War between Iran, Israel, the United States... All states are warmongers! The only solution for humanity is internationalism!

“The largest B-2 strike in history”. The words chosen by General Dan Caine, Chief of Staff of the US Armed Forces, to describe the bombing of several Iranian nuclear sites on the night of 21-22 June, show the historic significance of the event. One hundred and twenty-five aircraft were in the air, a submarine and several ships were mobilised, and 75 precision missiles and 14 GBU-57 “bunker-buster” bombs were dropped in a matter of hours. With their Operation Midnight Hammer, the United States has made a dramatic return to war.

It is not yet possible to assess the extent of the damage and the number of casualties in Iran and Israel since the fighting began on 13 June, but the firepower is abundant and destructive. As this leaflet goes to press, we are learning that after Iranian strikes on US military bases, the belligerents have announced a “ceasefire” while missiles were still raining down on both sides.

The Middle East is plunging into barbarism and chaos

According to the war propaganda, the bombing of Iran is a huge success: the mullahs' regime has been permanently weakened and could even disappear, Israel and America have put an end to the nuclear threat, and they will impose peace and security in the Middle East.

All of this is nothing but lies! The Middle East will continue to descend into chaos, chaos that will impact the entire planet. Unable to respond directly, the Islamic Republic, with its back against the wall, will not hesitate to sow barbarism wherever it can, to activate all the armed groups under its control, and even to make massive use of terrorism. The threats Iran is making against the strategic Strait of Hormuz alone symbolise the fact that the global economic crisis will worsen and, with it, inflation.

And if the mullahs' regime of terror does not survive, the aftermath will be just as terrible as their reign: the country will be divided between warlords, there will be a cycle of revenge between the various factions, terrorist groups even more armed and dangerous than Daesh will spring up, and there will be mass exoduses of the population.

This is not an apocalyptic prophecy, but a lesson learned from all the wars of the last twenty years. In 2003, the US invasion of Iraq, which was supposed to deal a fatal blow to the “Axis of Evil” and impose a Pax Americana on the region, turned the country into a field of ruins where armed groups and mafia cliques fought each other non-stop. In 2011, neighbouring Syria descended into civil war, involving armed terrorist groups such as Daesh, regional powers such as Turkey, Iran and Israel, and global powers such as the United States and Russia. In 2014, Yemen joined the macabre dance. The result: hundreds of thousands of deaths and a devastated country. In 2021, Afghanistan fell back into the hands of the Taliban after twenty years of war waged by the United States to... overthrow the Taliban.

At the end of 2023, Hamas launched a terrorist attack of rare barbarity against Israeli civilians. The Israeli army responded with unbridled brutality, launching a campaign of mass destruction in the Gaza Strip that quickly turned into outright genocide. In the months that followed, the chaos spread at an unimaginable pace: facing Hamas' allies, Netanyahu launched a deadly offensive on all fronts in Lebanon, Syria and now Iran. Fundamentally, the same dynamic is at work in Ukraine, Sudan, Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The capitalist world is sinking into war-torn chaos: as in Gaza and Lebanon in recent months, any ‘ceasefires’ in Iran will be temporary and precarious, agreed upon to better prepare for the next massacres. The ‘twelve-day war’ (the official name given to this latest episode of the war in Iran) has been going on for almost fifty years and has just worsened considerably for decades to come...

A war with catastrophic global repercussions

The war with Iran will weaken the United States' main adversaries: Russia, which needs Iranian drones in Ukraine, but also China, which needs Iranian oil and access to the Middle East for its ‘New Silk Road’. As for Operation Midnight Hammer, it once again demonstrates the undisputed superiority of the US Army, capable of intervening massively on the other side of the planet and sweeping away all its enemies. These strikes are an explicit message to China, just as the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 were primarily a warning to Russia.

