This political report for the week of March 1-7, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).
I. Imperialism and War: The US-Israeli War of Extermination Against Iran
The defining political reality of the week ending 7 March 2026 is the continuation and intensification of the criminal US-Israeli war of annihilation against Iran, which entered its second week with a mounting toll of devastation and an explicit escalation of imperialist objectives.
On 7 March, President Donald Trump declared publicly that there would be “no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER”—the most extreme formulation yet of American war aims, signalling the intention to wage permanent war until Iranian society is physically destroyed.[1] Trump spelled out the content of this demand in genocidal terms: surrender means either that Iran announces it, “or when they can’t fight any longer because they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.” The White House simultaneously raised the prospect of direct deployment of US ground troops inside Iran. These are not the statements of a government seeking a diplomatic settlement. They are the declarations of an imperialist power pursuing regime change and the neo-colonial subjugation of a nation of 90 million people.
Plumes of smoke rise as strikes hit the city during the illegal US–Israeli military campaign in Tehran, Iran, Thursday, March 5, 2026. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]
By week’s end, more than 1,200 Iranians had been killed, including 200 children, and over 12,000 wounded. Nearly 30 clinical facilities had been damaged and 10 forced to close. Israeli strikes had reopened a major offensive in Lebanon, with blanket evacuation orders issued for the Dahiyeh district of Beirut and Israeli ground forces crossing into southern Lebanon. The WSWS/SEP statement “Stop the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran!” framed the offensive as an expression of capitalist imperialist rivalry—chiefly the drive by US imperialism to reassert global hegemony against its rivals, above all China, and to seize control of the world’s principal oil-exporting region.[2] The assault was launched while US-Iranian negotiators were still meeting in Geneva—a deliberate deception exposing the pretence of diplomacy as a cover for aggression.
The most egregious single crime of the week was the torpedoing of the unarmed Iranian naval frigate IRIS Dena in the Indian Ocean on 4 March—a war crime committed without warning in international waters, thousands of miles from any combat theatre.[3] The vessel had participated in India’s International Fleet Review 2026 and the multinational MILAN 2026 exercises at Visakhapatnam, invited alongside 73 other nations including the United States. The exercise rules prohibited munitions. The IRIS Dena was unarmed and homeward bound when a US submarine attacked it without warning, sending more than 140 sailors to the bottom of the Indian Ocean. The crime was then celebrated at a Pentagon press briefing by the Secretary of War himself. Confirmation that Australian naval personnel were aboard the submarine directly implicated the Albanese Labor government in the commission of a war crime.[4]
The complicity of imperialist governments was total. Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared support for the assault, stating that Israel was doing “the dirty work… for all of us.” The G7 issued a statement casting Iran as the aggressor and greenlighting further escalation. France’s Emmanuel Macron deployed the carrier Charles de Gaulle and other assets to the eastern Mediterranean without a pretence of parliamentary debate. Britain’s Keir Starmer was exposed by leaked National Security Council documents as having been informed of the initial strikes more than two weeks in advance and as having worked with Washington to craft legal cover for British participation. Spain initially postured with anti-war rhetoric under Prime Minister Sánchez, then rapidly dispatched the frigate Cristóbal Colón to the eastern Mediterranean after Trump threatened to cut off US-Spanish trade—a graphic illustration of how bourgeois anti-war posturing evaporates the moment imperialist pressure is applied. Japan, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia similarly endorsed US and Israeli war aims. Washington announced that the US Navy would begin escorting commercial tankers through the Strait of Hormuz—a dramatic escalation placing American warships directly off the Iranian coast—while the US announced further medium-range missile deployments to the Philippines as part of the broader strategic encirclement of China.
The WSWS warned that oil price surges and shipping disruptions through the Strait of Hormuz would deepen the global economic crisis, imposing severe costs through inflation, job losses, and intensified austerity. Asian markets took major losses, with semiconductor and export sectors particularly hard hit.
II. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression
The war abroad proceeded in lockstep with an intensification of repression at home and across the capitalist world.
In the United States, a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing exposed the bipartisan character of anti-immigrant repression: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem defended ICE killings and refused to apologise, while Democratic senators simultaneously resisted calls for the abolition of ICE and CBP. The Trump administration seized immigrant student Ellie Aghayeva from Columbia University, illustrating the militarisation of campuses. A Nashville journalist was detained by ICE while documenting immigration raids—a direct assault on press freedom and the suppression of coverage of state violence. Republicans exploited a shooting in Austin to inflame anti-Muslim hysteria and push for expanded DHS funding. ICE detention conditions continued to claim lives, with the death of immigrant detainee Nenko Gantchev in a Michigan facility exposing the Democratic Party’s “oversight” as a façade sustaining rather than restraining a murderous apparatus. Florida carried out the execution of Billy Leon Kearse, part of a resumed pattern of state executions targeting the poor and racialised. Charges against Chinese researchers at the University of Michigan were dismissed, but the politicised “China spy” witch hunt on campuses intensified—serving as a tool of geopolitical scaremongering.
In Germany, the Cologne Administrative Court handed a legal victory to the far-right Alternative for Germany, demonstrating that bourgeois legalism shields rather than curtails fascist organisation. Germany simultaneously announced plans for the largest military buildup on the European continent since World War II and advanced sweeping new restrictions on migrants and refugees. France’s state moved to designate Mélenchon’s LFI as “extreme left”—deploying legal categories to justify the repression of political opposition. Germany’s government also attempted to police political expression at the Berlinale film festival, censoring critical voices while promoting its own geopolitical line.
In Kenya, President Ruto’s government arrested a popular TikToker for satirical content and detained left activists including Communist Party leader Booker Omole. A Birmingham Labour council secured a High Court injunction to prevent solidarity with striking bin workers—proof that Labour administrations function as instruments of capitalist class power regardless of their electoral base.
III. Austerity, the Global Economy, and Class Attacks
The Iran war triggered immediate and severe global economic shocks whose costs landed on the working class. Oil prices surged sharply. Asian markets fell heavily, with semiconductor sectors and export industries facing supply chain disruptions. These consequences prefigure a deepening global economic crisis to be paid for through inflation, rising fuel costs, and intensified austerity.
In Philadelphia, a $2.8 billion “Master Plan” proposed shuttering 18 schools—the commodification of public education in service of capital. In Australia, the South Australian election exposed billions being funnelled into AUKUS war spending while public education and housing budgets collapsed. The housing crisis deepened as government pledges proved hollow and market-led demolitions displaced working-class communities.
Tech industry executives boasted about AI-driven mass layoffs, celebrating workforce reductions as shareholder value creation—automation deployed to eliminate jobs and intensify exploitation. The United Steelworkers’ refinery contract was exposed as locking in uninterrupted fuel flows benefiting oil company profits and, indirectly, the war itself. Canada Post’s proposed settlement, endorsed by union leadership, sacrificed job security to protect corporate interests. Severe drought in the US Southwest deepened conflicts over water rights, with environmental crisis produced by the capitalist profit drive being weaponised to discipline labour.
