Lead article: Trump’s wars at home and abroad threaten humanity

Part 2. The war on Iran and beyond: Trump drives for a new fascist world order

by Franklin Dmitryev

Part 1 of this article took up President Donald Trump’s war at home, brought to new heights by federal agents’ murders of peaceful protesters in Minneapolis. Now we turn to the other face of his war for absolute power: the international stage, as the U.S. launches a new and far bloodier war with Iran, which has already spread to Lebanon, Cyprus, and eight Arab countries counterattacked by Iran or its allies.

Just at the moment when the revolt resumed there, on Feb. 28 U.S. president Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weakened it by launching what they described as a war of “overwhelming strength and devastating force” on the country aimed at bringing down the Islamic Republican regime—or co-opting it.

On the very first day of war, a bomb squarely hit a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing 165, most of them girls between seven and 12 years old, with 95 other people wounded. Dozens of pupils were trapped under the massive, smoking pile of rubble. Rescuers frantically tried to dig them out with bare hands while distraught parents worried or screamed nearby. At least two students were killed at a school near Tehran by another Israeli attack. Later that day, the main sports hall in the city of Lamerd was hit by a missile, as were a hall next to it and two nearby residential areas, killing at least 18 civilians at a time when dozens of teenage girls were training in the building.

In the first two days, two public squares in civilian areas and nine hospitals were also reportedly attacked, killing over 20 people.

HORROR AT WAR, JOY AT THE DEATH OF A MONSTER

Yet, amid the terror, uncertainty, and pain from the U.S.-Israeli bombings, many Iranians took time to pour out into the streets of cities across Iran to celebrate with dancing, fireworks, and a chorus of car horns when bombs killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In January, like many times before, crowds of protesters had been chanting, “Death to the Dictator,” referring to him. Since he ordered the slaughter of tens of thousands of those protesters, as well as presiding over a whole complex of repression, he was one of the country’s most hated figures.

“No one outside can understand what Iranians who were victims of this murderer feel right now. I was hoping—for the sake of Nika, Sarina and Mahsa—that the news was true,” one young woman told The Guardian, referring to Jina Mahsa Amini, whose killing set off the Women Life Freedom revolt in 2022, and Sarina Esmailzadeh and Nika Shakarami, two sixteen-year-olds killed during the revolt.

Contrary to what some in the Western Left believe, this does not mean that more than a fraction of them are ready to bend the knee to Trump or accept the leadership of Reza Pahlavi, a reactionary who has learned to parrot Trump and curry his favor. Pahlavi is the son of the U.S.-supported Shah (king) who was overthrown by the 1979 revolution. The illusions that some have about the benevolence of U.S. intervention will no doubt evaporate as quickly as did similar ones in Iraq after the U.S. defeated the hated dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.

What neither the U.S. nor Israeli nor Iranian regimes want is to allow the Iranian masses to shape their own future through a new revolution. As Khamenei’s forces slaughtered tens of thousands of protesters to crush the huge revolt, Trump made noises about coming to their rescue—which many protesters did not want. But Trump did nothing, much as President George H.W. Bush had appealed to Iraqis to rise up after the 1991 Gulf War, then sat by as Hussein slaughtered the Shia uprising in the south and the Kurdish uprising in the north.¹ This was in keeping with how President Eisenhower encouraged Hungarians to revolt in 1956 with hints that the U.S. would intervene, only to stand by as USSR tanks put down the Hungarian Revolution; and Stalin’s troops sat outside the gates of the city as the Nazis drowned the 1944 Warsaw Uprising in blood. Nevertheless, Iran’s revolt resumed when college campuses reopened—until the bombing began.

