By CARLOS SAPIR
Just over four months ago, the U.S. abruptly discontinued nuclear talks with Iran in order to launch a surprise attack on the country, together with Israel. Arrogant declarations from Trump suggested that the war would be over within weeks, and that it would result in the prompt destruction of the Islamic Republic regime. The imperialists called on the Iranian people to take a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to overthrow the Iranian government, a call which was enthusiastically repeated by Reza Pahlavi and his monarchist supporters.
Nearly a half-year later, as a shaky ceasefire threatens to fall apart, all of Trump’s promises, predictions, and goals appear to have fallen by the wayside, while Iran is now arguably in the strongest geopolitical bargaining position relative to U.S. imperialism that it has enjoyed in living memory.
The balance of military forces
Going into the war, U.S. and Israeli military spokesmen promised a rapid victory that would leave Iran in ruins and with a new, pro-Israel regime. Early dispatches bragged about the unprecedented deployment of AI-powered missile-targeting technologies and seemingly indisputable U.S. air superiority as they carried out successful assassination airstrikes against Iranian leadership.
While the U.S. propaganda mill didn’t stop churning, its narrative was punctured by the retaliatory Iranian missile barrages against U.S. military assets across the Gulf, and also against Israel. Satellite imagery showed the ruins of billions of dollars of U.S. infrastructure in the UAE and elsewhere, as U.S. forces relocated into civilian infrastructure, with Iranian missiles soon following, creating further damage and chaos. Across the region, while U.S.-supplied air defense systems were able to mitigate the Iranian counterattack, their storage of ammunition was strained to the breaking point, with Iran demonstrating that it could exhaust anti-missile systems at an economically efficient pace.
The narrative of U.S.-Israeli air superiority over Iran more generally was diminished by the downing of U.S. materiel by Iranian anti-air defense forces in April. Meanwhile, despite their much-vaunted use of AI to locate and vet targets, the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign has been effectively indiscriminate—with thousands of civilian casualties, including hundreds of children, and notoriously including the targeting of a girls’ elementary school in Minab (likely by the U.S.), as well as the obliteration of a Jewish synagogue in Tehran (by Israel).
Notably, despite repeatedly threatening to deploy ground troops on Iranian soil, the U.S. held back from actually doing so, even after it became clear that the air war was not going to be sufficient to defeat Iran. This speaks to the political limitations restraining the U.S. war machine: whether based on the already-low popularity of the war and the lack of appetite for another prolonged, indefinite invasion and occupation of a country in the Middle East, or on the prospect of a sharp increase in U.S. casualties (with current casualty reporting already being suppressed even with the relatively low level of exposure to danger faced by U.S. soldiers), Trump’s government recognized that they could not press forward with these goals without risking a loss of control, either at home or in the armed forces themselves.
Meanwhile, it appears that the Iranian government arrived at the “ceasefire” more consolidated and in control than before the war; the dual threats of imperialist bombs and state repression have ended the wave of mass protests of early 2026 and foreclosed opportunities to demand greater democratic rights, as the logic of the war emergency and the need to fight the invasion takes center stage in Iran. The monarchist, pro-imperialist factions that had risen to prominence in the diaspora during the February protests have been thoroughly discredited in light of the brazen destruction and ultimate ineffectuality of the U.S.-led invasion.
A shifting economic balance
A pivotal factor of the war, which drove Trump to negotiate for a ceasefire, was Iran’s ability to restrict the flow of trade through the Strait of Hormuz, causing the sharpest supply shock for petroleum on the global market in recent memory (in addition to jeopardizing other key industrial reagents for fertilizer that have historically traveled through the strait). The impact of this shock was mitigated by the U.S. government’s decision to aggressively draw down its strategic fuel reserve, releasing a quarter of its supplies over four months in order to tamp down the price of oil and prevent runaway inflation. With Northern Hemisphere annual peak energy demands still around the corner as an abnormally, climate-change-and-Super-El-Niño-fueled summer sets in, the U.S. fuel reserve was expected to only be able to underwrite the global demand for oil for a few more months before the reality of a crash in production and logistics hit home.
No matter which way the war turns, oil markets are expected to face significant turbulence in the coming weeks. Even if strait traffic were to magically jump back to pre-war levels today, there would still be a storm of shaky production restarts, flagging demand from Asian economies that already slowed down from the shock (or in the case of China, pivoted to other energy sources), traffic bottlenecks in the strait, and volatile pricing signals that leave the private sector struggling to identify what the new market “normal” will be.
Oman has signaled that it would be willing to adopt a Malacca-style toll for the Strait of Hormuz together with Iran, wherein passage would technically be free, but new fees would be imposed in exchange for vital services of strait navigation, docking, and insurance coverage. Conversely, Indonesia has indicated that it may consider revising its control over Malacca to impose its own new tolls, potentially rewriting the rules of maritime trade in the process. While Iran’s infrastructure suffered severe damage from the war, this newfound control over the Strait of Hormuz represents a huge asset.
While a dozen or so ships were able to cross through Omani waters in early July, Iran since then has reasserted its willingness to attack ships crossing outside of its preferred sea lanes, and the U.S. has resumed strikes on the Iranian coastline and reimposed sanctions on Iran. At the same time, Trump said that the ceasefire deal with Iran was “over” and negotiating with Iran was “a waste of time.” Later, he conceded that talks could continue despite his personal frustration and distaste for the Iranians. It remains to be seen whether the situation will stabilize or whether open war will resume.