The WSWS placed these developments in the framework of capitalist crisis: war and austerity as twin fronts of the same ruling-class offensive, financed by cuts to Medicaid, Social Security, and every social programme workers depend on for survival.
IV. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal
The week documented significant episodes of working-class resistance alongside the systematic effort of union bureaucracies to contain and strangle that resistance.
In Lorain County, Ohio, 140 Job and Family Services workers entered their third week of strike action over wages, staffing, and healthcare.[5] Workers described being paid poverty wages so low that some qualified for the very social benefits they administered to clients. Starting pay was as low as $15 an hour for caseworkers handling Medicaid, SNAP, and childcare assistance. The UAW bureaucracy was exposed as isolating the strike and refusing to call for unified action with JFS workers across Ohio. Contract faculty at New York University announced an official strike date over wages, job security, and academic precarity. Entertainment industry workers continued their walkout against studios over pay, AI-driven job displacement, and conditions.
In Germany, the train drivers’ union leadership agreed to a contract imposing real wage cuts—a textbook act of bureaucratic betrayal, with the union apparatus functioning as a stabilising mechanism for capital against its own members. IG Metall leadership at Bosch moved to suppress internal opposition from workers challenging concessions. The Hanover trial of Deutsche Bahn over the death of rail apprentice Simon Hedemann put corporate cost-cutting on record as directly responsible for a young worker’s life.
Victorian early childhood educators in Australia struck for the second time in a campaign for pay parity and adequate staffing. Turkish miners broke through gendarmerie barricades and seized control of a mine in a militant wildcat action—demonstrating the latent social power of the working class when it acts independently of bureaucratic constraint. Workers’ struggle roundups across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific documented recurring disputes over wages, conditions, and privatisation at every point on the globe.
The US trade union bureaucracy’s silence over the Iran war was the subject of specific WSWS analysis. The AFL-CIO and the great majority of union federations issued no statements against the assault, leaving the working-class majority politically unorganised at the very moment when its industrial power—in ports, logistics, transport, and production—could be decisive in disrupting the war machine. In Quebec, trade union federations renewed their alliance with the Parti Québécois even as the PQ embraced anti-immigrant, pro-business, and far-right positions. The WSWS condemned this as a fundamental betrayal of class independence—channelling working-class anger into bourgeois nationalism that defends capitalist interests and legitimises anti-immigrant scapegoating. Ontario students protested cuts to the Ontario Student Assistance Program, linking educational austerity to the broader class offensive.
V. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism and the Pseudo-Left
The week provided abundant and unambiguous evidence of the political bankruptcy of every reformist and pseudo-left formation.
Germany’s Left Party chairman Jan van Aken celebrated the assassination of Iranian leaders—“May Khamenei rot in hell”—while nominally condemning the war as criminal and illegal. The WSWS exposed this as the characteristic method of pseudo-left politics: verbal criticism combined with legitimisation of imperialism’s aims and outcomes. Spain’s PSOE-Sumar government demonstrated in miniature how the entire social-democratic tradition operates: Sánchez’s “No to war” posture collapsed the moment Washington applied economic pressure, exposing it as a political calculation to contain domestic opposition rather than a genuine break with NATO.
Venezuela’s Chavista leadership reached a diplomatic normalisation with the United States on terms handing Wall Street access to Venezuelan oil, gold, and critical minerals—reproducing dependency under the banner of “stability.” Australia’s Albanese Labor government endorsed the assault within three hours of Trump’s announcement, was directly implicated in the sinking of the IRIS Dena through AUKUS personnel, and used the ASEAN Special Summit in Melbourne to deepen Australia’s integration into US war planning against China. Congress voted down resolutions to restrict war powers, confirming that the US legislative apparatus—across both parties—has become an instrument of imperialist policy. Legalistic remedies within the framework of the bourgeois state cannot stop imperialist war. Baden-Württemberg’s state election campaign offered workers nothing but competing concessions to big business, confirming that electoral competition between bourgeois parties produces only distributional jockeying for capital’s benefit.
VI. The Revolutionary Tasks of the Working Class
The week ending 7 March 2026 demonstrates with stark clarity the inseparability of imperialist war, domestic austerity, state repression, and the betrayal of the working class by union bureaucracies and pseudo-left formations. Every capitalist government—“Labour,” “Socialist,” “social-democratic,” or conservative—is serving the same ruling-class interests: expanding militarism, imposing austerity, repressing dissent.
American workers captured the class consciousness at the heart of the anti-war sentiment: “We have more in common with the Iranian people than we do with billionaires.” Detroit autoworkers declared, “We shouldn’t be bombing people, period.” This sentiment must be developed into a politically conscious, internationally organised movement that breaks decisively from the trade union bureaucracies, Labour and social-democratic parties, and pseudo-left formations that have lined up behind imperialist war.
The WSWS and the ICFI call on workers and youth to build rank-and-file committees independent of the union apparatus, forge international coordination and join the Socialist Equality Parties to fight for the socialist and revolutionary strategy alone capable of stopping the war and overthrowing the capitalist system that produces it.
[4] “Australian naval personnel involved in US sinking of Iranian ship: Oppose the pro-imperialist Labor government and war against Iran!” WSWS / Socialist Equality Party (Australia), 7 March 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/07/bckg-m07.html
People watch from a rooftop as a plume of smoke rises after an US-Israeli strike in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, March 1, 2026. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]
1. The joint US-Israeli assault on Iran, which began in the early morning hours of February 28, is a criminal act of war waged in flagrant violation of the United States Constitution and international law. Its opening salvo included the murder of Iran’s head of state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior leaders of the Iranian government. There is not a shred of legal justification for the attack. No authorization has been sought from or granted by the United States Congress, as required by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. No resolution of the United Nations Security Council sanctioned the use of force. The assault was launched while US and Iranian negotiators were still engaged in talks mediated by Oman, which had concluded just two days earlier in Geneva. The attack on Iran is precisely what was described at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders in 1945–46 as a “crime against peace”—the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
2. The war began just two weeks after Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2026 to dress up a program of predation and domination as a civilizational mission—urging Europe to cast off “guilt and shame” over imperialist atrocities in the colonies and the Holocaust, lamenting the decline of the “great Western empires,” i.e., the very colonial order built on plunder, repression and mass killing. The rhetoric of imperial nostalgia has been followed by the real thing—cruise missiles, airstrikes and the bombardment of Iranian cities—confirming that the talk of “civilization” is the customary lying preface to barbarism.
3. The bombardment of Iran is a crime—against a people and against civilization. When strikes hit cities like Tehran, Qom and Isfahan, the target is not merely “infrastructure” but the accumulated intellectual, cultural and social life of a historic society. The reduction of a nation of 90 million to coordinates and “regime-change” slogans is the language of imperialist barbarism. Working people in the United States and internationally must oppose this onslaught, demand an immediate end to the attacks, and reject the normalization of mass killing and cultural annihilation as instruments of policy.
