The US and Israeli attack on Iran is morally repugnant. It is calculated only to benefit an elite of racist, Islamophobic warmongers. It will not benefit Iranians or ordinary people anywhere on earth.

There are genuine grassroots movements resisting the Iranian government, which is a blood-soaked authoritarian regime—as are the US and Israeli governments that are attacking it. But participants in Iranian social movements do not want Donald Trump to attack Iran. As some of them wrote last month,

“Any military or imperial intervention can only weaken the struggle from below and strengthen the Islamic Republic’s hand to carry out repression.”

Social movements in Iran have been resisting an oppressive government for decades. But the establishment of a puppet regime serving the US and Israel will not help them. In attacking Iran, Trump does not necessarily seek to overthrow the government, but simply to subordinate it to his will, unseating the top figures in order to put himself in place of them. He did precisely that in Venezuela in January 2026. The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro did nothing to change the distribution of power in Venezuelan society; the chief result of Trump’s intervention has been that he has put the pieces in place to loot the country of its natural resources for the benefit of elements of the ruling class of the United States.

Like other autocrats around the world, Trump aims to sideline ordinary people, reducing all politics to a matter of tyrants contending for power at the expense of those they rule. He will gladly sacrifice the lives of Iranians, Israelis, and US citizens for his own benefit.

As capitalist profiteering is coming up against inherent limits all around the world, despots have returned to amassing wealth the old-fashioned way—by brutal state violence. One of the things that has sustained the global economy over the past few years is the boom of market speculation in a handful of tech companies trying to sell “artificial intelligence” products. In actuality, this is a rush to invest in the next generation of military technology in order to prepare for an era when it will be even more central to determining how wealth and power are distributed. We can see proof in this week’s conflict over whether the US military should be able to use AI tools produced by Anthropic to pursue the mass domestic surveillance of US citizens and to set fully autonomous weapons loose upon the world.

The Israeli military made extensive use of AI to perpetrate genocide in Gaza. This—not saving bureaucrats the trouble of writing their own emails—is the chief use case for AI.

For the Israeli government, the entire Mideast is now the West Bank. The attack on Iran shows that they are determined to subject hundreds of millions to the violence they have already been inflicting on Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian people.

In the US, Trump’s decision to declare war without consulting Congress shows that he already understands himself as a dictator. The attack on Iranians is meant to strike terror into Trump’s foes all around the world, including in the United States.

We must understand this attack as a threat to us, as well. From Caracas and the Twin Cities to Tehran, it’s easy to see what sort of world they are trying to create. The same weapons that are used against Iranians today will be turned on anyone who resists Trump and his toadies tomorrow, unless we stand up to them together before it is too late.

We must build the grassroots capacity to interrupt the war machine. The hundreds of thousands senselessly slaughtered in Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Iraq, Myanmar, and Ukraine show what awaits down this road otherwise.

Real liberation can only come about through solidarity between grassroots movements. We must resist Trump’s warmongering by all means.

Further Reading

• “A State that Massacres Its Own People Cannot Be a Force of Liberation for Others”: A Conversation on the Recent Uprising in Iran
• Iran: An Uprising Besieged from Within and Without
• Making Sense of the PKK’s Self-Dissolution: What Does It Mean for the Middle East?
• “Women, Life, Freedom” against the War: A Statement against Genocidal Israel and the Repressive Islamic Republic
• Precarious Work Means Precarious Life: How the Rajaee Port Disaster Exemplifies the Assault on Baluch Ethnic Minorities
• Ya Ghazze Habibti—Gaza, My Love: Understanding the Genocide in Palestine
• Against Apartheid and Tyranny: For the Liberation of Palestine and All the Peoples of the Middle East—A Statement from Iranian Exiles
• Jin, Jiyan, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom): The Genealogy of a Slogan
• Revolt in Iran: The Feminist Resurrection and the Beginning of the End for the Regime
• The Syrian Cantina in Montreuil: Organizing in Exile — How Refugees Can Continue Revolutionary Struggle in Foreign Lands
• “There Is an Infinite Amount of Hope… but Not for Us” — An Interview Discussing the Pandemic, Economic Crisis, Repression, and Resistance in Iran
• Lebanon: The Revolution Four Months in
• Against All Wars, Against All Governments: Understanding the US-Iran War