The devastating attack on Iran proves that the well-being of its population is not what the Trump administration cares about. At the same time, the violent crackdown on the resistance to ICE shows that this president would like to emulate the Iranian leaders’ massacre of protesters in the U.S. The Marxist-Humanist principle that there are two worlds in every country remains true: the rulers of the U.S. and Iran are no friends to the oppressed and exploited majorities of either country. On the other hand, people-to-people solidarity is a potential force for a different direction, as seen in last year’s joint call by Israelis and Iranians for a ceasefire. They concluded:

“We refuse to accept the inevitability of violent conflict as the only way forward between our nations, Israel and Iran, or their positioning as eternal arch-enemies. The endless and senseless wars of this region won’t benefit our people, all of whom have the right to live in peace and security.”

Rhetoric about saving protesters aside, the Trump regime is unclear about why it attacked Iran, spouting a welter of rationales. Is it to obliterate Iran’s nuclear weapons program, which Trump claimed already to have obliterated with its bombings last June? Is it to eliminate the country’s ballistic missiles? Is it to end Iran’s alliance with its purported “axis of resistance,” including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis? Or is it what commanders euphorically told their troops: “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”?

Privately, Trump is reported to have stated “his desire to go down in history as the president who ‘changed the Iranian regime.’” It is clear that the administration has not thought deeply about what is to happen after the shooting stops, nor do they seem capable of such thought. They are intoxicated with fantasies that they can easily install a compliant regime, whether led by would-be king Reza Pahlavi, or by regime remnants acting as Trump’s agent, like Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela.

Neither would be welcomed by Iranians in revolt. As Raha, an Iranian revolutionary in exile, told News & Letters:

IRAN REGIME’S MAIN ENEMY: THE REVOLUTIONARY PEOPLE OF IRAN

“If we accept the premise that the most important priority of the ruling system in Iran is the preservation of the regime’s survival, and if we acknowledge that the survival of any oppressive system is fundamentally threatened by a broad social movement, then it can be concluded that the regime’s main enemy is in fact internal—namely, first and foremost, the people of Iran themselves.

“As the massacres of January clearly demonstrated, the survival of the system, at least for a time, is prolonged by the brutal suppression of the freedom-seeking movement. Accordingly, it can be predicted that after the end of the current destructive war, the remnants of this ill-fated regime, in order to prevent its overthrow, will resort not to political opening but to even more intense repression and suffocation. The nature of this system will not be changed by external air strikes.

“It is possible that after the end of the current war, the regime’s regional assertiveness will be severely curtailed and surrounding states—especially the sub-imperialist state of Israel—may feel more secure. However, the destruction of missiles and the dismantling of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program will not eliminate the weapons it holds for internal repression.

“On the contrary, the ruling regime may now, by feigning victimhood and invoking the martyrdom of the bloodthirsty leader of the world’s Shiites, manage to rally a portion of society for a while and, alongside intensified repression, even push the social movement backward. In the end, however, the responsibility for overthrowing the system and bringing the regime’s leaders—whether alive or dead—to account for their crimes rests with our people. Forward toward such a day!”

PUSILLANIMOUS DEMOCRATIC PARTY LEADERS

In February, a U.S. poll found only 21% in favor of the war on Iran, while another found only 27%. Many protests registered opposition to the war, both before and after it started.

Even so, once war started, the “respectable” opposition, from politicians to media, could hardly resist its pull. The New York Times editorialized, in effect: Sure, the ayatollahs needed to be punished, and, gosh, we “hope that the decapitation of this regime could lead to the end of Iran’s theocracy,” but couldn’t you have planned it better, and did you have to leave Congress and the public out of the decision? Therefore, they mildly ask Congress to “demand briefings and force a debate on war powers” and ask the president to “bring international partners into the fold.” If only a more levelheaded politician were in charge of this terrible war!

The centrists who dominate the Democratic Party apparatus, however, showed no great concern for the well-being of Iranians. As Drop Site News reports, “a substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats.” Drop Site also reports that anti-Trump Republicans have made “a similarly cynical calculation.” The same Democratic leaders focused their criticism of the attack on Venezuela, if they dared to utter one at all, on the fact that the president failed to consult Congress first.

Some Democrats in Congress even opposed a war powers resolution to rein in Trump. Several accepted Trump’s lies about the supposed imminence of Iranian nuclear weapons and missiles that could hit North America—despite full awareness of the same lies from the Bush administration about Iraq. Senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania tweeted, “President Trump has been willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region.”

