The following statement was released March 1, 2026, by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, on behalf of the party’s National Committee.
Working people in the United States, the Middle East, and the world over must oppose Washington’s large-scale air and naval assault, begun February 28, on the national sovereignty of Iran and the many peoples who make up its population.
This attack on multiple targets in Tehran and across that country — from top leaders of the regime, to ballistic missile installations and production facilities — has nothing to do with the US administration’s pretext of promoting peace, prosperity, and “freedom” for those who live in Iran or elsewhere in the region. It is a blow to the aspirations for peace held by workers and millions of other oppressed and exploited people in the United States.
Washington’s assertion of the right to use its massive military arsenal to simply murder political figures it disapproves of sets a lethal precedent, at home and abroad. Who will be the next foreign “enemy” the US government places in its crosshairs? Or domestic “enemy”?
“When we” — the United States Armed Forces — “are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” blustered President Donald Trump in his eight-minute, middle-of-the-night “social media” address announcing “Operation Epic Fury.” Had Trump’s demagogy been addressed not to “the Iranian people” but instead to the profit-driven US ruling families — whose class interests are protected by both the imperialist Republican and Democratic parties — those words would have had some accuracy to them.
Amid their intensifying conflict with imperialist rivals and rising capitalist powers such as Beijing, the US rulers increasingly act the world over on their view that the natural resources, industrial base, exploitable labor, strategic location, and right to govern are theirs to take — not yours, not those of the toilers. That’s true from Greenland and parts of Canada and Europe today, to Venezuela’s oil fields, the Panama Canal, and the tightening naval blockade of Cuba’s access to energy and other necessities of life.
The participation of the capitalist Israeli government and armed forces in the current military operation against Tehran is different in both its character and goals from those of imperialist Washington. Israel’s objective is to end Iran’s nuclear threat as part of its defensive war against Hamas and the Iranian rulers. Working people in the United States and worldwide have a historic stake in an Israeli victory in that battle to prevent another Holocaust, a threat that was starkly announced by the October 7, 2023, pogrom jointly planned by the Tehran regime and Hamas.
As millions of Jews in Israel and elsewhere know all too well, their very survival is endangered by the Iranian government’s course to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them. Even a few such weapons of mass destruction could annihilate the vast majority of Israel’s seven million Jews, some half of all Jews on earth. As recently as May 2025, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared that Israel “is a lethal, dangerous, cancerous tumor [that] should certainly be eradicated, and it will be.”
Israel’s successful “twelve-day war” in June 2025 was aimed at destroying the nuclear and related military installations of Iran’s capitalist regime. It was a defensive operation against yearslong efforts by Tehran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other reactionary forces to destroy Israel as the only state on earth that provides unconditional refuge from Jew-hating violence and pogroms.
Class-conscious workers, of whatever national or religious origin, place no political confidence in the government, political parties, or armed forces of the Israeli capitalist state. But the US imperialist government’s current aerial and naval strikes on Iran have nothing to do with Israel’s life-or-death battle.
The US ruling families, their political parties, and their government have never lifted a finger to defend Jews in Israel, Europe, North America, Australia, or anywhere else. Nor have the US rulers ever acted to advance the interests and aspirations of the some two million Palestinians in Gaza, and millions more Palestinians and Arabs in Israel itself and across the region.
To the contrary, Washington has been and remains the biggest obstacle to Israel obtaining a decisive defeat of Hamas. The US rulers’ objective is to strengthen their own class domination of the countries and peoples of the Middle East, in order to exploit the natural wealth and labor of millions of Arabs, Jews, Kurds, Druze, Yazidis, and others. To impose a Pax Americana — an American imperialist peace of the grave — across that region. As we’re already seeing, Washington’s assault on Iran and its buildup of massive firepower in the Middle East increase the likelihood of more devastating wars both there and around the world. The US rulers’ actions are dragging humanity toward a third world war.
As the Socialist Workers Party National Committee stated in the immediate aftermath of Washington’s air attacks on Iran in June 2025: “The US ruling class has its eyes firmly fixed on plunder. On pillage of the Middle East’s vast natural resources — oil and gas fields, above all — and exploitation of its low-wage labor.
“Amid the capitalist world’s profit-driven rivalries and arms buildups today, the last thing Washington wants is to destabilize its economic, political, and strategic relations with bourgeois governments in the Middle East. It acts to maintain US imperialism’s interests — and its control — over what happens there.” And the SWP statement concluded:
“Iran’s working people, of many nationalities, remain the most important curb on the aims of the regime there. They are feared by both the Iranian rulers and imperialist powers. …
“The crisis of imperialism is accelerating, and conflicts among rival capitalist powers are becoming ever more explosive. As during the buildup to the second imperialist slaughter of the twentieth century, Jew-hatred and violence are once again being openly embraced as a banner of reaction. It is capitalism and the ruling classes who are the enemy of working people everywhere, however, not ‘the Jews.’”
Defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews!
US troops, bases, and warships out of the Middle East!