Originally published in Counterpunch+, 22nd March 2026

Two days into the US attack on Iran, Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the extraordinary claim that the war was, in fact, a legal, pre-emptive defensive measure necessitated by Israel’s own pending strikes on the country. Scrambling for a legal figleaf for the US role in the aggression, he claimed that the Israeli strikes alone would have led to Iranian retaliation against US forces in the region, and therefore Iran, although it did not know it, posed an imminent threat to the US, which the US had the legal right to pre-emptively defend itself against. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” he told reporters on March 2nd. 

This tortuous abuse of logic is, of course, a legal nonsense. I cannot legally punch you in the face on the grounds that I knew my buddy was about to punch you in the face and you might have retaliated. But legal niceties are, of course, not something in which Trump and his team have any interest. 

Yet despite being an obvious pile of crap, Rubio’s statement has been leapt on by many, on the left as well as on the far right, to somehow ‘prove’ that the US ruling class were bounced into a war against their own interests by the Israelis. 

There is a section of MAGA that have always attempted to sell Trump as an isolationist, who will end US involvement in foreign wars. Trump himself has never promised that – rather, he has consistently, and massively, ramped up military spending, and not only to build ‘deterrence’, but in order to attack other countries; famously asking, what was the point of having a military if you are not going to use it? His criticism of the ‘Democrats’ wars’ was that they were supposedly launching them altruistically, to help the nations they were annihilating (for someone supposedly skeptical of the Democrats, he certainly swallowed a lot of their bullshit) – whereas he would never bomb people for their own good, but only to serve the US. Whether the parents of the resulting severed children would be able to discern the difference is, of course, moot. 

Even Trump’s supposed hostility to NATO, widely portrayed, even by many on the left, as evidence of Trump’s ‘isolationism’, is, in fact, a war plan. His threats to leave the alliance have been aimed, openly, at pressuring his allies to ramp up their own military spending. Why? To join the US in future wars of aggression, in particular the looming big one, with China. As Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute has noted, Trump’s regular humiliation of his European allies over their lack of military capability aims to coerce them into building up their militaries into a position where they are able “to hold down the Russian flank if the US ends up in a conflict with China.” 

Trump’s first term should have put to rest any ideas that Trump was somehow an ‘anti-war’ President. His very first foreign visit was to the monarchical dictatorship of Saudi Arabia, to sign a $110billion arms deal, a massive show of support and material commitment to the horrific and genocidal war on Yemen that the Saudis were then carrying out on behalf of western capitalism. 

During that first term alone he ramped up economic warfare on both Iran and China with punitive sanctions; approved the sale of lethal weaponry to Ukraine that Obama had banned; doubled the rate of US global gun-running; launched airstrikes against the Syrian government in the midst of its struggle against ISIS and Al Qaeda; killed tens of thousands in the terror bombing of Raqqa and Mosul; and dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in history – in its first ever use – on impoverished Afghanistan. 

By the end of the first year of his second term, he had already ordered 658 airstrikes, more than Biden managed in four years, on seven different countries. 

Nevertheless, claimed his apologists, he has never directly launched an open war of regime change in the Middle East. Despite all the illegality, aggression, killing and bloodshed, this was the one thing that made him – and, by extension, the broader MAGA movement – somehow different from the Democrats. Now they no longer even have that. 

Floundering to explain Trump’s war, many of the movement’s major spokespeople have seized on Israel as a convenient means of whitewashing US imperial interests. 

Candace Owens, leading face of the far right’s slick 21st century makeover and, until recently, a key Trump apologist, tweeted a message to US soldiers that “Trump has betrayed America and expects you to die for Israel…This was not Trump’s decision; it was Bibi Netanyahu’s decision… Israel is dictating our foreign policy and we would now like that to stop.” Tucker Carlson also claimed that Operation Epic Fury was being waged strictly on behalf of Israel, after he had visited Trump in the White House three times in the previous month, supposedly to lobby against the attack. Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Megyn Kelly have all characterised the attack on Iran as a “betrayal” of the US, being fought purely on behalf of Israel, at the expense of American interests. Most significantly, Joe Kent, Trump’s most senior counter-intelligence officer, quit on 17th March with a bombastic resignation letter claiming that “we started this war due to pressure from Israel,” who were also responsible for “draw[ing] us into the disastrous Iraq war.” 

