Domestic Report, Part 2:
The Move toward World War III

March 23, 2026

Perhaps, the U.S./Israeli war on Iran was set in motion by Benjamin Netanyahu, flattering a self-important Donald Trump, tricking him to fall in behind Israel’s war.

Or maybe the war was set in motion by Trump, like one of those extortionate tricks he brags about in The Art of the Deal, his own special negotiating strategy. (“We’ll stop bombing you if you give up.”)

Or maybe this war, which Trump baptized “Epic Fury,” was another spectacular diversion, one of the hundreds Trump has tossed out ever since his inauguration, to take all eyes off the Epstein files.

Or was it the result of a personal pique, a tantrum Trump threw because he felt “cheated” out of the Nobel Peace Prize?

In fact, you can find all of these inanities—and many more like them—littering the “Opinion” pages of the sober American press that speak for U.S. capital (The New York Times, et al). Yes, Trump and Netanyahu are egomaniacs—and worse. But pop psychology doesn’t explain why this biggest, most powerful, absolutely predominant imperialism decided to go to an unprovoked war.

This latest war on Iran is being called a “war of choice.” What seems to disturb most commentators is that the U.S. didn’t have to go to war against Iran. The U.S. hadn’t been attacked, There was no immediate threat of attack. And even Trump’s chosen head of the U.S. intelligence apparatus testified to Congress that there was no indication of a foreseeable threat. But U.S. imperialism did go to this war, it chose to go, it was not pulled in, it made a completely free, conscious choice to go.

In other words, the choice to go to war against Iran was a choice dictated by policy—not just Trump’s policy, but the policy of the American state. It was a keystone of a long-range global offensive by U.S. imperialism, intended to check those countries that had flirted with slightly independent policies. The attack on Iran, like that on Venezuela before, is a way to clear the ground for the battles that lie ahead, that is, for the war that even now is generalizing, World War III.

Today, according to The Guardian, more countries than at any time since World War II have their own troops engaged in fighting outside their own borders. In the last year alone, the U.S. has bombarded seven countries, before the latest attack on Iran: Yemen, Somalia, the first bombardment of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Venezuela. To some extent, U.S. Special Forces carried out raids in Colombia and Mexico, in addition to their kidnapping in Venezuela. Cuba has been cut off from Venezuelan and Iranian oil, while Trump declares: “I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba in some form. Whether I free it, take it. I think I can do anything I want with it.” Maybe that’s only another one of Trump’s “negotiating tactics”—like his claims on Canada and Greenland, or maybe it’s a direct threat like the ones he aimed at Iran and Venezuela while pretending to negotiate with them.

But world war is not just a total of all the wars. The question is what additional wars do they promise?

All of this came after two ongoing wars, one which weakened Russia, the other which opened more of the Middle East to Israel’s control. It’s true those wars were set off by Russia’s own invasion of Ukraine, attempting to break NATO’s choke hold, and by Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians. Regardless of who “started the war,” after four years of war in Ukraine, Russia’s military has been stripped to the bone by the enormous loss of soldiers in battle, and its state debt has rapidly overwhelmed Russia’s financial system. And the devastation wreaked on Gaza reinforced the threat that Israel poses in the Middle East.

The question left unanswered in all this is where the antagonism between the U.S. and China is going. China may be a really important trading partner for the U.S., but it is also its most important competitor. The contradiction inherent in this has still to play out, but that doesn’t make it less important. China may not have been brought directly into the latest scrimmaging in the Middle East, but it promises to be impacted by these wars nonetheless. Crippling both Venezuela and Iran, Trump clearly intended to control where their oil goes, preventing it from nourishing China. After the first U.S. attack on Iran 9 months ago, and even more after the attack on Venezuela, China drew the obvious conclusion and stocked up, storing half a year’s supply of oil. But the U.S. perspective lies far past half a year into the future.

