This is a statement signed by the Current for Permanent Revolution – Fourth International and March to Socialism (South Korea), Corriente Roja por la Cuarta Internacional (Spanish State), Rouge (Belgium), and What is to Be Done (Canada).
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The imperialist war of aggression by the United States and Israel against Iran enters its fourth week. In what is already the largest U.S. offensive in the Middle East in a quarter century, Donald Trump’s objectives remain unclear. Oil prices rise and obstacles to global trade multiply. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of international oil trade passes, has triggered the worst energy crisis since the 1973 oil embargo. Military attacks on oil tankers and the paralysis of maritime traffic in the Gulf negatively impact the global economy. It has increased inflation and pushed the price of oil above $100 per barrel, exacerbating the threat of stagflation.
Trump seems to have entered this new imperialist adventure with the simplistic hypothesis that a devastating military attack by the United States and Israel would lead to the rapid fall of the ayatollah regime, and its replacement by a leadership willing to submit to the United States (as in Venezuela with Delcy Rodríguez). He sought an operation that would avoid sending ground troops, as had been done in Iraq in 2003.
Trump did not achieve the results he desired. After the spectacle of the initial bombings, the outcome was neither regime change nor the conquest of a collaborationist leadership in the style of Venezuela. Despite the military superiority of the U.S.-Israel alliance, and having obtained important tactical victories, this alone was not enough to force the surrender or collapse of the Iranian regime — although there are risks of internal fissures and uncertainties about the regime’s response following the assassination of Ali Larijani, Iran’s national security chief.
Mojtaba Khamenei now heads the theocratic regime after the assassination of Ali Khamenei, maintaining a defiant stance against Washington. The high command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the Armed Forces suffered heavy blows but has not collapsed. Tehran continues to respond militarily. Its objective is to increase the military, political, and economic costs for the aggressors, to the point that they eventually consider it better to give up and seek a negotiated solution. For this reason, it wears down enemy defense systems, bombs U.S. embassies, and attacks Trump’s allies in the Persian Gulf — such as the United Arab Emirates, whose oil port of Fujairah was bombed in retaliation for the U.S. attack on Kharg Island (a crucial component of Iran’s energy infrastructure).
Economically, the pressure is mounting. There is no prospect of a return to regular oil trade, and Europe’s gas supply is in danger. The idea of militarily escorting oil tankers is little more than a fantasy: each trip would cost more than the cargo itself. Indeed, the countries Trump called upon (France, England, South Korea, and Japan) to send warships to force the opening of the Strait of Hormuz have so far refused to do so or have avoided clear answers.
There are many contradictions besieging the U.S. bipartisan imperialist regime — especially the Trump administration — amid an imperialist military offensive that is more a sign of the hegemonic decline of the United States than its strength. Internally, the unpopularity of a war that costs the public treasury an exorbitant $1 billion per day is growing. National figures of Trumpist right-wing politics, such as Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and podcaster Joe Rogan, oppose the war, increasing fissures within the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. One of the most striking manifestations of this crisis is the recent resignation of Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who stated that “[I]t is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” In an NBC News poll, 54 percent of the population rejected the offensive against Iran, reflecting Trump’s declining approval ratings which he seeks to contain ahead of the midterm elections in November.
Moreover, one of Trump’s main problems is the alliance with Israel. As a continuation of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people, Netanyahu aims to eliminate the Islamic Republic and plunge Iran into a civil war that leads to political, religious, ethnic, and territorial fragmentation, following the model of Syria or Libya. He can only survive through a strategy of “permanent war” in the Middle East, as shown in the bombings against Lebanon. For Trump, what he cannot afford is to sink the United States into another “forever war” that consumes resources and diverts the country from the strategic priority of containing China in the Asia-Pacific. This is the reason for his contradictory statements, sometimes claiming the war could last four to six weeks, sometimes assuring it is about to end, without specifying when or how. The gap between the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism and those of Israel tends to widen, with no simple solution in sight.