4. It is widely acknowledged, even in the capitalist media, that the United States faced no threat from Iran. In fact, Trump himself, following the Twelve-Day War of June 2025—in which the United States struck three Iranian nuclear facilities with the largest conventional munitions in its arsenal—declared that Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity had been “obliterated.” He repeated this claim as recently as his State of the Union address on February 24, 2026. His assertion, four days later, that Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the United States was directly contradicted by a 2025 assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which concluded that Iran was years, if not a decade, from developing intercontinental missile capability. Two intelligence sources told CNN that Trump’s claim was not backed up by intelligence. Even the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Jim Himes, said after being briefed: “We have not heard articulated a single good reason for why now is the moment to launch yet another war in the Middle East.”
5. The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) warned repeatedly that such an attack was imminent. On February 19, just nine days before the assault, the ICFI stated: “The objectives of US imperialism—the domination of the planet—cannot be achieved peacefully. War against Iran is, for the United States, an essential stage in its preparation for the coming conflict with China.” It continued with a warning of the most far-reaching implications: “War will not be stopped by appeals to imperialist and bourgeois governments. The international working class confronts a situation comparable to that which existed on the eve of World War II. But the comparison is inadequate, because the consequences of war today would be infinitely more terrible than they were 87 years ago. Humanity faces the imminent danger of a nuclear catastrophe that could result in the destruction of all human life.”
6. Trump is hardly attempting to present a coherent, let alone convincing, explanation for his decision to launch a war. Just four days earlier, he had delivered a State of the Union address, the longest in history, that devoted barely a few sentences to Iran, even though he had by that time signed off on the war. The military buildup—the largest in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq—was well advanced. Israeli and American intelligence agencies had been tracking Khamenei’s movements for months.
7. Trump announced the war not in a nationwide address from the Oval Office, not before the Congress that the Constitution charges with the power to declare war, but in an eight-minute video posted at 2:30 in the morning to his private social media platform, Truth Social, from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. He wore a white baseball cap emblazoned with “USA.” Trump was not speaking to the American people. He was speaking to his base—to the fascistic movement that he has cultivated and that constitutes his real political constituency. As the WSWS wrote in a statement on February 28, “Now, Trump, baseball cap on his head, announced his decision in the dead of night, while most Americans were sleeping. He has set the United States and the entire world on a disastrous course.” The statement drew the inescapable historical parallel: “In the future, historians will compare Trump’s February 28, 2026 attack on Iran to Hitler’s September 1, 1939 invasion of Poland. They are crimes of equal magnitude.”
8. The fact that polls confirm overwhelming popular opposition to war has no effect whatsoever on Trump’s calculations. A University of Maryland poll conducted weeks before the strike found that only 21 percent of Americans favored an attack on Iran, while 49 percent were firmly opposed. A YouGov snap poll taken on the day of the strikes found just 34 percent approval—the lowest public backing for a US military campaign in modern history, less than half the support recorded for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 43 percent disapproval versus only 27 percent approval. Seventy-four percent of respondents in a CBS/YouGov poll said Trump required congressional approval he never sought. The Quinnipiac poll found seven in 10 voters opposed military action against Iran. These figures reveal the depth of the chasm between the American ruling class and the population it oppresses. The war is being waged not in the name of the American people but against their clearly expressed will.
9. The war itself has taken the form of targeted assassinations of political leaders and military commanders, accompanied by massive bombardment that has produced terrible civilian casualties. Within hours of the first strikes, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was confirmed dead, along with the chief of army staff, the defense minister, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the secretary of the Defense Council and approximately 40 other officials. A girls’ elementary school was struck in the city of Minab in southern Iran; Iran reported nearly 150 schoolchildren killed. The Iranian Red Crescent reported more than 200 dead in the initial hours alone. The assault has continued, with strikes “in the heart of Tehran” as the toll mounts. The killing of Khamenei’s daughter, grandchild, daughter-in-law, and son-in-law have been confirmed.
10. In a telephone interview with the New York Times on Sunday, Trump declared that the United States and Israel “intended” to continue the war for “four to five weeks,” making clear that Washington is preparing a sustained bombing campaign aimed at bludgeoning Iran into submission. In the same interview, Trump spoke with chilling indifference about the deaths of US soldiers, stating bluntly, “We expect casualties,” while adding that Pentagon estimates could be “quite a bit higher.” These remarks amount to an open declaration that the White House is prepared to sacrifice countless lives—above all, in Iran but also throughout the region and among US troops—to prosecute a criminal war of conquest.
11. Iranian leaders and military officials were caught by surprise, once again accepting, as they had done before the June 2025 war, American assurances that negotiations were being pursued in good faith. Iran’s foreign minister had left Tehran for Geneva only days before the attack. Iran’s state news agency published a commentary expressing disappointment over the talks but blaming Washington for the impasse—still, even at that late hour, operating on the assumption that the diplomatic process was real. The pattern is now unmistakable: The United States uses the pretense of diplomacy to lull its adversary into a false sense of security while preparing the killing blow. In June 2025, Israel struck while US-Iran talks were scheduled to resume days later. In February 2026, the assault came two days after the Geneva round ended.
12. The response of the European imperialist powers has been no less contemptible. Though it was the United States and Israel that launched the war—striking a sovereign nation while negotiations were ongoing, assassinating its head of state, bombing a school full of children—the joint statement issued by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz denounced not the aggressors but the victim. The E3 statement “condemned Iranian attacks on countries in the region in the strongest terms” while saying merely that the three governments “did not participate in these strikes.” Starmer called the Iranian regime “utterly abhorrent” and demanded that Iran “refrain from further strikes”—as though a nation subjected to a surprise attack that killed its leadership and its schoolchildren has no right to defend itself. By the next day, Starmer had gone further, announcing that British jets were conducting “defensive operations,” that Britain had already intercepted Iranian strikes, and that he had accepted a US request to use British bases to strike Iranian missile sites. The pretense of non-involvement is being discarded day by day, precisely as it always is. The European powers are being drawn into the vortex of American militarism, just as they were in Iraq, in Libya, and in the proxy war in Ukraine.
13. The United States and Israel have certainly inflicted serious damage. The decapitation of Iran’s political and military leadership is a devastating blow. But history teaches that it is usually a grave mistake to judge the outcome of a war on the basis of the results of its first days or even months. The initial shock and awe of the 2003 Iraq invasion was followed by two decades of insurgency, sectarian civil war, and strategic catastrophe for the United States. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021—20 years after the “successful” invasion of Afghanistan—stands as a monument to imperial hubris. Iran is a nation of 90 million people with a land mass nearly 74 times that of Israel. Its population has endured eight years of war with Iraq, decades of sanctions and repeated foreign assault. The assumption that the murder of Khamenei will produce the collapse of the state, with a grateful population welcoming regime change imposed by US mass murder, is the same delusion that has attended every American military adventure since Vietnam.
14. The United States has unleashed a war with incalculable economic, social and political consequences. Iran’s retaliatory strikes have already spread across the Persian Gulf, hitting US military bases, civilian airports, and infrastructure in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan. Missiles have struck Israel, killing civilians in residential areas. The Strait of Hormuz—through which approximately 20 percent of the world’s oil passes daily—faces disruption. Oil prices have surged. Global shipping routes are in turmoil. Airlines have canceled flights across the region. The conflict threatens to engulf the entire Middle East in a conflagration whose scale and duration no one can predict. The first American casualties have already been reported.
