Every day it’s a-getting closer
Moving faster than a roller coaster.
The third world war will surely come our way (apologies to Buddy Holly)
“Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu aims to overthrow Iran’s clerical-military regime and talks openly of liquidating the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This is a fight to the death.
“There is a very high risk that the US, Britain, and France will be drawn directly into the conflict – pitting the democracies against the coalescing confederacy of Iran, China, Russia and North Korea, and its disturbingly large tail of semi-aligned states.
“The hybrid struggle between two rival blocs resembles the treacherous landscape before the Thirty Years War in 1618, and the First World War in 1914. All it takes is hubris and a few more errors to set off this slow-burning fuse” (Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, ‘Israel’s attacks on Iranian energy threaten a perilous chain reaction’, The Telegraph Economic Intelligence, 17 June 2025.
The seeds of the third world war were planted in 1917 with the publication of the Balfour Declaration. As French and British imperialists battled as part of the First World War in the Middle East to annexe the territories of the Ottoman empire, they mobilised local Arab populations in their support by promising them independence. The ‘independence’ that was granted, however, turned out to be subjection to British or French interests under compliant Arab leaders. These Arabs, however, were not entirely trusted which is why Britain came up with its plan to accommodate the crazy dreams of a tiny sect of Zionists who were claiming Palestine to be a Jewish homeland by divine decree. Britain awarded itself the mandate of Palestine and oversaw large waves of Jewish immigration into Palestine, which became a flood as a result of Hitlerite genocide of Jews in Europe. Arab resistance was suppressed and in 1947 the ‘Jewish’ state of Israel was born. It was always a colonial project, a project for the occupation of the territory by a foreign power for settlement by foreigners whose purpose was to safeguard British imperialist interests in the Middle East – in particular to be on standby to protect the Suez Canal and to ensure compliance of Arab states in continuing to supply oil to the world at an acceptable price. The Jewish settlers drove Arabs out of their homes through the use of armed terror and massacres, but the millions of displaced Palestinian Arabs have never accepted this injustice and have always tried to fight back in every way they could. Their problem has been that they were never just fighting back against the Jewish settlers who had stolen their homes and livelihoods, but also against the British and American imperialist powers that have always backed little Israel to the hilt, armed it, financed it and seen to it that it thrived. For Israel was their unsinkable aircraft carrier enforcing their control over the wealth of the entire region, and the Jewish population was a ready and willing source of cannon fodder should the imperialists ever need to use force to defend its interests in the locality.
The major problem faced by Israel was the Palestinian resistance that has never given up. To ensure the safety of its Israeli asset, Palestinians had first to be subjected to a reign of terror in the hope that as many as possible would voluntarily emigrate; all dissent had to be ruthlessly repressed especially by long imprisonment terms without trial; then those that remained had to be confined behind walls, having to pass through heavily armed checkpoints whenever they needed to move into ‘Jewish’ areas; then they were ‘given’ their own land in the West Bank and Gaza to administer for themselves, but with no sovereignty of any kind, no ability to come and go as they pleased, no right to export and import what they pleased. Gaza in particular was in effect just a concentration camp. In the meantime Israeli settlers were taking over more and more of the West Bank and the parts of Jerusalem that had been allocated to Palestinians – again locking the Palestinians out, demolishing their homes, destroying their crops and trees, and committing daily acts of violence and oppression. This of course only caused Palestinian resistance to grow and Israeli repression to intensify.
The assault on Gaza
The Palestinian resistance was faced with the choice of continuing to be subjected to a slow genocide or fighting back; and on 7 October they mounted an attack that by its size, strength, ingenuity and daring, shook Israel to its foundations. In response, the Israelis set about trying to clear the whole of Gaza of its Palestinian population by carpet bombing, IDF incursion and starvation. This is being done with full imperialist approval, with US President Donald Trump presenting plans to turn Gaza into a tourist resort and anybody in the US or Europe denouncing the genocide being persecuted as ‘anti-semitic’.
