Donald Trump is again issuing genocidal threats against the people of Iran and threatening to resume attacks on Iran. 

On April 30, Iran submitted yet another proposal for ending the U.S. and Israel’s criminal war of unprovoked aggression against their country. CNBC reported that on May 2 Trump said of the Iranian proposal that he “can’t imagine that it would be acceptable in that they have not yet paid a big enough price for what they have done to Humanity, and the World, over the last 47 years.”

Also on April 30th Trump was being briefed on various military options for renewed attacks on Iran aimed at forcing it to capitulate, according to Axios. These included “a plan for a ‘short and powerful’ wave of strikes on Iran—likely including infrastructure targets.” 

Another plan focused on “taking over part of the Strait of Hormuz to reopen it to commercial shipping.” Yet another option put on the table was deploying special forces to seize Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium.

All of these options would entail very serious escalation, including the possibility of ground forces invading Iranian territory, and massive destruction of Iran’s civilian infrastructure. This would— once again!—inflict horrors upon horrors on the Iranian people in this totally unprovoked war of choice by the U.S.

The next day Trump again threatened Iran with obliteration: “Do we want to go and just blast the hell out of them and finish them forever, or do we want to try and make a deal? And those are the options,” Trump declared.¹

Voices Warn Of Renewed War

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a leading Democrat, told the Los Angeles Times: "I do have the impression, from some of the briefings that I have received as well as other sources, that an imminent military strike is very much on the table."

Robert Pape, a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago, points to a recent surge of U.S. Boeing C-17 military transport aircraft coming into the region: "I have seen more buildup of force—actual firepower, with the addition of a third aircraft carrier, and logistics—than we've seen since the beginning of the war in February. So there's been a notable change in the past week,” Pape told the Los Angeles Times on May 2.² 

On May 1, Israel’s war criminal Defense Minister, Israel Katz, warned that Israel may have to return to war to defeat the existential threat posed by Iran. And after Trump rejected Iran’s latest offer, Ha’aretz, a major Israeli liberal-leaning newspaper generally viewed as reliable, reported that a senior Iranian military official warned that a resumption of conflict was likely. 

Especially in light of Trump’s non-stop lying, bombast, and frequent reversals, none of these developments prove conclusively that the U.S. is going to break the ceasefire and resume attacks on Iran. But they do underscore the ongoing and intensifying dangers presented by the U.S. and Israel—through threats, blockades, sanctions, outright attacks and more—to Iran, the Middle East and the world. (And note: Israel continues to wantonly kill people in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.)

In short, there is the strong possibility that the U.S. imperialists, led by the depraved fascist Donald Trump, along with their genocidal Israeli attack dogs, are once again poised to re-launch their war on Iran, a war that would almost certainly escalate and widen the war and wreak terrible, unjust and unprovoked horror on the Iranian people.

Any New U.S.-Israeli Attacks on Iran: War Crimes on Top of War Crimes

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has been a war crime from the start, as Iran didn’t pose an immediate threat. These murderous imperialists have already inflicted terrible suffering on the Iranian people, from slaughtering innocent school children, to destroying critical civilian infrastructure, to killing nearly 3,400 people and injuring over 26,500. 

Take one dimension of these crimes: attacks on civilian structures, which is a war crime. The Trump regime claimed it never targeted civilians, but the evidence shows just the opposite—that they mainly targeted civilians. 

Iran’s Red Crescent Society estimates that the U.S. and Israel bombed over 132,000 civilian structures including apartment buildings, universities, hospitals, research facilities and bridges! 

A Bloomberg news survey of the 2,816 buildings in Tehran that had been damaged or destroyed by U.S.-Israeli bombs found that less than a third of them had any connection to Iran’s military. Rather more than two-thirds were civilian structures—25 percent were linked to industry, 21 percent to civilians, 19 percent were commercial and 2 percent governmental.

Iran’s government says that more than 23,000 factories and businesses suffered bomb damage, and that now the war and the U.S. blockade have seriously deepened Iran’s economic crisis: food and medicine costs are skyrocketing, Iran’s currency has plunged in value, and over a million people have lost their jobs.