15. The real reasons for this war lie not in Iran’s nuclear program — for which there is no evidence, acording to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) that it is anything other than peaceful—but in the geopolitics of oil, the struggle for control of strategic resources and the deepening crisis of American global hegemony. Iran sits atop the world’s fourth-largest proven oil reserves and second-largest natural gas reserves. It commands the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most strategically significant chokepoints in the global energy system. The control of these resources—and more importantly, the ability to deny rivals access to them—has been the central preoccupation of American foreign policy in the Middle East for more than seven decades.
16. The drive to subjugate Iran cannot be separated from the broader trajectory of American imperialism. As the WSWS explained even before the attack, the seizure of Venezuelan oil and the assault on Iran are components of the same strategy: The United States is seeking to take hold of the world’s energy resources in preparation for military confrontation with China, which imports more than 70 percent of its daily oil consumption. Iran accounts for more than 10 percent of Chinese energy imports, and losing access to it would be a major strategic blow to China’s independent industrial base. The war against Iran is, in this sense, a war for global hegemony, directed not only at Tehran but at Beijing, Moscow and the European capitals whose dependence on Middle Eastern energy gives Washington an instrument of coercion. The Trump administration has threatened not only Iran but also its nominal allies—imposing tariffs on European goods, threatening Greenland, seizing control of Venezuelan oil, and making clear that in the emerging era of great-power competition, the United States intends to use its military supremacy to maintain dominance over every strategically significant region on Earth.
17. The role of the Democratic Party in enabling this war makes it the accomplice of Trump. They have funded every weapon now being deployed against Iran. The $901 billion National Defense Authorization Act passed the House in December with 115 Democrats voting yes. In the Senate, two-thirds of the Democrats voted in favor. In January, 149 House Democrats voted for $839 billion in defense appropriations. In the weeks preceding the attack, as the largest military buildup since the 2003 Iraq invasion was underway, neither House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, nor Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, nor Senator Bernie Sanders, nor Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mounted any serious effort to prevent the war. On the contrary, AOC repeated the administration’s regime-change talking points at the Munich Security Conference. Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania explicitly pledged his support for bombing Iran on Newsmax, declaring: “I absolutely was fully supportive and was cheering for that Midnight Hammer.” Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer issued a bipartisan statement explicitly opposing a resolution that would have prohibited the use of force against Iran without congressional authorization. Democratic Senator Mark Warner declared: “I think it’s appropriate the president has all the options on the table.”
18. The Democrats promote all the vicious anti-Iran propaganda employed by Trump. They echo his characterization of Iran as the “number one state sponsor of terror.” They recycle every lying argument for regime change—from the need to ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon to the claim that the Islamic Republic is uniquely oppressive (in a region with savage US-backed dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states). The New York Times, speaking for the Democratic Party, was actively involved in legitimizing and preparing public opinion for the attack, publishing detailed outlines of military options, including strikes designed to “create the conditions on the ground” for murdering Khamenei. Now that the war has been launched, the Democrats’ “opposition” consists entirely of procedural complaints about the absence of congressional authorization—not a single word of principled opposition to the war itself. Jeffries himself declared, “Iran is a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted.” This is not opposition to war. It is a demand to be included in the decision to wage it.
19. The assault on Iran is the outcome of a 73-year history of American imperialist aggression against that country—a history that makes nonsense of the propaganda presenting Iranian resistance as irrational or unprovoked. In 1953, the CIA and British MI6 overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh to secure Western control of Iranian oil; some 300 people were killed in the streets of Tehran. For 26 years the United States sponsored the Shah’s dictatorship, training and equipping the SAVAK secret police in the methods of torture and repression. During the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, the US provided intelligence to Saddam Hussein’s regime knowing it would be used to direct chemical weapons strikes against Iranian soldiers—tens of thousands of whom were gassed. In July 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner, killing all 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children; the warship’s captain was awarded the Legion of Merit. Since 2007, Israel, with American complicity, has assassinated at least seven Iranian nuclear scientists by car bomb, magnetic device and remote-controlled machine gun. The Stuxnet cyberweapon, jointly developed by the US and Israel, destroyed approximately 1,000 centrifuges at the Natanz facility. In January 2020, the US assassinated General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. In June 2025, the US bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities under international safeguards, killing over 1,000 people and specifically targeting nuclear scientists in their homes. And now, in February 2026, it has assassinated the country’s head of state and dozens of other top officials, as well as bombing an elementary school. To describe Iranian hostility to the United States after all this as irrational is not analysis. It is the self-serving mythology of an imperial power.
20. This is, moreover, a war being waged by a government that is simultaneously at war with the American people. The Trump administration is systematically dismantling democratic rights, purging the civil service, weaponizing federal agencies against political opponents, attacking the judiciary, gutting social programs and concentrating unprecedented power in the executive. It has deployed ICE and CBP agents to terrorize immigrants, murder American citizens, and subject American cities and neighborhoods to police-state methods that violate the Bill of Rights. The same administration that has launched this criminal war against Iran is seeking to impose a dictatorship at home. It governs in the interests of a financial oligarchy whose wealth has reached obscene levels, while the working class confronts falling real wages, a housing crisis, collapsing public services and the erosion of every social gain won over the past century. The war against Iran and the war against the American working class are not separate phenomena. They are two fronts of the same offensive. Militarism abroad has always served as the instrument and companion of social reaction at home.
21. The working class—in the United States, in Iran, in Europe and throughout the world—must be mobilized against this criminal war. No section of the capitalist political establishment will stop it. The Democratic Party, as demonstrated above, is not an opposition to imperialism. The trade union bureaucracies, bound hand and foot to the Democratic Party and the capitalist state, will do nothing. The pseudo-left organizations that orbit these institutions serve only to channel opposition back into the framework of capitalist politics.
22. The Socialist Equality Party and the International Committee of the Fourth International advance the following program in the fight against the criminal war on Iran:
The immediate and unconditional cessation of all US and Israeli military operations against Iran. Not a single bomb more, not a single drone more. This war must be stopped now, and with it the broader US-Israeli campaign of aggression across the Middle East—including the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the escalating attacks aimed at subjugating the entire region through terror, blockade and military force.
The withdrawal of all US military forces from the Middle East and the closure of the hundreds of military bases that serve as the infrastructure of imperialist domination. The vast network of American military installations across the Persian Gulf—in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Iraq—exists not to defend the American people but to project the power of American finance capital over the world’s energy resources.
The disbanding of NATO and the liquidation of the massive military-intelligence apparatus of American imperialism. More than 1 trillion dollars a year is funneled into the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies—a colossal diversion of social resources into the machinery of death. These resources must be redirected to meet the pressing social needs of the working class: healthcare, education, housing and the rebuilding of crumbling infrastructure.
The repudiation of all forms of sanctions and economic warfare against Iran and every other country. The sanctions regime that has strangled the Iranian economy for decades, restricting access to medicine and essential goods, is a form of collective punishment directed against an entire population. It must be ended immediately.