From day one, this war in the Middle East has expanded. Under cover of the supposed threat posed by Iran, Israel used massive bombing to clear southern Lebanon of Hezbollah, and of Lebanon’s people. And Iran, viciously attacked, unable to reach the U.S. with its military technology, began to pull countries around the Persian Gulf into the war. Not only had they provided the U.S. with land for its bases in the Middle East. They were an important center of oil and gas production and/or transmission, which impacted also fertilizer for the world’s crops and helium for the production of semi-conductors.

By clogging shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran expanded the war into an economic war, which not only threatened the African and Asian nations most dependent on Middle East oil, it also risks shaking the financial system of the whole globe. The Middle East today plays a really important role in the world’s economy, Abu Dhabi and Dubai are among the most important of imperialism’s financial centers, being totally integrated into that system.

Even if the U.S. finds itself in a good situation facing another oil shortage because of its domestic production, the international trading framework may well come back to haunt it. It may find itself bogged down in a long war of attrition, one of those “forever wars” that Trump had promised his base not to be trapped in.

The war that is even now generalizing is developing within the framework of the long term economic crisis. Despite its predominance, the U.S. financial system has been piling on debt. The production of goods and services is becoming an ever smaller share of the U.S. economy, which increasingly turns around speculation. War may be a necessary product of capitalism, a consequence of the economic crisis, but war itself stands to aggravate the economic crisis.

World War III comes out of today’s existing relations of power. It does not start out as a fight between several competing imperialisms, fighting against each other to divide up much of the rest of the world, as the earlier world wars did. Rather, the U.S., which came out of World War II as the predominant economic and military force, looks to impose or reinforce its order on the rest of the world. What alliances the U.S. will form to carry out the war are not necessarily those it has rested on before. What enemies it had may not find themselves on the other side as the war develops.

The U.S. has long spent more on war than its biggest competitors combined. In 2024, U.S. outlays equaled that of its top nine competitors. The total amount the U.S. spent in 2026 was supposed to reach slightly less than one trillion dollars before the attack on Iran shuffled all expectations. But Trump’s upcoming 2027 budget called for an astounding 50% increase. (All of this is according to the International Institute of Strategic Studies.)

Authoritarianism at Home

The other important preparation for a war of global magnitude has been the steady development of an authoritarian regime, organized today around the one figure who has been busy pasting his name on everything he can find in Washington, including the new one-dollar gold coin.

Trump spent his first year in office of this, his second term, attacking, trying to isolate and hold in check any entity, any person who might provide or express some opposition to his policies: that is, law firms which defended “unpopular” clients, civil liberties lawyers, universities and their research arms, professors, public school teachers, media groups, reporters, newspapers, journalists, unions to some extent, even cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center or the Smithsonian museums, particularly their historical units, and regulatory bodies. The National Parks have been a particular target, given that materials passed out or posted in the parks can convey some sense of the actual history of the Civil War, or the attacks on Native Americans, or earlier wars with Canada or Mexico.

Trump has used federal agencies as a kind of personal detective force, keeping check on any opposition. For example, the IRS and the FHA were used to build a case of fraud against the chair and another member of the Federal Reserve.

He has swamped the court system itself with damage suits or criminal cases widely expected to fail, but in the meantime, they cost the individual or organization being sued or charged time and money—over 4,000 of them in this term alone. Most of them have been ruled against by lower courts, but this just elevates the suit or the case to the next, and then the next level of the judiciary, and then perhaps to the Supreme Court, which has discovered a new way to support Trump by passing on the cases that come before it, refusing to issue a substantive judgment.

Of course, this kind of judicial obfuscation didn’t start with Donald Trump, but he has elevated it to an art, as he would be the first to say, if he were to write another book (or, to be exact, to find another ghostwriter to do it).

On the other hand, Trump’s administration has ignored court orders telling them to desist from one or another project. For example Homeland Security deports people before any hearing.

Migrant roundups were promoted as a TV spectacle. Every night, TV news was filled with shocking images of raids on migrants in their homes or workplaces. Squads of masked men in military uniforms in Los Angeles, without insignia or anything to identify them, stepped out equipped with automatic weapons ready to fire or batons ready to herd their targets. In Chicago, armed men disembarking from a military helicopter entered a building through the roof, dragging people from their sleep and forcing them to wait hours in the street—men, women, children, elderly grandmothers in their nightclothes, handcuffed, lined up, to be taken by bus to some unknown destination. In Georgia, a Hyundai factory was raided, all their employees, legally admitted technicians from South Korea—making it seem the plant would be closed, only to see them released a few days later.