While they ritualistically denounced Iran’s regime, not one dared to mention that the Trump regime has committed similar crimes: beat, jailed and killed protesters, check; represses political dissidents and speech, check; oppresses women and LGBTQ people, check; “its leaders have impoverished their own citizens while corruptly enriching themselves,” check; “bankrolled terrorism that has killed civilians in the Middle East,” check (remember Gaza?).

WAR FALLOUT SPREADS

The global ramifications of this spiraling war are only beginning to appear. Israel closed all crossings into Gaza, sparking a new food crisis where famine raged just months ago. Israel also used a symbolic attack by Iran ally Hezbollah in Lebanon as an opportunity to launch a long-planned campaign to smash the party and occupy more territory there, killing at least 31 people and displacing many more.

The disruption of oil and methane gas production and shipping risks setting off an economic shock through a cascade of inflation, interest rate hikes, strangling of investment and consumer spending. Transportation and agriculture (especially through fertilizer production) are still way too dependent on oil and gas, despite the well-known need to end their use in the face of the ever-spiraling climate crisis. The windfall that U.S. oil and military companies stand to make won’t help working people and other consumers. The diversion of even more capital to military contractors, from weapons makers to big tech, also threatens to undermine the economy.

War spreading to even more countries, and escalating, is an ever-present threat. Already, this is another leap into the new era of war set off by Russia’s Chechen wars and Bush’s Iraq and Afghanistan wars—occasioned by Al Qaeda’s 9/11 atrocities—then dragged further down by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, driven by genocidal ideology, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Those bloodbaths brought to a new, dangerous level the use of technologies such as autonomous drones and AI, which the Iran war is pushing further. All of this may inflame recruiting by terrorist organizations, and it signals the continuing disintegration of international law and human rights.

‘SUCCESS’ IN VENEZUELA STOKES THIRST FOR CONQUEST

Trump was emboldened by the Jan. 3 operation in which U.S. military forces violated Venezuela to bomb some installations, residential buildings—and, reportedly, “warehouses full of medicine and food”—and to kidnap the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, with his spouse Cilia Flores. Eighty to 100 people were killed, mostly Venezuelans plus 32 Cuban guards.

This followed four months of murderous attacks on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, under the pretense that the fishermen and/or smugglers are waging war against the U.S., although they were never going to get close to its shores. In truth it was only killings of noncombatants, as one-sided as a typical Trump operation—which continues, with a death toll of at least 148 as of Feb. 20. He undertook the entire war without consulting Congress, which by the Constitution is the entity that has the authority to declare war, and in complete disregard of international law.

THE HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF VENEZUELA

Any pretense of “liberating” the Venezuelan people fell apart as soon as Trump started talking about the coup. “Oil, oil, oil!” he brayed. The repressive state apparatus that Maduro had personified remains in place, even intensified with masked, armed patrols, checkpoints, phone searches, and repression of journalists. The only change is for that state to be taking orders from the U.S. now. Same regime, new face: former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez got Trump’s blessing to be the new president “partly on the basis of her relationship with Wall Street and oil companies.”

“We’re going to be running it [that is, the country],” announced Trump. The regime’s smooth transition to a U.S. subsidiary reveals the dialectical interplay between imperialism and national capitalism calling itself socialism. It also reflects fear of the deep discontent against the Maduro regime, which was as much a cause as an effect of its harsh repression.

The 2014 crash in oil prices, Maduro’s neoliberal restructuring and corruption, and the U.S.’s economic sanctions brought about great suffering, such that working-class families could barely afford enough food to eat. That also caused unrest and the biggest emigration in Latin American history, nearly seven million people by 2022. The 770,000 who ended up in the U.S., many of them Black, have been viciously targeted for deportation by the administration.