Full accountability for the architects and perpetrators of this war. The launching of a war of aggression without congressional authorization, in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the U.N. Charter, is a criminal act. Those responsible—from the president to the military and intelligence officials who planned and executed the assassination of a head of state and the bombing of civilian targets, including an elementary school—must be held to account.
The defense and extension of democratic rights. The fight against war cannot be separated from the fight against the fascist transformation of the American state. The same government that bombs Iran without congressional approval is gutting democratic rights at home, attacking the judiciary, weaponizing federal agencies and criminalizing dissent. The working class must defend the right to protest, to organize and to oppose the policies of its government without fear of repression.
23. These demands cannot be achieved through appeals to any section of the political establishment. They require the independent political mobilization of the working class. The International Committee of the Fourth International has established that the building of a genuine anti-war movement must be based on four essential principles:
First, the struggle against war must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive elements in the population.
Second, the new anti-war movement must be anti-capitalist and socialist, since there can be no serious struggle against war except in the fight to end the dictatorship of finance capital and the economic system that is the fundamental cause of militarism and war.
Third, the new anti-war movement must be completely and unequivocally independent of, and hostile to, all political parties and organizations of the capitalist class.
Fourth, the new anti-war movement must, above all, be international, mobilizing the vast power of the working class in a unified global struggle against imperialism.
24. American workers have nothing to gain and everything to lose from a war that will cost lives, drain resources, fuel inflation and accelerate the drive toward dictatorship. The fight against war is inseparable from the fight against the capitalist system that produces it. Imperialism is not a policy choice; it is the inevitable product of the contradiction between a globally integrated economy and its division into rival nation-states, each dominated by a ruling class that pursues its interests through the exploitation of the working class at home and the plunder of resources and markets abroad. The struggle to stop this war is the struggle to put an end to the profit system itself and to replace the outmoded division of the world into rival nation-states with a world socialist federation, in which the productive forces of humanity are harnessed for the benefit of all.
25. Call meetings in your factories, workplaces, schools and neighborhoods demanding the immediate end of this war. The world must know that the American people oppose this war and demand that it be ended immediately. Take a stand. Join the Socialist Equality Party in the fight to build a powerful movement against imperialist war.
Statement by David North, national chairperson of the Socialist Equality Party (US), opposing the war and calling for an immediate end to the illegal attack on Iran. pic.twitter.com/IeFnx4Vfju
This political report for the week of February 15–21, 2026, is compiled based on coverage from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org).
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, peaks standing between Alexander Sollfrank, right, Commander of the Operational Command and Carsten Breuer, Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, during his first visit to the Operational Command of the Bundeswehr in Brandenburg, Schwielowsee, Saturday, June 28, 2025. [AP Photo/Michael Kappeler/DPA via AP, Pool]
I. Imperialism and War
US War Preparations Against Iran
The most urgent development of the week is the accelerating US preparation for war against Iran. Washington drew up plans for “leadership change” and “targeting of individuals” in any Iran strike, while US forces were repositioned in the region in readiness for what military planners described as a “sustained, weeks-long” campaign.[1] The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group was already operational in the Arabian Sea and the USS Gerald R. Ford — the world’s largest warship — transited the Strait of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean. More than 50 fighter jets, two carrier strike groups and dozens of refueling tankers were deployed.[2]
Trump and Netanyahu held a three-hour war council at the White House to coordinate strategy.[3] European imperialist powers — Britain, Germany and others — lined up behind regime-change in Tehran. This is not a bilateral US-Iran crisis but an expression of inter-imperialist competition for regional dominance, energy resources and geostrategic control. The working class internationally must oppose this war drive through mass mobilisation, linking anti-war demands to opposition to the domestic austerity imposed to finance rearmament.
Gaza: Slaughter Continues Amid Diplomatic Theatre
Israeli air strikes killed 12 Palestinians on the eve of Trump’s “Board of Peace” meeting — a cynical exercise in diplomatic theatre that masks Washington’s unconditional backing for genocide. Eyewitness testimony from Gaza published during the week, recounting the brutal killing of a Palestinian child and the systematic denial of medical care, cuts through every abstraction and exposes the class basis of imperialist violence. More than 100 international film artists condemned the Berlinale festival for censoring artists who oppose Israel’s actions, while Germany’s parliament president conducted an embedded visit to Gaza, signalling Berlin’s endorsement of the genocidal campaign. European institutions are not neutral bystanders — they are complicit partners in imperialist crime.
Militarisation of Europe
The heads of British and German armed forces called this week for “whole-of-society” mobilisation and massive increases in defence spending, demanding that Europe’s populations be made ready for war. Factories in ailing industrial regions of Berlin are being repurposed for military weapons production. This is a declaration of class war: rearmament will be paid for by workers through wage cuts, service reductions and political repression. The working class must respond with international anti-war mobilisation and rank-and-file committees to resist the austerity that militarisation demands.
II. Authoritarian Consolidation and State Repression
ICE: Spearhead for Dictatorship
ICE raids intensified across the United States during the week. Masked ICE agents conducted operations outside GM’s Factory Zero in Detroit; two Amazon Flex drivers were abducted during enforcement actions; a two-month-old infant was deported after falling gravely ill in a south Texas detention facility; and a former Cass Tech student, Alcides Caceres, was held in what lawyers described as an illegal “domestic Guantánamo.” Immigration attorney Eric Lee warned that the mass detention infrastructure being constructed by the Trump administration is the spearhead of a broader drive toward authoritarianism and domestic dictatorship.
Pennsylvania high school students who walked out in protest against ICE operations were met with violent police repression. The UAW bureaucracy remained silent as agents operated outside Factory Zero. This silence is not accidental — it reflects the union apparatus’s accommodation to state and employer power. The defence of immigrant workers is inseparable from the defence of the entire working class, and requires workplace committees prepared to shut down production in defence of coworkers.
Trump’s Assault on Democratic Rights
Trump signalled plans for an executive order restricting voting procedures ahead of midterm elections. The jailing of a former South Korean president for coup-related offences, contrasted with Trump’s continued occupation of the White House, illustrates the decomposition of bourgeois democratic forms under the weight of capitalist crisis. These are not isolated authoritarian manoeuvres — they form part of a systematic consolidation of executive power that requires mass, independent working-class political resistance, including preparedness for a general strike.
State Repression Internationally
In Hungary, German anti-fascist Maja T. was sentenced to eight years in prison in a politically orchestrated show trial. France’s mainstream politics lurched further right following the death of a prominent fascist figure. The ANC government in South Africa moved to deploy the army domestically to suppress worker unrest. Russia banned WhatsApp. The Albanese Labor government in Australia moved to bar women and children interned in Syria from returning home. France’s human rights commission documented torture, mass detentions and systematic discrimination against the Kanak people during 2024 unrest in New Caledonia. The common thread is the international capitalist class reaching for repression as its preferred instrument of social management.