As usual, however, the reactionaries miscalculated. They thought they could destroy the Palestinian leadership in short shrift and that would be the end of the problem for many years to come. But they have been unable to do so. The Palestinians keep fighting on in spite of all the hardship, and it is Israel that is facing existential problems as a result: its population is deserting; its soldiers are either being killed or returning unable to fight any longer through injury or PTSD; its economy is in ruins, and the cost of the war is bankrupting it. That being the case, Israel desperately needed the US not just to arm and finance it but also to actually join the war as a participant.
Escalation to the attack on Iran and the overwhelming Iranian response
Hence Israel’s attack on Iran. Israel knew that Iran would retaliate but calculated that the US would need to intervene to save such a valuable Middle Eastern asset as Israel. And it would seem that the powers-that-be in Washington, or at least Trump himself, were quite happy to see Israel attack Iran, kill generals and scientists and damage military assets, failing to realise that this attack would put Israel in danger of obliteration. Sure enough, the Iranian counteroffensive proved more than a match for Israeli defences.
In just the first few days Iranian strikes hit more than 150 targets, including air bases, F-35, F-16 and F-15 fighters, tankers and transport aircraft, as well as command and control and electronic warfare centres located at these bases.
The attacks targeted military centres, military-industrial facilities used by the Israeli army to produce missiles, military equipment and weapons, as well as other military targets. These included the Israeli Defence Ministry building in Tel Aviv twice. the Israeli National Security Ministry building in Tel Aviv. several Israeli warplanes, including four F-35 fighter jets, the pilot of one of which has been captured.
The country’s anti-missile defences that everybody thought were impenetrable have been totally overcome. How did this happen? Some of the answer was given by “Dr Marion Messmer, a senior research fellow of security studies at Chatham House, [who] said Israel’s air defences may not be as effective as many believe.
“Speaking of the Iron Dome in particular, she told The Independent it has ‘better PR than is actually warranted’…
“’Part of the Iranian strategy is essentially to fire a lot, and therefore to hope that the interceptors won’t be able to shoot everything down, which is one of the things that we’ve seen.’
“Experts believe that Iran may have also used hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), which can manoeuvre and glide at hypersonic speed, making them a lot harder to intercept.
“’If you’ve got something that can manoeuvre, then obviously you can either pre-program an erratic flight path, or you can change it if you see that interceptors have been launched. That then makes it much easier to avoid any interception,’ Dr Messmer explained…
“Iran’s Revolutionary Guards on Monday said they had employed a new method that caused Israel’s multi-layered defence systems to target each other and allowed Iran to successfully hit many targets.
“Dr Miron speculated that this may have been done by positioning decoy drones near Israeli defence missiles, in such a way that it would cause another Israeli missile to wipe it out.
“But the main cause of the most significant breach to Israel’s air defence in years, she said, is the sheer ‘overload’ of Iranian missiles which left it ‘overwhelmed’” (Alex Croft, ‘How has Iran managed to breach Israel’s Iron Dome air defence system?’, The Independent, 19 June 2025).
In the face of Iran’s devastating counter-attack, Netanyahu fled the country, while Israeli citizens were not allowed to leave. They were not so much human shields as bargaining counters to get the US to join the war against Iran.
America enters the war
Confronting the real danger of Israel’s imminent obliteration, US imperialism flew its warplanes into Iran, ostensibly to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent it from developing weapons grade uranium. Before committing itself, the US tried to strike terror into the hearts of the Iranian government with threats of how its bunker-busting bombs would be able to blast out even the deeply buried Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow. It was put about that as Israel didn’t have the necessary bunker-busters or the specialised aircraft to carry them, it was only America that could save the day.