And nothing the U.S. and Israel has done has in any way helped the Iranian people or prevented the Islamic Republic from continuing its barbaric repression against its political opponents. The Center for Human Rights in Iran reports that some 22 political prisoners, including ten detained during the January 2026 protests with at least two teenagers, were hanged between March 17 and April 27. Another 4,000 people have been arrested by the regime, largely for their suspected political opposition to the regime, just since the beginning of the U.S.-Israeli war on February 28. 

Any resumption of U.S. and/or Israeli attacks would be further war crimes on top of the terrible war crimes that they’ve already committed against Iran.

Why Is Trump Considering Even More Murderous Attacks on Iran?

Trump is being driven by the necessities facing U.S. imperialism and his fascist regime to consider resuming open warfare against Iran—in spite of the fact that, as the last round of fighting showed, this too, can, create real difficulties for the U.S.

The Trump regime had big ambitions in launching war on Iran. They aimed to end 47 years of difficulties and frustrations in dealing with Iran’s Islamic Republic by overthrowing the regime, crushing Iran as a regional power, and strengthening the U.S.-Israeli stranglehold on the Middle East. This includes having unchecked military freedom to attack adversaries, ongoing control of the region’s waterways (a key pillar of U.S. global dominance), and preventing global rivals such as China and Russia from increasing their regional influence and footprints.

All this flows from the overall dynamics the global capitalist-imperialist system imposes on world powers, and in particular on the need the fascist Trump regime has to even more directly and aggressively exploit and plunder the world, and to demonstrate its dominance and invincibility.

Trump Expected Quick, Overwhelming Victory…It Hasn’t Turned Out That Way

Trump and his regime expected a quick and overwhelming victory over Iran. He reportedly expected Iran to capitulate when he threatened them this past January, then when the U.S. built up a massive armada in the Persian Gulf region, and then after the U.S. and Israel decapitated much of Iran’s top leadership—including its “Supreme Leader”—on the first day of the war.

Things didn’t work out that way. Now, over 60 days later, Axios reports that one thing driving the Trump regime to consider returning to military attacks is their fear that the U.S. could get drawn into a “frozen conflict” of no war, no peace, and no deal, with U.S. forces remaining in the region and the Strait of Hormuz still closed. 

So, what went wrong for the U.S. and got the Trump regime to this impasse?

Instead of collapsing, Iran’s regime held together. Despite having much of its weaponry destroyed, Iran was able to counter-attack and inflict serious damage on U.S. bases and allies in the region—a level of destruction that has been covered up until now. Recently both NBC and CNN released investigative reports showing that at least 16 U.S. military bases in the region had been damaged—some even made inoperable—by Iranian strikes.³ Meanwhile, the U.S. has seriously depleted its supplies of some of its key weapons.

Iran has used its geographic location—its 1,400 mile border along the Persian Gulf—to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz through which 20 percent of the world’s oil shipments flow. Iran’s closure of the Strait has caused huge problems for the U.S. and its allies around the world, as well as for the world economy as a whole. And agreeing to a temporary cease-fire while imposing a blockade and further sanctions on Iran in hopes that this would force Iran to capitulate to U.S. demands hasn’t so far worked either. [When is a cease-fire not a cease-fire? When the U.S. continually violates it by blockading Iran—which is literally an act of war—while outlandishly claiming that it is observing a “ceasefire.”]

Heightened Danger in the Gulf 

Some opponents of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran are now basically arguing Iran has gained the upper hand. Why? Because Iran has withstood the U.S.-Israeli bombing without caving in or collapsing, 2) because it has inflicted serious damage on U.S. facilities, taken control of the Strait of Hormuz, and 3) because it is not facing the political pressures the Trump regime is.

Yes, Iran has created enormous problems for the U.S., but this analysis doesn’t take into account the enormous damage the U.S. has already inflicted on Iran and continues to inflict through its blockade. And more, it doesn’t grasp that Trump’s is a fascist regime, which as the pathbreaking revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has analyzed:

…is a regime that openly and aggressively strips away basic rights and blatantly declares that there is no rule of law and due process of law other than what it dictates, and that raw destructive power is what must rule in the international arena, without even the pretense of adherence to international law or concern about the sovereignty, or even the right to exist, of less powerful peoples and countries. 

