US President Donald Trump continued his increasingly unhinged attacks on all the nations who have refused his pleas, and threats to bail-out American imperialism from the catastrophic unprovoked war against Iran that they, along with the Israeli regime, launched nearly three weeks ago.
Trump is raging over the refusal of the UK, Europe and the rest of the world to fall in line with the USA, and send warships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
This week Trump went back to threats, following the European countries ruling out sending warships to the straits, with the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, saying bluntly: ‘This is not our war, we have not started it’, adding: ‘What does Donald Trump expect from a handful of European frigates in the Strait of Hormuz that the mighty US navy cannot manage alone? This is the question I find myself asking.’
This is the question that everyone is asking.
Trump responded by threatening that NATO face ‘a very bad future’ if members don’t fall in line and provide military aid to reopen the vital waterway.
All Trump’s claims to have won and brought Iran and its leaders to their knees, through missile attacks, along with the targeted assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in the unprovoked and cowardly strike on February 28, have been exposed as completely delusional.
Far from being crushed, Iran has launched massive counter-attacks that have targeted US and Israeli bases and assets across the entire region, causing massive damage to both the US and the Zionists, while the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has wreaked havoc in a global capitalist economy, already in the grip of a historic crisis.
It has also caused a massive political crisis for Trump at home.
Already, Trump’s popularity ratings have plunged as the effect of his trade war tariffs have driven up the cost of living for US workers, and now they face petrol prices rocketing as a result of a war that the overwhelming majority oppose.
This has caused splits even within Trump’s most loyal MAGA base.
On Tuesday, National Counter-terrorism Centre Director, Joe Kent, a Trump appointee and loyal supporter of his right-wing attacks on American workers, resigned, citing opposition to the war and urging Trump to ‘reverse course’.
In his resignation letter, Kent said that Iran posed ‘no imminent threat’ to the US and claimed that the Trump administration ‘started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby’.
Kent rages against ‘high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media’ who ‘deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform’ and deceived Trump into launching war against Iran.
While it is undoubtedly true that Netanyahu and his Zionist regime were urging Trump to war, it is also true that Trump was driven, above all, by the requirements of the US ruling class, desperate to seize the oil and mineral resources of the Middle East, and secure its vital strategic position for exploitation by American capitalism.
All the calls from Kent along with Starmer and all the other world leaders for Trump to ‘back down’, are worthless.
Trump may be a demented president, crashing around the world regardless of the human suffering, and all the millions of lives lost as a result, but he represents a demented senile capitalist system, that in its final stage of imperialism has no way out of its crisis except wars in an attempt to re-impose the dictatorship of bankrupt capitalism over the working class and masses of the world.
Imperialism in its death agony is prepared to plunge the world into a World War in order for bankrupt capitalism to survive.
The powerful working class in the US, UK, Europe and across the world must act now by forcing their trade unions to call mass general strikes to bring down Trump, and their capitalist governments, replacing them with Workers Governments and socialism.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists in Britain today, and build sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International across the world to organise the victory of the World Socialist Revolution!