III. Global Economy and Corporate Restructuring
IMF Presses China; Inter-Imperialist Economic Rivalry Sharpens
The IMF this week called on China to halve industrial subsidies from 4 to 2 percent of GDP and pivot from export-led manufacturing to domestic consumption, warning of international “spillovers” from China’s growing trade surplus and rising share of global manufacturing. Beijing rejected the framing, defending its competitiveness as innovation-driven — signalling that no major course correction will follow and that economic confrontation, above all with Washington, will intensify. The IMF’s prescriptions are not neutral technical advice but coordinated imperialist pressure to constrain China’s industrial rise. Workers in China and internationally must reject both IMF-dictated restructuring and nationalist protectionism as twin instruments of rival capitalist classes.
Wages, Jobs and Corporate Profits
The week’s economic reporting exposed the class content of the global “cost of living crisis” with precision. In Australia, new data confirmed real wages have fallen to their lowest level in 15 years — nominal growth of 3.4 percent against inflation of 3.8 percent — while major corporations simultaneously announced record profits and accelerated job cuts. Volkswagen announced plans to impose a 20 percent cost reduction across all its brands by 2028, equivalent to €60 billion annually, with entire plant closures envisaged — an escalation beyond the 35,000 job cuts and real wage reductions of up to 18 percent already certified by IG Metall in December 2024. UPS simultaneously prepared a second round of driver buyouts ahead of 30,000 planned layoffs in 2026, while the Los Angeles Unified School District moved to eliminate hundreds of positions. The US Department of Labor’s annual tally recorded 5,070 workers killed on the job in 2024 — not accidents but the structural outcome of deregulation, staffing cuts and production speedups driven by the profit motive, with union bureaucracies and weakened regulators normalising lethal conditions. In Argentina, Javier Milei’s Labour Modernisation Law — slashing protections and facilitating mass layoffs — passed despite a national general strike, as the CGT and allied bureaucracies deliberately confined action to a symbolic 24-hour stoppage. India’s BJP budget raised defence spending by approximately 15 percent while cutting the share of social expenditure and shifting rural relief costs onto cash-strapped states, combining military build-up with attacks on workers’ rights through new labour “reforms.”
Militarisation of Production and Civilian Infrastructure
The economic offensive is inseparable from the drive toward war. In Berlin, factories in declining industrial regions are being bought up and retooled for military weapons production. Walter Reed military hospital formalised an agreement with Kaiser Permanente to coordinate mass-casualty care for future wars — the subordination of civilian healthcare to military contingency planning. Veolia, the multinational water services corporation, was implicated in New Zealand’s wastewater crisis, exposing how the privatisation of essential infrastructure produces environmental disaster and social harm. Across every sector, the picture is the same: capital extracts record profits, destroys jobs, slashes wages, converts civilian production to military ends — and charges the working class for it all. The working class must reject the austerity that funds militarism, build independent rank-and-file committees to resist corporate restructuring, and link these struggles across borders and sectors into a unified international movement.
IV. Austerity and Economic Warfare
India: Guns Before Butter
The BJP government’s 2026–27 budget raised defence spending by approximately 15 percent while cutting the share of social spending and shifting rural relief costs to debt-ridden states. Corporate subsidies and infrastructure CAPEX were expanded alongside labour “reforms” that erode workers’ rights. The budget encapsulates capitalism’s response to global strategic instability: privilege military capacity and corporate accumulation while attacking living standards. The tens of millions who joined a one-day national strike against Modi’s class war assault the prior week demonstrated the scale of mass anger — but the Stalinist-led federations channelled that energy toward bourgeois electoral alternatives rather than independent working-class struggle.
In Argentina, a 24-hour general strike failed to halt the passage of Javier Milei’s Labour Modernisation Law, which slashes worker protections and facilitates mass layoffs.[4] The CGT and allied bureaucracies deliberately bottled up the struggle, enabling the ruling class to ram through anti-labour reforms that constitute the most sweeping attack on working-class rights in decades. The lesson is unambiguous: a single-day strike controlled by bureaucracies that refuse to paralyse production is not a general strike — it is a safety valve.
Volkswagen: 20 Percent Cost Reduction Across All Brands
Volkswagen announced a corporate plan to cut costs by 20 percent across all brands, threatening plant closures, job losses and intensified speed-ups. Co-management institutions and union bureaucracies will facilitate these cuts unless workers build rank-and-file committees to coordinate cross-plant resistance and international solidarity across global supply chains.
Falling Real Wages and Public Service Collapse
Real wages continued to fall in Australia. Seven Los Angeles County public health clinics announced the end of clinical services. The Los Angeles school district moved to eliminate hundreds of positions. Washington D.C. declared a public emergency after a major sewer collapse. The US Department of Labor reported 5,070 workers killed on the job in 2024 — an annual death toll that reflects not accidents but the structural outcome of capitalism’s drive for profit under conditions of deregulation and staffing cuts.
V. Class Struggle and Bureaucratic Betrayal
US Healthcare: The Central Arena of Struggle
The Kaiser Permanente strike of 31,000 healthcare workers entered its fourth week, with operating engineers from IUOE Local 501 joining the action, broadening the dispute to technical trades whose withdrawal threatens hospital functioning.[5] Nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian simultaneously defied the New York State Nurses Association’s attempt to impose a second sellout agreement through a rushed snap ratification vote. Rank-and-file nurses had overwhelmingly rejected the first tentative agreement — nearly 74 percent voted it down; the bureaucracy responded by engineering a second vote under conditions designed to maximise management-friendly outcomes and minimise membership oversight.[6]
These strikes reveal a healthcare system driven by profit, executive pay and marketisation. The decisive question is whether they remain fragmented or develop into a unified national fight. That depends on the construction of democratic rank-and-file committees across hospitals, unions and regions, capable of coordinating industrial strategy, enforcing strike discipline and expanding the struggle beyond the boundaries set by bureaucratic leaders.
Mexican Auto Parts Workers Occupy Plants
Workers at six First Brands maquiladora plants occupied factories across northern Mexico after mass shutdowns and the firing of over 4,000 employees, physically preventing the removal of machinery.[7] The occupations echo the historic sit-down strikes of the 1930s and demonstrate the willingness of workers to assert direct control over production. This struggle exposes the transnational integration of auto supply chains: UAW bureaucratic nationalism and employer collaboration must be broken by international rank-and-file coordination. UAW rank-and-file candidate Will Lehman publicly backed the occupations and linked them to his campaign for democratic restructuring of the union.[8]
San Francisco Teachers and the NYSNA Sellout
The UESF bureaucracy in San Francisco ended a four-day strike with a tentative agreement containing minimal raises, a no-strike clause, and acceptance of austerity parameters — while the district warned of imminent budget cuts and layoffs. In New York, the NYSNA forced a second snap vote on a contract for NewYork-Presbyterian nurses that fails to secure safe staffing or meaningful job protections. Both episodes exemplify the same dynamic: union bureaucracies choreograph controlled stoppages that dissipate militant momentum while accepting the fundamental terms of the employers’ austerity agenda.