NO ROOM FOR DEMOCRACY OR CHANGE FROM BELOW

Venezuela’s political opposition, led by far-right María Corina Machado, was shocked to be immediately discarded in favor of a Maduro insider. Machado—an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, Javier Milei, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza—had fruitlessly turned herself into yet another barnacle hanging onto Donald Trump. Machado argued that only outside military intervention could dislodge the authoritarian regime, as against the other main faction of the bourgeois opposition, which urged reform from within the electoral system. What neither faction, nor Trump, nor Maduro, nor his successor regime would countenance is a revolutionary change by the Venezuelan masses themselves.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Machado the Nobel Peace Prize, aiming to appease Trump without openly succumbing to his lobbying for the prize. What better qualification could there be for a peace prize than cheerleading his killings in the Caribbean and calling for military action by the U.S. against Venezuela? Later, she fawningly handed the prize to Trump, but he had already privately ranted that he would not allow her to become president because she accepted the prize. The ruling class is well aware that such petty narcissism is driving decisions of world politics, and they meekly accept and manipulate it.

Past rhetoric notwithstanding, democracy and human rights have nothing to do with the reasons for the attack on Venezuela. The excuse of drug trafficking also has nothing to do with it, as is obvious from Trump’s pardon of former Honduran president and actual drug kingpin Juan Orlando Hernández. Still, it doesn’t just boil down to oil, however much Trump repeats that it does.

Just after the invasion, he himself bragged “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” This aim is announced in his 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS—which he did not write):

“We will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere…we want a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains; and we want to ensure our continued access to key strategic locations.”

“Non-hemispheric competitors” above all means China. The attack on Venezuela is an assertion of power globally, not just in South America. It is one offensive in a multipolar geopolitical struggle, which, in its overall contours, raises the specter of world war.

OBJECTIVE FORCES BENEATH THE BRANDING

Trump’s pattern of lurching forward and back, from tariff changes to the need to “own” Greenland, amounts (in Hegel’s words) to a “giddy whirl of self-perpetuating disorder,” which confuses observers. He is not only subject to his own capricious whims and transactional ventures, but sways with the shifting winds coming from the various personages and power centers exerting influence on him from inside and outside his administration, not to mention his propensity to be swayed by the last person he talked to, or the last person to hand him a million (or billion) dollars. Also his own explanations of his motivations are often lies and they change from day to day, which makes it hard to know what is the real motivation and thereby to penetrate through the surface to the objective forces that he is falling in line with. What Raya Dunayevskaya wrote about Stalin describes Trump too: “the receptacle and the executor of class impulses” who “didn’t know what strong objective forces were pulling for him….There wasn’t a zigzag, however, that didn’t rhyme with the strong pull of an objective force.”²

Trump and his lackeys variously give as the reason for the action in Venezuela “narcoterrorism,” oil, and dominance of the hemisphere, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s fulminations about liberating Venezuela, Cuba, etc. They did not mention ideology as a reason, but it is. A number of commentators suggest it is meant as a distraction from the damning Epstein files, inflation, the crisis of healthcare access, and so on, but while that could affect the timing, it is not a compelling argument about what motivates the military action—aside from its connection to the ongoing drive to militarize the whole of U.S. society, in the face of the massive resistance on the ground, especially in Minnesota, to the secret police presenting themselves as “immigration law enforcement” (see part 1).

As always with Trump, there is a corrupt, money-grubbing aspect: in November, billionaire Paul Singer, who gave $5 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign, bought Citgo at a steep discount. Trump plans to send much Venezuelan oil to Citgo’s Gulf Coast refineries, whose emissions will increase their environmentally racist pollution of nearby Black communities. Chevron is also preparing to profit handsomely from Trump’s control of Venezuela’s oil. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil,” the president declared. Profits will be enhanced by the war on Iran, with oil prices shooting up.

Touting the benefits to the U.S. economy, as if his cronies’ profits would somehow trickle down, continued into Trump’s State of the Union address. He wove it into his delusions about how great the economy is, and how “hot” life is in the U.S. And yet people still believe the evidence of their eyes and ears!