But this show of force is only a temporary victory that will not resolve any conflicts or calm any of the other imperialist sharks. On the contrary, tensions will rise everywhere, and every state, large or small, every bourgeois clique, will try to take advantage of the chaos to defend its sordid interests, which will further increase global disorder. China, above all, will not take this lying down and will eventually flex its muscles too, in Taiwan or elsewhere.

Once again, these are the lessons we learn from history. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, the United States has been the sole superpower. There are no longer any blocs within which allied countries must respect a certain form of discipline and order. On the contrary, each country plays its own card, each alliance is increasingly fragile and circumstantial, making the situation more and more chaotic and uncontrollable. The United States immediately understood this new historical dynamic. That is why it launched the Gulf War in 1991, a veritable show of force to send a message to everyone: ‘We are the strongest, you must obey us.’ Bush Sr.'s announcement of a ‘New World Order’ meant nothing less. And yet, two years later, in 1993, France supported Serbia, Germany supported Croatia, and the United States supported Bosnia in a war that would ultimately tear Yugoslavia apart.

The lesson is clear and has remained unchanged for thirty-five years: the more opposition to American supremacy grows, the harder the United States must strike... and the harder it strikes, the more it fuels opposition and every man for himself across the globe. On a regional scale, the same is true for Israel. In other words, with the war in Iran, the development of chaos and disorder through war will accelerate even further. Asia will become the hotspot of global imperialist tensions, caught between China's growing ambitions and the increasingly massive military presence of the United States. The American bourgeoisie knows that this is where it must now concentrate most of its armed forces.

“No King”, “Free Palestine”, “Stop Genocide”: the only future for capitalism is war!

Faced with these unspeakable horrors, faced with large-scale massacres, many people want to react, to shout their anger, to come together, to say “stop”. And this is indeed necessary because if we let it happen, if we do not react, capitalism will drag all of humanity into a huge mass grave, a series of scattered, uncontrollable and increasingly deadly conflicts. Many of those who are willing to react are now taking to the streets in various ‘anti-war’ movements: No Kings, Free Palestine, Stop Genocide, all of which are supported by the forces of the capitalist left.

But the slogans put forward by the left, including those which appear to be most radical, are traps that always come down to attributing the causes of war to this or that leader, to Netanyahu, Hamas, Trump, Putin or Khamenei, and ultimately to choosing one side against another. With their hypocritical rhetoric ‘for peace’, ‘for the defence of democracy’, ‘for the right of peoples to self-determination’, the forces that control capital seek to delude us into believing that capitalism could be less warlike, more humane, that all we need to do is elect the ‘right representatives’ and ‘put pressure on the leaders’ to establish world peace and ‘fairer’ relations between capitalist nations. All this ultimately amounts to exonerating the warlike dynamic into which the entire capitalist system, all nations, all bourgeois cliques are inexorably sinking.

Trump, Netanyahu and Khamenei are undoubtedly bloodthirsty leaders. But the problem we face is not this or that leader: it is capitalism. Regardless of which bourgeois faction is in power, left or right, authoritarian or democratic, all countries are warmongers. This is because capitalism is sinking into a historic crisis that it cannot resolve: competition between nations is only intensifying, becoming more brutal and spiralling out of control. This is what the left is trying to hide. And this is the trap into which those who participate in these rallies fall, thinking they are fighting against war.

Denouncing all these movements as traps may surprise or even anger those who sincerely want to take action in the face of such widespread massacres: ‘So, you think there's nothing we can do?’ ‘You criticise, but something has to be done!’

Yes, something must be done, but what?

To end wars, capitalism must be overthrown

Workers in all countries must refuse to be carried away by nationalist rhetoric. They must refuse to take sides with one bourgeois camp or another, in the Middle East or anywhere else. They must refuse to be fooled by rhetoric that asks them to show ‘solidarity’ with one people or another in order to better indoctrinate them against another ‘people’. Expressions like ‘Martyred Palestinians’, ‘bombed Iranians’, ‘terrorised Israelis’ all serve to lock people into choosing one nation over another. In all wars, on both sides of the border, states always recruit people by making them believe in a struggle between good and evil, between barbarism and civilisation. Lies! Wars are always a clash between competing nations, between rival bourgeoisies. They are always conflicts in which the exploited die for the benefit of their exploiters.