BP Whiting Refinery Workers and the USW Betrayal
Workers at BP’s Whiting refinery, who voted 98 percent for strike authorisation, were left on the job under day-to-day extensions while the United Steelworkers International negotiated a national pattern deal in secret. Workers publicly denounced the union for isolating their facility. The USW’s pattern deals normalise concessions, fragment industrial power and prevent the coordinated national strike that alone can defend wages, jobs and safety.
Royal Mail: CWU as Industrial Enforcer
At Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant Mail Centre in London, workers circulated the Postal Workers Rank-and-File Committee statement exposing the CWU leadership’s role in implementing the Optimised Delivery Model — a restructuring scheme that extends delivery spans, intensifies workloads and entrenches two-tier pay. The CWU has disappeared into closed-door talks with management and the EP Group. The breakdown of service is not the result of operational difficulties but of deliberate asset-stripping backed by the union apparatus. The only path forward is democratically controlled rank-and-file committees that restore power to workers on the shop floor.
VI. Elite Criminality and Political Decay
The Epstein Files and the Monarchy
Former Prince Andrew was arrested on suspicion of Misconduct in Public Office after documents from the Jeffrey Epstein releases linked him to the sharing of confidential information and access with Epstein’s network. Searches were conducted at royal residences.[9] Further documents forced high-profile billionaires, corporate lawyers and executives to resign. US corporate media simultaneously framed public outrage over the files as “conspiracy theories,” protecting elite networks from accountability.[10]
The arrest and the ongoing revelations do not represent justice — they represent factional damage control within a decomposing ruling class. The Epstein files expose the intimate integration of the monarchy, the state and the global financial oligarchy.[11] Newly released documents also confirmed Noam Chomsky’s extensive personal accommodation with Epstein — travel on his plane, stays at his properties, private counsel during Epstein’s 2019 media crisis — exposing the capacity of sections of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia to be co-opted by the ruling class while posturing as moral critics.[12] The lesson: meaningful opposition to oligarchy cannot rest on celebrity dissent. It requires independent working-class organisation.
VII. The Political Bankruptcy of Reformism
Fortress Europe: Social Democracy’s Capitulation
The European Parliament approved a revised Asylum Procedure Regulation and Return Border Procedure Regulation, creating an EU-level list of “safe countries of origin” (including Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, India, Bangladesh, Colombia and Kosovo) and expanding powers to deport migrants to external “return hubs.”[13] The measures passed with notable defections and abstentions from social-democratic deputies in Denmark, Malta, Romania and Sweden. This is not a technocratic tightening of asylum law but a political offensive — the continentalisation of “Fortress Europe.” Social-democratic parties have abandoned any substantive defence of migrants or democratic rights, aligning with conservatives and the far right to militarise borders and outsource repression. The measures serve capitalist interests: disciplining labour markets, deflecting social unrest into xenophobia and consolidating the authoritarian tools the ruling class requires for class war at home.
The Pseudo-Left as Bureaucratic Enforcer
The DSA launched personal attacks and smears against UAW rank-and-file candidate Will Lehman, whose campaign for union president — built on abolishing the Solidarity House bureaucracy and establishing rank-and-file committees — drew wide grassroots support from autoworkers in the US and Canada. The DSA’s intervention exposes the pseudo-left’s function: to police acceptable labour politics and divert militancy into safe institutional channels. In Catalonia, union bureaucracies and the regional government moved rapidly after a mass teachers’ strike to contain rank-and-file anger through negotiated settlements. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani threatened a 9.5 percent property tax rise on workers while shelving rental voucher expansions and accommodating Governor Hochul — the DSA mayor managing capitalist budgets rather than challenging Wall Street.[14]
David North’s Lectures in Ankara
David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the WSWS and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), delivered lectures at Bilkent University and METU in Ankara titled “Where is America headed? The American volcano and the global tsunami.” The lectures connected the US political crisis — domestic democratic erosion, rising inequality, aggressive imperialism — to Trotsky’s analysis of the epoch and the necessity of world socialist revolution. The strategic tasks posed are clear: build political independence from bourgeois institutions, construct rank-and-file and party-building organs across borders, and prepare the working class to lead the struggle against war, austerity and dictatorship.
***
The developments of this week confirm the central thesis advanced by the International Committee of the Fourth International: capitalist crisis produces simultaneous austerity, repression and imperialist war, while union bureaucracies and reformist parties function as the enforcers of the ruling class within the workers’ movement. The necessary answer is the independent, international organisation of the working class around a Trotskyist programme — rank-and-file committees in workplaces and schools, coordinated across national boundaries, and the construction of sections of the Fourth International capable of providing revolutionary leadership.
—theSocialist.lk
References:
[1] “US draws up plans for ‘leadership change’ and ‘targeting individuals’ in Iran strike,” WSWS, 21 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/21/abbz-f21.html
[2]: “US forces in position for illegal attack on Iran,” WSWS, 20 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/20/lhql-f20.html
[3]: “Trump and Netanyahu hold Iran war conclave,” WSWS, 12 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/12/wali-f12.html
[4]: “National strike in Argentina fails to halt historic labor counterreform and mass layoffs,” WSWS, 21 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/21/bdeb-f21.html
[5]: “Expanding nurses strikes in California and New York raise need for unified struggle,” WSWS, 18 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/18/uyrg-f18.html
[6]: “New York nurses in ‘uprising’ against union boss’s attempts to sabotage strike,” WSWS, 18 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/18/rtmw-f18.html
[7]: “Auto parts workers occupy plants across northern Mexico after 4,000 jobs cut,” WSWS, 18 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/18/whph-f18.html
[8]: “Will Lehman backs plant occupations by Mexican auto parts workers against mass layoffs,” WSWS, 20 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/20/jczl-f20.html
[9]: “Former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor arrested in Epstein investigation,” WSWS, 19 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/19/xxkq-f19.html
[10]: “US corporate media slanders anger over Epstein cover-up as ‘conspiracy theories’,” WSWS, 18 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/18/pbbm-f18.html
[11]: “Andrew’s arrest, the British monarchy, and the international oligarchy,” WSWS, 20 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/20/zcdn-f20.html
[12]: “Noam Chomsky’s contemptible friendship with Jeffrey Epstein,” WSWS, 15 February 2026. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/02/15/f305-f15.html
This perspective article was originally published on the World Socialist Web Site on 23 February 2026.
President Donald Trump speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Friday, Feb. 20, 2026, in Washington with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]
Friday’s Supreme Court ruling invalidating $160 billion in tariffs collected under President Donald Trump over the last year generated sighs of relief among sections of the ruling class. It also provoked an unhinged verbal tantrum at a hastily convened press conference during which Trump labeled the three conservative justices who joined the three liberals against him “fools and lapdogs … of the radical left.”
The decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and its fallout expose deepening divisions within the ruling class that ultimately stem from the decline of US capitalism.
After labeling the three liberals a “disgrace to our nation,” Trump accused the entire majority of being “swayed by foreign interest and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think.”
Trump called the forces challenging his unbridled assertion of power to set and modify tariffs, “major sleazebags” who are “foreign country-centric,” and the two justices he nominated who voted with the majority, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, “an embarrassment to their families.”