THE INCOHERENT DONROE DOCTRINE

As an attempt to reorganize the world order, this jumble of impulses is the pretentiously named “Donroe Doctrine”—a doctrine of peace through war on Venezuela, war on Iran, war on Yemen, bombing Syria, bombing Nigeria, threats to seize Greenland by force, trade war against the world. War is peace! Other key elements of the NSS include:

• Dismantling the European Union and supporting pro-Trump fascist parties to take over European countries
  
• Inveighing against “the era of mass migration” and, in coded language, championing narrow nationalism and white supremacy globally
  
• Building up “the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent”
  
• Attacking Europe over restrictions on “free speech,” that is, hate speech, harassment, and fascist organizing, while abandoning the “hectoring” of autocratic countries like Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia over democracy and human rights
  
• Attacking “disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies”
  
• Undermining multilateral international institutions such as the UN and its complex of organizations

Rubio elaborated on this in his speech at the Munich Security Conference, an ode to white supremacy and “great Western empires” that “transformed empty plains,” omitting the dispossession, genocide and slavery involved and lamenting “anticolonial uprisings.”

Trump went so far as to plunge a knife into the back of the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the world’s most powerful military alliance, when he threatened to invade Greenland and take it over from NATO ally Denmark. The Prime Ministers of Denmark and Spain called any such invasion the end of NATO, leading commentators to announce that NATO “is coming to an end.”

BORED OF PEACE

While withdrawing the U.S. from 66 international organizations, from the global climate framework to the World Health Organization, Trump set up a “Board of Peace” that he delusionally conceives as a replacement for the UN, calling it “the most consequential International Body in History” which will bring about “WORLD PEACE!” In a bait-and-switch move typical for the inveterate con artist, he got the UN Security Council to approve the Board as part of a “peace plan” for Gaza, and then he foisted on the world this dictator’s caricature. Its scope is the whole world and its charter does not even mention Gaza. It is headed by Trump, even after he leaves the White House. He has veto power over anything, can enact his own “resolutions or other directives,” and can name his successor.

He promptly invited Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu to take time out from their peacemaking genocidal campaigns in Ukraine and Palestine to serve on his Board of Peace. With characteristic modesty, he did not mention the credentials the two have earned as indicted war criminals.

The board has drafted a resolution for ruling Gaza, which, says Martin Griffiths, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, gives Israel “a place at the top table” while leaving Palestinians “at the very bottom of this pyramid of power.” At the same time, the board plans to build a 5,000-person military base on over 350 acres of Gaza’s land, ringed with barbed wire. Having cut back on all kinds of humanitarian aid, the administration will lavish $10 billion on the board, despite lacking legal authority to do so—proving that the entire U.S. Treasury is his piggy bank until he’s stopped. The flip side is withholding payments to disaster victims, soybean farmers, health clinics, and those who had paid $175 billion in illegal tariffs. Meanwhile, the Trump administration made a new leap in legitimizing Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank, and its ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, endorsed the ambitions of Israel’s far right to take over most of the Middle East, as a “biblical right.”

Gaza lies in ruins. Life there is desperate. During the “ceasefire,” more Gazans are killed by Israeli weapons daily. Reconstruction would be a huge project. Instead, Trump and Netanyahu dream of expelling all the Palestinians and building a combination luxury resort, colonial settlement, and military bunker.

‘POWER OVER’ IS THE ONLY PRINCIPLE

What principles underlie the attempt to restructure the world? Trump and his top lieutenant Stephen Miller made clear that there is no principle but the power to dominate. The president boasted that the only limit to his global power is “My own morality. My own mind,” as if anyone believes he has any morality. Miller snarled separately: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Applying those principles to the war on Iran, War Secretary Pete Hegseth thundered: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation building quagmire, no democracy building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives. As the president warned, an effort of this scope will include casualties. War is hell, and always will be.”

