FIRST, the US invaded Venezuela. It put its president Nicolas Maduro in chains, and threw him inside a New York City jail on drug trafficking charges. It then decided to run Venezuelan oil and Venezuela for now. Then it threatened to annex Canada as its 51st state, and the semiautonomous Danish region of Greenland as part of its territory, ostensibly to protect it from the growing Chinese and Russian presence in the Arctic. Both Canada and Greenland were able to prevent these moves. At least for now.
Then, together with Israel, the US unleashed a bombing blitz on Iran. It left Iran’s supreme Islamic leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dead, along with 47 other Iranian leaders, according to US President Donald Trump. The air strikes also destroyed, among other things, a school for young girls where at least 165 girls were killed. The strikes were conducted allegedly to prevent Iran from developing its own nuclear bomb.
This line seems a bit overused. Tehran has consistently denied this charge, and the US had already done something definitive about it when it bombed the Furdow uranium enrichment plant, the Natanz nuclear facility, and the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center on June 22, 2025. Trump himself announced its success.
It seems more realistic to say the US and Israel attacked Iran again in order to force a real Islamic regime change on the Iranians. So, it tried to decapitate the leadership by assassinating Khamenei, but it failed to produce the desired result. Instead, it produced a dazzling crop of Islamic martyrs whose martyrdom was instantly venerated not just within the Sia communities in the Middle East. Khamenei’s death was honored in India, Pakistan and Egypt. In Lebanon the Hezbollah decided to express it with firepower against the US.
Ordinarily, the world powers would have responded with strongest possible statements. They would have flooded the UN Security Council with urgent resolutions demanding swift action against the US and Israel. But nothing like that happened. It looks like they were overwhelmed by the sheer weight of American military power. The US is the first of the five permanent veto-wielding members of the Security Council (the others being Britain, France, Russia and China); it also has the world’s mightiest military machine. So, the UN response has been largely restrained. There is no loud denunciation of crimes against humanity, or even naked aggression.
Within the US system itself, the constitutional process appears to have been stymied by Trump’s brazen authoritarianism. Under the US constitutional system, Congress alone, rather than the president, may declare war on another country. But in both Venezuela and Iran, it was Trump alone who sent the US military into war. And yet there have been no massive protests on behalf of the US Constitution. And Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University seems to be the only notable academic who was ready to raise some serious questions about the aggression after it happened.
In an interview on YouTube Sachs suggested that Trump’s act of war was actually the initiative of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and had nothing to do with Iran’s supposed ambition to produce its own nuclear bomb. The attack, according to Sachs, was a naked assertion of hegemonic power, the US’ untrammeled ambition to remain the lone superpower, against the emerging multilateral world order. But Sachs asked the most important question that is now on everybody’s mind. Will the attack on Iran, which Trump threatens to continue if it should retaliate against the US and Israel, lead to a third world war? This has become the question of the hour as the martyrdom of Khamenei and other Iranian leaders threaten to create a new Islamic revolution.
Iran is a large country in terms of territory, with a population of over 93 million people. It has a standing military strength of close to a million troops, with a modern arsenal of missiles and drones. It has no nuclear weapons of its own, but as a member of Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), it is allied with at least three nuclear powers (Russia, China and India). Two of these (Russia and China) could declare support for Iran, in a realignment of global forces. But it is best that these nuclear powers work together in the search for peace. The president of Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto, has offered to mediate the conflict, and both Trump and Iran’s emerging new leadership have indicated a desire to talk. It is the only recipe for survival. War is no longer an option. A bigger war could be one in which there will be no winners.
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