And all of this came before the execution-style murders in Minneapolis.

These actions, orchestrated like a television campaign, were designed to terrify the people who are not rounded up. Despite all the hype surrounding the roundups, there are still almost 15 million undocumented immigrants in the United States (according to the Pew Research Center): those who work in agriculture in California or other western states, in small shops in Chicago and the Midwest, or in the factories of Asian automakers in the South. The importance of these deportations is not so much a question of numbers. Obama, in fact, carried out deportations at a much faster pace than Trump did, but Trump has turned them into a political spectacle.

But Trump was walking a fine line. He was spreading images of raids to appease his base’s desire to get rid of the foreigners “who are taking American jobs”; but the economy can function only thanks to the work of millions of immigrants, and this limits what he has been ready to do.

Trump may have stepped back somewhat after the fiasco which was Minneapolis, but he’s always seemed to know how far he can push something. Up until now, the American bourgeoisie has given little sign that it might shut down Trump’s act. So far, his methods have worked rather well for them.

The issue of ICE is larger than the question of the immigrants it continues to round up today. In theory, the U.S. military is constitutionally prohibited from operating within national borders—though it has done so in the past, for example, when it suppressed a march of homeless veterans in 1932, or when, during the 1967 urban riots, the 82^nd Airborne Division patrolled the streets of Detroit. Even the National Guard isn’t supposed to enter civilian areas unless a state governor or city mayor requests it. By sending ICE agents into cities just on his own say-so, without any legal justification, Trump has set some new precedents that can be useful in the midst of social unrest. And by building a new network of concentration camps widely in the country, by ignoring any claims on civil rights, Trump shows the direction in which this society is going.

What we are witnessing today is certainly not fascism, a term often misused. Nor is it even comparable—yet—to the repression of the McCarthy era, when large numbers of people were imprisoned, lost their jobs, homes, and benefits, lost friends, lost their citizenship, and/or had their children taken away because of the causes they championed—or because of the causes their adult children championed. Some were killed.

But, at the very least today, there is a growing authoritarianism, which could take different forms in the future and intensify very rapidly. Trump has already effectively staked out for himself the powers held by previous war-time presidents, giving it his own special twist, via his nightly missives posted on Truth Social, a site where truth is in short supply, but where implicit threats of violence and judicial scapegoating loom large.

Up until now, this all has stayed within a carefully measured (somewhat legal) limit. That has not stopped Trump from issuing comments that might well be taken as an incentive to commit violence by some of his followers—some of the same ones who stormed the Capitol on January 6, for example, but were subsequently pardoned by Trump for their efforts. Marjorie Taylor Green wasn’t the first to find herself in the cross hairs of Trump’s diatribes. But even this former staunch, solidly right-wing supporter had to worry about her and her family’s safety when Trump took to social media to call her disloyal.

By summer and even more by October, Democrats were trying to capitalize on the popular discontent with Trump that turned around many different issues. They organized a day of protests in cities of all sizes, even in small towns. The goal was clearly to keep the population’s more generalized anger focused on Trump, reducing it to his alleged attempt to establish himself as a dictator. Even though many people brought different signs to the protests, the one demand common across all of them was “No Kings!”

Interestingly enough—there were no banners or posters bearing the party’s colors. Known members of the Democratic Party appeared in all the marches, but they didn’t appear as its organizers. Was this the Democrats’ way to mobilize voters against Trump at a time when popular support for the Democrats was even lower than Trump’s declining approval ratings? Maybe.

Popular resentment toward Trump did make itself felt in the November elections, albeit on a limited scale since they were primarily local. Democrats won statewide victories (New Jersey and Virginia), as well as a referendum in California. These are traditionally Democratic states, but the size of their margin was remarkable.