In actual fact the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs (MOBs) [that cost approximately $20 million EACH] had no such guaranteed power, as Wesley Clark, a former supreme Allied commander Europe of Nato, pointed out. When on 17 June six b-52 bombers each carrying two MOBs, were dispatched to Iran supposedly on a mission to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, they undoubtedly caused a great deal of damage but did not succeed in destroying the plants. What imperialism hopes it has achieved is, by bombing civlian nuclear power plants, to undermine Iran’s ability to provide cheap energy to its citizens, provoking them into overthrowing their firmly anti-imperialist government so that US imperialism gets a chance to instal a more compliant one.
Iran strikes back
Nevertheless, US imperialism’s main motivation is to try to save Israel’s skin. Iran responded by attacking US military bases in Qatar, Bahrain and Iraq. With regard to the Al-Udeid base in Qatar, the Iranian government said it had targeted it with exactly the same number of missiles that the US had used to bomb its peaceful nuclear facilities and warned that, if the US did not back down, its Middle Eastern military bases would all be obliterated. It also became obvious even to Trump that the 40,000 US troops stationed in the Middle East could be next in the line of fire, as well as its aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf, which Iran is well positioned to attack and destroy. The next thing we know is that Trump announced a ceasefire.
There is of course no guarantee that the ceasefire will hold. US imperialism, in particular, is notorious for flouting the agreements that it makes as soon as it suits it to do so. As we go to press no ceasefire is being observed, Trump having apparently demanded that Iran desist from bombing 12 hours before Israel had to do so, a condition which naturally Iran never accepted. The Spectator is reporting that Trump is now furious with Israel for not observing his ceasefire. Let’s see!
The nuclear issue
The aggression against Iran mounted by both Israel and the United States has, according to them, all been aimed at stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons. We were expected to believe that Iran’s ability to produce them was ‘imminent’ and therefore immediate action was necessary to prevent that happening. Well, Saddam’s notorious (but non-existent) ‘weapons of mass destruction’ had been quite successful in luring the gullible to supporting imperialism’s war on Iraq, so why not use the same trick again? However, there is even less evidence of the existence of Iran’s nuclear weapons than of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
Fawaz Gerges, Professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, writes in The Guardian of 20 June 2025, (‘We’re on the brink of a disastrous, illegal conflagration in the Middle East. Trump must be stopped’):
“The foundation of Israel’s justification for launching pre-emptive strikes and of Washington’s quiet complicity is alarming. The core claim is that Iran was rapidly taking steps to ‘weaponise its uranium’, with Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, repeatedly warning that Tehran was approaching a point of no return in developing a nuclear bomb.
“But Netanyahu’s narrative flatly contradicts the US intelligence assessment, which found that not only is Iran not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, it remains at least three years away from having the capability to do so. The CIA disputes the Israeli claim that Iran is close to crossing a nuclear threshold.
“Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified in March that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had not authorised a nuclear programme, one that was in fact suspended in 2003. Even if Iran was making a bomb, international law doesn’t give Israel and the US the right to bomb Iran….”
More than that! The only bar to Iran developing nuclear weapons is its signature to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT). Other than that, why should Iran not develop nuclear weapons, given that Israel has already accumulated quite a stockpile, estimated in 2021 to have reached 90 nuclear warheads? Theoretically this stockpile does not exist, but in practice everybody knows that it does, with US imperialism staunchly turning a blind eye. However, in its arrogance, Israel has provided its own proof: : “An extraordinary three-part series on Israeli television, ‘The Atom and Me’, lays out how the country got its nuclear weapons….It shows the country’s single-minded determination to get the bomb no matter what it took, including stealing nuclear explosives and bomb components from the United States and violating a major nuclear arms control treaty to which Israel is a party—and lying about it…
“Several events discussed in the television series deal directly with the United States: the theft in the 1960s of bomb quantities of uranium 235 from the NUMEC facility in Pennsylvania, where the leaders of the Israeli team that spirited Eichmann out of Argentina appeared inexplicably in 1968 with false identities; the illicit purchase of hundreds of high-speed switches (krytrons) for triggering nuclear weapons, and spiriting them out of the country in the 1980s by Israeli spy and arms dealer, and by then Hollywood producer, Arnon Milchan; and, most significantly at this point, Israel’s 1979 nuclear test in the seas off South Africa of what appears to be the initial fission stage for a thermonuclear weapon. The nuclear test violated the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty to which Israel is a party…
“No one was ever charged in the disappearance of nuclear material from NUMEC. When the issue of Israel’s involvement arose again in 1976, President Gerald Ford’s attorney general suggested to the president the possibility of charging US officials, presumably in the Atomic Energy Commission, with failing to report a felony. But it was too late. Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter, who let the matter drop. Milchan was never charged for the filching of krytrons even though he later bragged about his arms dealing and spying for Israel. And Carter—and every US president after him—took no enforcement action in response to the illegal 1979 nuclear test” (Victor Gilinsky and Leonard Weiss, The US hypocrisy about Israel’s nuclear weapons must stop’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 21 March 2025).