Even if the U.S. is ultimately able to secure a lasting treaty that returns traffic to normal, it has already expended roughly 10 years of oil reserves in order to do so, exposing it to greater volatility in the future and setting a hard limit on the amount of time that it can spend playing chicken with the world economy.
Checking Trump’s scorecard
While Trump has repeatedly shifted the goalposts in order to announce every successive action in the course of the war as a “victory” that has completely decimated Iran’s fighting forces, recent history provides very clear benchmarks for imperialist success: there is the status quo from immediately prior to the war, when U.S. and European economic sanctions against Iran were in full force, and the Strait of Hormuz was shipping petroleum and economically pivotal resources at a rate of around 150 ships per day.
There is also a further benchmark in the form of the Obama administration’s 2015 deal (canceled by Trump during his first administration), which saw the lessening of sanctions in exchange for a commitment to back off of the road to nuclear warhead production and accept International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) oversight of its nuclear facilities.
In comparison to either standard, the terms of the late-June “ceasefire” offered a much more favorable position for Iran; it had received commitments toward the removal of sanctions and the unfreezing of foreign assets, but as yet it has not made any meaningful concessions regarding its nuclear program. Nor has it given up its newfound control over the Strait of Hormuz itself. The baseline of negotiations was that Iran would be set to receive many of the same concessions that it negotiated for in 2015, but without having to offer anything other than vague promises about re-opening the strait.
Shifting battlegrounds and alliances
While overall the war has been a defeat for U.S. imperialism and a victory for Iran, it has also done much to reconfigure the web of alliances across the Middle East. The Iranian retaliation against Gulf states over their U.S.-ties has had mixed results diplomatically, irrespective of its direct military impact on the U.S. itself.
The UAE and Kuwait, already two of U.S. imperialism’s closest allies and collaborators in the region, as well as Bahrain, appear to have been pushed to further solidify their reliance on the U.S. in order to punish Iran. Qatar, historically the Gulf state with the closest ties to Iran, distanced itself in the aftermath of the attacks, and Iran’s most recent attacks on boats have targeted vessels tied to Qatar’s natural gas industry.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has attempted to establish closer ties to Pakistan and Turkiye in a rebuke to both the U.S. and Iran. Oman has been given greater leverage as Iran tries to court it to cooperate with and legitimize its plans to assert control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iraq has seen its internal contradictions sharpen as U.S.-aligned and Iran-aligned political factions struggle to assert control, and as Israel establishes forward military bases in Iraqi territory.
Another key point of contention throughout the war has been the role of Lebanon. Tied to its attacks on Iran, Israel has also invaded and occupied Lebanon once more, all while conducting brutal bombing campaigns across the country. Multiple attempts at ceasefires between Iran and the U.S. have been jeopardized by Israel’s refusal to withdraw from Lebanon, which has violated the terms of a ceasefire proposed by Iran and that the U.S. had ostensibly agreed to.
While the Iranian government has signaled that it considers any act by Israel to be an extension of the U.S. in the context of the war (an eminently reasonable position, given the pivotal role of U.S. military logistical support and economic support to Israel that are a precondition of Israel’s ability to operate its air force), they appear to be stopping short of insisting on a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, at least for the time being, with no real resumption of hostilities over the Gulf in response to Israel’s continued attacks on Lebanon. Together with continued violence by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank (and accompanied by recent reports that Hamas is stepping aside and allowing a technocratic, U.S.-backed board to govern in Gaza), it demonstrates both the power of what Iran is capable of doing in solidarity with Palestine and other oppressed nations, and the limitations of its political will to do so.
Insofar as Iran stands up to Israel’s crimes against Palestine, Lebanon, and other nations, it deserves praise. But the Iranian state has also demonstrated that it is not going to use its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz to actually end the genocide in Palestine, and that it may well leave Hezbollah and Lebanon on their own to face Israel without much more than diplomatic complaints to protest it.
Strategies for Palestinian (and broader Arab) liberation cannot rely decisively on Iranian state intervention to swoop in and save the day. Even in Iran itself, the Iranian regime’s strategy appears to be to parlay its strategic military leverage into being re-admitted into the global capitalist system, with patronage and investment from China, the U.S., the EU and Russia alike.
While winning the war against the U.S. is a necessary first step for fending off imperialist intervention, truly defeating imperialism will require militant, working-class organization that can assert its own political and economic program after the war, and reject a return to capitalism as usual. The same is true for Palestine and the Middle East more broadly; liberation means going beyond the imperialist framework of a “two-state solution” with an independent Palestinian rump state alongside the endlessly belligerent Israel. Fighting for a secular, democratic, and unified Palestine will require a mass struggle by the working class and the oppressed for genuinely revolutionary change, and cannot be accomplished by bourgeois leaderships that are angling primarily to secure their own piece of the pie.
The war is not over yet. Nevertheless, Iran has given U.S. imperialism an important rebuke: it cannot simply waltz in and dictate terms to the rest of the world, nor can it depose governments on a whim, as the U.S. did in Venezuela and appears poised to do in Cuba. The limits of further imperialist attacks on Iran will be determined by its capacity to defend itself against invasion, and by working people in the U.S. and around the world organizing to stop the U.S. war machine.
The post As ‘ceasefire’ falters, Iran has scored a victory against Trump and Netanyahu first appeared on Workers’ Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores.
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