Whilst it is no doubt pleasing to see the MAGA movement tear itself apart, this is a pernicious and foolish narrative. Playing into the key Trump theme of white victimhood, it portrays poor innocent USA as a well-meaning dupe of the Big Foreign (Jewish) Other – and airbrushes US imperialism out of the picture altogether. And there are many on the left pushing the same line: Navarra media’s Aaron Bastani, for example, claimed that Rubio’s comment demonstrates that US and Britain have been ‘bounced into a conflict’ by Israel and ‘there’s no ‘national interest’ about this.’ 

The reality is that Iran has been in the crosshairs of the US empire for decades. The Dubya-era policy of Full Spectrum Dominance had already spelt out a quarter of a century ago that the US military required control of all aspects of the battlefield – air, sea and land – across the globe. The implication of this was that no regional independent power should be allowed to exist, as these could potentially deny US military control over certain battlefields. Iraq – not just its government, but its potential to exist as a functioning, independent nation state – was taken out in pursuance of this strategy in 2003; and then in 2007 we learnt from former commander of US forces in Europe, Wesley Clark, that the US Defence Department had also planned to take out Somalia, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan and Iran in the years that followed. With the exception of Iran, all have now been wrecked by US or US-sponsored war. 

Iran poses a particular threat to the US-dominated colonial world order, for a number of reasons. Like Iraq, it has a large population and rich resources, an exception to the standard arrangements in the Middle East, created by the British and French on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War, which largely divided the region into countries with large populations and minimal oil (like Egypt) or significant oil resources and tiny populations (like the Gulf states). The presence of both in Iran gives its state a strength and independence almost unique amongst the countries of the region. And it has been consistently using this independent strength to resist imperialist designs – from the attempted annihilation of resistant populations in Yemen and Gaza, to the collapsing of the Syrian state, to the dollar’s monopoly as an oil-trading currency – for many years. Iran’s decision to start trading oil in the yuan in 2012 seriously rattled US strategists, as the global tribute on which the entire US military and economy depends rests on maintaining the dollar’s position as a reserve currency. This position is what enables the US to exchange intangible dollars for the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of real goods and services which it imports, effectively for free, each year – but only as long as other countries want dollars in the bank. And they only want dollars in the bank if they know they are tradable for the world’s uber-commodity – oil. The minute the link is broken, the whole system is under serious threat. 

Furthermore, Iranian military solidarity with Syria blocked, for many years, the west’s attempts at state collapse there; whilst their support for Hezbollah in Lebanon has helped that force to act as a brake on Israeli impunity. That is not only an Israeli problem. Israel is one of the key pillars of imperial control of the Middle East (the other being the House of Saud), and acts as, in the words of Reagan’s Defence Minister, an “American aircraft carrier…that cannot be sunk.”

Even if Israel did not exist, therefore, Iran’s very existence as an independent regional power, would still have to be destroyed in order to maintain US imperial hegemony in its era of growing crisis. 

And beyond US hegemony, global capitalism as a whole requires war, as William I Robinson has repeatedly explained, in order to stave off its growing accumulation crisis. This crisis consists of ever declining avenues for profitable investment as markets become glutted, with workers too impoverished to consume what they produce.  This brings capitalism up against one of its fundamental, and insoluble, contradictions: that as each individual capitalist is incentivized to maximise production and minimise wages, this very process cuts the ground from beneath the feet of the entire system, with the mass of workers simply unable to afford to buy what they produce (with ever increasing efficiency). War can provide a temporary respite, however, by eliminating a mass of productive capacity, and providing opportunities to invest in rebuilding from the ashes. It is no coincidence that the mechanism which transformed the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s into the ‘Golden Era’ of capitalism (from the 1950s to the 1970s) was precisely World War Two, the most destructive bloodletting humanity has ever inflicted on itself. 

Ultimately, US imperial hegemony requires the dismantling of China, openly cast since 2018, along with Russia, as the “principal priority” for the US Defence Department. Jack Watling again, notes that the war on Iran is part of a broad US global strategy to isolate China in preparation for a war on China which they are envisioning fighting as early as next year. Watling refers to “a global strategic view within the [US] military and security community that they run the risk of being in what they would call global protracted simultaneous conflict with China but also others from next year. And in that context they want to desynchronise those threats so that if a conflict breaks out over Taiwan it is just between the US and China and certain regional countries… And there is a logic therefore for writing down Venezuela, Cuba … and Iran as one of the greatest threats potentially to US bases and supply lines. Now that’s a strategic logic for destroying the navy and the strike capabilities, the ballistic missiles that Iran has, which is broadly speaking the entire objective that has been articulated by the US military.” Indeed, recent western wars, from Iraq to Libya to Syria to Iran, can also be read as attempts to cut China off from its potential allies, its supply lines and its sources of raw materials in preparation for the big war with China. 

