its record of mass murder and executions of its own population for decades, including this year while Trump was issuing empty noise about “help is on the way.”
Fourth, the angry split between the gangster administrations of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu is real, and tactically important for the Palestine solidarity struggle.
Strategically, however, the U.S.-Israeli partnership remains intact — and may be disastrously enhanced by a proposed “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” in the draft 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, to essentially fuse their military-industrial operations.
Anatomy of a Debacle
Trump and some of his advisers are furious with Benjamin Netanyahu for suckering the U.S. president into launching the war on the absurd promises of instantaneous military victory, rapid Iranian regime collapse, and installation of a client government on the Venezuela 2.0 model.
In the end, Trump surrendered to reality, achieving nothing of what he arrogantly promised at the outset of “Epic Fury.”
Part of the MAGA base is furious with Trump for starting the war; many pro-Israel neocon hawks and even some “pragmatic centrists,” including Democrats, are angry that he failed to continue and “finish the job”; financial markets verged on panic of world economic hemorrhage if the war continued; and most decisively, the U.S. population was staggering under the war’s inflationary surge for what people correctly see as having no constructive purpose.
Inside Israel — where the majority of the Jewish population since October 7, 2023, has become tragically inured to the genocide in Palestine and catastrophic suffering in Lebanon — when the war began Trump’s popularity surged well past their own prime minister’s.
With the U.S.-Iran “Memorandum of Understanding,” Trump’s political standing in Israel has slumped. As for Netanyahu, he needs permanent war to preserve his coalition of far-rightists, religious fundamentalists, and essentially neonazi settler pogromists, and to keep his own corruption trials suspended. And the ostensible main opposition in Israel is denouncing Netanyahu not for starting the war, but for accepting the U.S.-dictated “humiliation” of the ceasefire.
For this Israeli government, then, it is essential to blow up the U.S.-Iran agreement and force the resumption of this ruinous war. That’s the number-one reason why Israel continues bombing Lebanon, with dozens of civilians killed daily, immediately after announcing yet another “ceasefire” deal.
Global Consequences
Where this leads in U.S., Israeli, and Iranian broader regional politics and global economy will take time to emerge. But let us not overlook how the peoples of the Middle East (as some now call it, Western Asia) and the world are collateral damage in this imperial debacle.
The longterm effects of the Strait of Hormuz blockage have implications for hunger in the Global South that won’t be fully known for at least a year. And this at a moment when a “super El Niño” phase in the Pacific Ocean can impact agriculture by massive climate disruptions.
Israel’s occupation-annexationist rampage in southern Lebanon threatens the very existence of the Lebanese state. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinian people are human sacrifices on the altar of settler-colonialism and U.S. and European indifference.
If the Iranian regime has won the war — at least in terms of its survival and control of the Strait of Hormuz, and promises of sanctions relief and massive reconstruction subsidies from Gulf states — the Iranian people have not. Over a million Iranians are newly unemployed, and thousands or tens of thousands were murdered by the government earlier this year.
And let’s remember that the Iranian president a year ago — before the 2025 “twelve day war,” before the mass murders of protesters, and before the most recent war — was warning the nation that the capital Tehran would have to be “evacuated” as it would ultimately run out of water, as if there were anywhere for the population to go.
Iran’s internal crises rule out the scenario proclaimed by some geopolitical pundits, and parts of the anti-imperialist left that should know better, that Iran has now become a “fourth global power.”
The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is yet another example of imperialism creating problems it can’t solve. Again, the U.S.-Israeli defeat in this war and the partial U.S.-Israeli rupture are to be welcomed — and if all this weakens Trump’s death grip in American politics, so much the better.
But there shouldn’t be illusions that this automatically opens a road anytime soon to progressive solutions, which will require mass movements, popular mobilizations, and alternative politics that remain to be organized.
27 June 2026
Source Solidarity webzine.
