The United States has resumed open warfare against Iran. Over the past week, American forces have bombed hundreds of targets across the country, reimposed a naval blockade on a nation of 90 million people, and declared the right to continue the onslaught indefinitely. What is unfolding is a new stage of a war of conquest—aimed at the destruction of Iran as an independent state, the seizure of the Strait of Hormuz and the transformation of the world’s most important energy corridor into an American toll road.

Under the June 17 agreement, the United States had lifted its blockade of Iranian ports in exchange for 60 days of safe passage for ships through the strait. The “ceasefire” lasted barely three weeks. Trump declared it finished on July 8, the final day of the NATO summit in Ankara, where the imperialist powers pledged to raise military spending toward 5 percent of GDP and celebrated Ukraine’s deep strikes into Russia.

On Friday, Trump threatened that “the U.S. Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran.” Beginning Saturday night, US forces struck more than 300 targets across Iran in three consecutive nights. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded by declaring the strait, through which one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply normally passes, “closed until further notice.”

Then, on Monday morning, Trump announced the reimposition of the naval blockade of Iran and, in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, declared: “We’re going to hit them very hard tonight, and we’re going to hit them hard tomorrow. And there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.” The United States, he wrote on Truth Social, “will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped” through the strait.

These developments confirm the warning issued by the World Socialist Web Site on June 15 that any ceasefire with US imperialism would be the prelude to further war. “The end of this stage of the war does not mean the end of the war,” we wrote. “The 2026 ceasefire framework will pave the way for the war that follows.”

The renewed onslaught is the product of the failure of US imperialism to achieve its aims. Trump launched his attack on Iran in February to topple the government in Tehran, dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, break its armed forces and take the Strait of Hormuz. After 136 days, none of these goals has been achieved.

There is a definite logic to the actions of US imperialism. In the past week Trump has threatened to seize Kharg Island, through which roughly 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports flow, and to destroy Iran’s power plants and the desalination plants supplying the drinking water of 90 million people. Two carrier strike groups, two amphibious groups and some 50,000 American troops are massed in the region.

A blockade is an act of war, and its logic leads toward invasion. How does the Trump administration intend to carry out the occupation of the Strait of Hormuz? Such an operation would require a massive deployment of ground troops and casualties far beyond those already imposed on American forces throughout the Middle East.

A further warning must be made. On June 10, the journalist Seymour Hersh reported that Trump had asked whether it “was doable” to use low-yield nuclear weapons against the underground factories where Iran builds its missiles. Given the desperate situation confronting US imperialism, the use of nuclear weapons cannot be excluded.

Nor is Iran the final target. The war on Iran is one front in a developing world war that threatens humanity with catastrophe. It proceeds alongside Israel’s ongoing slaughter in Gaza, its violence in the West Bank and its bombardment of Lebanon, which has killed 4,322 people since March. NATO is escalating its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and all factions of the American ruling class are united on the need to confront China.

No faction of the political establishment opposes the predatory aims of the war. There is criticism only of its results. Both Democrats and Republicans condemned the deal in June as too favorable to Tehran. In a June 22 Wall Street Journal op-ed, former Vice President Mike Pence wrote that the agreement “smacks of the kind of appeasement” Trump had rejected in his first term, urging that “Mr. Trump should let the armed forces finish the job.”

The Democratic leadership attacked the deal in identical language. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it the “art of surrender.” On Sunday’s television programs, the Democrats renewed the critique. Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut told CNN that “the regime survived what the president promised us would be a regime-ending attack.”

The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military. Its leaders have tactical conflicts with the administration over how the war has been fought, but they are united on its aims: US domination of the Middle East and stepped-up preparation for conflict with nuclear-armed China. They have worked systematically to exclude opposition to the war from their opposition to Trump and to suppress the antiwar sentiment of the population.

The complaint is not that Trump waged a criminal war of aggression, assassinated a head of state and his family members during diplomatic talks, and killed thousands of Iranians. It is that the war has not yet succeeded in achieving its ends.

Trump’s statements express the utter criminality and gangsterism of American imperialism and the financial oligarchy for whom he speaks. The threat to destroy an entire country, made openly and on the record, is a threat of genocidal violence, itself a war crime. The demand for 20 percent tribute on all cargo passing through the strait is the language of a protection racket, backed by aircraft carriers.

The war is equally lawless at home. Under the War Powers Act, a president who commits forces to hostilities has 60 days to obtain congressional authorization or withdraw them. Trump has converted this restraint into a perpetual-motion machine for illegal war. As the deadline approached, he signed the June 17 ceasefire and notified Congress that hostilities had “terminated,” supposedly rendering the 60-day clock, in the administration’s telling, a dead letter.

War abroad and dictatorship at home are not two policies, but one. A government that claims the right to destroy a country of 90 million cannot tolerate democratic rights among its own population—above all when that population is paying for the war through surging prices and a massive decline in living standards.

But this points to the force that can stop it. The working class—in the United States, in Iran, throughout the Middle East and internationally—has no interest in this war and every interest in ending it. Workers all over the world must be mobilized against US imperialism’s offensive against Iran, as the spearhead of an international anti-war movement directed against the capitalist system that produces war.