These are the forces driving the war on Iran, and they would exist even if Netanyahu had never been born. 

Moreover, just because the war is going badly for the US, does not mean that it is not driven by imperial interests. As Mao liked to say, the imperialist picks up a rock only to drop it on his own two feet. This is not because some sneaky Jew talked him into it; it is because imperialism is fundamentally unsustainable, and even though the measures it takes to extend its dominance may end up hastening its decline, it takes them anyway because the consequences of not doing so may well be judged as yet more calamitous. The war on Iraq went badly, and was widely seen as a disaster – yet, it achieved its fundamental goal of knocking out Iraq’s potential as an independent regional power, and thus postponing the inevitable end of US oil-dollar hegemony for a few years longer. 

The war on Iran is also going badly. Twenty years ago, Eric Hobsbawm noted that the US “can destroy us all, but it cannot make the world go its way anymore.” This appears to be true for Iran too: Trump can crow all he likes about killing several layers of Iran’s political leadership, sinking its navy, and destroying its infrastructure: but none of this will actually prevent Iranian attacks on Israel, the Gulf states, or even US bases (including those thousands of miles away, such as Diego Garcia), nor will it open the Strait of Hormuz to the tankers of the US and its allies. To do that will require an agreement. This war may prove to be a seminal moment in the collapse of US and western hegemony, for it has demonstrated to the whole world that the US cannot protect you. Given that US foreign policy essentially amounts to nothing more than a protection racket, this is not a good look, as protection (from itself, from its allies, and from the fallout of its own aggression) is all it has to offer. And now, it is clear, it cannot even offer that. Taiwan will certainly be taking note. 

Mirroring the war on the ground, the information war, too, is falling apart. US and Israeli officials are contradicting each other all over the place – over who started the war, over US prior knowledge of the Israeli attack on South Pars; over whether the war’s aims are regime change, or destruction of nuclear capacity, or missile production infrastructure, or leverage to force a new leadership to submit to a more humiliating deal; over whether even a single other country is willing to help Trump pull his chestnuts out of the fire in the Strait of Hormuz . Trump’s threats to respond to any further attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure with the total obliteration of Iran’s gasfields was proven to be an empty threat after Iran completely ignored it and went on to repeatedly hit Kuwait’s Al-Mahdi oil refinery 

Despite all this, however, US imperial logic still demanded this war. The only way to extend crumbling US hegemony is to destroy regional powers with the capacity to resist its military domination. This means the permanent fracture and crippling of nations like Iran. As Trump himself has admitted, the war aim is to destroy Iran’s capacity to make missiles. Given that any country with even a moderately advanced economy has such a capacity, this amounts to a plan to prevent Iran from ever having a functioning industrial economy. Iraq is the model, or better still, Gaza. 

Trump has been open about his intention to destroy Iran since at least 2016, and stuffed his first Cabinet with Iran war hawks. Yet the US did not feel it could launch a direct attack whilst Iran’s allies Hezbollah, Syria and Russia were all strong. It took time to get the pieces in place, and to get all three degraded, overthrown or bogged down in their own war. Even with Iran isolated, however, this did not mean that a win was guaranteed; and obviously the US ruling class were split about the operation’s wisdom and chances of success from the start. But this does not mean that the logic driving its timing – that this may be the only time to strike with a chance of winning, given that the world balance of forces is only going to change in Iran’s favour over time – was not essentially sound. 

If we are to have a chance of ever coming out of this period of fascism and world war into which we are rapidly plunging, we need to enter into it with eyes wide open. The far right are on the ascendancy, and, as fascism always is, they are very ideologically flexible. Today there is a fascism masquerading for everyone – a pro-Zionist fascism, and an anti-Zionist fascism; a libertarian fascism and a welfare statist fascism; an isolationist fascism and an imperialist one. In the end, however, what unites them is that they are fundamentally anti-working class, and fully on board with the militarist build-up which is leading to world war. The US ruling class is increasingly bent on channelling all anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, and anti-war popular sentiment towards fascism; and needs, therefore, to have plenty of its spokespeople in place to absorb the popular anger against this war – and to do so in a way that utterly elides the reality of US imperialism, blaming all its symptoms on the nefarious influence of its foreign junior partner. That the left would be party to this is indicative of the depth of work that needs to be done.