(from Bob Avakian's social medial message REVOLUTION No. 114, Defeating Trump/MAGA fascism: Looking to some future elections... or working now to mobilize millions around this powerful unifying demand: The Trump fascist regime must go!)

As an expression of that, the Trump regime is hell bent on achieving some sort of “victory” to maintain its intimidation and is capable of unleashing terrible violence to do so. As we’ve written at revcom:

But the problem such regimes face is that they cannot afford to be perceived of as having lost a conflict. The intimidation loses some of its force. And this would be especially true if Iran—which suffered a terrible pounding at U.S. hands—was to be perceived as having been able to not only withstand the might of the U.S. armed forces but to have actually gotten the best of them. This could happen if Iran were to keep some of its nuclear materials, or to maintain in some form its ability to extract money from ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz (which it did not do during the war). 

In such a situation, particularly if Iran should inflict defeats on U.S. forces, once again we raise the specter of Donald Trump with his hand on the nuclear button.

The Dangers Ahead

At the same time, the war has accelerated an increasingly intense shakeup of traditional alliances among the imperialists. To take one stark example: the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the sharp drop in energy availability has had a severe and disproportionate negative effect on some economies, including those of Europe. When the German prime minister said that Iran had “humiliated” the U.S., this stung Trump—and Trump immediately said he would remove 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany. These troops have been stationed there as part of the NATO alliance’s deterrent to any Russian military action against western Europe.⁴ As the week went on, Trump upped the threat against Germany and included Italy and Spain “for good measure.” Other conflicts and shakeups of traditional alliances are happening in other parts of the world—including in the Persian Gulf itself, between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

In this context, Trump’s upcoming meeting with the main U.S. rival, China, on May 14 will be important. China has significant interests in several countries in the Persian Gulf, it has opposed the U.S.-Israeli war from the beginning, and it has also called for Iran to stop its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and for the U.S. to remove its troops. How these contradictions play out in Beijing less than two weeks from now is extremely uncertain and will be very high-stakes. 

To get into all that is beyond the scope of this article, but these kinds of sharp changes and dramatic conflict makes the chance of things getting way out of control even more likely. And it drives home the point from Bob Avakian:

We the people of the world can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. And it is a scientific fact that humanity does not have to live this way.

Remember: Trump has threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization, and he has never apologized in the slightest for doing so. Even short of using nuclear weapons—which one way or another remains a definite possibility—another round of U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran could have devastating consequences for Iranians and people across the Middle East, and more readily spread, including possibly dangerously drawing in other powers. If Iran shows anything, it is that once the genie is out of the bottle, nothing can be predicted with any degree of certainty.

What are our responsibilities? What can and must be done? 

This past May 1 marked the 60th day of the U.S. war on Iran—the day when this war officially becomes illegal under the U.S. “War Powers Act.” This milestone sparked some half-hearted criticism from congressional Democrats and toothless demands that the Trump regime end the war or seek the approval of Congress.

Instead, the Trump regime openly stated it wasn’t going to abide by the War Powers Act—and Trump officially wrote Congress: “The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated” (because of the ceasefire) at the very time the regime was considering options for new attacks on Iran!

This underscores the growing urgency of three things:

First, spread everywhere the demand to “STOP THE U.S.-ISRAELI WAR AGAINST IRAN” and that the “THE TRUMP FASCIST REGIME MUST GO NOW!” Get this dividing line demand reaching into every corner of society.

Second, dig deeper into the causes of this monstrous war—into the roots that run deep into its economic and political structures, no matter who is president, and which takes on an even more virulent and violent form with a fascist like Trump. (Go here, here and here for more on this.)

Third, seriously dig into the solution to this: a revolution, one aimed at putting into place a genuinely socialist system, on the basis of the vision and blueprint laid out in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America by Bob Avakian, and popularized in WE NEED AND WE DEMAND: A WHOLE NEW WAY TO LIVE, A FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM. And if this resonates at all, as you go deeper, above all, get involved.