“Trump is losing the war in Iran”. This headline from Foreign Policy magazine on 30 March sums up a growing consensus regarding the war as it enters its second month. Despite endless, confused and conflicting claims of “victory” by Trump and his henchmen, all data points towards this war being an unmitigated disaster.
Contrary to claims that Iran’s missile arsenal and capabilities had been decimated, the real view of US intelligence is that only about one third of Iran’s missiles have been taken out. Meanwhile, the US used up 40% of its own crucial ‘THAAD’ interceptor missiles in the first 16 days of the war alone! Over 850 Patriot missiles were fired – only 57 of which were produced by the US war industry in the whole of 2025. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of Iran and Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel and targets throughout the region is increasing.
Not only is Iran’s regime still intact, but it is clearly continuing to function at a high level. Tehran is demonstrating its ability to not just close the crucial Strait of Hormuz, but to control it effectively, allowing select ships to navigate the waterway and even beginning to charge tolls for passage (the latest being a deal with the Philippines).
It appears that only a complete humiliation of US imperialism will allow this war to end in the short term. Indeed, on 1 April, Trump addressed the world suggesting that he could well walk away without even reopening the strait, never mind securing Iran’s enriched uranium or toppling its regime. In short, this would mean ending the war with US imperialism in a significantly worse position than before it started.
An Historic Miscalculation
Part of the roots of Trump’s Iran debacle can be found in his successful decapitation of Venezuela’s government in January. After those events, we wrote:
“Trump’s hubris and limitations
Underestimating Trump’s determination to act on his threats would be a grave mistake. He is drunk on “success”, increasingly seduced by the prospect of using the US military to achieve quick and easy “wins”…. However, it would also be a mistake to overestimate Trump. In fact, his hubris will inevitably lead to miscalculations in every sphere, and military miscalculations are the most costly of all. Trump’s increasingly unbridled aggression, combined with US imperialism’s inability to deploy significant ground troops, is a recipe for new crises and quagmires.”
This is exactly what has come to pass, and sooner than many would have expected. Trump was indeed drunk on success and full of hubristic militarism. But instead of another, and even greater, demonstration of American prowess on the world stage, his war of aggression in the Middle East has turned into the opposite. The whole world – including Washington’s other China-aligned adversaries – is now talking not about US military might, but about its weakness and limitations.
Trump is now desperate to get out of the war. But even if he succeeds, the damage to US imperialism’s standing will not be undone. Nor will the damage to the world economy from the biggest ever energy supply shock, caused entirely by US aggression, an impact which is just beginning.
This crisis is also just desserts for the US ruling class, which helped Trump’s Bonapartist regime to power as a battering ram to serve their interests. He is now their Frankenstein monster. Likewise for the Western governments which spent 2025 bowing before him and are now watching NATO go up in smoke.
Trump has no good options to extricate himself from this mess. The Economist on 23 March listed four: “talk, leave, continue or escalate”. In practice, Trump now faces only two: escalate the quagmire, or cut and run.
Trump’s Options – 1. Escalate
The logic of war is that it will continue to escalate until it is brought to an end. And this is the case with this war, despite Trump’s assurances of major progress in “negotiations”.
Talk about peace is being combined with preparations for more war. The USS George HW Bush carrier, and 82nd Airborne Division of marines are en route to the Middle East, along with thousands of other troops. The 82nd division specialises in parachuting “into hostile or contested territory to secure key territory and airfields”.
An obvious possibility, which Trump has himself hinted at, is that these deployments are being made in preparation for the invasion of Kharg island (where most of Iran’s oil is processed) or other key island or coastal facilities in the Persian Gulf. There has also been some speculation about a ground operation to secure enriched uranium that is thought to have survived Trump’s alleged “obliteration” in bombings last June.
If Trump is determined to dig deeper into this quagmire in a desperate attempt to save face, such an escalation could happen. It would, however, be an extremely risky military operation.
The main reason that US casualties have so far been low – 13 dead and more than 300 injured – so far, is that 95% of the troops deployed are hundreds of miles from Iran. Naval assets in particular have never gone within 1,000km of Kharg Island. If Trump wants to mount a land invasion, thousands of troops would have to run the gauntlet through the strait of Hormuz and then sail hundreds of miles beyond it into the Persian gulf. This would inevitably see US troop casualties sky-rocket.
Moreover, such an operation would then unleash a dynamic of “mission creep”. If US troops take an island, suffering losses in the process, they would need to hold and defend it, which could create pressure to step up attacks on, or further invade the Iranian mainland.
This war’s unprecedented unpopularity in the US itself would also make such an escalation even more costly for Trump, with crucial midterm elections around the corner.
However, this trajectory remains possible. As well as from Netanyahu, Trump is reportedly under pressure from Gulf dictatorships, in particular Saudi Arabia, to step up the war.
There is also much potential for escalation on the other side of the conflict. Last week, Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen entered the war, firing multiple barrages at Israel. If their involvement escalates, and leads to the closure of Red Sea shipping routes, the economic impact of the war will hit the stratosphere. It is telling that, so far, neither Israel nor the US have carried out retaliatory attacks against the Houthis.
The energy and infrastructure war could also escalate much further in general. Trump’s threats to “blow up and completely obliterate all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet “touched.” are nothing short of genocidal. In his 1 April speech, Trump threatened another 2-3 weeks of bombing, to send Iran “back to the stone age”. If Iran responded by targeting desalination infrastructure in the Gulf, which produces most of the region’s fresh water, a severe humanitarian catastrophe would unfold.
Trump’s Options – 2. Cut and Run
For the Gulf regimes and the world economy as a whole, Trump’s seemingly preferred option is a nightmare. Trump could walk away and leave the regional and world economy in ruins, with Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz. It would also leave a weakened, but an even more dangerous and hardline regime in power in Tehran.