That hellish worldview goes hand in hand with Trump’s delusion that, in his hands, U.S. military and economic power can subjugate the whole world. At the same time, his incoherent mind is suffused with the fear that his power and prestige will be humbled by war, economic competition, or revolt. He carries on a war for absolute domination and he is desperate not to lose. A big part of that war is a war on our minds, always trying to make us think that he has already won when the outcome is very much in dispute. His self-divided, self-estranged mindset conforms perfectly to the long, deep crisis in which capitalism is mired.

THE DIALECTIC OF CONTINUITY IN DISCONTINUITY

The post-World War II world order, including its post-Cold War metamorphosis, always portrayed itself as a “rules-based order,” and yet always allowed plenty of loopholes, from the Korean War passed off as a “police action” to Israel’s six-decade colonization of Palestine defying a body of UN resolutions. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney acknowledged the loopholes in his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 20:

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”

He was also correct in calling the current situation “a rupture, not a transition.” We are in a qualitatively new situation—and it has its roots in the deep crises of capitalism. The discontinuity, or rupture, is built on a ground of continuity with past actions of imperialism—not alone by the U.S., though it reigned as the sole superpower since the collapse of the USSR—as well as police repression and killings at home. But Trump’s frontal assault on international institutions and his drive to impose fascism globally, in concert with Putin and several other far-right national leaders, is still a rupture.

It is vital to be clear that Trump is not just an aberration but is rather the expression of the essence of the current phase of capitalism in crisis. Just defeating Trump in the midterm elections, or even getting rid of him altogether, would be a relief but it would not solve the problem that threatens the very future of humanity. As urgent as it is to oppose Trump, it is just as urgent and concrete to link that to the necessity to abolish capitalism, in both its private and state forms, and to found a new society on truly human foundations.

Capitalism in crisis always drifts toward war. The disintegration of the world order started before Trump took office, with roots in the economic crises of 1974-1982, which ushered in neoliberal restructuring. The even deeper economic crisis of 2008 followed, and then the crash induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Politics and economy are not in separate worlds: the end of the Cold War resulted not in a utopian “end of history” but in the Gulf War and the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosova, alongside the heyday of predatory capitalist globalization.

STOP THE SLIDE TO A NEW WORLD WAR

The imperial hubris of the 2003 Bush-Cheney war on Iraq and ambitions to mold the Middle East to their liking ended up destabilizing the Middle East and weakening U.S. power, while increasing Iran’s regional power. Then the truly revolutionary impulses of the 2011 Arab Spring were crushed by counterrevolutions with the tacit acquiescence of the imperial powers, who are loath to see revolutions succeed. Accordingly, the European Union became much more concerned with the political ramifications of the refugee flow from Syria and other countries than they were with the well-being of the people who fled and the people who were still fighting for their freedom. European anti-immigration politics, with a hefty boost from Putin’s machinations, hastened the rise of the new wave of fascism and militarism across the world.

It is vital to recognize that both the genocidal war against Ukraine by Putin’s Russia and Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank are part and parcel of this new wave of fascism and militarism that is relentlessly tumbling toward a new world war. The same is true of the wars going on in Sudan and Congo, where multiple regional and global powers are fueling the conflict while extracting resources.

The U.S. far right’s aim to lift politically like-minded parties to power in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa does not portend peaceful international cooperation. Quite the contrary. The trade wars set off by Trump’s tariff onslaught can easily become the prelude to shooting wars, as history shows. This macho man’s abject, submissive adulation of Putin did not stop him from ordering the seizure of a Russian-flagged ship guarded by a Russian submarine, justified by the Venezuelan oil it carried.

Containing China’s rise to superpower status is one of the central concerns of the “Donroe doctrine.” The war on Venezuela is its corollary. At this very time, the U.S. and Russia have allowed all arms control agreements to expire, and a new nuclear arms race is in the offing, this time joined by China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, France, and the UK, with several other countries considering acquiring nuclear weapons, including Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Germany, Poland, and even Japan, the country that has historically agitated most for nuclear disarmament after being the only one whose cities were blasted with atomic bombs!