It seems obvious that what were described as ‘thefts’ were in fact gifts, and that US imperialism was fully involved in enabling its Middle Eastern attack dog to develop its own nuclear weapons production capacity.
Israel never signed up to the NPT. Iran did. And Iran did so because it had no intention of developing nuclear weapons. In Islam, which the Iranian government takes very seriously, nuclear weapons are generally considered haram (forbidden) owing to their indiscriminate nature and potential for widespread destruction, which contradicts the Islamic principle of protecting human life and the environment. Several scholars and leaders, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have issued fatwas (religious rulings) declaring the development, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons as forbidden.
The IAEA
As Israeli bombs rained down on Iranian nuclear targets, it became apparent that the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors were given access to all areas of Iranian nuclear production in order to verify that Iran’s nuclear programme was indeed entirely peaceful, had betrayed Iran. The head of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi (an Argentinian Jew), had falsely claimed that Iran was in breach of its Treaty obligations, thus giving Israel the pretext it needed for its attack. Although Grossi later said that there was no evidence at all that Iran was anywhere near making a nuclear bomb, that admission was too little and came too late. The result has been that Iran has withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and in future everything it does will be done in the strictest secrecy. It is also quite likely that the IAEA had been feeding detailed confidential information about Iranian nuclear facilities and personnel to Israel either directly or via the US, helping Israel to identify its targets.
The assault by Israel and the US on its programme of development of nuclear power for exclusively peaceful services may well end up forcing Iran to develop nuclear weaponry for the purposes of self-defence as David Sanger has pointed out in the New York Times:
If America did succeed in destroying Iran’s current nuclear facilities, the possibility could arise that “Iran could slowly recover, its surviving nuclear scientists could take their skills underground and the country could follow the pathway lit by North Korea, with a race to build a bomb. Today, North Korea has 60 or more nuclear weapons by some intelligence estimates, an arsenal that probably makes it too powerful to attack.
“That, Iran may conclude, is the only pathway to keep larger, hostile powers at bay, and to prevent the United States and Israel from carrying out an operation like the one that lit up the Iranian skies on Sunday morning” (‘With military strike his predecessors avoided, Trump takes a huge gamble’, 21 June 2025).
Imperialism drops a bunker-buster on its own foot
Making it much more likely that Iran will hasten to develop its own nuclear weapons is not the only way in which imperialism is shooting itself in the foot.
(a) Energy supplies
A major problem for imperialism, which causes the US’s imperialist allies to worry and is leading them to distance themselves, verbally at least, from the American assaults on Iran, is Iran’s ability to block shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large proportion of oil tankers have to pass if they are to deliver their cargoes where needed. It is not a step Iran would take lightly as any blockade would also affect its own shipping, but it is nevertheless an option to be considered, as it would send the price of energy soaring again in the imperialist countries and strengthen internal opposition in those countries to the waging of the war by their ruling class.
Furthermore, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard points out (op.cit), Iran “… might try to mobilise the Iraqi Shia militias, such as the Kataib Hezbollah and the Popular Mobilization Forces, to paralyse the Basra oil terminals – threatening up to 3.4m b/d of exports.