This option would represent, in effect, a giant “screw you” to the entire planet by a sulking strongman in Washington. Trump has lashed out repeatedly at Western and Asian “allies”, and recently appeared to relish the prospect of leaving those economies most dependent on energy from the Persian Gulf in the lurch.
This is linked to another process which has been dramatically accelerated by this war – the dynamiting of the so-called “Western alliance”. On 31 March Trump tweeted, “All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us.”
The following day, both Trump and Marco Rubio repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO, with Trump telling reporters, “I always knew they [NATO] were a paper tiger, and Putin knows that too, by the way”.
As Trump’s disastrous miscalculation has become clearer, Western governments have increasingly distanced themselves, around a growing chorus of “this is not our war”. With these and similar statements, Starmer, Macron, Meloni, Mertz and others are partly running scared from their own electorates , who oppose the war implacably. They are also desperately trying to shield their complicity in Trump and Netanyahu’s campaign of bloodshed in the region over the past two years.
This rift escalated last week, with Spain and France denying the use of their air space to the US air force, and Italy refusing to allow troops to land in a Sicily air base. The Spanish embassy in Israel has been permanently closed in protest at what President Pedro Sanchez called a “genocidal state”.
Despite the fact that Zelensky’s regime in Ukraine has bent over backwards to support Trump and Netanyahu’s aggression (over 300 Ukrainian military personnel have been flown in to assist with anti-drone operations), this is all terrible news for Kyiv. According to the Financial Times, Trump already threatened to stop weapons supplies (which Europe already pays for) to Ukraine. Putin, whose war coffers are being quickly replenished by the oil crisis, could scarcely be happier.
Regardless of whether or not Trump formally pulls out of NATO (which would mean its de facto dissolution), there is no going back from the significance of this accentuated rupture in the global order. While the Chinese regime remains mired in its own deep crises and thus is too weak to fully capitalize on the US’s new quagmire, it will nonetheless benefit from such an historic calamity for Washington’s global power and influence.
Under Trump, US imperialism is the main source of crisis and instability on the world stage. This reputation will be difficult to shake off. Its military vulnerabilities will also be learnt from, including in Beijing, where Iran’s ability to quite easily close the Strait of Hormuz bears many lessons for a hypothetical blockade of Taiwan.
World Economy – War Only Leaving “First Traces”
After one month of war, Commerzbank made it clear that it was still only “leaving its first traces” on the global economy. This is not only the worst energy supply shock in history, but also the most difficult to emerge from.
The next biggest oil crisis in history, in 1973, only saw the disruption of roughly half the number of barrels per day. It resulted from a decision by regimes in the Middle East to turn off the taps for part of the world’s oil supply. The problem facing the world economy today, is that even if Iran does decide to turn the taps back on, the taps have been bombed to pieces!
The world’s biggest LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) facilities in the world will take up to five years to be fully rebuilt according to Qatar energy. It is not without reason that the chief of the International Energy Agency warned last week that “markets and governments are underestimating the situation”.
Given the length of time it takes to transport energy from the Gulf, supplies have not yet even dried up for much of the world. When they do, however, emergency measures along the lines of those already implemented in Thailand, the Philippines, Australia and much of Asia will be on the order of the day. And of course, it is not just energy that is being impacted. Fertilisers and food are also being severely disrupted, on an even greater scale than following the outbreak of the Ukraine war in 2022. In addition, one third of commercial helium, a key factor in semiconductor production, is now blocked in the Gulf. And one the largest aluminium producers, in UAE, has stopped production.
This war, as with all major wars, also exerts new inflationary pressures. Predicted interest rate cuts have turned into their opposite in Europe and the UK. UK food inflation is predicted to hit 9% and gasoline prices have already doubled in the US. This can spur on new bouts of industrial struggle, just as the Ukraine war-fuelled inflation crisis of 2022/23 led to historic strike waves in Britain, Germany, Canada and the US.
For Revolutionary Struggle to Defeat Imperialism
Despite the growing focus on the economic impact of the war, its human cost must continue to be underlined more than anything else. The slaughter of thousands and mass displacement is now the reality for millions throughout the region, especially in Iran and Lebanon. 116,000 civilian buildings have been destroyed in Iran according to the latest update.
The new wave of Israeli state terror which Trump has unleashed has made more than one fifth of Lebanon’s population homeless, and opened up a new large-scale occupation of the country’s south by Netanyahu’s troops. The onslaught against the Palestinian people has also been stepped up. Murderous raids continue in the West Bank and the Israeli parliament has approved a bill which legalises racist executions.
In Iran, the war has quite predictably killed off, for now, the protest movement which Netanyahu and Trump disgustingly referred to when launching their attacks. Despite suffering heavy military blows, the Islamist dictatorship has benefited from the war, just as the Iran/Iraq war which began in 1980 allowed the new regime of the Ayatollahs to be fully consolidated as a dictatorship. Many pro-opposition Iranians who initially welcomed Trump’s offensive have turned against the war, undermining the growing popularity of the reactionary “crown prince” Reza Pahlavi in the process.
Socialists approach this and all wars from a class, internationalist, and consistently anti-imperialist standpoint. We stand for the defeat of imperialist aggression, but do not fall into the trap of supporting a reactionary regime with its own imperialist ambitions in the process. The task of kicking out imperialism, and the task of toppling the Iranian dictatorship, are interlinked, and belong to none other than the working class and oppressed masses of the region. In Western and Asian countries, the antiwar movement must be rebuilt and the labour movement must fight every attempt to make working people pay the price of Trump’s war crisis.
The task which is ultimately decisive is that of building revolutionary socialist parties throughout the region and internationally. If you agree, get involved in ISA today.
