Trump threatens war on Iran as U.S. economic stranglehold tightens

On Jan. 2, Donald Trump posted a threat on Truth Social that should alarm anyone paying attention. “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

Read that again. The president of the United States just promised to invade Iran if its government kills protesters — something U.S. state forces have done many times from the Civil Rights movement to police and National Guard killings at Jackson State and Kent State in 1970 to the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings.

This isn’t empty bluster. 

Last June, while U.S. and Iranian diplomats were still talking, U.S. and Israeli warplanes launched coordinated strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities in a 12-day assault. The United States deployed B-2 bombers to strike the underground sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan with bunker-buster bombs specifically designed to penetrate the fortified facilities. 

The conflict killed over 1,000 people in Iran and injured thousands more, most of them civilians, according to Iran’s Health Ministry. In December, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said Iran “didn’t get the full message.”

Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met at Mar-a-Lago that month to coordinate the next strike. Trump told reporters afterward that he could “knock out their missiles very quickly” and that the consequences for Iran would be “maybe more powerful than the last time.”

So when Trump says “locked and loaded,” he means it. The question is why.

The economic vise

The protests Trump claims to care about started in early December when shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar went on strike. The Iranian currency, the rial, had hit a record low against the dollar. Prices for basic goods were soaring. The strike spread. People took to the streets, furious about the cost of living.

This didn’t happen by accident. For decades, the United States has waged economic war against Iran through sanctions that target its oil exports, its banks, its shipping industry. In late 2025, Washington reimposed United Nations “snapback” sanctions, tightening the noose further. Economist Jeffrey Sachs calls this “economic strangulation” — a form of collective punishment aimed at an entire population.

The numbers tell the story. According to the International Monetary Fund’s projections from October, Iran’s economy is expected to grow just 0.6% in 2025, down from 3.1% the year before. Inflation is forecast at 42.4%. The rial has collapsed, wiping out people’s savings and their ability to buy food, medicine, fuel. Then came the June airstrikes, which caused billions of dollars in damage on top of everything else.

So yes, Iranians are protesting. They’re angry. Many blame their own government for corruption and mismanagement, and they have every right to. But the crisis itself — the currency collapse, the runaway inflation, the shortages — was engineered in Washington. The sanctions are designed to create exactly this kind of desperation, to turn people against their government, to make the country ungovernable.

Trump’s offer to “rescue” Iranian protesters is a sick joke. The U.S. created the economic disaster that drove them into the streets. Now it wants to use their suffering as a pretext for war.

The response from inside

Here’s what makes this moment different from past U.S. threats: Iranians aren’t playing along.

After the June airstrikes, something unexpected happened. People who had been protesting the government rallied against the foreign attack. In January, massive counter-protests erupted in Fars and Hamedan provinces. Demonstrators chanted “Death to America” and condemned what they called the “destructive actions” of rioters. The message was clear: We have grievances with our government, but we won’t let you use them to destroy our country.

The most striking example came from death row. Pakhshan Azizi is a Kurdish social worker sentenced to death by the Iranian government. The U.S. State Department made her case a cause célèbre, holding her up as proof of Iran’s brutality. 

From her cell, Azizi smuggled out a statement rejecting what she called “American sinister instrumentalization of her case.” She wrote: “If the United States government truly believes in the principles of human rights and humanity, it must first cease its warmongering, aggression, and crimes in the region. It must also end its explicit support for the Zionist regime, which has committed genocide against the people of Gaza.”

A woman facing execution told the U.S. government she doesn’t want its help. That tells you everything about how Iranians see this offer of “rescue.”

Iran’s government, for its part, has responded with defiance. The Foreign Ministry called Trump’s threat a “gross violation of the fundamental principles of the UN Charter” and “incitement to violence.” Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf warned that any U.S. attack would make “all American centers and forces across the entire region” legitimate targets. President Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran is in a “full-fledged war with America, Israel, and Europe.”

What this is really about

The official story is that the U.S. opposes Iran because of its nuclear program, its support for regional militias, its human rights record. These are pretexts. The real issue is that Iran refuses to be controlled.

Since the 1979 revolution, when Iranians faced the Shah’s bullets to overthrow a dictator installed by CIA coup, Iran has refused to return to its former status as a U.S. client state. It trades with countries the U.S. wants isolated. It trades with countries the U.S. wants isolated. It supports movements the U.S. wants crushed. Most importantly, it sits at the crossroads of two major projects that threaten U.S. dominance: China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which would create a land route from China to Europe through Iran, bypassing U.S.-controlled sea lanes, and Russia’s International North-South Transport Corridor, which would connect Russia to India via the Caspian Sea and Iran, giving Russia access to the Indian Ocean.

Both projects depend on a sovereign, stable Iran. That’s what the U.S. cannot allow.

The conflict with Iran is fundamentally about preventing countries from building economic and political systems outside U.S. control. Any nation that seeks real sovereignty — the ability to trade with whom it chooses, build the infrastructure it needs, control its own resources — becomes a threat to Washington’s dominance. General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, said the quiet part out loud when he admitted the ultimate goal of a war on Iran is to “weaken China” and ensure “U.S. global dominance.”

The preferred outcome is regime change — installing a government in Tehran that will take orders from Washington the way the Shah did before 1979. Analyst Behrooz Ghamari Tabrizi describes the goal as forcing Iran back into being a “client state” that “lacks the authority to challenge American regional influence.” 

But if that proves impossible, the fallback is a failed state. Think Syria or Libya: a country torn apart by civil war, no longer capable of challenging anyone. U.S. planners have discussed this option since the 1970s, when internal documents floated the idea of breaking Iran “into ethnic parts” to neutralize it as a regional power.

This is what’s at stake. Not preventing nuclear weapons or protecting protesters. Control. The U.S. empire requires that Iran remain weak, divided, and compliant. An Iran trading freely with China and Russia, helping to build new infrastructure and new financial systems outside U.S. control, aligned with other countries resisting Washington’s dominance — that is the real threat.

Where we stand

Trump’s threat is reckless and dangerous, but it’s also a sign of weakness. The U.S. has been trying to break Iran for more than 40 years through coups, sanctions, assassinations, cyberattacks, proxy wars. Iran is still standing. Its alliances with China and Russia are deepening. New trade routes, financial systems, and economic partnerships are being built despite U.S. opposition.

The danger is that Washington, facing the limits of its power, will lash out. The June airstrikes killed a thousand people. Another attack could kill many more. A ground invasion — which Trump’s threat implies — would be catastrophic.

The lie is transparent. This has nothing to do with human rights or democracy. It’s about empire, oil, and a desperate attempt to maintain dominance over countries building economic ties outside Washington’s control.

When workers in Tehran go on strike because they can’t afford food, the answer isn’t U.S. bombs. The sanctions strangling their economy come from Washington. The military threats hanging over their heads come from Washington. The same forces of capital and empire that exploit workers in Iran exploit workers everywhere. The fight against imperialist war abroad and the fight for justice at home are one fight.