The war against Iran must not be understood as an isolated eruption of aggression by US hyper-imperialism. Nor can it be explained merely by the obsessions of Donald Trump, the expansionist ambitions of Israel, or the influence of the most reactionary sections of the US ruling class. The war belongs to a much wider crisis. The United States is lashing out because the foundations of its power are weakening, while its ruling class has neither the political imagination nor the social capacity to repair them.

The US is not powerless. It remains the world’s most dangerous military power with nine hundred foreign military bases and nearly two-thirds of global annual military spending and controls many of the institutions of international finance in a Wall Street-Dollar complex. A wounded tiger is still a tiger. But Washington is increasingly unable to convert its military, financial, and diplomatic advantages into stable political outcomes. It can destroy countries, but it cannot easily reconstruct its own productive economy or build an international order that commands consent. The violence against Iran is therefore an expression not of confidence, but of frustration.

SOURCES OF FRUSTRATION

The first source of this frustration is the long decline of US industrial capacity. During the neoliberal decades, the country’s ruling class transferred factories abroad, attacked organised labour, and transformed productive investment into financial speculation. Entire industrial regions were hollowed out and made into factory deserts so that corporations could take advantage of cheaper labour elsewhere, while Wall Street captured a growing share of the resulting profits. It is not that the US has ceased to manufacture things, since real manufacturing output has risen over the past fifty years due to, amongst other factors, productivity gains. But there has been a profound erosion of industrial depth, with fewer workers (from 25% of non-farm employment in 1970 to 8% today) in manufacturing, a small share of global manufacturing, weakened supply chains, lost productive ecosystems, persistent trade deficits, and dependence on foreign capacity in strategically vital industries.

The United States remains a major manufacturer, particularly in aerospace, armaments, pharmaceuticals, and several advanced technologies. But the direction of change is unmistakable. According to UNIDO, China produced 32 per cent of global manufacturing value added in 2024, compared with 15 per cent for the US. Northern America ran a substantial deficit in manufactured goods, while China consolidated its position as the world’s largest manufacturing economy. In December 2025, US manufacturing capacity utilisation stood at only 75.6 per cent, below its long-term average.

Washington can impose tariffs, provide subsidies, and demand that companies return production home. But industrialisation is not a switch that a president can turn on. It requires trained workers, public infrastructure, long-term investment, technological depth, and a state capable of planning. The financialised US economy has spent decades dismantling these capacities. Its ruling class wants the benefits of industrial strength without challenging the power of finance or raising the social wage of the working class.

The second source of anxiety is the dollar-Wall Street system. The dollar remains the principal reserve currency, accounting for nearly 57 per cent of allocated official foreign exchange reserves in late 2025. Dollar-denominated banking, debt, trade invoicing, and offshore dollar markets – the vast Eurodollar system – still give the US enormous structural power. Because banks and companies outside the US need dollars, Washington can use access to its financial system as a political weapon. But this weapon has been overused. The seizure of sovereign assets, unilateral sanctions, exclusion from dollar-clearing systems, and the threat of secondary sanctions have shown every government that its reserves and commercial transactions are safe only as long as Washington permits them to be safe. The freezing of Russian assets was particularly instructive. It announced that property rights, supposedly sacred to the capitalist order, could be suspended when required by US strategy.

No other currency has yet displaced the dollar, and the decline in its reserve share has been gradual. But the search for alternatives is real. Bilateral settlement in national currencies, regional payment systems, central-bank digital arrangements, and increased purchases of gold are not declarations of a new financial order. They are insurance policies against US coercion. The dollar system is not collapsing, but the confidence on which it depends is being steadily corroded by Washington itself.

The third problem is Europe. Since 1945, the US has treated Western Europe as the eastern flank of its own power. NATO institutionalised European military subordination, while the dollar system and US corporations narrowed the continent’s economic sovereignty. The war in Ukraine deepened this dependence as Europe cut itself away from relatively cheap Russian energy, expanded purchases of US energy, and increased military spending largely through weapons systems tied to US production and command structures.

The 2025 European Union–United States trade arrangement exposed the quality of this relationship. Europe accepted tariffs, promised enormous purchases of US energy, and pledged substantial investment in the US. European leaders presented submission as negotiation and their ruling classes have accepted slower growth, industrial strain, and greater energy insecurity to remain within Washington’s strategic enclosure.