‘Iranians’, ‘Israelis’ or ‘Palestinians’, among all these nationalities there are exploiters and exploited. The solidarity of the proletariat is therefore not with the ‘peoples’, it must be with the exploited of Iran, Israel or Palestine, just as it is with the workers of all other countries of the world. We can’t bring real solidarity to the victims of war by demonstrating for an illusory peaceful capitalism, by choosing to support one camp which is said to be under attack or weaker against another which is said to be the aggressor or stronger. The only solidarity is to denounce all capitalist states, all parties that call for people to rally behind this or that national flag, this or that militaristic cause!

This solidarity requires, above all, the development of our struggles against the capitalist system which is responsible for all wars, a struggle against the national bourgeoisies and their states.

History has shown that the only force that can put an end to capitalist war is the exploited class, the proletariat, the direct enemy of the bourgeois class. This was the case when the workers of Russia overthrew the bourgeois state in October 1917 and when the workers and soldiers of Germany revolted in November 1918: these great movements of struggle by the proletariat forced the governments to sign the armistice.

It was the strength of the revolutionary proletariat that ended the First World War! Real and lasting peace everywhere can only be won by the working class overthrowing capitalism on a global scale.

This long road lies ahead of us, and today it passes through the development of struggles against the increasingly harsh economic attacks being unleashed on us by a system plunged into an insurmountable crisis. By refusing the deterioration of our living and working conditions, by refusing perpetual sacrifices in the name of the competitiveness of the national economy or building up the war effort, we are beginning to stand up against the heart of capitalism: the exploitation of man by man. In these struggles, we stand together, we develop our solidarity, we debate and we become aware of our strength when we are united and organised.

The proletariat began to walk this long road during the ”Summer of Discontent” in the United Kingdom in 2022, during the social movement against pension reform in France in early 2023, during the strikes in the health and automobile sectors in the United States in 2024, and in the strikes and demonstrations that have been going on for months and are continuing even now in Belgium. This international dynamic marks the historic return of workers' militancy, the growing refusal to accept the permanent deterioration of living and working conditions, and the tendency to unite across sectors and generations as workers in struggle, regardless of nationality, ethnic origin or religion.

Some will criticise revolutionaries by claiming: ‘In the face of war, you propose to do nothing, to postpone indefinitely the fight against the massacres taking place before our eyes!’ Today, the struggles of the proletariat do not yet have the strength to stand up directly against war; this is a reality. But there are two possible paths: either we participate in the so-called ‘peace now’ movements and allow ourselves to be disarmed in the struggle for a ‘fairer’, ‘more democratic’ capitalism, and thus buy into the ideologies that contribute to the general development of imperialism by pushing us to support the nation, the camp, the clique described as ‘less bad’ or ‘more progressive’. Or we can patiently participate, through struggles on our class terrain, in rebuilding our solidarity and our identity, working towards a historic movement that is the only one capable of uprooting the roots of war and poverty, nations and exploitation: capitalism. Yes, this struggle is long! Yes, it will require great confidence in the future, an ability to resist the fear and despair that the bourgeoisie wants to instil in us. But it is the only way forward!

To participate in this movement, we must come together, discuss, organise, write and distribute leaflets, defend genuine proletarian internationalism and the revolutionary struggle. Against nationalism, against the wars our exploiters want to drag us into, the old slogans of the workers' movement, those of the Communist Manifesto of 1848, are today more relevant than ever:

"Workers have no country!

Workers of all countries, unite!”

For the development of the class struggle of the international proletariat!

International Communist Current, 24 June 2025