Finally, there was one result that the media talked about and that excited much of the left: candidates who called themselves Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won the mayoral elections in New York City and Seattle. Whatever they meant by the label, and whatever the left took it to mean, they ran as Democrats and aligned their policies with those of other liberal Democratic mayors. The DSA is a far cry from a return to the days of Eugene Debs. But the result was enough to trigger a cascade of vitriol from Trump against the supposed communist threat—that is, until, the following week, when Zohran Mamdani visited the White House and courted Trump. Ultimately, Trump and Mamdani described themselves as “two guys who grew up in Queens and understand each other well.” They certainly do.

Finally, Trump’s electoral base is showing some signs of fracturing. The trigger for supporters of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement was Trump’s maneuvers to prevent the release of the Epstein files, which Trump himself had claimed a few years earlier contained the names of members of the “elite,” of the “rich,” who had sexually abused children. For many MAGA supporters, this was a red line that could not be crossed. Other issues also arose. Perhaps the most significant was Trump’s refusal to renew the Medicaid extension and health insurance subsidies. As pointed out by Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene—once Trump’s most ardent supporter in Congress—even her family was complaining about the impending loss of their health insurance. In fact, the cuts to health coverage disproportionately are affecting residents of Republican-led states compared to those in Democratic states. Ultimately, the vote to release all of Epstein’s files was almost unanimous. But this unanimous decision was reached only because Trump knew he had lost the vote.

The unease in his base was reinforced when Trump’s belligerent actions in the Caribbean upset the isolationist tradition deeply rooted in rural areas. Despite his campaign promises to end ongoing wars and not start new ones, first there was Venezuela, and then Iran. Important people who spoke for MAGA—Steve Bannon, Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Joe Rogan, for example—found it difficult to swallow what had become Trump’s wars.

From Minneapolis to Antifa Trial

It’s difficult from our situations cut off from everyday reality in Texas to know the practical reality of the supposed “Antifa trial” held in Forth Worth Texas. And it’s obvious we won’t know from the press coming out of Texas. But there are certainly some conclusions we can draw from it.

The Justice Department claims that a nine-member “cell” of Antifa, which was recently convicted of charges that included rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, obstruction and attempted murder of a police officer and officers at the ICE Prairieland Detention Center. Seven others plead guilty last year of reduced charges of providing material support to terrorists—providing testimony for the trial. One of those convicted, who apparently was carrying a gun, a legally registered gun—imagine that, carrying a gun in Texas, who would have thought it—shot the officers, but everyone with one exception was convicted of the same charges.

Had they or some of them styled themselves Antifa? They might have. There certainly are some young—and not so young—people today who act as though by their own resources, they can stop the growth of right wing and racist gangs.

But the point is, this was a trial aimed at throwing everything in the book at a group of people who had almost certainly not done nearly or even all of what they were charged with, but had opposed government policies.

At the end of the trial, Pam Bondi said, “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last.” Trump said, “We are getting rid of the Left.” We should take his threat seriously.

Minneapolis has an almost diametrically opposed importance. We don’t need to recount here all the developments over that several month period. What is important for us is to realize how quickly it can happen that people organize themselves—in fact how they used their own collective experience, using the organizations they were already part of: neighborhood associations, churches, unions, block clubs, gardening clubs, professional associations, school classes of all sorts, workgroups, etc. Their activity rested on the people who surrounded the people who decided they had to do something. Yes, they might have used the internet, or even occasionally posted on social media, but what gave them possibilities was all of what these people had done before the movement broke out, all of the people they knew, all of the activities they had been part of, etc., that is, their networks. And what probably let them jump quickly into action was the experience many of them had had during the movement surrounding the death of George Floyd.

This is not to say that a “soviet” was built up. Not at all, and those who organized, even if most were workers, did not approach the question as workers.

But the fact of this kind of organization is what differentiated the events in Minneapolis from what happened before in Los Angeles and Chicago.

In one sense, we already had foreseen the situation we face today. But only in one sense. On the practical level, we are being thrown into a situation none of us ever knew before. That’s all the more reason to look to the experience of those who came before us. The COVID look-down was the opportunity to study those experiences. Hopefully, some of us did that.