Just as dangerous is the rush toward climate catastrophe. The new wave of fascism, with Trump and Putin at the fore, is not only negating the meager measures put in place by figures like President Joe Biden and the European Parliament, they are actively pushing climate denial and obstruction, doubling down on fossil fuels and making climate disinformation into official ideology replacing science.

The fact remains that world leaders, of whatever party, broke the promises they made over the last 34 years to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. The emissions continue apace, global heating is accelerating, and its disastrous effects are getting worse year by year. The need identified by scientists remains urgent: a radical, wide-ranging social transformation that includes, but is not limited to, slashing the extraction and use of fossil fuels and intensive industrial agribusiness. In a vicious cycle, the climate crisis displaces more and more people, amplifying the flow of refugees and immigrants on whose presence fascist agitators feed.

CONFUSION ON THE LEFT

There is a clear need for a deep and thoroughgoing opposition movement to our present reality. Sadly, influential parts of the Western Left are so seriously disoriented that they cannot muster solidarity with the actual human beings in Iran. That makes it impossible to project a coherent vision of a liberated future. As Terry Moon pointed out,

“Everyone has ideas about what the Iranian masses can do, but missing is actually listening to what the people are saying for themselves….Many who consider the U.S. as enemy number one cannot imagine there can be two or more enemies that must be fought simultaneously. The most vulgar is Workers World (WWP), which shouts: ‘Iran is not erupting. It’s being attacked.’ ³They echo the regime’s excuses for its slaughter of thousands, proclaiming: ‘There are only two sides. You either stand with Iran as it defends its sovereignty, or you stand with U.S. imperialism and Zionism.’”

Vijay Prashad, writing for Peoples Dispatch and reposted on Monthly Review’s online website, demonized the revolt as “a violent, top-down assault…resulting in the deaths of roughly 100 law enforcement officers.”⁴ Just as it suits bourgeois commentators to equate the theocratic counterrevolution with the 1978-79 revolution that it hijacked and crushed, Prashad writes that “other currents” were “largely sidelined and even—in some cases—repressed” (repressed by whom, he does not say). As if the vast, revolutionary self-organization and self-activity of masses in motion were nothing but different political currents! He continues to equate counterrevolution with revolution by speaking of “the republic’s transformative social agenda.” The rewriting of the history of 1979 and of today is one combined narrative that erases the subjectivity of the masses in revolt. What direction does that give to the movement?

Some other parts of the Left (such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation, PSL; Jill Stein; and Medea Benjamin) simply erase today’s revolt in Iran by not mentioning it, while publishing post after post protesting war on Iran. Or only allowing the masses to have agency when they are opposing the U.S., not their oppressors at home. Or mentioning that protesters were “hurt or killed” but not by whom. Or downplaying the number killed.

Iranian exile and author of The Fire Next Time blog Siyavash Shahabi criticizes what he calls Orientalism that excuses Iran’s bloody repression: “As if people must first pass a test of ‘correct geopolitical positioning’ before they earn the right to live….Orientalism…becomes most dangerous precisely when it makes this system invisible: when it scrubs blood out of the story and strips people of their humanity.” Joseph Grosso found similar campism among big Left names from Ali Abunimah to Jason Hickel to Jacobin.

Unsurprisingly, the same tendencies spread confusion by defending Maduro as a socialist and anti-imperialist and laughably claim to prove that he was not a dictator.

‘ANTI-WAR’ FAR RIGHT TRIES TO INFECT THE LEFT

We should not overlook how the antisemitic far Right has made inroads into the Left. Marco Rubio, perhaps unintentionally, nourished the old antisemitic trope that Israel (standing in for the globalist Jewish conspiracy) controls the U.S. government when he claimed that the U.S. had to attack Iran first because Israel was going to attack regardless and the Iran counterattack would hit U.S. forces. That may or may not be true; consider the source.

In any case, the floodgates opened. MAGA stars like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Megyn Kelly fumed that this is “Israel’s war.” Tucker Carlson ranted: “American leaders, whose job it is to represent Americans, are more loyal to a foreign country than they are to their own.” Politicians who helped Israel fell under “a kind of spell, a kind of hypnosis, a kind of haze that people are in, where they’re doing things for reasons they don’t understand.”

