CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Iran Crisis Exposes the Impotence of America’s Neoliberal War Machine

Image by Iman Soleimani Zadeh.

After some delays, the United States is dispatching a second aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, from the Caribbean to the Middle East to join the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and threaten Iran.

This is the third Atlantic crossing for the Ford’s crew since it set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, in June 2025, and the second time its deployment has been extended, first to redeploy from the Middle East to the Caribbean, and now to redeploy back to the Middle East.

There is a grave danger that the U.S. government is preparing to exploit the genuine sympathy of people all over the world for the Iranian civilians massacred during protests in December and January as a pretext for an illegal military assault on Iran.

A new US war on Iran would be a cynical and catastrophic escalation of the crisis already swallowing its people, piling the unimaginable death and suffering of a full-scale war on top of many years of economic strangulation under US “maximum pressure” sanctions and the repression of the recent protests.

The world must act to prevent war, and the voices of Americans calling for peace and humanity may have an impact on President Trump and US politicians, in an election year when Americans are already sickened by US complicity in genocide in Gaza and the murderous paramilitaries invading US cities.

In a succession of speeches and in its National Security and Defense Strategy documents, the Trump administration promised a major shift in U.S. foreign policy away from endless wars in the Middle East, to prioritize its ambitions to expand U.S. power and coercion in the Americas and the Pacific.

But Trump is already following in the footsteps of the five US presidents before him, quickly abandoning his formal strategy goals and diverting America’s overpriced but impotent war machine back to the Middle East, to threaten or even attack Iran.

The renewed US threats against Iran have made it clear to Iran’s leaders that their symbolic strikes on Al Udeid air base in Qatar in June 2025, in retaliation for US strikes on nuclear facilities in Iran, were an insufficient deterrent to future US and Israeli attacks.

So Iran has signaled that it will respond to any new Israeli or U.S. attacks with more deadly and destructive retaliation against US forces in the region. Foad Azadi at the University of Tehran reports that Iranian leaders now believe they would need to inflict at least 500 US casualties to successfully deter future attacks.

Iran’s leaders may well be right that Trump would have a low tolerance for US casualties and the political blowback he would suffer for them, if he should make the fateful choice to launch such an unnecessary and catastrophic war.

Iran has had many years to prepare for such a war. It has modern air defenses and an arsenal of ballistic missiles and drones with which to retaliate against US targets throughout the region, which include US bases in Qatar,........

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