Yet a satrap remains useful only while it is economically and politically stable. Europe’s stagnation, fiscal pressures, fractured political systems, and growing popular discontent weaken its usefulness to the US. Washington has tightened the yoke, but it is pulling along a continent whose productive strength is being damaged partly by that very yoke.

The fourth source of US weakness lies in the Gulf Arab world. For decades, Washington offered monarchical security in exchange for oil priced in dollars, military facilities, arms purchases, and political compliance. This arrangement was never uncontested, but it formed a central pillar of US power. The war on Iran has shaken that pillar. It has demonstrated that US bases and weapons cannot guarantee the safety of Gulf infrastructure, shipping lanes, desalination facilities, or energy exports. The interruption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on energy facilities have imposed enormous losses on the Gulf economies. Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have discovered that the US can initiate a war but cannot insulate its allies from the consequences.

Even Gulf rulers hostile to Iran must now calculate their security differently. Their economic plans require peace, investment, predictable shipping routes, and stable relations across Asia. China is their largest commercial partner, while India and other Asian economies are indispensable energy markets. They cannot indefinitely subordinate these material interests to a US-Israeli project of permanent war. Washington may still sell them weapons, but it can no longer promise them order. The war has turned US protection into a source of insecurity.

The fifth failure concerns China. For more than a decade, Washington has tried to slow China’s development through tariffs, sanctions, technology restrictions, military alliances, and naval pressure. The purpose is not merely to correct a trade imbalance, but it is to prevent China from moving upward through the most advanced sectors of production. Yet China’s manufacturing scale cannot be undone by a list of prohibited technologies. Its strength rests upon an integrated industrial system: infrastructure, scientific education, public finance, vast supply chains, and the capacity to coordinate investment. US restrictions have inflicted costs, but they have also accelerated China’s efforts to develop domestic technologies. Meanwhile, Washington’s tariff policies have unsettled its own companies, raised costs, and encouraged the reorganisation rather than the destruction of Asian supply chains.

The US can encircle China militarily, but it cannot bomb its way back to industrial primacy. Aircraft carriers do not produce machine tools, and sanctions do not educate engineers. The central contradiction of US strategy is that it is attempting to solve an economic and industrial problem through financial pressure and military encirclement. Slowly Japan and South Korea will learn the lessons being absorbed in the Gulf Arab states: US military bases are a target, not a shield, and – after the Mecca Agreement – perhaps the East Asian states need a regional security agreement and not imposed imperial security.

There is, however, one region where Washington has recently registered political gains: Latin America. The second progressive cycle has receded, and an Angry Tide has risen. The far right of a special type has advanced through elections, judicial warfare, media manipulation, capital strikes, and the exploitation of real public anxieties about crime, inflation, and institutional weakness. From Argentina and Ecuador to Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Colombia, reactionary governments have promised order while preparing privatisation, austerity, closer military cooperation with Washington and Tel Aviv, and renewed submission to international finance. This is a victory for the US, but it is an unstable one. The Angry Tide has no answer to the structural problems of the continent. It cannot overcome dependency, create sovereign industrial capacity, conduct meaningful land reform, or satisfy the needs of workers and peasants. Its programme is anger without emancipation: police violence for the poor, freedom for finance, and submission to Washington. If the social and political movements in the hemisphere organise themselves effectively, they will be able to turn the tide rapidly.

The war on Iran emerges from this total picture. The US cannot easily rebuild its industry, restore unquestioned authority to the dollar, stabilise Europe, guarantee the Gulf monarchies, or halt China’s advance. It therefore reaches for the instruments in which it retains an overwhelming advantage: bombs, sanctions, blockades, and threats. For that reason, Trump is the most adequate president for the US at this period. Dull liberalism cannot do this job. It requires the hatchet of ugly imperialism.

But violence cannot resolve the crisis that produces it; it can only distribute that crisis across the world. The danger is immense precisely because the US ruling class remains heavily armed while increasingly unable to achieve its objectives by other means. The task before the world’s peoples is not to celebrate imperialist decline as an automatic process, but it is to organise the political forces and build the historical bloc capable of preventing a desperate empire from setting the world on fire.