In this scenario, it is imperative to build a global movement against the imperialist war and for the political and military defeat of the United States and Israel in Iran. The anti-imperialist, socialist, and revolutionary Left must unconditionally defend the defeat of the United States and Israel (as well as the European powers that support them). In other words, the Left must unequivocally be on the side of the oppressed nation against the oppressor nation. Likewise, it is necessary to impose an immediate end to the Zionist military offensive against Lebanon. The banner of defeating the regional reordering plans of Zionist terrorism is inseparable from the battle to defeat Trump and Netanyahu in their offensive against Iran.
For this reason, all positions that equate imperialist military intervention with the reactionary regime of Iran are mistaken. For Marxists, it is an obligation to stand on the side of the oppressed nation, despite the reactionary character of the regime. If the United States and Israel succeed and impose their objectives, the conditions of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle will worsen not only in Iran but throughout the world, especially in the Middle East. This outcome would have disastrous effects on the struggle for the emancipation of the Palestinian people. In Lebanon, it would mean the advance of national destruction in the face of Netanyahu’s expansionist ambitions. In Latin America, such an outcome would imply the reinforcement of the “Donroe Doctrine,” with more violent and interventionist measures of domination over the “Western Hemisphere”: the worsening of Venezuela’s neocolonial submission (which, with the collaboration of the chavista regime, has advanced toward becoming a U.S. protectorate), the economic strangulation that afflicts the Cuban people and the remaining achievements of the 1959 Revolution, as well as U.S. interference in the politics of many countries in the region.
On the contrary, if U.S. imperialism and Zionism suffer a defeat, the conditions will improve for a frontal battle against militarism and colonial interventions worldwide. For this reason, we must raise a powerful movement against this imperialist war that openly defends the defeat of Washington and Tel Aviv in their criminal war.
This position, defended by the Current for Permanent Revolution – Fourth International, March to Socialism of South Korea, Corriente Roja por la Cuarta Internacional of the Spanish State, Rouge of Belgium, and What is to Be Done of Canada, is based on the most absolute class independence in the face of the anti-worker, repressive, and reactionary regime of the ayatollahs. We consider that no emancipation or freedom for the working class, women, and the Iranian people can come with bombs or through the interventions of imperialism and the genocidal State of Israel.
The ultraconservative theocratic political regime of Iran, now led by Mojtaba Khamenei, has already proven many times to be a relentless enemy of the working and popular masses of Iran, responsible for the persecution of women and Kurds, and for the repression of workers’ strikes in the country. Faced with the imminence of war, the theocracy closed ranks and sealed its internal unity with a bloodbath against the population, brutally repressing protests against the economic crisis that had put the regime in check in January. This was a forceful demonstration of popular discontent, which Trump and Netanyahu tried, unsuccessfully, to instrumentalize for their politics of “regime change.” This conduct systematically undermined the preparation for confrontation and anti-imperialist resistance in Iran. But such is the modus operandi of the ayatollahs’ theocratic dictatorship, which emerged from the political expropriation of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the most organic of the revolutionary, working-class, and anti-imperialist processes in the Middle East, which was ultimately brutally repressed by the Shiite clerical apparatus.
Furthermore — even within the context of its right to self-defense against imperialist aggression — Iran’s actions in the course of the war entail the repression of each manifestation of dissent, a nefarious method that weakens the struggle against the United States and Israel. We condemn such a policy of repression, as well as labelling all protesters who fight against the economic crisis and the reactionary regime as “enemies.”
This is why we categorically oppose the “campist” policy of sectors of populist Left (and bourgeois center-left), which attempt to identify the anti-imperialist struggle with political support for bloodthirsty and reactionary regimes, or for so-called “multilateral powers,” China and Russia. During the Palestinian genocide, neither lifted a finger in defense of Gaza. Neither China nor Russia (Putin remains focused on obtaining maximum benefit from the war in Ukraine and now from the rise in oil prices due to the war against Iran) acted in defense of their allies, beyond predictable statements of repudiation of U.S. aggression and support for the attacked regime. China, despite seeing its strategic interests harmed by rising energy prices, acts cautiously so as not to jeopardize its agreements with Israel (or with the reactionary Gulf monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia). The reality is that, far from being “progressive” alternatives or a “lesser evil” compared to the imperialist disaster, both China and Russia are capitalist states (in the case of China, a major capitalist power and, for some comrades, an emerging imperialist power), endowed with profoundly reactionary, authoritarian, and anti-worker regimes. They are not allies in the struggle of the peoples of the world against colonial and militarist barbarism.