Carlson routinely platforms antisemitic, Hitler-adoring, pro-Putin Nazis like Nick Fuentes. Republicans have spent the last two years falsely accusing people who oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza of antisemitism, trying to get them deported, fired, expelled, or arrested, while ignoring the virulent antisemitism on the Right. But the “Zionists control U.S.” trope exists on the Left as well. Consider “Understanding the U.S. and Israel’s illegal war on Iran” by Craig Mokhiber, platformed by Monthly Review:

“What could possibly explain Trump’s decision to opt for such self-inflicted wounds to U.S. interests? The answer, in a word, is Israel….The rise to power of Donald Trump…provided the perfect opportunity for the Israeli regime to compel the U.S. to sacrifice its own interests on behalf of the regime.”

As is typical with antisemitism as “the socialism of fools,” the class and other divisions that define two worlds in every country—including the U.S., Israel, and Iran—are covered over with the nationalistic appeal to undifferentiated “U.S. interests.”

The intra-MAGA clash over the war gave an opening for “peace” fascists to further cozy up to anti-war leftists. In December, Medea Benjamin tweeted: “We visited Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene today to thank her for becoming such a strong anti war voice in congress and tell her we will miss her.” Greene is an apt replacement for recent Left illusions that Trump stood for peace.

The terrible truth is that a significant portion of the Left is attracted to Red-Brown politics (in other words, coalitions with the far right). Some, like PSL and WWP, platform and work with a cesspool of Holocaust deniers, Trump supporters, pro-Putin “Eurasianists,” and white supremacists. And yet, the majority of the U.S. Left tailends the same counterrevolutionary tendencies when these tendencies, like the PSL front group ANSWER, organize demonstrations opposing war on Iran and genocide in Palestine. This may be out of desperation, but it poisons thought and discourse, impeding any effort to help movements find a liberatory direction and to project a coherent, revolutionary vision of a truly free future.

No wonder the radical Left has such difficulty gaining traction in the U.S., even at a time when new revolt is stirring here and internationally and raising questions about the whole structure of the state and society!

TOWARD A NEW BEGINNING

Even some who make sure to distance themselves from the Maduro regime and its apologists somehow, in their coalition-building, lose their tongues when it comes to criticizing Putin’s war on Ukraine. They should have paid more attention to the internationalist Left within Ukraine, who were quick to release a statement of solidarity with the Venezuelan people:

“President Maduro declared his ‘full support’ for Russia from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, and state institutions and the media actively promoted the Kremlin’s interpretation of events. However, it would be a grave mistake to equate the Maduro regime with Venezuelan society….The struggle against Maduro’s dictatorship and the struggle against American imperialism are not mutually exclusive. They are two sides of the same conflict, in which peoples become pawns in geopolitical games. That is why today we must speak out in solidarity with the people of Venezuela, the same solidarity that Venezuelans showed towards Ukraine in its resistance to Russian aggression.”

The contradictions in the resistance to the Trump regime show that the question of what kind of opposition is needed must no longer be evaded. How can we build the kind of movement that doesn’t restrict itself to anti-Trump, or even to anti-capitalism, but allows free discussion of the fullness of second negativity, that is, not just what we are against but what we are for, in the short and the long term, and how to relate that concretely to our activities here and now, with free discussion and clarification of our vision of the future, and what it would take to build a very different, fundamentally human, type of society.

We can begin by taking note of the two worlds in every country, and the one-world quality of the oppression of Venezuelans, of immigrants and others in the U.S., of the people in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Iran, and the need to forge solidarity with all of those people in the world of the oppressed and exploited in each country. And to refuse to separate that from listening to the thoughts and actions of freedom that emerge from their revolts and resistance.

–March 4, 2026

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1 See coverage in the April, May, and June 1991 issues of News & Letters.

2 Marxism and Freedom, pp. 240, 242, 243.