What do you call it when a powerful country suddenly launches a war against a far lesser power—during negotiations? 

What do you call it when that same leader threatens to wipe out the civilization of his targets if they do not cease resisting him? And when he simultaneously attacks the press and ramps up his repression against dissent?

What do you call it when that same powerful country—forced into agreeing to a ceasefire by massive international outrage and, very likely, by opposition at the highest reaches of its own ruling class—then massively violates that ceasefire by declaring a naval blockade (which is legally considered an “act of war”)? 

You call it a fascist regime—at the head of the world’s most powerful capitalist-imperialist state.

The Challenge That Every Decent Person in the U.S. Confronts

The final question—and ultimately the most important—is this: what will history say about the millions of people who lived in that country, who saw that this war was not just wrong and abhorrent but threatened humanity itself, and who still had the real chance to do something about it?

That depends on us.

What we do or don’t do—not next November, but NOW—carries immense weight, one way or another. As Donald Trump has been forced to learn, wars tend to take on a dynamic of their own. Wars have unforeseen and often magnified consequences. Be clear: those consequences at this point will happen under the leadership of someone known for saying “if we have nukes, why can’t we use them” and who—again—threatened to wipe out the civilization of those he attacked. And the fact that he is either “unhinged” or else wants to give that impression makes that threat even more dangerous and plausible. 

The danger is here, it is NOW, and it is palpable. The need is simple, it is great, it is urgent, and it, too, is – or through our actions must become—palpable: THE TRUMP FASCIST REGIME MUST GO NOW!

This demand must impact all of society, at this urgent moment. As one important expression of this, many people and political forces will be coming into the streets on May 1 in opposition to many of the policies of the Trump regime, including the war against Iran, and Lebanon. This day must be stamped with the demand for the Trump fascist regime to go, not just as a sentiment…but as something to be actively and urgently made real.

The State Of Negotiations

As we write, the Trump regime says that it intends to resume ceasefire negotiations early this week; Iran has not announced its intent. As we referred to above, the U.S. violated this ceasefire by declaring a naval blockade. The U.S. Central Command claims that it has already intercepted 23 vessels traveling either to or from Iranian territory. Iran then shut down the Strait of Hormuz—a major shipping route for 20% of the world’s oil exports—in retaliation. Meanwhile, on Friday as this was happening, Trump claimed—in a manic series of thirteen social media posts in the space of an hour—that Iran had actually fully agreed to all U.S. demands and that the war was going to be over pretty soon. Iran, numerous times, told Trump to stop lying. Yet by Sunday, Trump was persisting both in his claims that Iran was getting ready to not only negotiate but cave into U.S. demands as well as his threats to bomb all of Iran’s power plants and bridges if they do not. (Such a bombing is legally a war crime under the Geneva Convention, which the U.S. did sign.) And let’s remember that we are not referring to an actual peace agreement that has broken down—we are only referring to an agreement to talk about an agreement.

Even if a basic agreement could be quickly done, that would not deal with the damage done. This encompasses first of all the lives of an estimated 3,400 Iranian and more than 2,100 Lebanese so needlessly taken or destroyed by Israel and the U.S., those who loved them who must now mourn and make up for the empty place they leave behind, and those who have been cruelly and needlessly wounded or permanently disabled by the war. And this is not to mention the tremendous damage done to schools, housing, hospitals, and production facilities that people need to live.

The damage goes well beyond Iran and Lebanon. The war means higher energy costs and it also means that minerals that go into making fertilizer will not be available. Already, fewer crops are being grown. If the war continues through June, the World Food Program estimates that the number of people facing acute hunger is projected to increase by 45 million—from a pre conflict baseline of 318 million.... Altogether, this means that up to 363 million people could become acutely food insecure in 2026.

Beware Of The Fascist Who Paints Himself Into A Corner

A year ago March, Bob Avakian—the revolutionary leader and architect of the new communism—made this extremely important point:

Trump fascism 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 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!)

This has been borne out… in spades. 

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 danger of this whole situation is intensified given the role that China—the U.S.'s main imperialist rival—plays in the region. China has extensive interests throughout the Middle East, including Iran.

The point here is not to predict what will or will not happen in the war, which can’t be done with a high degree of certainty anyway… especially in what Mao Zedong called “that most uncertain of enterprises,” war. But it is to point to real factors that will figure into an outcome and to drive home that any sense that somehow people can wait ‘til November to remedy this is out-of-touch with reality and severely irresponsible. 

One other factor that has largely gone unreported on: the fascist regime has been ramping up its repressive apparatus. In just the past two months, 1) the FBI has been put in charge of coordinating the efforts of ten different agencies to proactively "investigate, prosecute, and disrupt" targets identified under Trump NSPM-7 memorandum—a wide-ranging group of targets that include people who espouse oppositional views that are protected by the First Amendment and other constitutional provisions (for instance, being “anti-capitalist” could get you targeted); 2) the FBI established, together with the Internal Revenue Service, a new “mission control” center to investigate the finances of groups and individuals for connections to the regime’s extremely expansive definition of “domestic terrorism” or “political violence;” and 3) the government was able to win a conviction of nine people in Texas with sentences running from ten years to life on the theory that everyone at a demonstration is guilty of the worst crime that anyone at that demonstration might commit. (In this case, wounding a prison guard a few blocks away from the actual demonstration—a prison guard who was treated and released the same night.)

The danger on all these fronts is very real, and it is very NOW.

Yet within this danger, there are openings that could be seized—to urgently drive this regime to power and where even more fundamental revolutionary challenges to this system could be posed. As we said at the beginning, it is likely that Trump agreed to the ceasefire in the first place due to pressure from other forces in the ruling structures of this system who thought that Trump was doing too much damage to larger U.S. interests in the ways that he was waging this war. (There are also divisions within the fascist camp itself which could make the regime potentially more politically vulnerable than usual, with some attacking Trump for supposedly putting U.S. interests in second place to Israeli desires and designs.)

In this situation, there are three sharp challenges posed to anyone with any care for justice, any sense of decency:

First, to find the ways to act around—and spread everywhere—the demand that “THE TRUMP FASCIST REGIME MUST GO NOW!” Very immediately, a whole range of political forces have called on people to come out and show up on May 1 against many of the policies of the Trump regime, including the war. But it is not just policies—it must be the regime itself that is politically targeted. The point is not to make a single statement, but to kick off momentum throughout society around this dividing line demand.

Second, to dig deeper into the WHY of this whole thing. Why did the vaunted U.S. democracy end up putting a fascist lunatic in its top office, not just once, but twice? And what does it say that that same system—well before Donald Trump—took the lives of over 14 million people since World War II in wars directly waged or military coups masterminded by the U.S. all over the world—including Iran, in 1953? (To get a deep sense of what this system has done to just the country of Iran, go here.)

And third, seriously dig into the solution to this: a revolution, one aimed at putting into a 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 FUNDAMENDALLY DIFFERENT SYSTEM. And if this resonates at all, go deeper and above all, get involved.