The confrontation against imperialist aggression can only be carried out with complete political independence from all capitalist states and reactionary regimes, such as Iran and the Arab bourgeoisies in the Middle East. Because of its bourgeois and reactionary nature, the Iranian regime’s war strategy does not aim to call for the mobilization of the Muslim masses — both Arab and non-Arab — in the region against their own governments, political regimes, and imperialist oppression, even though the only possibility of victory lies in an uprising by the oppressed masses of the Arab and Muslim world.
The alliance of workers, women, youth, peasants, and oppressed peoples (such as the Kurds) throughout the region in anti-imperialist class struggle, is the only progressive alternative against the offensive of the United States and Israel, as well as against attempts to instrumentalize popular discontent by different enemy camps.
Trump has been squandering his political capital in a war that enjoys no internal prestige, and above all suffered a significant defeat in Minneapolis, where the mobilization of workers and the population forced him to retreat in the anti-immigrant offensive carried out by ICE. Such conditions must be seized upon so that a great movement against the war emerges among workers and the population of the United States. Rejection of imperialist aggression is fundamental, but it must be accompanied by the slogan of the military defeat of Trump and Netanyahu, taking advantage of the strength of the pro-Palestine movement that swept through the student movement and sectors of the working class in 2024. In the imperialist European countries, it is a task of the highest order to raise a powerful antiwar movement from the forces that oppose the genocide in Gaza and confront the Far Right. Macron, Starmer, Merz, and Carney say they are not at war against Iran, but France offers its warships, England its military bases, and Germany its support for Trumpist militarism. In the case of the Spanish state, Sánchez says “No to war,” but allows the continued operation of U.S. military bases which are used for the offensive in Iran. Meanwhile, all European states increase their military budgets and reinforce warmongering rhetoric, saying they would participate in efforts to reopen Hormuz. They must be confronted head-on, with the methods employed by the dockworkers of Genoa and by the Italian working class, who together with students, staged a mass general strike in defense of Palestine.
We are at a crucial moment. The tendencies toward wars and new economic crises are appearing on the horizon in an increasingly pronounced way. Trump represents an attempt at a “solution by force” to overcome the hegemonic decline of the United States and restore its dominance. In a world marked by rivalry between powers, militarism, and protectionist tendencies, with the hegemonic conflict between the United States and China as a strategic backdrop, workers and young people around the world must equip themselves with their own anticapitalist and socialist strategy to stop the catastrophes being prepared by our class enemies. In the struggle to build this socialist strategy, it is particularly important to reconnect with the historical legacy of the heroic 1979 revolution. The Iranian working class, its youth, and its feminist movement have written heroic chapters in history, and in those years, the revolution — which began with democratic and social demands — gave the working class the opportunity to develop mass self-determination organizations. The alliance between imperialism and the clergy, brutal repression, and the absence of a revolutionary socialist leadership succeeded in hijacking a workers’ revolution — which had been a global example — transforming it instead into an Islamic counterrevolution.
Today, despite the deeply reactionary and oppressive character of the Iranian regime, and without giving it any political support, we consider that a defeat of the United States, the Zionist State, and its allies would be an auspicious development for the exploited and oppressed of the world.
We, who sign this declaration, also consider it fundamental that the organizations that claim to be part of the anti-imperialist Left, and especially the broad pro-Palestine movement that has developed worldwide (which was reminiscent of the movement against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s), connect our ongoing struggles and direct them toward the same goals: to fight for the defeat of the United States and Israel, to demand an end to the bombings in Lebanon, and to firmly raise the banners for the liberation of the Palestinian people.
Down with the imperialist war against Iran! For the defeat of the United States and Israel! We must build a mass international movement against imperialist aggression, with the working class and youth leading the way! Stop the bombings in Lebanon! Stop the genocide of the Palestinian people! For the total withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region!
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Current for Permanent Revolution – Fourth International
March to Socialism (South Korea)
Corriente Roja por la Cuarta Internacional (Spanish State)
Rouge (Belgium)
What Is To Be Done? (Canada)
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