“Oxford Economics said a full-blown oil crisis of this kind would push oil to $130, and push both global and US inflation to 6pc.”
This is a prospect that has certainly put the wind up bourgeois leaders in all the imperialist countries, who are already struggling with the imposition of more and more austerity on their respective working classes.
(b) Losing in the court of public opinion
It must not be forgotten that Trump was elected on a platform of ending America’s ‘forever wars’, yet now he appears to be plunging America into a brand new forever war against Iran! Polling suggests that no less than 60% of the US population opposes engaging in war with Iran, and that percentage is bound to increase the more the US is hammered by Iranian retaliation. Iran, after all, has yet to deploy its newest technologically superior weapons.
These concerns were very well expressed in a rather enjoyable article in The Times published on 23 June 2025, from which we quote:
“Donald Trump never let Joe Biden forget the 13 American service members killed during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan as he built his campaign around becoming a ‘peacemaker’ president. Trump claimed, falsely, that not a single American soldier was killed in Afghanistan during the last 18 months of his presidency after he agreed a deal with the Taliban.
“Not only did this deny the fact of the 12 soldiers who lost their lives in hostile action during this period but it revealed one of the greatest threats to his carefully nurtured image — the deaths of American soldiers overseas on his watch. Any casualties in the Middle East as a direct result of his actions will shatter his image with his adoring Make America Great Again (Maga) base…
“The stakes have been raised over his Middle East adventure by one of Maga’s most prominent figures, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia. Unlike other sceptical Maga voices which have been inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt on Iran, Taylor Greene is posting strongly contrarian views.
“’Maga is not for foreign wars. We are not for regime change. We are for AMERICA FIRST. The United States should not be involved in fighting nuclear-armed Israel’s war with Iran,’ she wrote on Monday.
“She also posted but quickly deleted a far more biting critique, accusing Trump of a ‘bait and switch’ on his voters ‘to please the neocons, warmongers, military industrial complex contracts, and neocon TV personalities that Maga hates’. In a post that sounded like it was written in a blind fury, she added: ‘I spent millions of my own money and TRAVELED THE ENTIRE COUNTRY campaigning for President Trump and his Maga agenda and his promises. And Trump’s Maga agenda included these key promises: NO MORE FOREIGN WARS. NO MORE REGIME CHANGE. WORLD PEACE.’
“Trump perplexed many of his supporters with his post on Sunday night suggesting regime change for Iran after his top officials had spent the day carefully and clearly distancing themselves from that idea.
“Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, told Fox News on Sunday: ‘I don’t like the regime but we’re not into the regime change business here. We’re into the safety and security of the United States business.’
“This was exactly what Maga wanted to hear. Then Trump posted that evening: ‘If the current Iranian regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a regime change??? MIGA!!!’
“The shockwaves among his supporters were felt back at the White House, so out came Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, on Fox on Monday morning to explain: ‘Our military posture has not changed … why shouldn’t the Iranian people take away the power of this incredibly violent regime?’
“This corrective did not placate Taylor Greene. Her deleted post shows the explosive potential of the Maga base to fracture if American bodybags start arriving back from the Gulf (David Chater, ‘Trump is breaking his promises — and it will cost him supporters’).
On top of that, the President’s unilateral act of war has been done in breach of the US Constitution which would require the authorisation of Congress which has the exclusive right to declare war. While the President may not have uttered the words ‘I/We declare war against Iran’, initiating any act of war when not under attack does amount to a declaration of war. Requiring Congress’s authorisation is supposed to safeguard the US against acting without careful consideration – which is certainly what appears to have happened here. Given that the arsenals of the imperialist world have been severely depleted by Nato’s war in Ukraine, from the imperialist point of view it would certainly have been desirable to consider whether war was a good idea just at this time!
At the time of writing it is not clear whether the war will stop or not. If it does stop, the issues that have given rise to it have in no way been resolved and it’s only a matter of time before we will once more be staring WW3 in the face.
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