Trump ranted, imitating a Mafia don, that “foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years are ecstatic … dancing in the streets, but they won’t be dancing for long, that I can assure you.”
The Wall Street Journal editorialized, “Trump owes the Supreme Court an apology—to the individual Justices he smeared on Friday and the institution itself. Mr. Trump doubtless won’t offer one, but his rant in response to his tariff defeat at the Court was arguably the worst moment of his Presidency.”
The legal issues presented are relatively straightforward. Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution expressly allocates all taxation power, including the imposition of duties on imported goods and services, to Congress. Following President Richard Nixon’s resort to extraordinary measures in response to the collapse of the post-World War II Bretton Woods financial framework, Congress enacted the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which allows the president to identify an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and declare a “national emergency,” triggering executive power to “investigate, block, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit” transactions involving foreign-held property. The list of executive powers notably does not include tariffs, and for almost 50 years no president invoked IEEPA powers to impose them.
Shortly after resuming office, however, Trump declared a national emergency based on drug trafficking to justify a 25 percent duty on most Canadian and Mexican imports, and another national emergency citing trade deficits to justify an array of tariffs, modifications, reductions and exemptions that sent equity markets careening. The rate on Chinese goods was ratcheted up in rapid succession—from 10 percent to 20, then to an additional 34, then 84, and finally 125 percent—bringing the total effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods to 145 percent.
Trump’s IEEPA tariffs account for almost three-fourths of US tariffs imposed last year. Without them, the average effective US tariff rate would fall from 17.4 percent to 6.8 percent.
Separate suits were filed by businesses hammered by tariffs, joined by 12 states. Several lower courts ruled the IEEPA tariffs illegal prior to the Supreme Court taking the case, where nine justices splintered into three camps of three, producing seven separate opinions totaling 170 pages.
The decisive opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, contains language that amounts to a remarkable indictment of the White House’s dictatorial aims. Roberts wrote that the Framers, “having just fought a revolution motivated in large part by ‘taxation without representation,’” gave Congress “alone … access to the pockets of the people,” and deliberately excluded the executive branch from any part of the taxing power. This was, Roberts noted, the “birthright power” of Congress—a characterization that underscores how fundamental the majority considered the constitutional question.
Gorsuch went even further in his own concurring opinion, warning that “our system of separated powers and checks-and-balances threatens to give way to the continual and permanent accretion of power in the hands of one man. That is no recipe for a republic.”
Roberts was blunt in his description of the scope of power Trump claimed, writing, “All it takes to unlock that extraordinary power is a Presidential declaration of emergency, which the Government asserts is unreviewable.” The only check, Roberts observed, would be a veto-proof supermajority in Congress—rendering the legislature virtually powerless. This would “replace the longstanding executive-legislative collaboration over trade policy with unchecked Presidential policymaking.”
Trump craves the tariff power to bully and extort foreign nations, to promote or harm certain economic sectors, and to steer wealth to favored industries and companies, including those that directly benefit his family. Roberts’s opinion, read in full, describes a president who has arrogated to himself the unilateral power to tax the entire population, even the world, answerable to no one, on the basis of an “emergency” declaration that he asserts cannot be reviewed.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh drafted a 63-page dissent joined by the arch-reactionary Trump toadies Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito that, Roberts noted, “echoed point-for-point” Trump’s arguments. Kavanaugh bemoaned the fact that the US “may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs,” like a bank robber asking to be let off the hook because the stolen money has already been spent.
Kavanaugh then switched from his role as a supposed neutral judge to Trump’s consiglieri, advising him, “Although I firmly disagree with the Court’s holding today, the decision might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case.” Those alternatives were not raised in the briefing, which addressed only IEEPA tariffs, and Kavanaugh’s addressing them in his dissent, which itself has no legal force, deviates from accepted judicial standards.
Media outlets reported that Trump exploded in profane anger when informed of the ruling while in the midst of a breakfast meeting with various governors. A few hours later he appeared before cameras in the White House press room, his face beet-red with rage under layers of orange makeup.
“Those tariffs remain,” Trump said repeatedly. “We’re still getting them and we will after the decision,” adding, “As Justice Kavanaugh—whose stock has gone so up, you have to see, I’m so proud of him—wrote in his dissent … ‘the decision might not substantially constrain a president’s ability to order tariffs going forward.’”
“He’s right,” Trump continued, “In fact, I can charge much more than I was charging. So I’m going to just start.” Following a Kavanaugh suggestion, Trump announced new tariffs under a never used emergency statute that authorizes 150-day tariffs to remedy balance of payment deficits.
The invocations of the American Revolution by the majority justices are not merely rhetorical ornaments. As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches this July, the Revolution and the democratic principles it evoked are intruding into political life—and not only into the sphere of legal opinions. The language of 1776 retains an explosive contemporary relevance.
That a chief justice of the Supreme Court felt compelled to invoke the memory of the Revolution against a sitting president’s assertion of unchecked taxing power is itself a measure of how deep the present constitutional crisis has become. The ideals of the American Revolution, rooted in the Enlightenment and in the struggle against monarchical tyranny, stand in irreconcilable opposition to the regime Trump is attempting to construct.
The Supreme Court has not, however, undergone a democratic awakening. The Court is, and remains, a pillar of the capitalist state. Its function is to uphold the property relations and class interests upon which the existing social order depends. Nothing in Friday’s ruling alters that fundamental character. The same Roberts Court that struck down Trump’s tariffs has gutted voting rights, overturned Roe v. Wade, and granted presidents sweeping criminal immunity. To recognize the political significance of the divisions within the Court on specific issues is not to harbor any illusions in the nature of the institution itself.
Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh—the uncompromising Nazis on the Court—argued that IEEPA gives the president essentially unlimited power to impose tariffs. Thomas, in his separate dissent, suggested a bare and temporary congressional majority can delegate virtually any power to the president.
The conflict between the two factions is not absolute. Roberts, Gorsuch and Coney Barrett have provided critical support for large portions of Trump’s fascist agenda. They have backed the brutal assault on immigrants—the mass arrests, the deportation flights, the use of military facilities as detention camps—that constitutes one of the most vicious attacks on democratic rights in modern American history. On the tariff question, however, which impinges directly on the economic interests of powerful sections of the ruling class, a part of Trump’s judicial majority has been compelled to blurt out—though in carefully worded legal language—that the president is seeking to overthrow the Constitution.
The ruling exposes a profound crisis within the American ruling class. One faction, represented by the Wall Street Journal and the internationally oriented sections of finance capital, recognizes that Trump’s tariff war is a catastrophe—raising consumer prices, disrupting supply chains, and provoking retaliatory measures that threaten the global position of American capitalism. The other views the tariff power as an instrument of personal rule and plunder, a means of rewarding allies and punishing enemies entirely outside the framework of democratic accountability.
The ruling class is deeply divided, its democratic institutions are breaking down, and the working class has no voice in official politics. The defense of democratic rights and the struggle against the emerging dictatorship can be carried forward only through the independent social and political mobilization of the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program. It is the working class that is the true heir of the revolutionary principles and spirit of 1776, and it is the working class that must fight to defend them.
